• Fant (unregistered)

    Could have sworn this was my ex-employer. But CA Service Desk Manager doesn't fit.

  • (cs)

    This is all about instilling in the employee a sense of hopelessness. Do this long enough and they will just mindlessly execute whatever dreadful task you set them out to do.

    It's the modern form of slavery, and it is magnificent!

  • Jeroen (unregistered)

    Couldn't agree more with these practices! I do have problem with the IE8 lock; everybody knows IE6 is still the industry standard. No need for those fancy new (insecure!) features.

  • Tux "Tuxedo" Penguin (unregistered)

    Blakeyrat, say hello to Dilbert from me, shall you?

  • ciny (unregistered)

    ...suddenly, the mandatory weekly full laptop virus check (every Friday afternoon) seems like just a minor annoyance...

  • Httpster (unregistered)

    Also, unequivocally refuse to purchase or allow network access to macs or iPads. Especially to groups who are developing business iOS applications. If an employee attempts to bring in hardware from home to complete this job, threaten termination.

    Yes, this is real. Fortune 100 company.

  • amomynous (unregistered) in reply to Fant
    Fant:
    Could have sworn this was my ex-employer. But CA Service Desk Manager doesn't fit.
    It does not look like my current employer. They're just dumb in other ways. But CA Service Desk Manager does fit... it's a freaking fucking damned steamping pile of motherfucking shit.
  • amomynous (unregistered)

    And let me see if I get that right... is that a chair without a back rest? Please tell me that it is not real...

  • TimeLord (unregistered)

    On the plus side... a free pad of sticky notes!

  • Call me Skunk (unregistered) in reply to amomynous
    amomynous:
    And let me see if I get that right... is that a chair without a back rest? Please tell me that it is not real...
    Nope, not this time. It's an armrest for the chair which is turned sideways.
  • (cs)

    Sad thing is that many people would work under this conditions knowing that there are much more better places. Anyway, I wouldn't even last a day there without opening JobHunter and start looking for jobs

  • amomynous (unregistered) in reply to Call me Skunk
    Call me Skunk:
    amomynous:
    And let me see if I get that right... is that a chair without a back rest? Please tell me that it is not real...
    Nope, not this time. It's an armrest for the chair which is turned sideways.
    Whew, now I see the back rest to the left, nearly blended with the cube wall color. That was a frightening thought...
  • Extra spicy vindaloo (unregistered)

    My last position had all of these, plus queries from the website were to a back end system that were batched, with a 30 second delay.

    Send query..

    keep browser open...

    a bit longer...

    "Your data will be here promise"

    a little more...

    ERROR: Incorrect format.

  • Florent (unregistered)

    I saw the LCD monitor ... and then I realised that the picture was taken in the 21st century. Then I wept.

  • MrBester (unregistered) in reply to Fant

    Replace CA Service Desk Manager with Salesforce and have only one login for the entire development team. Never offer any training on how to use it, but mandate the Chatter app be running on all developer machines and ensure all the critical change requests are communicated only through it.

  • Sweat shop grunt (unregistered)

    That desk actually looks a million times better than my current sweat shop setup. I work at a company that thinks developers don't need to use their brains. They can be interrupted 100 times a day because they're crammed into open cubeless tables where noise, visual distractions, smells, etc.. are a way of life. Being able to produce code is a byproduct of how well you can ignore the shitty environment and even then the code written is crap. The only good thing is I'm being paid a lot.

  • Hopless Cubicon (unregistered)

    Hey, we don't even get the second monitor here!

  • (cs) in reply to amomynous
    amomynous:
    And let me see if I get that right... is that a chair without a back rest? Please tell me that it is not real...

    Actually, that sounds like a good idea. You want your employees to be diligently working, not lounging back and slacking off.

  • rafo2001 (unregistered)

    No internet for the developers, just sites from the "white list" (google, stackoverflow and experts exchange are all no nos). ALL external storage blocked by policy, a "attendance book" that must be signed every time you stand up from your desk. And, last week, an executive "brain storm" to figure out the best way to block all wireless (3G, LTE, Wifi, etc) data access from the employees phones and devices. Thanks god, the "no internal phone" initiative was dismissed due the high volume of user support.

  • not an anon (unregistered)

    This makes me want to point Blakeyrat at my team's current developer openings out of sheer pity for him, even though they involve a snoofle-level Pit-O-WTF (TM), written in C++ and running on Linux, that I know he'd loathe working on.

  • Andrew (unregistered) in reply to Florent
    Florent:
    I saw the LCD monitor ... and then I realised that the picture was taken in the 21st century. Then I wept.
    ... because all we've ever used in the past 15 years are Oculus Rifts.
  • (cs)

    Any terrible company worth their salt will have one legacy app which is simultaneously (i) critical to the business (ii) no longer supported by its vendor and (iii) comprises an ActiveX that will only run in IE6.

    Correction. AT LEAST one.

  • Jupp3 (unregistered) in reply to rafo2001
    rafo2001:
    experts exchange are all no nos.
    I'd definitely expect a site called expertsexchange be blocked pretty much everywhere where there is any kind of censorship :-)
  • (cs) in reply to not an anon
    not an anon:
    This makes me want to point Blakeyrat at my team's current developer openings out of sheer pity for him, even though they involve a snoofle-level Pit-O-WTF (TM), written in C++ and running on Linux, that I know he'd loathe working on.

    Oh don't worry, if something I've learned from reading Blakeyrat's rants (Blakeyrant :-p ) is that he hates everything.

  • Not an expert (unregistered) in reply to Jupp3
    Jupp3:
    rafo2001:
    experts exchange are all no nos.
    I'd definitely expect a site called expertsexchange be blocked pretty much everywhere where there is any kind of censorship :-)
    I dunno, I'd probably want an expert doing my sex change.
  • eman_ruoy (unregistered) in reply to ciny
    ciny:
    ...suddenly, the mandatory weekly full laptop virus check (every Friday afternoon) seems like just a minor annoyance...
    That actually doesn't sound bad. Basically, your day is done early!
  • Toy boy (unregistered)

    All you need is Gramma's dentures sitting in a glass of polident.

  • amomynous (unregistered) in reply to eman_ruoy
    eman_ruoy:
    ciny:
    ...suddenly, the mandatory weekly full laptop virus check (every Friday afternoon) seems like just a minor annoyance...
    That actually doesn't sound bad. Basically, your day is done early!
    What the hell are you talking about? You're expected to work just as well and be as productive with an antivirus app raping your hard drive and other computer resources... probably twice as good now that your computer is GUARANTEED to be totally virus-free. No network access restrictions needed, the entire company is safe.
  • Les (unregistered)

    Is that a padded mouse pad? Sweet!

  • Andrew (unregistered) in reply to Hopless Cubicon

    That guy gets a second monitor AND he doesn't have to share his cube. That's not hell. That sounds great.

  • Chelloveck (unregistered) in reply to Jupp3
    Jupp3:
    rafo2001:
    experts exchange are all no nos.
    I'd definitely expect a site called expertsexchange be blocked pretty much everywhere where there is any kind of censorship :-)

    True story: I used to write code for printers. Trying to figure out how to get data in an out of them I found that the rather technical website I needed was blocked by the "alternative lifestyle" rule in the proxy. Seems the proxy had a problem with a site about the bi-directional parallel port.

    I think it was later that afternoon that I wrote my first ssh-over-https tunnel to bounce requests off my home machine so I could actually get my work done. Good times.

  • (cs)

    I didn't know you could even configure a cubicle that small.

    As for computers, try having a current laptop config with 4 GB of RAM, but only 2.8 GB is available because they used 32-bit Windows despite the fact that everything on the machine is compatible with 64-bit Windows. Add to it the Symantec EP that seems to always be doing scheduled scans, and your hard disk never stops grinding. I am surprised that our hard drives are not dying after a year or so. I am definitely going to buy Toshiba disks from now on, because they must be bulletproof to take this kind of punishment.

  • (cs)
    Create a long, involved and unnecessarily complex QA process that takes literally 5+ hours of employee time to go through, even if no bugs are found. Require testing the code in three different environments before it is pushed to prod.

    Well, it's good to have a rigorous testing process. You're far more likely to find errors before they affect any users if you carefully test your code before deployment.

    ...the prod servers are configured entirely differently, and not one of the testing servers matches it.

    Oh.

  • Hannes (unregistered) in reply to eman_ruoy
    eman_ruoy:
    ciny:
    ...suddenly, the mandatory weekly full laptop virus check (every Friday afternoon) seems like just a minor annoyance...
    That actually doesn't sound bad. Basically, your day is done early!

    Wow, you've never worked at an actual company, right? If there is anything that delays or interrputs work (earthquakes, snow storms, etc) of course it is expected from the employees to work longer that day to make up for the hours that no one could work.

  • moseph (unregistered)

    Can we all just chip in a few pennies a day so this poor soul can liberate himself from purgatory?

  • Bruce W (unregistered)

    I am bookmarking this. I will reread it every time I complain about my company's craziness.

  • Vinit (unregistered)

    Does a company like this exist? Where do I apply... ?

  • (cs) in reply to ciny
    ciny:
    ...suddenly, the mandatory weekly full laptop virus check (every Friday afternoon) seems like just a minor annoyance...
    You mis-spelled "perfect opportunity to slack off and go home early"!
  • (cs)

    There's further demoralisation advice at this article on Fear-driven development that I saw while surfing randomly the other day.

  • Accalia Elementia (unregistered)

    Huzzah!

    @blakeyrat made the front page!

    and well deserved to him as well.

    i wonder if we should make a badge for events such as this?

    captcha: Saepius. Yes, yes i am. thanks!

  • Tom (unregistered)

    I'd like to add the following.

    non-production machines (e.g. the ones developers use to write code on) are not permitted to access the internet - but due to the size of the hard drives, you haven't got room to have both the MSDN help pages and your source code either.

    Lock down USB ports too, just in case anyone thinks of that workaround...

  • Walky_one (unregistered)

    You might also add to it "Don't bother with virus checks. Everybody knows that Mac's don't have viruses. So even if every computer in the network is infected with an USB virus this doesn't matter. After all these viruses are only targeting Windows"

    Happened to my wife: Everytime she brought an USB stick from work (which was every second week because she was expected to read some papers back home) we needed to clean it first. The IT at work just shrugged "Doesn't bother us"...

    Considering that this was the IT of a major hospital and medical development.... Well...

  • EatenByAGrue (unregistered)

    They left out some really important and very common steps, like: 8. Ensure that there is little-to-no opportunity for career advancement within the firm. Your entire tech staff should be very aware that their reward for overtime and fantastic work is being able to remain in their current position for at least 5 more years before the company will even think about promoting them or even giving out a raise.

    1. Shower all the non-tech employees who were vaguely associated with a project with bonuses and public recognition and promotions, while completely ignoring the tech team that did the actual work.

    2. Fire somebody at least once a month, to keep everyone on their toes. The person getting the ax does not have to do anything wrong to trigger this.

    3. Institute mandatory 24x7x365 on-call duties for the entire tech team, with frequent-enough call-ins that they can't commit to doing anything non-work-related, ever.

    (Yes, I've seen all of these in real life)

  • (cs)

    Forum favorite? Since when?

  • Noc (unregistered) in reply to ciny

    Virus check on Friday afternoon? No, that might encourage someone to leave early because he won't get anything useful done anyway.

    For some reason every company I've ever worked for scheduled virus check for Wednesday at noon. It would usually complete at about 6 o'clock and if you interrupt it, say because you turn the PC off to leave at 5 o'clock, it starts again the next day.

    And for some reason, even if the company manages to Wake-On-Lan to deploy patches in the middle of the night while no one is working, they never manage to do the same for friggin' virus scans. Which never find any viruses because they are filtered out in the proxy and the USB ports are blocked.

    Captcha: erat. As in: quod demonstrandum.

  • (cs) in reply to Noc
    Noc:
    Virus check on Friday afternoon? No, that might encourage someone to leave early because he won't get anything useful done anyway.

    For some reason every company I've ever worked for scheduled virus check for Wednesday at noon. It would usually complete at about 6 o'clock and if you interrupt it, say because you turn the PC off to leave at 5 o'clock, it starts again the next day.

    And for some reason, even if the company manages to Wake-On-Lan to deploy patches in the middle of the night while no one is working, they never manage to do the same for friggin' virus scans. Which never find any viruses because they are filtered out in the proxy and the USB ports are blocked.

    Captcha: erat. As in: quod demonstrandum.

    I guess running Linux is not an option. One of the first things I ask when applying for a job: do you encourage BYOD and am I free to use OS/IDE of my choice?

  • (cs) in reply to Vinit
    Vinit:
    Does a company like this exist? Where do I apply... ?
    Yes - try any branch of the Federal Reserve Bank
  • Rance Mohanitz (unregistered)

    You guys get to install stuff on your PCs?

  • amomynous (unregistered) in reply to Rance Mohanitz
    Rance Mohanitz:
    You guys get to install stuff on your PCs?
    I can boast that as a big plus at my job... I asked "can I use Linux?", the IT support guy said "Yeah.", so I wiped WXP the next day using a USB with a distro. That was 4 years ago. I had to request a WXP virtual machine for a few crappy monthly tasks that require Windows, though (MS requires that you purchase special licenses to use its shitty OS as a host).
  • amomynous (unregistered) in reply to amomynous

    Side note: it is a 1000+ employees IT company, and I bet less than 50 use Linux. My divison have over 80 employees, and I'm the sole Linux guy.

    True story: one time some worm spread like fire through the network using shared folders. I just sat back and amused myself at everybody acting like freaked out hamsters.

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