• the way, this website sucks. (unregistered) in reply to Andrew

    No no, look closely - that's a laptop.

  • (cs) in reply to Tom

    Wow -- not being able to go out to the internet??? I couldn't write code if I couldn't look up how to do something. Not that I couldn't figure it out on my own, but -- for example, how do you get the horizontal scroll position of a div that has "overflow: hidden" in terms of the number of divs enclosed within it?

    Or what attributes do I use to specify parent-child relationships for entity framework?

    Time to move on, guy.

  • (cs) in reply to ubersoldat
    ubersoldat:
    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

    JobHunter is blocked, dummy!

  • (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.

    Try working at a place where the secure access portal requires regular virus scans before it will allow you to connect remotely. Taking the occasional WFH is okay, as long as you remembered to set that virus scanner off that previous weekend because it takes 18 fucking hours to do.

  • (cs)

    "Forum Favorite Blakeyrat" should be happy that he has a job and can now feed his small children.

  • Peter G. Bouillon (unregistered)

    Run for your life, while there is time.

    Enforced redundancy cancellations will come very shortly. And the employees in the other team (the one with the better desks etc.) will remain in the company.

  • Tux "Tuxedo" Penguin (unregistered) in reply to amomynous
    amomynous:
    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).

    Couldn't you just use wine?

  • (cs)

    "Forum favorite Blakeyrat"?

    Uh, yeah. I'm sure he's the favorite something.

  • the way these moderators are ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL (unregistered)

    disregard that I can't read apparently

  • s73v3r (unregistered) in reply to Nagesh
    Nagesh:
    "Forum Favorite Blakeyrat" should be happy that he has a job and can now feed his small children.

    I know this is meant as a joke, but seriously, fuck people who have this attitude. That no matter how shitty your job, you should be "grateful". If a job is shitty, there is absolutely nothing to be grateful for about it.

  • Steve (unregistered)

    Ahh, my former employer. Except we used Lotus Notes for everything... email, change management, ticketing.

    But the ultimate best part was the management. I had to work with one of the Mainframe programmers so she could update some feed. All emails to her had to be cc'ed to her boss and every meeting we had, needed to include her boss. Her boss must know every minute detail of everything that was happening.

    Needless to say it took three months to make a minor change because of scheduling conflicts.

  • Dave (unregistered)

    Seriously, though, we've been trying to get him to leave without having to fire him, and the fucker just won't go.

  • J Whattam (unregistered)

    Sounds like IBM...

  • Reductio Ad Ridiculousum (unregistered) in reply to Dragnslcr
    Dragnslcr:
    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.

    I read it as you did. I thought "well, 3 times does seem excessive, but at least all the bugs should be backed out". Then I read how the prod env is different, and this came unbidden to my lips, unbidden I tell you!

    "WTF"

  • Cheong (unregistered)
    1. Instead companies often has shared account to be used by all subcontractors, casing all the awkward moments when using TFS. 2 and 3) Instead of going through all the troubles, most companies don't have QA at all. It's hard to tell which one is more damaging.
    2. In additional to that, the cubicle wouldn't has drawers /shelves of any form. Instead, provide small lockers at the other side of office, make sure he has to walk pass the "standing desk employees" to access the locker. When you find the employee placed the piles of document on his desk, tell him tidiness is expected and explain that this is "against the rules". He must clean it up immediately. 5, 6) In most case, DBA and change management employees do not exist. Neither does the ticketing system. If they have it, expect it to work only under IE6, where you have to start XPMode in order to use it. (Which can be painfully slow)
    3. And most companies have firewall turned off by default (Although I always go through all the trouble to turn it back on, I don't think it's demoralizing, though) There are some companies that use GPO to make sure the user can run predefined set of applications. Thank God that they leave the company's CRM EXE on desktop instead of shortcut. If you need to run a program, just copy it to desktop and rename it to the CRM EXE's name.

    Whenever you think you're in hell, always remember that there are deeper level(s) of hell.

  • (cs) in reply to Andrew
    Andrew:
    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.
    I think the idea is that spotting the LCD brought the horrific realisation that the picture was in fact taken in the 21st century, not say 1970 or so.
  • QJo (unregistered) in reply to Cheong
    Cheong:
    1) Instead companies often has shared account to be used by all subcontractors, casing all the awkward moments when using TFS. 2 and 3) Instead of going through all the troubles, most companies don't have QA at all. It's hard to tell which one is more damaging. 4) In additional to that, the cubicle wouldn't has drawers /shelves of any form. Instead, provide small lockers at the other side of office, make sure he has to walk pass the "standing desk employees" to access the locker. When you find the employee placed the piles of document on his desk, tell him tidiness is expected and explain that this is "against the rules". He must clean it up immediately. 5, 6) In most case, DBA and change management employees do not exist. Neither does the ticketing system. If they have it, expect it to work only under IE6, where you have to start XPMode in order to use it. (Which can be painfully slow) 7) And most companies have firewall turned off by default (Although I always go through all the trouble to turn it back on, I don't think it's demoralizing, though) There are some companies that use GPO to make sure the user can run predefined set of applications. Thank God that they leave the company's CRM EXE on desktop instead of shortcut. If you need to run a program, just copy it to desktop and rename it to the CRM EXE's name.

    Whenever you think you're in hell, always remember that there are deeper level(s) of hell.

    I recently had a spell in a Middle Eastern country, working as an web design consultant. There they had two grades of personal hygiene facilities (what you in the US would call "bathrooms"). Visitors and non-employees of that establishment had one grade (well-appointed, clean and freshly-decorated), while employees had another grade (nasty).

  • Martin (unregistered)

    Employees shouldn't be able to have their own workplace.

    Each day, you can sit anywhere at any computer. As a result, everything is broken and slimy.

  • Fritz, a.k.a. Fritzo (unregistered)

    Blakeyrat owns or at least manages the company, right?

  • Fritz, a.k.a. Fritzo (unregistered) in reply to Zylon
    Zylon:
    "Forum favorite Blakeyrat"?

    Uh, yeah. I'm sure he's the favorite something.

    Did they say which forum? I'm guessing Fetlife or some Brony forum.

  • Duncan (unregistered) in reply to Noc
    Noc:
    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.
    We have anti-virus scheduled for Wednesday mornings. Also software updates get pushed out every Wednesday morning and (at least on Windows 7) there's a scheduled defrag every Wednesday morning as well (I think that's a default Microsoft thing).

    Wednesday mornings are not a good time to actually do any work.

  • (cs)

    I liked the point to "turn off UAC by policy" :)

  • John Doe (unregistered)

    How can I disable CA software?? helllllllllllp

  • RC (unregistered)

    Don't forget the mandatory Encryption on all laptop hard-drives. Especially ENGINEERING laptops. So that every file has to be de-crypted, compiliers, design docs, grinding grinding grinding.

    All because a Senior Level HR person had downloaded the entire 50,000+ employee database records to their Company laptop and then had it stolen (or reported stolen). No, we can't stop doofus from downloading all personnel records to a laptop, but we can make sure all of Engineering suffers because of one HR person's stupidity.

  • amomynous (unregistered) in reply to Tux "Tuxedo" Penguin
    Tux "Tuxedo" Penguin:
    amomynous:
    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).

    Couldn't you just use wine?

    No kind of wine hack, wack and witchcraft was able to avoid the crappy, custom-build, business critical applications crash and burn miserably.

  • justme (unregistered) in reply to Reductio Ad Ridiculousum
    Reductio Ad Ridiculousum:
    Dragnslcr:
    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.

    I read it as you did. I thought "well, 3 times does seem excessive, but at least all the bugs should be backed out". Then I read how the prod env is different, and this came unbidden to my lips, unbidden I tell you!

    "WTF"

    I was testing software and ran into timing issues. It was closed with this answer: "The testing machines are underpowered on purpose. It would be too expensive to buy two identical sets of machine. We know this will be okay in production because the hardware is better." Shudder

  • justme (unregistered) in reply to Martin
    Martin:
    Employees shouldn't be able to have their own workplace.

    Each day, you can sit anywhere at any computer. As a result, everything is broken and slimy.

    And call it empowering the user by offering choices. It's like a huge game of adult musical chairs to find a workspace.

  • Karl Gregory Jones (unregistered)
    The desktop background should be locked to the company's logo for literally no good reason.

    "No good reason" ...?

    Of course there's a good reason!

    It's the same reason why we gladly sing the Corporate Anthem after mustering for inspection at the start of each work day:

    Esprit de Corps.

  • Ketorin (unregistered) in reply to Sweat shop grunt
    Sweat shop grunt:
    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.

    Was that a Japanese company, by any chance?

  • Thankfully not working at The Nerdery (unregistered) in reply to Ketorin

    Sounds like the Nerdery. Except for the "being paid a lot" bit.

  • (cs)

    I guess this explains Blakeyrants

  • nonanonguid (unregistered)

    That is a perfect description of Microsoft India vs Redmond.. in India all junior IC's get cubicles, mid level managers windowless cabins and higher up's cabins with windows.. Most people are restricted to 1-2 monitors

    In Redmond most teams either use a completely open workspace or everyone gets a cabin. Most folks there have a minimum of 3 screens, I've seen 7 as well. Some people from India get to visit the Redmond campus once in 1-2 years, if only to see what they are missing out on in India

  • J (unregistered)

    But you have drawers!

  • (cs) in reply to nonanonguid
    nonanonguid:
    That is a perfect description of Microsoft India vs Redmond.. in India all junior IC's get cubicles, mid level managers windowless cabins and higher up's cabins with windows.. Most people are restricted to 1-2 monitors

    In Redmond most teams either use a completely open workspace or everyone gets a cabin. Most folks there have a minimum of 3 screens, I've seen 7 as well. Some people from India get to visit the Redmond campus once in 1-2 years, if only to see what they are missing out on in India

    See, I'd rather have the cubicle than the open workspace. I'm dreading our likely move at the end of 2015 - open workspaces are the new corporate standard, but even with cubes there's already too much noise and commotion for my tastes.

  • (cs) in reply to Zylon
    Zylon:
    "Forum favorite Blakeyrat"?

    Uh, yeah. I'm sure he's the favorite something.

    Yes yes and yes!

  • QJo (unregistered) in reply to justme
    justme:
    Martin:
    Employees shouldn't be able to have their own workplace.

    Each day, you can sit anywhere at any computer. As a result, everything is broken and slimy.

    And call it empowering the user by offering choices. It's like a huge game of adult musical chairs to find a workspace.

    "Er, right okay, guys -- looks like I'm WFH again today -- see you tomorrow!"

  • Qazwsx (unregistered) in reply to QJo
    QJo:
    I recently had a spell in a Middle Eastern country, working as an web design consultant. There they had two grades of personal hygiene facilities (what you in the US would call "bathrooms"). Visitors and non-employees of that establishment had one grade (well-appointed, clean and freshly-decorated), while employees had another grade (nasty).
    I've worked at a place located in an office building where the upper floors were offices for the organization, and the lower floors had a shopping centre. The bathroom on the floor I was working on had only two stalls, so whenever it was full, I'd go downstairs to the much larger public bathroom.
  • Mr. AHole DBA (unregistered)

    If you guarantee 5 9's uptime, then you should go through full testing in QA and Stage. If the environment's don't match the things you are testing (testing only code on a staging machine which doesn't interact in any way with the firmware bios of the hard drive for example) is fine.

    You probably shouldn't spend the money matching prod 1 to 1 if you only let's say offer 3 nine's uptime though. At the end of the day, you gotta tie it to dollars and SLAs.

  • Friedrice The Great (unregistered) in reply to Nagesh
    Nagesh:
    "Forum Favorite Blakeyrat" should be happy that he has a job and can now feed his small children.
    Run for your lives. Blakeyrat has reproduced!
  • nonanonguid (unregistered) in reply to ATimson

    :)

    The Redmond guys have the managers sitting in the open workspace as well, so I imagine its better than giving managers cabin privileges while not providing them to IC's

  • (cs) in reply to ciny
    ciny:
    ...suddenly, the mandatory weekly full laptop virus check (every Friday afternoon) seems like just a minor annoyance...

    True. And at my place you can just reboot once the scan starts and the annoyance is gone... But I now have an ssd so it doesn't bother me that much anymore.

  • not an anon (unregistered) in reply to Mr. AHole DBA
    Mr. AHole DBA:
    If you guarantee 5 9's uptime, then you should go through full testing in QA and Stage. If the environment's don't match the things you are testing (testing only code on a staging machine which doesn't interact in any way with the firmware bios of the hard drive for example) is fine.

    You probably shouldn't spend the money matching prod 1 to 1 if you only let's say offer 3 nine's uptime though. At the end of the day, you gotta tie it to dollars and SLAs.

    Why do you only have 1 dev, 1 QA, and 1 Stage? You should be able to have as many test environments as you like! (Bonus points if you can spin-up a self-contained one on your workstation.)

    CAPTCHA: quibus - Why would anyone have a quibus with being able to stand up a test environment on a whim?

  • Vasil (unregistered) in reply to ciny

    Consider this a subtle hint to leave work early :) At least I do ...

  • Chris (unregistered)

    Cerner...

  • Pascal (unregistered)

    Wait, you use a ticketing system? My last employer didn't! We only used excel spreadsheets and word documents to manage everything. It was a pain.

    Oh, and I had 4 different testing environments. Performance testing had to be planned 5 months in advance. So, we almost never test for performance. Which sucks when we find a big problem; we had to fix the code without prior testing, so the performance testing was actually done in production. (we were able to test than no bugs were introduced, but not the actual performance)

    When I said this was the work of an amateur, my superior said that I wasn't managing and that other teams had "reasons" for this...

    And, of course, none of the environments had the same settings. Sometimes, the deployment from one environment to another failed silently so we had no idea we had a bomb about to blow in production.

    And, of course, we don't automate our GUI and non-GUI tests. When I quit, we were just starting to use unit tests! Don't even think about continuous testing...

    And everything from database structures changes to deployments to simply executing a .exe in production to edit some setting file had to be processed through forms / tickets that takes days. It's much worse than only DBA-related work in that article...

    But hey, the pay and job security are great! And, you don't even need to keep current with the best practices! So, tons of "zombies" still work there! I changed department to forendics... it's much better now that I can actually be usefull.

  • Marnee (unregistered)

    At my old job, what they do is make the top people take help desk calls over night, for a week straight, every two weeks, and still have to work a full day.

    We get at least 4 calls a night. In the middle of the night. Every night.

    When I complained they said they'd so something about it, meaning they would hire more help. And that I should just take the night off and they'd get someone to cover me. Uh?

    Three weeks passed and they hadn't done a thing about it. Didn't even start the hiring process or talk to us more about it or make any kind of plan. NOPE

    So I quit.

  • Anonymouse (unregistered)

    I think I worked there once, for like 2 weeks. ;)

    Captcha: capio, as in, I better capio my resume-o.

  • (nodebb)

    If that's Blakey's cube, I think we now why he had such a charming forum disposition.

  • (nodebb)

    this is insane

  • (nodebb)

    i like that

    Addendum 2024-07-31 02:00: For those considering corner desks, Progressive Desk has a fantastic product called the Corner Ryzer. It’s specifically designed to optimize corner desk setups. You can standing desk electric https://www.progressivedesk.com/ find more details about it here: Corner Ryzer. It might be just what you need to complete your workspace!

Leave a comment on “How To Demoralize Employees: A DIY Guide For Terrible Companies”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article