• Pir8 (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    We use a web-based, outsourced HR app for PTO. We got an emergency broadcast email from them one day about some unexpected down time. I looked into it a bit to see what was going on on their site. I found that their downtime was because they forgot to renew the domain name registration.

    Oh, but that happens to the best of people, say http://www.ifpi.com .

  • (cs) in reply to bstorer
    bstorer:
    JG:
    bstorer:
    Cyrijl:
    I had to create our vacation application system. Reading this makes me feel alot better. Mine isn't nearly as cumbersome as this.
    I wrote one of these a few companies ago. A co-worker and I and had it running in about a week. Another week and it interfaced with Exchange and flagged scheduling overlaps. And yet only the IT department ever used it because it was decided that it couldn't be allowed to interface with the payroll system. So IT management used it within the department and then printed out the forms to hand to HR. So stupid, and yet so common at this company. Man I loved that place. We discovered that there was no reason to work on an assignment within the first week of it being assigned, because there was a 75% chance they'd cancel it at the next meeting.

    Wow, you measure time in companies.

    Somewhat similar to measure knowledge in LOCs (Libraries of Congress).

    It's simpler that way. I suppose I could measure it in unsustainable tech booms, in which case it was about 1.5 ago. Or I could measure it in Windows releases, where it's about three to five releases ago, depending on how you count.

    Or you could measure it in a more preciseley defined unit like the root (solar mass per pascal-petameter)

  • rumpelstiltskin (unregistered) in reply to Paul
    Paul:
    Hold on. So there were "tens of thousands" of employees? Let's say 25,000. The average vacation time is probably less than 3 weeks each (if it's an American company). With no other information available let's say the average employee puts in three requests per year (for instance, I always take my vacation in one block, while others take smaller blocks), so that's 75,000 requests per year, or 1,500 per week.

    Aim to handle 4x the average. So there may be 6000 requests for time off in any work week, or 1200 per day, or 150 per hour, or 2.5 per minute. Build in some more redundancy to handle 10 transactions per minute.

    They couldn't build a scalable system to handle that?

    Come on, Paul, do you really think the number of vacation requests is uniformly distributed over time? Do you really think as many people are asking for a week off in January, as ask for a week off in July? Or, do you really think as many people are filling the form out at 3am, as are filling it out at 10am?

  • James (unregistered)

    Step 1: Deploy PKI and an email client that supports signed messages

    Step 2: Employee sends leave request to supervisor in a signed message

    Step 3: Supervisor responds with signed message, possibly CCing an HR distribution list for easy archival

    Step 4: Employee goes to Tahiti and spends the bonus they gave everybody instead of buying a ridiculous PTO database system

  • James Schend (unregistered) in reply to grrrr
    grrrr:
    Jesse Harris:
    I work for a company that makes time and attendance software and I can tell you right now that building this custom app was a waste of time and energy. They could have very easily programmed a form in Outlook for their absence requests. Most time and attendance software (including ours) allows you to track accruals and let employees login to view balances and make requests. I'm amazed that nobody would bother looking at an off-the-shelf solution for this issue and that making an absence request system that's fast and functional would take more than a week, tops.

    If its Kronos or Lawson then it is junk, try debugging.

    If it's Oracle Apps, it's unusable junk that needs rewritten from scratch.

  • Wodin (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    Lynx:
    Once a user has time to let IT systems work into their everyday workflow/ process, it becomes very very hard to extradite or even just improve the process.
    I suspect you mean extract, not extradite. (That would sort of be a more feral style of "outsource.")

    On the other hand, what the system in the OP requires is probably "extraordinary rendition."

    I suspect that Lynx meant "expedite".

  • Edward Royce (unregistered) in reply to Cyrijl

    Hmmmm.

    Cyrijl:
    I had to create our vacation application system. Reading this makes me feel alot better. Mine isn't nearly as cumbersome as this.

    You don't hate your fellow coworkers nearly enough.

    I suggest you take a moment, think deeply about how flawed your coworkers are and then, greatly reinvigorated, approach the application design with an eye towards giving those users precisely what they deserve.

  • Paul (unregistered) in reply to rumpelstiltskin

    [quote user="rumpelstiltskin"][/quote]

    Come on, Paul, do you really think the number of vacation requests is uniformly distributed over time? Do you really think as many people are asking for a week off in January, as ask for a week off in July? Or, do you really think as many people are filling the form out at 3am, as are filling it out at 10am?

    [/quote] No, no, and no. Which is why I calculated the average over an eight hour day, suggested aiming to handle a multiple of the average, and added more redundancy to make the peak 16x the average.

  • AGould (unregistered)

    Of course, the root problem is "why do we need such a convoluted and complicated system?", to which the answer is invariably "to prevent abuses".

    My work is still paper-based vacation/banked forms, to which they add the wrinkle of requiring the user to keep signed copies of everything "just in case".

    Translation: if a supervisor can bury your paperwork long enough, they don't have to grant the banked time. We had someone who was "audited" three times, and lost almost 100 hours of banked time (accumulated over two years), because she would have to hand in the file to a supervisor, who promptly misplaced it. And this doesn't even start to cover the "you have to have your overtime pre-approved" policy that was a non-starter. It's just a bit incompatible with a "stay until it's done" mentality.

    I just keep it on a spreadsheet, fill out the forms on request, and let my boss know that if there's an issue, I'll solve it simply - I won't work overtime anymore.

    Hasn't been a problem in five years...

  • (cs) in reply to Peter
    Peter:
    If I had to guess why the nightly batch system burst into flames and crashed, I'd say it was most likely the PDF generator, and based on current flaming crashes, it would be amyuni based. Runs like a champ on a developer's box, but has some threading and memory leak issues that take out servers.
    Sounds like an excellent guess to me. But the real ... er ... aardvarking is that these loons deployed a totally new system across 10K+ employees without actually testing that it scaled in the first place.

    I mean, how hard can that be? Oh yeah, I remember. Surprisingly hard without testers who have an IQ higher than that of a field-mouse. (Relax, guys: I know you're out there. <bad joke>The field-mice, that is.</bad joke>)

    Of course, this could be "anonymised," and the company might only employ two men and a hugely talented dog. In which case it's even more ... aardvarked.

    Seriously, though, there seem to be too many developers who (as you say) build things on their own box, with the whizzy three screens and the graphics card and all, and then expect it to work on a server. Not gonna happen. This is then compounded by a QA department led by the usual PHB who wants "realistic" tests, ie feeding bits of paper through scanners and pressing buttons on the web page like lust-crazed monkeys.

    Actually, just writing a <hawk, spit>perl</hawk, spit> script to inject ten thousand rows into the database for overnight processing tends to point out the salient problem. Kills a few trees on the way, sure, but a small price to pay.

    Loved the grotesquely tabbed interface, btw. I have to work through one of those for my "HR needs" (ie getting paid), and it's clearly designed by someone paid by the tab.

    The only thing these ninnies got right was to remove the password requirement for non-financial (or other sensitive) input to their squitty little HR system. And they even got that wrong. Good luck on getting Windows Secure Authentication (or whatever it's called) to work on this pile of crap over a network from home, or from Starbucks, or wherever.

    Quite astonishing that they managed to do worse than a pre-existing Access database, though. I may have to revisit several of my more cherished prejudices.

  • Faking it (unregistered)

    The term "Shit canned" comes to mind. But then again, such is life.

  • (cs) in reply to Paul
    Paul:
    rumpelstiltskin:
    Come on, Paul, do you really think the number of vacation requests is uniformly distributed over time? Do you really think as many people are asking for a week off in January, as ask for a week off in July? Or, do you really think as many people are filling the form out at 3am, as are filling it out at 10am?
    No, no, and no. Which is why I calculated the average over an eight hour day, suggested aiming to handle a multiple of the average, and added more redundancy to make the peak 16x the average.
    Now, that would be a lovely rejection message for your request for Tuesday off on this system, wouldn't it? "I'm sorry, we cannot advance your request for time off to your boss. This system is incapable of handling the load between Thanksgiving and the New Year. Try again after Mother's Day."

    (Although I suspect that such exceptional processing would be well beyond the designers of this monstrosity.)

    In between his night job of spinning straw into gold, rumpelstiltskin might want to look up how real server systems work. Take credit-card processing, for instance. As in my example above, they suffer from a sustained peak demand (50% of the annual total, and on some days it shoots off the graph) between Thanksgiving and Christmas. How do they deal with this? Simple.

    (a) They buy far more powerful hardware than they expect to need, just in case. (b) They test the fuck out of the thing before it goes into production before Thanksgiving. (c) They lock the entire server room down a week before Thanksgiving and do not open it again (except for operators and physical maintenance) until three days after Christmas. (d) Everybody, from managers on down, wets their pants for two months.

    It's a fun job, really.

    However, in the case of the OP, I think these people are just blatant morons who should have their remaining brain-cells botoxed for the benefit of the gene pool. That's one final, useful, thing that the otherwise appalling HR department could do for the company. Plastic surgery on the archipallium: you know it makes sense.

    BTW, in the current case, the palliative for rumpelstiltskin's issues would be something called "process." Either you get pre-approved well ahead of time, or you just bunk off and get your boss to sign for it later.

    Most rational organisations can cope with this level of deviant behaviour.

  • foo (unregistered) in reply to Morg
    Morg:
    The real WTF is that there are vacation forms. When I'm going to take a vacation, I tell my boss "Hey, I'd like to take off next Thursday and Friday." and he says, "Nice, have fun."

    That's interesting. My boss says "Um. Yeah. I'm going to need you to go ahead and come in on Saturday. And don't forget the new covers on the TPS reports."

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    Paul:
    rumpelstiltskin:
    Come on, Paul, do you really think the number of vacation requests is uniformly distributed over time? Do you really think as many people are asking for a week off in January, as ask for a week off in July? Or, do you really think as many people are filling the form out at 3am, as are filling it out at 10am?
    No, no, and no. Which is why I calculated the average over an eight hour day, suggested aiming to handle a multiple of the average, and added more redundancy to make the peak 16x the average.
    Now, that would be a lovely rejection message for your request for Tuesday off on this system, wouldn't it? "I'm sorry, we cannot advance your request for time off to your boss. This system is incapable of handling the load between Thanksgiving and the New Year. Try again after Mother's Day."

    (Although I suspect that such exceptional processing would be well beyond the designers of this monstrosity.)

    In between his night job of spinning straw into gold, rumpelstiltskin might want to look up how real server systems work. Take credit-card processing, for instance. As in my example above, they suffer from a sustained peak demand (50% of the annual total, and on some days it shoots off the graph) between Thanksgiving and Christmas. How do they deal with this? Simple.

    (a) They buy far more powerful hardware than they expect to need, just in case. (b) They test the fuck out of the thing before it goes into production before Thanksgiving. (c) They lock the entire server room down a week before Thanksgiving and do not open it again (except for operators and physical maintenance) until three days after Christmas. (d) Everybody, from managers on down, wets their pants for two months.

    It's a fun job, really.

    However, in the case of the OP, I think these people are just blatant morons who should have their remaining brain-cells botoxed for the benefit of the gene pool. That's one final, useful, thing that the otherwise appalling HR department could do for the company. Plastic surgery on the archipallium: you know it makes sense.

    BTW, in the current case, the palliative for rumpelstiltskin's issues would be something called "process." Either you get pre-approved well ahead of time, or you just bunk off and get your boss to sign for it later.

    Most rational organisations can cope with this level of deviant behaviour.

    I probably know you. That describes my company exactly.

  • (cs) in reply to Morg
    Morg:
    The real WTF is that there are vacation forms. When I'm going to take a vacation, I tell my boss "Hey, I'd like to take off next Thursday and Friday." and he says, "Nice, have fun."

    I fill in a paper form once a year to book summer vacation and that's only so that they can all be aggregated to ensure there's coverage at all times and everyone isn't gone at the same time.

    But yeah, everything else is ad hoc.

  • ajk (unregistered) in reply to Mythokia
    Mythokia:
    Somehow that reminds me of some of the governmental agencies websites here in Singapore. It's one of those online-only form exclusives where the person in their office tells you that it can only be done online, but eventually you HAVE to print it out anyway and bring it back to their office.

    Speaking of Singapore, The MoM (Ministry of Manpower) building is quite funny organized, each floor is like an isolated company so when you apply for say a PR on the 5th floor i.e. filling out all the forms, getting copies, photos etc then if you need to do some other similar application on another floor like getting a social visit pass for a family member you need to do the exact same paperwork again complete with signed copies etc. One would think they would cooperate a bit lol.

  • ChiefCrazyTalk (unregistered) in reply to Anonymously Yours
    Anonymously Yours:
    Where's the WTF? This is a brilliant example of management throwing time, money, and technology at a non-issue in order to look busy and thus justify their existence. It seems to have been amazingly successful since it's only generated even more activity for them to point to and say, "This is why you need us."

    The real WTF is that people think this is a WTF. Sure, using Access for that many users is bad, but having an electronic system allows for reporting, creating projections, reduces fraud, etc. Are people here really such luddites that they want to go back to pen and paper???

  • Lynx@Work (unregistered) in reply to ajk
    ajk:
    Speaking of Singapore, The MoM (Ministry of Manpower) building is quite funny organized, each floor is like an isolated company [ .. ] One would think they would cooperate a bit lol.
    You won't know it, but they are cooperating... :P

    On a more serious note, it probably would be a problem if they cooperate. Too much information sharing between governmental bodies can become Big Brother-ism. Are you going to be comfortable if the guy at the counter of the Vehicle Registration knows about the twins you registered for citizenships two weeks ago?

  • Lynx@Work (unregistered)

    Actually, I think the actual WTF is that there is a HR arm in the company...

    I know HR can bring real benefits to a corporation, but as a worker, most of the time HR gives me more grief than benefits. They seem to create more problems than solutions most of the time.

    A friend of mine once said that it's wrong to call it Human Resources to begin with. It implies you use and throw the people away like a resource.

    CAPTCHA: sanitarium. That's where I feel most HR people should be housed..

  • A chicken passeth by (unregistered)

    This is no WTF... this is just a standard story of feature creep and things that just "have to be done the business logic way" gone wrong.

    Happens when programmers are just programmers and marketing/admin/boss are the ones running the show. Projects of this type generate so many Wonderful, Technical and Fantastical stories..

  • (cs) in reply to Cyrus
    Cyrus:
    Asking "Where's the WTF" then pointing it out, I sense a new trend.
    Visionary! But would this be restricted to the 1nt3rn3ts or could it escape and wreak havoc out there, as in:

    DA: And then the defendant struck the man with a stick, took his money and ran off. Attorney: Where's the crime in that? He just hit a man with a stick, took his money and ran off! Judge: You're right. Case dismissed.

  • (cs) in reply to Lynx@Work
    Lynx@Work:
    A friend of mine once said that it's wrong to call it Human Resources to begin with. It implies you use and throw the people away like a resource.
    Now there's a WTF... the idea that throwing away resources is the norm. This is why the planet is in the state it's in.

    Human resources can be recycled too, you know. They don't call it Soylent Green for nothing. ;)

  • kobal (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Two jobs ago, I had to build something to share data with a partner company. I had no prior knowledge of the chosen product. In 6-40 hour weeks, I learned, configured, administered, coded, debugged, documented and deployed it. It worked. It is still in use.

    One job ago, they asked me to do the exact same project. I estimated 6 man weeks. The management assigned me support teams from the following departments: project management, dba, sa, network, security, external data approval, legal, hardware selection, capacity planning, middleware management, product management, application development, timekeeping and vendor management, for a total of more than 35 people at any given time. There were 3 mandatory weekly meetings where everyone involved had to attend. The first was to discuss the plan for the second meeting. The second was to discuss the project plan. The third was to review the project plan and assign work for the week. After a year of this, I was laid off (gratefully I might add). It's now 6 months later and I've been told that the project has barely moved forward since I left (ya think?)

    Those who can, do. Those who can't do, manage. Those who can't manage, but try to do it anyway should be <please suggest completions for this sentence!>

    In higher education..

  • (cs) in reply to Mythokia
    Mythokia:
    Somehow that reminds me of some of the governmental agencies websites here in Singapore. It's one of those online-only form exclusives where the person in their office tells you that it can only be done online, but eventually you HAVE to print it out anyway and bring it back to their office.
    Somehow that reminds me of the time I switched to a different bank and had to notify various companies of the new account to debit from. Some had an online form through which this could be done specifically, Some had a general customer contact form. And the national telecom offered two alternatives: A) a PDF form to print, fill in and snail-mail them - B) an online form to request the paper form to be snail-mailed to you so you can fill it in and snail-mail it back...
  • Daniel (unregistered)
    RDN is a free magazine for influential readers
    Subscription Rates: 
    Canada/Mexico
Print: 1 year for $59.95
Digital: 1 year for $39.95

All other countries
Print: 1 year for $79.95
Digital: 1 year for $39.95</div></BLOCKQUOTE>

    I guess that I'm not influential enough, or my definition of 'free' differs from Microsofts.

  • Shauno (unregistered) in reply to Daniel

    not real sure where the problem is, who cares if it take a day or two to process leave....your've got time management probs if you can't allow a day or two extra when waiting for leave approval.

    Most managers want leave requests submitted months before anyway.....at least this system saves on paper and toner waste etc

  • rumpelstiltskin (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    Paul:
    rumpelstiltskin:
    Come on, Paul, do you really think the number of vacation requests is uniformly distributed over time? Do you really think as many people are asking for a week off in January, as ask for a week off in July? Or, do you really think as many people are filling the form out at 3am, as are filling it out at 10am?
    No, no, and no. Which is why I calculated the average over an eight hour day, suggested aiming to handle a multiple of the average, and added more redundancy to make the peak 16x the average.
    Now, that would be a lovely rejection message for your request for Tuesday off on this system, wouldn't it? "I'm sorry, we cannot advance your request for time off to your boss. This system is incapable of handling the load between Thanksgiving and the New Year. Try again after Mother's Day."

    (Although I suspect that such exceptional processing would be well beyond the designers of this monstrosity.)

    In between his night job of spinning straw into gold, rumpelstiltskin might want to look up how real server systems work. Take credit-card processing, for instance. As in my example above, they suffer from a sustained peak demand (50% of the annual total, and on some days it shoots off the graph) between Thanksgiving and Christmas. How do they deal with this? Simple.

    (a) They buy far more powerful hardware than they expect to need, just in case. (b) They test the fuck out of the thing before it goes into production before Thanksgiving. (c) They lock the entire server room down a week before Thanksgiving and do not open it again (except for operators and physical maintenance) until three days after Christmas. (d) Everybody, from managers on down, wets their pants for two months.

    It's a fun job, really.

    However, in the case of the OP, I think these people are just blatant morons who should have their remaining brain-cells botoxed for the benefit of the gene pool. That's one final, useful, thing that the otherwise appalling HR department could do for the company. Plastic surgery on the archipallium: you know it makes sense.

    BTW, in the current case, the palliative for rumpelstiltskin's issues would be something called "process." Either you get pre-approved well ahead of time, or you just bunk off and get your boss to sign for it later.

    Most rational organisations can cope with this level of deviant behaviour.

    In response to Paul, fair enough. My point was, the load calculation indicates low concurrency, which I (still) don't believe is the case. In response to real_aardvark, I don't spin the straw into gold. That b*tch The Miller's Daughter does that, or at least used to do that.

  • (cs) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    (a) They buy far more powerful hardware than they expect to need, just in case. (b) They test the fuck out of the thing before it goes into production before Thanksgiving. (c) They lock the entire server room down a week before Thanksgiving and do not open it again (except for operators and physical maintenance) until three days after Christmas. (d) Everybody, from managers on down, wets their pants for two months.
    Sure they do. Last year no credit card transactions worked for 3 days before Christmas, not to mention that every December the cashiers usually have to try 3-5 times before the transaction gets through (though this seems to be caused by lack of phone lines in the processing centre).
  • (cs) in reply to ender
    ender:
    real_aardvark:
    (a) They buy far more powerful hardware than they expect to need, just in case. (b) They test the fuck out of the thing before it goes into production before Thanksgiving. (c) They lock the entire server room down a week before Thanksgiving and do not open it again (except for operators and physical maintenance) until three days after Christmas. (d) Everybody, from managers on down, wets their pants for two months.
    Sure they do. Last year no credit card transactions worked for 3 days before Christmas, not to mention that every December the cashiers usually have to try 3-5 times before the transaction gets through (though this seems to be caused by lack of phone lines in the processing centre).
    Well, it's not my fault the bastards terminated my contract, is it?
  • blastard (unregistered) in reply to Paul

    Unless people apply for vacation just before the summer or christmas and only do it during working hours, then you would get more load.

  • DarkSprout (unregistered) in reply to KM

    CAPTCHA: pirates (Who want's do be a pirate, cos a pirate is free - you are a pirate.)

    KM:
    Those who can, do. Those who can't do, manage. Those who can't manage, but try to do it anyway should be <please suggest completions for this sentence!>
    Those who can, do. Those who can't do, manage. Those who can't manage, but try to do it anyway should be promoted.

    -- KM

    Slight Word Change: "Those who can, do. Those who can't do, manage. Those who can't manage, but try to do it anyway are promoted. "

  • (cs) in reply to VGR
    VGR:
    Morg:
    The real WTF is that there are vacation forms. When I'm going to take a vacation, I tell my boss "Hey, I'd like to take off next Thursday and Friday." and he says, "Nice, have fun."
    Nah, the Real WTF™ is having sick leave request forms. "I'm planning on experiencing dehydration, cramps and diarrhea next week. Sign off on this please?"

    Na... Thats very clever of them...

    So you can get bad marks on am employee for filling it or for NOT filling it out. So you can lay him of more easy :D

    (P.s.: I am writing this from Germany, and we have somewhat... no much stricter laws for laying ppl of...)

  • Troy Mclure (unregistered) in reply to webhamster
    webhamster:
    Morg:
    The real WTF is that there are vacation forms. When I'm going to take a vacation, I tell my boss "Hey, I'd like to take off next Thursday and Friday." and he says, "Nice, have fun."

    I fill in a paper form once a year to book summer vacation and that's only so that they can all be aggregated to ensure there's coverage at all times and everyone isn't gone at the same time.

    But yeah, everything else is ad hoc.

    How does your company keep track of how many days of vacation you take? Seems to me if I owned a company I'd want to keep track of this pretty closely b/c employees lie and that costs me money.

  • Jesse Harris (unregistered) in reply to grrrr

    No, it's TimeForce. I haven't heard a lot of complaining about Kronos or Lawson, but man do I get an earful about the inflexible and expensive crap that is ADP's e-Time.

  • Rich (unregistered) in reply to Troy Mclure
    Troy Mclure:
    webhamster:
    Morg:
    The real WTF is that there are vacation forms. When I'm going to take a vacation, I tell my boss "Hey, I'd like to take off next Thursday and Friday." and he says, "Nice, have fun."

    I fill in a paper form once a year to book summer vacation and that's only so that they can all be aggregated to ensure there's coverage at all times and everyone isn't gone at the same time.

    But yeah, everything else is ad hoc.

    How does your company keep track of how many days of vacation you take? Seems to me if I owned a company I'd want to keep track of this pretty closely b/c employees lie and that costs me money.

    <radical>You could just evaluate if they're doing a good job and providing value for money</radical>

  • (cs) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Those who can, do. Those who can't do, manage. Those who can't manage, but try to do it anyway should be <please suggest completions for this sentence!>

    Just press TAB a couple of times, your shell will list the available completions.

    <ba-ba-dumm-TISHHHHHH>
  • (cs) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    NSCoder:
    What's PTO? Piss Them Off?

    They need a Process Improvement Process Improvement Process.

    PTO = Paid Time Off

    It's a fancy way to avoid having to give employees sick time, or any other type of leave time [ ... ]

    <innocent>So in that case, what's "USPTO" then?</innocent>

  • (cs) in reply to VGR
    VGR:
    "I'm planning on experiencing dehydration, cramps and diarrhea next week. Sign off on this please?"
    Sounds messy.

    Where do you find a pen that can write on those kinds of surfaces, anyhow?

  • (cs) in reply to ChiefCrazyTalk
    ChiefCrazyTalk:
    [ ... ] having an electronic system allows for reporting, creating projections, reduces fraud, etc. Are people here really such luddites that they want to go back to pen and paper???
    Reducing fraud? Pen and paper?

    I don't know if you've ever heard of a company called "Diebold", but pen and paper is actually a far better fraud prevention mechanism than something based on intangible identical interchangable undistinguishably-forgeable bits.

    I'm no luddite but I very very strongly want to go back to pen and paper for some things.

    Oh, also flowcharting. Damn if it doesn't sometimes take fifteen minutes just to draw a straight line in Visio, when I could have done it in five seconds with a pen and paper!

  • (cs) in reply to Daniel
    Daniel:
    RDN is a free magazine for influential readers
    Subscription Rates: 
    Canada/Mexico
Print: 1 year for $59.95
Digital: 1 year for $39.95

All other countries
Print: 1 year for $79.95
Digital: 1 year for $39.95</div></BLOCKQUOTE>

    I guess that I'm not influential enough, or my definition of 'free' differs from Microsofts.

    I suspect the second is likely to be the case, given what they think of as 'open' source.

  • Matt (unregistered)

    Gee, we have a paperless PTO system where I work, and it does pretty well. When you connect, the system knows who you are, no matter whether you're in Windows, Unix, Linux or Mac, through a short-term X.509 credential obtained via Kerberos and loaded in your browser or keychain. The system is tied to the HR database and knows which manager to notify for approval (which is done through a Plone workflow) and on request produces a leave calendar at the group, department or division level so we can see who is scheduled to be away.

    Maybe we have a spin-off possibility?

  • Foo (unregistered) in reply to gabba

    I think the problem lies not in the web ui, but in the back-end PDFing. With web processes, things should be instant or near-instant, with a tolerable lag period of 5-10 mins.

  • (cs)

    Just how did the developers mess this up so bad? Option 1 would be a perl/php/takeyourpick on https on the intranet. option 2 would be an 'application' that consisted of a customised browser that connected to the intranet application mentioned earlier. A mega-app that cals a pdf report creator that... no. just no. PTO stands for Please Turn Off.

  • Anonymously Yours (unregistered) in reply to ChiefCrazyTalk
    ChiefCrazyTalk:
    Anonymously Yours:
    Where's the WTF? This is a brilliant example of management throwing time, money, and technology at a non-issue in order to look busy and thus justify their existence. It seems to have been amazingly successful since it's only generated even more activity for them to point to and say, "This is why you need us."
    The real WTF is that people think this is a WTF. Sure, using Access for that many users is bad, but having an electronic system allows for reporting, creating projections, reduces fraud, etc. Are people here really such luddites that they want to go back to pen and paper???
    I agree with you that the problems with the first system do not negate the usefulness of an electronic system. However, version 2 should have been aimed as an improvement on the efficiency of the first system, not a grotesque attempt to expand it to encompass additional company needs. The biggest semantic problem was that it generated PDFs which -for heaven knows what reason- were required before your PTO could even be filled out. I can understand someone wanting to be able to make reports, but it would be far smarter to use internal data collection for PTO requests and perform PDF generation when reports are actually called for.

    The whole project could have been easily done as an internal website. If they really needed extra features, they could have just made the payment system a standalone module and added other pieces held together under nothing more than a common login. They would have had the PTO software done in a week, maybe another week to beat the ugly out of it. With mystery bugs and a DB import, I'd say they could have had a scalable web-app to replace the PTO in three weeks, tops.

    Instead they made a slow, ever-expanding monster. Then they started on yet another one, again expanding. Say what you will about the limitations of pen and paper forms, but this will still be an example of management working their way up to firing off tactical nukes to deal with an ant problem.

  • (cs) in reply to ChiefCrazyTalk
    ChiefCrazyTalk:
    The real WTF is that people think this is a WTF. Sure, using Access for that many users is bad, ....

    There are easily things that could be done to speed up performance. I suspect there are some details that are missing as I don't see how you could run a LAN with 10,000 users in it. Well, there are some large employers with campuses that large such as Microsoft. Or maybe universities and such.

    There is a large difference between using Access as the front end application user interface and Access as the data storage. In this situation using SQL Server, or equivalent, as a data storage could easily handle 10,000 users. Not all at the same time of course but in this kind of app I rather doubt that would happen.

    Things could have been easily done to speed up the Access app. It likely would've taken someone intelligent and who knows how to do some Internet searching only a few days or a week to speed up that app back to two seconds.

    Thus I disagree with your throw away statement that using Access for many users is bad.

    Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP

  • (cs) in reply to Foo
    Foo:
    I think the problem lies not in the web ui, but in the back-end PDFing. With web processes, things should be instant or near-instant, with a tolerable lag period of 5-10 mins.
    Back when I was allowed to work on server-side systems, around ten or fifteen years ago, we had a concept of "instant or near-instant." It wasn't real-time, because we didn't deal with latencies and all that guff, but it could be measured in a small multiple of clock cycles on an M68000.

    Nice to know that the WWW (Wonderful World of the Web) can now guarantee near-instant performance with a tolerable lag of 5-10 minues. (Saving the 40 second timeout on the browser, of course.)

    Actually, chucking out a single-page PDF form inside a tenth of a second should be trivial. I played around with this using embedded Python (hardly the speediest of alternatives, but the libraries for this particular task are really handy) in C/C++, and it works a treat.

    I therefore challenge your bizarre assumption that the addition of an "output to PDF" step stretches the processing time from your own 5-10 minutes to the quoted three days.

    Might it just be something to do with a totally fucked up database?

  • (cs) in reply to Tony Toews
    Tony Toews:
    ChiefCrazyTalk:
    The real WTF is that people think this is a WTF. Sure, using Access for that many users is bad, ....

    There are easily things that could be done to speed up performance. I suspect there are some details that are missing as I don't see how you could run a LAN with 10,000 users in it. Well, there are some large employers with campuses that large such as Microsoft. Or maybe universities and such.

    There is a large difference between using Access as the front end application user interface and Access as the data storage. In this situation using SQL Server, or equivalent, as a data storage could easily handle 10,000 users. Not all at the same time of course but in this kind of app I rather doubt that would happen.

    Things could have been easily done to speed up the Access app. It likely would've taken someone intelligent and who knows how to do some Internet searching only a few days or a week to speed up that app back to two seconds.

    Thus I disagree with your throw away statement that using Access for many users is bad.

    Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP

    Tony, with all due respect, you need to get a life. Even one inside the campus.

    Irrespective of whether Access is awful (and it is, honestly), or whether it is inadequate compared to easily-available alternatives (and it is, honestly), it has one Major Flaw.

    Everybody who has written an application using it, without exception, over the last ten years, is an incompetent idiot. It was specifically designed for incompetent idiots, and has been very successful in its aims.

    When you're developing it or selling it, this is not your problem. But now you're maintaining it. Which means that you're supporting ten years' worth of incompetent idiocy.

    Move over. Move to what you want to do, if possible. Move over to SQL Server, if there are openings. Failing that, move over to Excel/VBA, which is a good little product that actually supports work done by rational human beings rather than wannabees.

    This advice given to you for free, as a fellow member of the human race.

    Can I have 15% of your share options as my agent's fee, please?

    Tony Toews:
    Or maybe universities and such.
    No, I take that back. You don't have the mental competency to understand. As the days go by, I feel more and more happy that I would never in a million years pass the fabled Microsoft interview process.

    I don't mind occasionally feeling like a clueless moron. I'd hate to be professionally certified as one.

  • csrster (unregistered) in reply to Joe

    Software developers are not necessarily all super-nerds who know nothing but database normalisation and algorithm design. Some software-development degrees actually include things like HCI and even project management.

  • csrster (unregistered) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    Ian:
    This isn't so much an issue with technology or "make work" situations, as it is a lack of usability assessment. Obviously nobody thought about workflow while developing this application and instead just tried to factor in features they wanted.

    Going paperless isn't the problem, its letting developers make design decisions.

    I've been interested in HCI (Human Computer Interfaces) and general interface design since undergrad school. I can't stress enough how valuable this skill is to have. If all you're doing is coding together classes based on specs then forget it. But if you EVER have to create something that an end user is going to interact with, then having even a basic understanding of design principles puts you and your users at a big advantage.

    Software developers are not necessarily all super-nerds who know nothing but database normalisation and algorithm design. Some software-development degrees actually include things like HCI and even project management.

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