• What? I'm not giving you my name. (unregistered)

    First for free

  • cleese_pls (unregistered) in reply to What? I'm not giving you my name.

    first to say you are a coward:

    https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.rizon.net/#templeos

  • cleese_pls (unregistered)

    soon SOON ! https://thepasteb.in/p/pghQLq2BopLfR doYouSeeNow? tEri ? ? ? do you see? bring them back bring them all back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_Comics or they die they all die https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Studios wHatIsTheOriginOfTheJoker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercontinental_ballistic_missile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_biosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliocentrism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle Hyrule available Take Oxford, Take Stanford BTC to any woman who does the Oxford green walk naked More to any who NIP the changing of the guard they want women in science, do they ? ? ? well that's what they will get https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o4viqGUtrw just for us https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-8adc39DV0 lookAtMyWorksAndWeep!!!

  • Quite (unregistered)

    A horrible story that makes me angry.

    That is, a tale in the grand old tradition of TDWTF, the way things were before we ran out of tales like this.

    I sure hope this company goes under.

  • Whoever (unregistered)

    each with their own vendor-specific development environment and its own licensing costs

    Grammatical consistency, anyone? (Still, I suppose we should be grateful for the correct version of "its".)

  • (nodebb)

    I am so dreaming of a follow up story where Greg finds a new position, and Dave follows him there along with the 10 best developers of the team....

  • (nodebb) in reply to TheCPUWizard

    I think perhaps you meant "where Xavier finds a new position". Or, at least, I hope that's what you meant.

  • my name is missing (unregistered)

    Now if TDWTF could cut the spammers out. What happened to moderation? Also not paying Oracle is like cheating Satan.

  • (nodebb)

    Short term memory is the second thing to go as one ages...I forget what the first thing was..... I did indeed mean Xavier....NEED more coffee!

  • Brian (unregistered)

    With a boss like that, I have a feeling that Xavier is just the first of many to leave the company. At my former company, we got a new division head; among his many questionable decisions was laying off one of the head architects. Supposedly it was for budget reasons, despite the fact that the company was in the process of building a shiny new HQ (in a location that would significantly increase the commute for most employees). During my last 6 months or so there, they seemed to suddenly have a big problem with turnover...

  • His Derpiness (unregistered) in reply to my name is missing

    You're still ending up in hell as their bitch?

  • Sally Flynn (unregistered)

    I can't help but wonder if Xavier would have had a case for unfair dismissal.

  • Aspie (unregistered)

    With a boss like Greg you would hope that the chickens come home to roost quite quickly. Sadly in my experience this is not the case. The world adapts to life on planet Greg and somehow the massive escalation in costs is sold as a short term issue that will end up paying dividends once the cost cutting measures bed in. The short-term memory of the powers that be forget life before Greg and don't seem able to see behind his cost cut flag waving.

    Eventually they will notice that productivity seems to be down but that will be blamed on the old-timers and not the fact that delivering using the toolset allowed condemns you to try to climb up a glass wall covered in baby oil with an anvil tied to your ankles.

    If Greg hasn't been found out within 6 months just leave. It ain't worth the heart ache.

  • Gargravarr (unregistered)

    This is really low, even by new-CTO standards. And this is definitely why you don't hire a bureaucrat into a technical role - a Chief Technology Officer needs to know why technology costs money. Hope this company is sliding into oblivion and its good devs are heading for greener pastures.

  • operagost (unregistered)

    Whether Xavier has a case for his dismissal varies wildly among jurisdictions. But I would have reported this to the CEO. After all, Greg is the new guy. Just because he's CTO doesn't mean he won't be fired for costing the company a ton of money. The way the process is described, there's a paper trail PROVING Xavier followed the process and Greg didn't do his job at all, as if all the software needs would just go away.

  • (nodebb) in reply to operagost

    That is something... the CTO stated he would buy these things and then didn't, costing the company thousands more in fees/citations for unlicensed software. That's something that the other executives need to be made aware of.

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to DocMonster

    It's a minor administrative mistake, or at least that's how he'd portray it. $40k is nothing in the budget of a department with 100+ employees.

    Sure, the CTO appears to have been idiotic about licensing costs, but that's when you present a cost-benefit analysis for each piece of software which demonstrates exactly how foolish he's being.

    As for Xavier's redundancy, we have no idea whether or not his position was actually necessary, or if he was any good at it. If fighting for his department's budget was part of the role, it's a part he was bad at.

  • Eric Gregory (github)

    Ah yes, the old "comparison to zero" fallacy. Why spend $1 million fixing up a bridge when you can spend zero instead, and then get sued for $10 million when a bunch of people get hurt...

    ...oh right. That's why you don't compare a cost to zero without considering the consequences.

  • foxyshadis (unregistered)

    100+ developers, each of whom are most likely making $100-400 a day, and they spent a day to figure out how to save $4,000. That doesn't even touch all the obvious costs for retooling, converting, and retraining (even if the training is self-directed), let alone the non-obvious ones like exchanging known patterns and bugs with a whole new set of unknowns.

    Yes, a stroke of financial wizardry here, but far too many managers do see labor as a wasteable resource since employees are coming in every day anyway.

  • foxyshadis (unregistered) in reply to Dave

    I learned a long time ago that there's no stopping a CxO on the warpath, especially not a new one while they're still the board's golden child. If he doesn't ask for a cost-benefit analysis, then one is not only not going to be appreciated, it'll be seen as insubordination and wasting time.

  • Anon (unregistered)

    Why would anybody be jealous of a coin-smasher? Envious I could understand, but jealous? That's perverse.

    See https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/joy-and-pain/201401/what-is-the-difference-between-envy-and-jealousy

    Now, before you go quoting other popular dictionary definitions, or uttering such drivel as "language is always evolving", please consider what will become of language if we throw away perfectly good words and incorporate their meanings into others...

    Eventually we will all be talking like smurfs.

  • Carl Witthoft (google)
    Now, before you go quoting other popular dictionary definitions, or uttering such drivel as "language is always evolving", please consider what will become of language if we throw away perfectly good words and incorporate their meanings into others...
    Now THAT is an example of a perfectly cromulent post.
  • cleese_pls (unregistered)

    Before we heal our bodies, we must heal our minds. We must never project our own selves onto others. The human mind consists in layers. As the brain stem picks up the back, the front looks, while the middle makes sense.

    We need a real "ice bucket challenge". Something that soothes the human mind, not to provoke. Something to heal the world, not bifucate it, regardless of identity.

    We must look inwards first, to the inner eye of the big picture. Heaven exists in the heart of every human. God exists in the mind of the future. Men are in between. We say the right word, and it's the concept of madness that is weak, and God which is strong. There is no madness in the light of God.

  • cleese_pls (unregistered)

    Just tweeted Musk. Let's see if the coward hears the beckoning call !!!

  • Zenith (unregistered)

    Greg sounds like a clown, so I hope he suffered for this, either by being fired or saddled with a sinking organization.

    That said, I've worked with some duhvelopers that needed many thousands of dollars in annually-licensed tools to even approach barely adequate. Any time they had to do anything, it was "we need to license something to do this!" If they had to search a folder for JPGs and GIFs, they'd run to find a library before putting GetFiles() in a loop. If they needed two or three icons for an internal page, they ran out and spent thousands on icons because Paint was hard. God help them if they had to do anything like FTP or add pages to a TIFF or do Office automation or translate EBCDIC (had to do that because our old DLL just returned jibberish in .NET). Sometimes you need a tool and sometimes you need to take a couple of hours and actually program instead.

    Because it does add up. Buying Visual Studio every year. Buying an FTP manager because FTP is scary. Buying Aspose because your three use cases for Office COM are scary. Buying a refactoring tool because nobody designs an API and everybody is above reading compiler errors. Buying a code analysis tool because defensive programming and in-place optimization are frowned upon. Buying a style cop because half the team's brains shut off on seeing { or } on its own line. Buying ERwin because SQL is scary. Buying some auto-documenter even though the default output is every bit as useless as the XML defaults. Buying seven different calendar controls and thousands of icons for some internal page. And so on and so on. And then when you actually need something, like a code-signing or SSL certificate, suddenly it's "oh me, oh my, so 'spensive, not in the budget..."

  • Oliver Jones (google)

    Huh. I thought the best career protection a bozo CTO had was membership in the network of Oracle acolytes. Having some oracle skillz and being known to Oracle sales and tech reps is a really good thing for high level makers of bad decisions. Oracle influencers can beam you into another job if you lose one.

    But not if you don't pay their invoices.

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to foxyshadis

    "I learned a long time ago that there's no stopping a CxO on the warpath, especially not a new one while they're still the board's golden child."

    Quite. So you cover your arse and set him up to fail. Cost-benefit analyses, documented via email, are hard to get around.

    If you work somewhere so dysfunctional that being right isn't enough, the real question isn't how to beat the bastards, but why you're working there at all. Contrary to what many people seem to believe, there's always another job just around the corner, even in a recession. We all suffer because those people don't insist on being paid what they're worth and treated they way they should be.

  • (nodebb)

    The CFO probably was told that his "bonus" would come out of the expenses he cut. If he cut enough, he would get a large bonus. Of course since he wrote the checks, he could do the bonus money any way he wanted and nobody would be the wiser.

    This is the reason we tech people hate bean counters.

  • foxyshadis (unregistered) in reply to Zenith

    I agree with everything there, except that if I ever have to work with someone else's TIFF, I buy the parser in a heartbeat. I've implemented a few parsers in my time, but implementing from specs or from reversing are both bound to break the first time you get one from anyone else; they're extended and broken in so many unique ways that every piece of software must speak their own language. I guess no other format tries to be everything to everyone, so there isn't much choice for some workflows.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    Wait cheese... 'exists in the mind of the future'?!?

    So something 'exists' (present tense) in the future, but not the present? Something that is perpetually in the future, which can't lie in the past-time (minkowsky) cone of reality, might as well not exist at all, as it cannot in any way affect reality. So I suppose it's the empty set.

    Many statements about 'nothing' are vacuous: you can say a lot of things, even seemingly contradictory ones, and they're all true.

    Technically though, it's kind of a fun 'divide by zero' style loophole. You cannot observe it, and by extension it cannot cause anything, so one can make up any fantasy they like, and it's true. Well... literally "outside of reality".

  • cleese_pls (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous

    https://wordpress.com/post/stevehartken.wordpress.com/11

  • Zenith (unregistered) in reply to foxyshadis

    Did you really mean TIFF or were you thinking of PDF? I used a library for PDFs. TIFFs, though, were pretty easy if you followed the specification and all of the pages to be combined were of the same format. Same sort of deal with WAV actually.

    And that's another story where management squandered thousands of dollars on Sony recorders that, after sitting in a closet for nearly a decade, had to basically be thrown away because they wouldn't spend another $90 for something to convert their weird proprietary variant of WAV into a regular WAV. I don't know what they would've done if my friend hadn't been able to rig up DirectSound with my WAV-splicing function because they were just about out of working tape decks at that point. It sounds bad but it was a fun challenge that every other place I worked afterward would've suffocated by throwing a tantrum and expecting a solution to manifest out of thin air (too busy pissing away resources on phony testing that never finds bugs and meetings about the evils of Allman-style bracket placement to let any real work get done).

  • Guest as a post (unregistered)

    Moral of story: DON'T ever go on a long vacation!

  • (nodebb)

    When the Oracle license runs out, turn off Oracle. When the CEO calls asking why nothing is working, tell him Oracle stopped working because the CTO didn't send the check

  • Guntank (unregistered)

    In the next quarter, Greg will then save the company millions by placing the company's shifting losses into shell companies he made up, so only profit shows up on the final balance sheet...

    And all the shareholders will be happy. Until they aren't.

  • fuzzylogic (unregistered)

    In a case like this, I would walk over to the CEO's office and inform him that his new CxO's refusal to pay just cost the company a large amount of money and in order to cover that on the balance sheet he decided that my position was redundant. Either way he cost the company a large amount of money, and a long standing department head.

  • Wheresthespamohthereitis (unregistered)

    Oh, hey. I see the spam is back. Nice...

  • wildcat (unregistered)

    A company I worked for the i was the 2nd in command behind the main IT guy. I was straight out of college and wasn't making much. The main guy got a new job and moved on and they put me in his role plus mine. I asked for raise because I had more responsibility... they said "no". Gave my two week notice and in my last couple days there they offered me a 20K/year increase to stay. But they still penny pinched about everything. I still ended up leaving eventually because they would not let technology move forward. About a year after I left the company went completely under and was seized by the bank. Some companies don't understand you have to spend money to move forward and then spend it again to keep moving forward.

  • isthisunique (unregistered)

    I have to agree with Zenith. You can have the opposite extreme. I would definite raise an eyebrow at seeing Oracle licenses. I've seen enterprise software costs and it's nothing to scoff at. Some of these licenses can exceed the costs of your hosting and servers by several times if you consider they're not one off costs. Having built systems with open source saving to the tune of potentially tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, comparing that to throwing money at licenses I find it hard to fathom what you would really get from the licensing. At best it might gain a week here or there over the course of a few years but it can also introduce problems beyond the cost such as having systems a remote party managers that you know little about and having to act at a great distance through more hops to get things done. For me there essentially is next to know gain from acquiring exorbitantly priced licenses. There are few scenarios I can envisage where there is a legitimate gain or reason to use them. Another big unseen problem from this is that once people get these support licenses there's sometimes a drive to get your money's worth. The worse thing about that is that you should try to extract the maximum value from what you purchase. It's not done within reason though. You sometimes have things being done in an inferior way to another approach because that inferior way gets more out of the license fee. People then get defensive because no one wants to admit you're pissing tons of money down the drain on licenses that were purchased unnecessarily. I've seen so many enterprise endeavors coping perfectly well on community editions or open source alternatives. "Enterprise" is really just a marketing keyword. Because you're an enterprise doesn't mean you have to purchase things people have marked as for enterprise. It's a scam.

  • Adam Jorgensen (github)

    What a batshit crazy tale of insanity.

  • markm (unregistered)

    $40,00/100 developers = $400 on software tools per seat per year. It sounds quite reasonable to me.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to foxyshadis

    Past 2015, they're probably only getting $50/hr.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to isthisunique

    It will only take you 5 years and cost you 70% of your customers to shift from Oracle to another database system, because Oracle is such shit that it allows the basest of morons to run a database without even a hint of architecture, and also makes those mistakes completely impossible to resolve.

    Forget about creating tests for your Oracle-dependent shit, because you're extremely fucking lucky if Oracle even bothers releasing a development edition of e current database version within a year, and it will only support 1/10th of the features you might be using in the 'real' database. You'll have to do that migration completely blind, meaning you're likely stuck for at least a year with a barely-functioning product.

  • Dyspeptic Curmudgeon (unregistered)

    Xavier's frist mistake was to cut short his holiday. He earned it and the company should have (and would have) operated without him there. The fuse of the FUBAR by the CTO was still burning. If he had delayed returning, he might not have been home when it exploded.

    I think his second mistake was to NOT call the CEO directly from Oz. Boss my subordinate has reported that the CTO has refused/neglected to pay the damn-absolutely-imperative-necessary-licences which had been agreed upon and was about to cause immense bet-the-company-existence-damage. And Dave can give you details.

    Not having done those things, in the story, he missed his opportunity to let the CEO know what was going on. If Greg had him escorted out, then anyone in this position, should visit the CEO at home that night. Dollars to doughnuts the CEO will know nothing about it. And deserves to know. But only do this if you do not have anger management issues.

    In a right-to-work state, things are different but in just about any other jurisdiction, the last words to the CEO would be: "You will be hearing from my lawyer. The claim will include unjust dismissal, retaliation and defamation, for a large amount of money. I might consider coming back, if he is gone by the end of the week. And you better re-instate the Oracle licence or YOUR job is toast."

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    "one day later, all the phones went out because Greg never paid the phone bills. one day after that, all the electricity went out because Greg never paid the electric bills..."

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    oh i just remembered a story: a stupid employee didn't understand how software licences work, so he bought a SINGLE COMPUTER LICENCE of something and installed it on a HUNDRED computers! cost the company millions in fines!

  • Hannah Banana (unregistered) in reply to Dave

    Hi Greg!

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