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Admin
I'm confused. Was it Alexi or Alexei who quit?
Admin
yes.
Admin
Alexei ist like 2/3 of my colleagues.
Admin
soo..... The HPC did 2 good things: He fixed multiple puppet issues And he made the cause of more issues dissapear.. now that is a wtf.
Admin
Happy ending? HPC did a good job? Not even a backdoor left by Alex[e]i... I really miss a pretty WFT here!
Admin
Product Automation Engineer: Development Operations?
Admin
Dammit, that's Puppet Automation Engineer: Development Operations, natch.
Admin
I smell too much advertisement... Unfortunately, that made me believe it was all made up and just a pretext to advertise Puppet.
Admin
It was not made up. The names were made up to protect the innocent and not so innocent, and I asked them to anonymize the details because enough bridges are already burned for other reasons, but this is what happened to a high degree of accuracy. The guy was so frustrating to work with that my usually patient self ran out very quickly.
I moved on as well a few months later.
Admin
"As he worked on the requirements-not generated by users"
What's a "requirement-not" ?
Admin
An HPC doing two good things when he certainly wasn't paid for at least one of those? That is a WTF indeed.
Admin
Prima donna anti-pattern ho hum.
Admin
That's a misplaced hyphen; it should be "requirement-snot generated by users".
Admin
Section 404 of SOX dictates VERY little in the way of strict requirements; most companies take their compliance guidance from the PCAOB's AS5 document. I'm curious what the requirements were and how Puppet was used to meet them.
Disclaimer: IAMA SOX Auditor.
Admin
Your syntax parser must have crashed. Here's the full sentence:
There's actually a missing comma there, but subclause "not generated by users, but dictated by US law" is perfectly reasonable as background detail to "the requirements".
Admin
But the subclause is "but dictated by US law", since the first part of the sentence is "As he worked on the requirements-not generated by users,"
Admin
Looks like our writer used a hyphen when an em-dash was called for. One is for word-joining—the other is for separating clauses in a sentence.
Admin
Hey.. our requirements tend to be pulled out of someone's AS5, too!
Admin
As anyone who has been around the "requirements" knows: Sarbanes Oxley has insured full employment for the "auditors" who can keep saying "it needs to be there" or some such bllsht. Us low life just keep saying OK, and carry on.
Admin
Alexi sounds like a damn child. How does he hold down jobs like that?
Admin
By being just good enough at talking up a big game and skilled enough to prove his chops with an extremely in-demand set of skills like SAP and Puppet that he can get in, and then convincing management that it really is complex enough that it'll take years to put together. Once his bullshit unravels, he just moves on to the next company, flashing his certs instead of his references.
Admin
What is this? This is so unlike what I am used to read here. I don't like when the story teller tells me how to "feel" about something with quotation marks when there is no meat for that emotion! Maybe he was that good? Maybe he was the "expert" and the client is now screwed. How am I supposed to know? I can't judge properly if there is ambiguity! I don't want to feel like I routing for a wimp who blames others for their problems; I want to feel superior and be justified! :D
Admin
As much as I love a good HPC roasting,it's a relief to hear the occasional success story. Kudos.
Admin
Another happy ending? I had one of those too, but since it's illegal for me to return to my former position, I should get one of those jobs.
Admin
Well, this reminds me of my coworker that was let go just yesterday. He is really good with programming, but not so good with just using existing framework code instead of writing it from scratch again, and especially bad with sticking to the requirements. Didn't pay attention to anything we said, knew everything better. The resulting program doesn't work, and now it's me who has to fix it.
To top it off, the door that broke in the process of letting him go will be deduced from his last salary.
Admin
Malicious Obedience is one of the most satisfying forms of passive aggression.
Admin
With regard to the "how does this relate to SOX" question, the situation was this: Yes, SOX is rather loose as to what companies are required to do technically, but the business had come up with the requirements as to what needed to be audited/enforced, but they came up with multiple tests that were slightly different (yes, probably a wtf). Alexi knew just enough about SOX to know that we could determine what SOX compliance meant, but was under the impression that as a technical implementer he had the right or ability to actually influence what the business asked for. When it became clear he could not, he then shifted to taking those multiple tests that were slightly different, and implementing them in such a way that it caused them to step on each other, and the last one won.
We had meetings upon meetings trying to get him to understand that basic fact - that he was supposed to implement the requirements, not develop them, and I must confess I lost my patience multiple times. And I'm usually pretty even keeled. He had this rather annoying tendency to babble on for a half hour or more if he disagreed with you on anything and that got really old really fast.
This is one of those stories I'll probably tell for years...
Admin
... door that broke in the process of letting him go will be deduced from his last salary.
Sherlock Holmes: You say he was paid 76,000? Then clearly this door was broken by his departure.
Watson: Brillant deduction, Holmes!