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A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

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Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#91

Post by IshKebab »

masklinn wrote: post #83
Tistron wrote: post #64

I worked in a software company once where we acquired a product to integrate into ours. It was developed by a self taught programmer in his 50ies that did versioning by making copies of the whole directory when he had something that worked, the way I also worked before university. Since he was the only developer and he was pretty good this mostly worked. His first name was/is Leif so from then on me and my friends sp…

TBF making tarballs and storing that was how many projects used to work. Linus did that until they got Bitkeeper & git, he refused to use any existing VCS before that.

To be fair VCS before that sucked pretty badly.

Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#92

Post by thendrill »

pbourke wrote: post #60
thendrill wrote: post #58

Omg. It is not like he watched his buddy lose a finger trying to hang a bridge. It fucking just data. It is just made up numbers. There is a reason why higher up mangers and bosses don't go e shit about code or understanding technology. Coz in the end it doesn't matter. There is always a role playing nerd that would love to slay the dragon. So much nerds that get promoted because they belive in Dragons and such.

Except when the made up numbers are the whole damned business. Or not (waves at Experian)

Ahh well if we gonna focus on the numbers only. You are right. But then people should shut up about all this environmental and economical crisis. My numbers are fine screw you if your numbers are bad. Why should that be my problem?

Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#93

Post by someonehere »

I am not a fan of Dropbox. Stories like this are why I don’t use it.

A couple of years ago I inherited managing Dropbox for a company I was at. I’d never really used Dropbox in a more daily use company.

I discovered Dropbox wasn’t very IT admin friendly. If you share out a personal folder as your team folder, IT can’t find your folder to share it to new members of your team. The person who owns the folder has to share it out. So when new employees ask why IT can’t access and share the folder, we had to explain that’s how Dropbox works.

The other crappy thing I discovered about Dropbox from that time. I have no way to audit or tell who has what folder. If someone was sharing something illegal from their folder, I had to turn on the auditing capability and download logs as they were generated. It was confusing because if someone were sharing something and I was the admin of that account, I should have access to all files and accounts. Nope. So we dumped Dropbox before I left to avoid scrutiny down the road for any acquisitions of the company.

Dropbox is still a consumer product trying to be a workplace tool IMO. Maybe others have a different opinion.

This is a good story to tell on Monday.

Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#94

Post by plg »

someonehere wrote: post #93

I am not a fan of Dropbox. Stories like this are why I don’t use it. A couple of years ago I inherited managing Dropbox for a company I was at. I’d never really used Dropbox in a more daily use company. I discovered Dropbox wasn’t very IT admin friendly. If you share out a personal folder as your team folder, IT can’t find your folder to share it to new members of your team. The person who owns the folder has to shar…

what do you suggest as an alternative. asking for a friend

Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#95

Post by usaar333 »

someonehere wrote: post #93

I am not a fan of Dropbox. Stories like this are why I don’t use it. A couple of years ago I inherited managing Dropbox for a company I was at. I’d never really used Dropbox in a more daily use company. I discovered Dropbox wasn’t very IT admin friendly. If you share out a personal folder as your team folder, IT can’t find your folder to share it to new members of your team. The person who owns the folder has to shar…

> If you share out a personal folder as your team folder, IT can’t find your folder to share it to new members of your team. The person who owns the folder has to share it out.

> It was confusing because if someone were sharing something and I was the admin of that account, I should have access to all files and accounts. Nope.

In both cases, you should be able to assume the shared folder owner (via the admin console) and modify their permissions. Did this not work for you?

(note: I'm an ex-Dropbox eng that worked on a lot of the sharing/team management systems)

Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#96

Post by xauronx »

doctor_eval wrote: post #19

What I find interesting is that the “insane asylum” apparently knew that it was wrong. e.g. when asked why they need so much space on their laptops, they were evasive. To my mind this makes it much worse. Not only were they doing something dumb, but they knew it was dumb, and they hid it instead of fixing it. It certainly invites speculation about the company culture in the acquired business.

I worked for a small company right out of college and we had some monsters under the bed too. Unfortunately the manager would rather new code written than cleaning up technical debt or resolving risks. So I would have to double my estimates and use my “spare time” to try to work toward some level of sanity... but there were still plenty of things that I felt guilty about and would be evasive about if someone asked.

Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#97

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

bakul wrote: post #31
ryandrake wrote: post #14

I hate to be That Guy but how on earth is this not discovered during due diligence before “insane asylum” Company was acquired?

Reminds me of HP's 11.1 Billion dollar blunder of buying Autonomy.... https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/business/hps-autonomy-blu...

That article was worth clearing cookies for. Thank you.

Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#98

Post by narag »

masklinn wrote: post #85
narag wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't name the offender, but a well-known company I worked for did something funnier: zipping entire directory and checking the zip files in Visual Source Safe.

Given how broken VSS is, that might have been safer than using VSS as if it worked properly.

LOL, I used it in 1996-97 and it worked OK for a modest setup with only six users and blocking at file level. Later heard some horror stories from people working at big shops, but no worse than svn stories, anyway I haven't seen any of those.

Re: A Dropbox account gave me stomach ulcers

#99

Post by z3t4 »

This story has many angles, the developer who built the software, the founder who took all the money, then sold the software and fired the developer. Then Dropbox who we all laughed at, is now used for distributed databases.
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