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Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

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Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#131

Post by dx034 »

growlist wrote: post #125

Saw the exact same thing from our clients: utterly trenchant opposition to home working, then CV, lo and behold! Immediate switch to home working :D

To be fair, they probably had to choose between taking risks they previously weren't willing to take (trust in consultants should always be lower than in your own employees in my opinion) but had no choice with Covid. The last months were a matter of life or death for many companies.

And to make it clear, I love home working but I also know colleagues who work without screen protection in public places or leave their laptop unlocked when they are at home and have guests. That's potentially horrible for the company but absolutely unenforceable without physical presence.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#132

Post by growlist »

andi999 wrote: post #65

My reason for this rule would be: if you allow consultanta to work from home, how do you make sure they are not double- selling their workhours? Like they bill you 8h, but only work 4h on your project.

Monitoring how much they actually use their mouse, keyboard and phone is an obvious one, along with snapshotting their display. I'm not saying I agree with this, but I know it happens.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#133

Post by trabant00 »

thecupisblue wrote: post #117
trabant00 wrote: post #23

I find these types of articles to be truisms. We have some imperfect system. Everybody knows about the problems it has. Somebody writes an article about how stupid and wrong those problems are. How does that help anybody? The real question is how you fix those problems without introducing others. Passed a certain age and work experience you start to notice that the bureaucracy that stops you from doing quick smart fi…

> you start to notice that the bureaucracy that stops you from doing quick smart fixes also stops a lot of people from doing serious damage to the company. That is the problem - we treat everyone as equals, trying to put rules that work for everyone, so the lowest common denominator is who the rules are made for. So someone who can leverage their knowledge for the good of the company gets ducktaped with red tape beca…

Who gets to decide who is worthy of bypassing the bureaucracy and on what basis?

Answer: the higher on the hierarchy you are the less the rules apply to you.

I suspect this answer is not satisfactory to you, in which case offer an alternative.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#134

Post by growlist »

RegW wrote: post #73
andi999 wrote: post #65

My reason for this rule would be: if you allow consultanta to work from home, how do you make sure they are not double- selling their workhours? Like they bill you 8h, but only work 4h on your project.

However they now have to be trusted. It might have been better to have figured out which you trust and only use those.

Indeed, what amazes me is the implicit distrust so many managers have. Either they have a pretty low opinion of people, or they are lazy themselves and projecting. I've had managers openly say to me 'well we have noone else to check your estimation with'. Are there really that many devs out there that estimate 10 days, finish in 1 and take 9 off??

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#135

Post by paulcole »

J-dawg wrote: post #91

It's interesting that in tech there is this expectation that every available thing should be done to make the employee as happy and relaxed as possible. If an employer refuses to do these things it's met with "does not compute", as in this example. Granted, it does seem to make sense that your employees are as happy and relaxed as possible, but this attitude doesn't seem to exist in other industries to the same degre…

> It seems that in tech people expect to be "looked after"

White men who get a job right after college and haven’t developed life skills yet. Then once they get a taste of making $150k+ and having their every whim catered to think anything less is unacceptable.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#136

Post by altacc »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #112
altacc wrote: post #75

In 1605 there was an attempt to blow up the British Parliament during the state opening by placing explosives in the cellars. 415 years later they still search the cellars for barrels of explosives, using oil lanterns and armed with swords. I feel that so many organisations are doing the same thing, maintaining an old solution for a problem that no longer exists. So I think it's just as, or more, important to apply t…

I think searching government property for explosives and terroristic threats is a reasonable precaution to make. The fact that they were able to discover the explosives in the first place back then without Parliament exploding shows the value in preventative measures.

Except the plot was betrayed by one of the plotters, so the search was because they already knew.

It's probably an overly complicated metaphor to use!

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#137

Post by dx034 »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #112
altacc wrote: post #75

In 1605 there was an attempt to blow up the British Parliament during the state opening by placing explosives in the cellars. 415 years later they still search the cellars for barrels of explosives, using oil lanterns and armed with swords. I feel that so many organisations are doing the same thing, maintaining an old solution for a problem that no longer exists. So I think it's just as, or more, important to apply t…

I think searching government property for explosives and terroristic threats is a reasonable precaution to make. The fact that they were able to discover the explosives in the first place back then without Parliament exploding shows the value in preventative measures.

Absolutely, even for large companies it's standard to have security regularly look for suspicious items.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#138

Post by qznc »

sfifs wrote: post #25

In BigCorps, if there's a stupid requirement, there's usually a reason for the stupid requirement to be there in the first place but getting to the reason might require un-peeling a few org layers to since the people enforcing the policy will not be the people who wrote the policy. A more productive use of time would be to understand the reason for the policy, document out why it doesn't apply to your case and then a…

An example, I'm unable to resolve so far:

ISO 26262 includes the requirement to prevent “implausible values, execution errors, division by zero, and errors in data flow and control flow” (8.4.4). I'm confident the division by zero aims at integer division because the result is undefined. For floating point, division-by-zero is perfectly fine and well defined by IEEE 754.

Nevertheless, our safety folks require us to enable the traps and shut down the device in case a floating division by zero occurs. This is stupid because a division by a very small number has the same effect as division by zero. However, since it is explicitly mentioned in ISO 26262 nobody has the balls to allow it officially.

I don't even want to estimate how many man-months have been burned to fix such "defects".

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#139

Post by dx034 »

perlgeek wrote: post #80
HenryBemis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe (did a lot of flying lately) the 100ml still stands for sanitizers. You can go over the 100ml only if you got a baby with you and they allow the water/milk for the baby.

Funny thing is: once you travel with a baby, basically anything goes. 1L water bottle? no questions asked. Even though the baby won't drink 1L of water on a 2-hours flight. The whole restriction on liquids is fairly ridiculous, and even more of a security theater than most of the other checks. And I think the security guards know it, and use any excuse to look the other way.

Most attackers aren't that smart. Rules like this prevent many from trying an attack as it's much harder to perform an attack if you have to take your baby with you. No one ever said the 100ml rule was good, it was just the best alternative they could come up with.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#140

Post by smichel17 »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #18

Aren't all rules imaginary? > Every time someone in the management chain has axed the proposal with some variation of "this policy can not be changed because this is our policy and thus can not be changed", possibly with a "due to security reasons" thrown in there somewhere. That's circular, no doubt there. We've decided this rule must remain in place, because it's a rule . This decision-making process doesn't make a…

I've found this type of circular reasoning is also somewhat common in with regards to laws. Doing X is wrong, because it is illegal, because it is wrong. (and other variants).
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