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Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

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Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#161

Post by tonyarkles »

qznc wrote: post #138
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 e…

Somewhat recent experience doing robotics work really highlighted the dangers of dividing by small numbers. As a robot arm approaches a singular configuration, the matrix used to calculate motor torques starts to get very bad and, left unaddressed, will likely result in some pretty wild behaviour.

I would argue that dividing by very tiny numbers is also something that you should probably be catching, since the output very large numbers are likely not going to do what you’re expecting...

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#162

Post by flerchin »

At least part of OP's problem is that she was a consultant. She didn't work there. Note that in her story, employees of BigCorp did WFH. There's even less upside for BigCorp to change policy because it would positively impact some consultant's work/life balance. In BigCorp's mind, the consultant is exhorbitantly expensive and doesn't deserve work/life balance anyway.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#163

Post by yodelshady »

roel_v wrote: post #50
nisse72 wrote: post #39

Related, after telling us for years how dangerous it would be if people flew with more than 100 ml of liquid, it's now allowed (i.e. no longer dangerous?) to carry a larger quantity of hand sanitizer because of coronavirus: https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2020/04/15/tsas-tips...

When circumstances change, risk profiles and trade offs change. News at 11. I mean you can rage about the unlikeliness of people concocting explosives from various liquids, but that is entirely besides the point here.

True, but I think it isn't besides the point - the argument is the (global) risk profile hasn't changed all that much. The risk profile to the rule maker specifically has changed, in favour of them not simply maintaining established process.

Ideally, we wouldn't have to wait for a pandemic or other crisis to overcome this managerial hysteresis. Of course, if the rule is reinstated after a few months, or if a plane is brought down with 125 mL of liquid in a few years, then you're right - it's a rational rebalancing.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#165

Post by skocznymroczny »

anticensor wrote: post #57
zeepzeep wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said.. why would a person use the corporate computer for their (allow me the use of the word) 'hobby'? Because my work computer is around 100 times faster than my personal one.

I have the opposite situation: My personal computer is faster .

Even if the work machine has comparable specs to personal computer, it's much slower. Every machine is fast, but put antivirus software on it, backup solution, 10 "corporate security" products which monitor and log every move and even the strongest machine slows to crawl.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#166

Post by wegs »

watwut wrote: post #113
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…

I am 100% sure that if we all decided that formal clothes every day are way to go, our salaries NOT would go up 3-4 times. Those two things are not directly related. The salary is market thing, to large extend. The cloth and home office do have more to do with cultural background of people who run and join both institutions. It has also to do with value systems - higher preference for hierarchy, higher expectation fo…

I'm pretty sure that, if a software engineer, you were to pick up and conform to executive social and cultural norms, and did the work required to be able to manage people, raise money, and so on, your salary COULD go up 3-4x. Clothing is but one tiny piece of that. You'd also need to learn a new communication style, learn to code-switch ethics/values, and so on.

People who can bridge technical, business, marketing, and sales are extremely highly valued.

I've learned to adapt, and I have a choice of jobs spanning about a 10x salary range as a result.

The choice I made: I chose the job which was the most fun and fulfilling, while still paying enough to where I don't need to stress about money (so long as I live a modest life). At the time, I had an offer at 2x that salary, and was being recruited into jobs at 2x that in turn. I also had more academic job offers where I could financially scrape by, but /with/ financial stress, which didn't seem worthwhile.

Also: If financial institutions were so conservative, we wouldn't have regular meltdowns like the subprime mortgage crisis.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#167

Post by Aeolun »

serioussecurity wrote: post #52
Aeolun wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem with this logic is it hinders a hundred people on a daily basis to prevent one person from doing something stupid once a year. That’s just not great ROI.

I've seen individual engineers make a mistake that caused 100 engineer's salary worth of damage.

Indeed, but did those 100 engineers increase the company bottom line by 10% more because they weren’t hindered by too much red tape, and is that value a multiple of their salary?

Also, do you expect mistakes of that magnitude to keep being made?

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#168

Post by Chris2048 »

arethuza wrote: post #20
lwhi wrote: post #16

The dynamics feel a bit like good cop / bad cop on an organisational level. "I'd personally love to let X occur .. but it's not allowed due to company policy. This is mandatory." I have always believed everything is negotiable in business. As people, we're subject to the rule of law, and obviously our businesses need to operate accordingly. However, the policies that a company uses are really just a snapshot of curre…

"and thinking obviously changes" Sometimes it doesn't - sometimes people vehemently insist on application of policies even though what they produce is ridiculous. At a former employer I was quoted £70K (yes seventy thousand) for internal hosting of a not particularly business critical single static HTML page that would be accessed by maybe 100 people. I actually got a breakdown and it all made sense if you applied th…

> it all made sense if you applied the policies the infrastructure team had invented

Was it basically "we charge more for stuff we don't want to do"?

Makes sense, like:

> When a customer asked if he could have chips with his lunch, White hand-cut and personally cooked the chips, but charged the customer £25 for his time.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Pierre_White#cite_note-o...

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#169

Post by nmstoker »

This is all too common.

A friend told me about his company where the IT decision makers were largely centralised, physically near their cloud servers and they frequently discounted the measurable and serious difficulties of internal tech consumers suffered in other locations for years, even though their architecture would have made it comparatively easy to rebalance things for a more global approach.

Early in my career we were told of a major reorganization of my then company's network shares, required "Because of Compliance" - only once it was underway and some key points still needed to be clarified did it become clear that Compliance was not even aware of the project! Nothing happened to the individual who had lied and diverted substantial resources needlessly. The individual was not even a member of the department, so saw zero benefit either.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#170

Post by gruez »

ragebol wrote: post #89

Story colleagues told me once: requirements for a car's rear wind shield was that is had to withstand air pressures of 120km/h. But the car could not go in reverse that fast, so the requirement did not make sense and was loosened. On delivery of the produced cars, many rear wind shields were broken. Turns out they were transported from the factory on a train, faced backwards so they could fit more cars on the train.…

I feel like the point of the story is supposed to be "all requirements have a reason behind them", but to me it's more of a case of "even a broken clock is right twice a day"
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