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Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

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Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#201

Post by andi999 »

growlist wrote: post #134
RegW wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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??

If you are 10 times faster than the average, but can only bill average rates than it might look fair to you to do the work in 1 day and take 9 off. If then you mortage needs payments, you might think why take 9 days off and not do the same for somebody else. Of course I do not endorse this behaviour, but i can see how somebody could see this not as stealing as it is.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#202

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

aliswe wrote: post #160
qznc wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Mandatory additional detailed info: Division by zero in floating point equals to Infinity because in a floating point data structure there is space to represent such a value. For integers, there is no such information and therefore an exception should be thrown. For a 32-bit float, the following are true: Positive infinity: 011111111(and then 23 zeroes) Negative infinity: 111111111(and then 23 zeroes) NaN: x11111111(…

Mathematically speaking though, infinity is not the correct answer to x/0 anyway. It's just a usefully incorrect result in a lot of situations.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#203

Post by ath0 »

edoloughlin wrote: post #145
ath0 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really a fair assessment. An auditor's job is often to check if you're doing what an external standard says you should be doing (SOC 2 => AICPA trust principles; FedRAMP => NIST 800-53, etc.). Unfortunately, these external standards may be written vaguely and while you may have policies that define X as Y, the auditor doesn't have to accept your answers. For example, when PCI requirement 5 says "Deploy anti-virus…

So every team gets to argue with the auditors? Seems like the people writing the policy should do that so there's one argument instead of n.

Sounds like you've mostly worked in perfectly-sized and structured corporations, where the auditors and policy-writers were perfectly connected to changing product, business and technical needs; well-staffed with policy writers and architectural governance committees who have the time, skill and background to have regular, even-handed tradeoff conversations when these issues occur, and where the engineering teams are prepped and able to engage in those conversations well.

Are they hiring?

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#204

Post by andi999 »

mugsie wrote: post #86
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.

What stops your employees doing the same thing?

Usually you cannot work for two or more companies full time without the other finding out (at least this is what i presume)

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#205

Post by pjmorris »

tomxor wrote: post #176

The whole problem seems to pivot around blame. Having only ever worked at a small company, I've enjoyed the absence of fear of blame. When the hierarchy is so minimal risk-vs-benefit seems to be easy to communicate and digest between both ends of the spectrum and accept with shared responsibility. I understand this doesn't automatically scale, but it feels unsatisfying to assume blame is as inevitable part of growth.…

I once worked for a ~10 person consulting firm. We had a contract to do some IT work for a large firm's HR department. We'd joke that the HR department needed its own HR department, to work out the politics among them. And, we'd joke that we needed clients so we could borrow their office politics so we could have some.

My pop-science (I learned about Dunbar's number from Malcom Gladwell's 'Tipping Point') theory for this is that we're wired to think of some small set of people (~150) as 'our group'/'my people', and that within that group we're more likely to forgive, and outside that group, we're more likely to blame.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#206

Post by Chris2048 »

sidcool wrote: post #63

I had this experience with some companies I was interviewing with. They would force me to submit my most recent payslip from my previous employer. I gave up after some protest, coz they could not have proceeded with my interviews without it.

Had you already told them your previous salary?

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#207

Post by dustingetz »

the8472 wrote: post #108
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…

> 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. The issue is that all the policy documents often only contain the One True Way to achieve their goals, while the goals remain unstated. The documents should always come with a rationale. And appending "exceptions may be granted for equivalent or better processes"…

As explained in the book "Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers", the goals are unstated on purpose, due to the Principal Agent Problem.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#208

Post by scarface74 »

zeepzeep wrote: post #53
HenryBemis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it's all about Security (C-I-A). To mitigate this issue, on paper, an (usually) HR policy writes "do not do non-work related stuff with your work computer". And since many people ignore this rule, because "why have a second laptop?", the next best thing is to route all traffic from your laptop through the company, and weed out the GigHubs and GitLabs of this world (in the same manner that they block all sex…

> 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.

Then buy a faster personal computer? The resources I have freely available at work are infinitely more than I have at home, but that doesn’t mean I can set up my own Netflix competitor on it.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#209

Post by solidsnack9000 »

The author explains this situation as a downside of hierarchical organizations, but what other kinds of organizations are there they can claim real experience with?

What the author is describing here is poorly designed management incentives.

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