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Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

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Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#211

Post by rvense »

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…

About five years ago, a place I was working at was selecting a new laptop for all employees. Mine was up for replacement, so I was interested in what they were picking. They'd arrived at some god-awful Lenovo gamer model. It fit the performance and price point they'd decided they needed.

I said I'd prefer to have something smaller with less Christmas lights.

"Policy is everyone has to have the same laptop, and some people need more graphics power than the one you're asking for."

Turns out there'd been some big thing back and forth already about size and performance and this was the compromise that nobody liked.

"But why does everyone have to have the same laptop?" I asked.

"Well, it's just policy. Every desk has a docking station, and we don't want to have to buy different ones."

So I flipped the selected monstrosity over to reveal the extremely lacking docking connector at the bottom. There were some awkward laughs and I got my Thinkpad.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#212

Post by scarface74 »

globular-toast wrote: post #188
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…

> In BigCorps, if there's a stupid requirement, there's usually a reason for the stupid requirement to be there in the first place I disagree. I've worked in a BigCorp and many requirements were in place not due to reason but due to feelings and inertia. The "butts in seats" requirement was one of the main ones. Even after showing my boss that I could at the very least work equally as effectively from home, he still…

I just left a company that was trying to rush us back into an open office post Covid. As if it weren’t bad and noisy enough pre-Covid.

It kind of threw that whole “we are in this together. Accept your 10% pay cut.” bullshit out of the window. Especially when all of the management had separate offices.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#213

Post by JoeAltmaier »

danaris wrote: post #199
prepend wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is becoming regarded as mentally or physically abusive. An acquaintance of mine working in academia told me that her boss was being bullying and abusive. I was really concerned and asked what was happening. She told me that her boss and department were making her come into the office (pre-covid) at 9am despite that she assured them she could do all her research remotely. When she would not come in or come in l…

Requiring strict adherence to arbitrary bureaucratic norms, and particularly berating someone for daring to question them, is absolutely abusive. An awful lot of corporate culture is abusive, and designed primarily to give managers a warm fuzzy feeling of absolute control over their subordinates. Much of it derives directly from the assembly-line era, and much of the overall philosophy behind it is just thinly-veiled…

And there we differ I guess. The job is the job. Wear this; show up then; answer the phone with that phrase - its the job. Do it, and get paid. Not abuse.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#214

Post by colejohnson66 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #202
aliswe wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, it’s incorrect when dividing by 0, yes. But when you do the limit as the bottom factor approaches 0, it makes sense.

So, below, the first one is defined, while the second one isn’t.

    lim_{x->0+} 1/x == +Infinity
    1/0 != (anything)

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#215

Post by mylinkedlist »

Exact same story happened to me. I am an Indian contractor working for a US client in US. I asked for work from home in India. Customer manager said security council didn't approve it. He said something like their policy is 'don't take anything to China that you are not ok with loosing, India is one level below it, safeguard everything'. Now Corona happened and the entire team in India has been working from home for last 5 months.

Another one is AWS Workspace. I think its the same reasoning - that it is more secure and not having to deal with hardware. But that thing is horrible to use. Constantly getting Windows is on low memory, disconnections which can be recovered from only by a reboot that takes 40 minutes. Even on a good day, everything is slow, you can see the Window maximize/minimize in slow motion, run an IDE and try to debug to get 100% CPU. Join a conference call, can't even open any other Window without frustration. Once I am no longer working for this client, I want to give a piece of my mind to who ever is in charge of this.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#216

Post by meristem »

Corporate policy evolution through time: 1. given x unit of time passing, the core information that caused the assumption is forgotten or transmuted into something else. 2. given the same x unit of time passing, the context has also shifted but no tools were stated or developed to rethink the assumption.

Corporate knowledge management requires effort to be done well.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#217

Post by ardy42 »

whatshisface wrote: post #200
hnick wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. A reason can be argued against while a policy must just be followed. It's probably by design, because as soon as you put a reason that becomes a target and people start to get ideas about why it doesn't apply to them. Much like whe…

On the other hand, a reason can convince people, while a policy can be avoided, worked around or ignored while creating zero feelings of guilt.

> On the other hand, a reason can convince people, while a policy can be avoided, worked around or ignored while creating zero feelings of guilt.

Though, I'd imagine that, in many cases, adding reasons would turn a policy pamphlet into a textbook.

This seems like one of those areas where there are unavoidable tradeoffs:

* clear, concise, and rigid policies are easy to communicate and enforce, but frustrate people with better ideas.

* clear, concise, and flexible polices invite a lot of noise from people who think they know more than they do (e.g. can I use my own custom password hash I invented? It has more bits so it must be more secure.). Enforcement is also harder, since now you have to track exceptions.

* policy reasoning is harder to communicate, may never get read, and may actually discourage reading the policy.

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#218

Post by dtech »

gwd wrote: post #105
gjvc wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to know more about the details of this example :-)

So the company I work for made the front page of HN last year for a security breach. I won't go into details, but I will say one factor was a particular instance where security was overlooked for many years due to convenience. In response, the company has now sort of swung the other way: lots of things that have a perfectly valid reason and are reasonably safe have been forbidden or suddenly have needed to be justifi…

Was it the Twitter internal account management tool?

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#219

Post by cecilpl2 »

gjvc wrote: post #76
serioussecurity wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would love to know more about the details of this example :-)

Here's another famous example where the damage was thousands of person-years of salary: https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/06/project-failure-case-...

Re: Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary

#220

Post by dtech »

iso1631 wrote: post #158
corty wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone greatly overestimates ROI in their own area of expertise and greatly underestimates costs in the rest. You might be right in some special instance, but generally you are not. One example: Sending files via Email is a security problem. So you prohibit this via settings, virus scanners, appliances, etc. Now you've solved the emailed worm problem. However, you've just created a "how do we move files/data/screen…

And you end up creating far more security holes as people work around it. Shadow IT is great, it makes companies actually work rather than go bust.

Please tell this to my companies IT department. They've finally moved to Azure and Onedrive with it, but are still forbidding any files downloaded to devices or email attachments being send to external addresses because otherwise it's unsecure.

So everyone is still using WeTransfer/Dropbox/whatever like they were in the years before.

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