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The absolute worst scenario happened
201–210 of 566 posts
Re: The absolute worst scenario happened
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A "firefighting" consultancy might be fun, no? It is... interesting. I have been doing this over last 4 years. The biggest problem, as I pointed out before, is the disconnect between what companies claim they would do to fix the problems vs. what they would actually do. So ~90% of selling is repeatedly explaining the same things to different people whose jobs are in the eminent danger of being restructured/depriori…
hopefully you can skip most of those people and talk to the people who are in danger of being eliminated if your services are NOT engaged?
CEO: We are doing project X. We have engaged so and so to do it. You are to support this.
: I'm uncomfortable sharing this information with the outside party. I will need to get the approvals for
...
CEO: Yes, tell them to do this.
...
Jack, head of IT in charge of backups: Ok, you can have this access.
Consultant: Great. It says I'm not authorized to perform this operation. It is a blocker, could this be fixed so I could continue?
Jack: This was not in the scope of authorization that I have received. I'm uncomfortable providing this level of access without additional authorization.
Re: The absolute worst scenario happened
#203Tangent Alert! I have a 3 months resignation period, so I can't even leave... Maybe it's my (US) American experience, but being unable to quit a job strikes me as a terrible policy. This guy(gal?) is really required to submit 3 months notice or face some sort of repercussions (financial, I assume)? Does this 3 month period apply in reverse (employer can't fire employees without a full 3 month warning)? Not that the A…
In the US we have the similar crappy situations. No competes come to mind. Healthcare tied to employment (what if you wanted to start your own business?) is another.
Re: The absolute worst scenario happened
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's the possibility that those employees are happily retired and don't care. Or they're just not available in many ways. I know of a hospital which is still refusing to migrate off of a system which is not supported for a decade. Pay more money? 3 people worked on it: Adam had a stroke, Bob retired with enough money, Charlie left the country.
I bet if the hospital is to pay Bob/Charlie $1M for 6 months, post tax to fix it they would gladly do it. Note: this does not mean "We will pay you up to a million dollars, Net 90, after an invoice is approved and signed off by fifteen people". This means "We will wire a deposit of $250,000 today. The rest will be wired every month in 24 hours after an invoice is issued" The reality is company execs like to talk abou…
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Re: The absolute worst scenario happened
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really related to the subject of the article, but your comment reminds me of employers in Romania complaining they can't find people to hire, while they offer small salaries and people just leave the country for better paying jobs abroad. The solution to their problem is really simple: make better offers.
> The solution to their problem is really simple: make better offers. That's certainly a simple solution. The problem with simple solutions is that they are near guaranteed to not actually be feasible or realistic.
Unrelated to the initial post.
> The problem with simple solutions is that they are near guaranteed to not actually be feasible or realistic.
This. There is no amount of money anyone sane can be given to stay in Romania. Most recently i’ve read they (hospitals) were tying covid patients to their beds.
Couldn't help but comment on this as some of things i discovered are shocking for an eu member country (or any country for that matter), such as EU leading human trafficking, police corruption, collapsing health care, and the list goes on.
But sure, the simple solution is to give people money, not the constant abuse taking place at work and outside that makes people want to flee that place.
Re: The absolute worst scenario happened
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my EU-centric worldview, the US system of at-will employment, and of two-week notices as the standard courtesy, is crazy. Three months is the typical notice period for tech workers and other highly-skilled jobs. One month is the legal minimum in Sweden, and certainly several other countries. Of course it goes both ways, in fact it's even more difficult for the employer to get rid of an employee. An employee doesn'…
In my EU-centric worldview, the US system of at-will employment, and of two-week notices as the standard courtesy, is crazy. Oh, I agree. But 3 months seems crazy to me. If I have an open position and it isn't filled in ~4-6 weeks, it often gets given to some other team (on the basis that if I really needed that position filled, I'd do so). I can't plan hiring over that timeframe. And when hiring employees in India,…
> But 3 months seems crazy to me.
What you might not realise is that these three months would be the default legal position in case of disagreement. If you want to leave earlier and the employer agrees, you can usually leave earlier, too (with them being off the financial hook).
Re: The absolute worst scenario happened
#207Tangent Alert! I have a 3 months resignation period, so I can't even leave... Maybe it's my (US) American experience, but being unable to quit a job strikes me as a terrible policy. This guy(gal?) is really required to submit 3 months notice or face some sort of repercussions (financial, I assume)? Does this 3 month period apply in reverse (employer can't fire employees without a full 3 month warning)? Not that the A…
In Poland it scales over time: you start off with 2 weeks notice (for both sides), after a year or so this jumps to one month, and after 3 years it jumps to 3 months, or something like that. I've seen people quit right before their 3 year anniversary just so that they don't fall into the 3-months-notice period. I haven't worked much on regular job agreements (been contracting or "contracting" most of my life), but ge…
What do you mean by “contracting” in quotes?
Re: The absolute worst scenario happened
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Farming is low margin. Farmers don’t get to set the price of their products, and they aren’t handed billions in capital to burn through or 1000x multiples on their profit in the public markets. When most businesses say they can’t hire someone and the reason is because they don’t pay enough, the underlying cause of their low pay is usually because that’s what the company can afford. Sure, farmers could pay $10/hr, but…
...yes? The alternative to farmers is not harvesting their crops at all, since with the borders closed foreign labor is not available. If nobody wants to buy $10 doritos, that means the product can't exist in a market without cheap labor.
Well perhaps that's the problem of the market. That it can't particularly function to enrich some people without gross levels of exploitation.
Re: The absolute worst scenario happened
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
> > All domain information was wiped out and records became null. > > Every person who knew how the custom DNS system worked has left the company years ago. Our backups are fucked. Our records are wiped from all domain servers out there. Sure sounds like the data is lost to me.
To me it sounds like those people who left can command a very high day rate to help with the immediate aftermath. A high enough rate that even if they are doing hours elsewhere some will be tempted to sign in after their work hours to help out. A company does not just stop existing or being able to function, deleting DNS records didn't empty the bank account or the ability of the accountants to be directed to pay som…
To me it sounds like those people who left can command a very high day rate to help with the immediate aftermath
Those people are probably employed somewhere else and would need very significant incentives. More than likely their current employers would take a dim view of them freelancing to help a competitor, so: enough to take a year off or even to retire on. Basically the idea of hiring back former employees as consultants is a non-starter.
Re: The absolute worst scenario happened
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing the situation does show is a lack of proper care for their most critical assets. When the dust settles, there should be hard questions for several people. One being-- when was the last time backups were tested..
The answer to the question is there >We can't access the backups. Even if we could, we noticed two years ago when trying a restore from the backups, that it doesn't work. Booting the restored server leads to a kernel panic we couldn't figure out. Management said we don't have enough money to fix any of this.
IMO Management will find the money pretty quick if the business survive.
Up until now, they didn't know what 'backup not working' meant. Now they know.
Not being bitter -- there was a failure of communication from both parts.