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Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

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Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#71

Post by muspimerol »

bboygravity wrote: post #69
padolsey wrote: post #47

I remember working for a small agency in London with a bit of a top-heavy management structure. Many times would my shoulder be subtly gazed over to "check on progress". I ended up using IRSSI to chat with friends, wgets to read my fav blogs, and my twitter stream pouring into what looked like an excel spreadsheet UI . I always got my work done in the first couple hours of the day. I will always resent those managers…

I can't help but think that there must be some arbitrage opportunity there: massive companies hire top notch engineers and all make them waste their time in (commute to/from) offices. What if someone comes along and is like "I'm going to provide the exact same service, but without offices and everybody works from home". That company would have a competitive edge, because: people from the established company would hav…

> Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that in the real world, for most people, coming to the office IS actually more efficient?

I don't think the labor market is efficient to such a degree that we can draw this conclusion. Lots of startups are doing this, but it takes time, capital and luck to achieve the success of the big corporate competitors, which have a huge amount of middle management who hate WFH.

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#72

Post by anta40 »

genezeta wrote: post #60
9dev wrote: post #54

Seriously, they should use something like this in movies when showing hacker screens. Those are so ridiculous, sometimes I think it’s a deliberate inside gag to display an HTML page on a terminal when someone purportedly „hacks“ into a government computer.

Someone already mentioned hollywood [0]. From its homepage: Hollywood was created in 2014 and has been used by NBC News, CNBC, on Saturday Night Live, the Netflix series Unit 42, Yahoo Finance, and in TV commercials for Experian and SentinelOne, the DEFCON music channel, Full Frontal by Samantha Bee, an episode of Map Men, a parody music video by SUSE, the Spy Ninjas series on Youtube, and magazine articles such as t…

Look interesting, but seems like it's Linux only. And closed source.

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#73

Post by nwellnhof »

incanus77 wrote: post #6
vzaliva wrote: post #5

That reminded me: Back in the early '90s, I wrote an MS-DOS TSR ( Terminate and Stay Resident ) "boss key" program. It would bring up a fake TurboC compilation screen whenever I pressed a key - just in case my boss walked in while I was playing a game. (The tricky part was restoring the graphics state back to normal, but that's another story.) My boss wasn’t stupid. After a few close calls, he started asking why my c…

I recall playing an 80s-ish submarine (WW2?) game with a "spreadsheet mode".

Better known as "boss key": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#74

Post by kruuuder »

anta40 wrote: post #72
genezeta wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone already mentioned hollywood [0]. From its homepage: Hollywood was created in 2014 and has been used by NBC News, CNBC, on Saturday Night Live, the Netflix series Unit 42, Yahoo Finance, and in TV commercials for Experian and SentinelOne, the DEFCON music channel, Full Frontal by Samantha Bee, an episode of Map Men, a parody music video by SUSE, the Spy Ninjas series on Youtube, and magazine articles such as t…

Look interesting, but seems like it's Linux only. And closed source.

https://github.com/dustinkirkland/hollywood

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#75

Post by IshKebab »

bboygravity wrote: post #69
padolsey wrote: post #47

I remember working for a small agency in London with a bit of a top-heavy management structure. Many times would my shoulder be subtly gazed over to "check on progress". I ended up using IRSSI to chat with friends, wgets to read my fav blogs, and my twitter stream pouring into what looked like an excel spreadsheet UI . I always got my work done in the first couple hours of the day. I will always resent those managers…

I can't help but think that there must be some arbitrage opportunity there: massive companies hire top notch engineers and all make them waste their time in (commute to/from) offices. What if someone comes along and is like "I'm going to provide the exact same service, but without offices and everybody works from home". That company would have a competitive edge, because: people from the established company would hav…

What do you mean WFH is not a thing? Since the pandemic it's a huge thing.

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#76

Post by dijit »

muspimerol wrote: post #71
bboygravity wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but think that there must be some arbitrage opportunity there: massive companies hire top notch engineers and all make them waste their time in (commute to/from) offices. What if someone comes along and is like "I'm going to provide the exact same service, but without offices and everybody works from home". That company would have a competitive edge, because: people from the established company would hav…

> Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that in the real world, for most people, coming to the office IS actually more efficient? I don't think the labor market is efficient to such a degree that we can draw this conclusion. Lots of startups are doing this, but it takes time, capital and luck to achieve the success of the big corporate competitors, which have a huge amount of middle management who hate WFH.

There is also the danger of being successful and then acquired by a big tech.

You will then be folded into the organisation, maybe the initially hired staff will retain certain perks but they will be eroded with time, and new joiners to the project would never be afforded the same.

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#77

Post by astrobe_ »

odysseus wrote: post #46

In my twenties I played nethack (with the ascii tileset) in a terminal window while working. It only took my boss a couple weeks to catch on. He was not happy.

Back in the days, I figured that Nethack would be too obvious so I went for MUDs (online multiplayer text adventure) instead. Except you need to connect somewhere in order to play. Hopefully, I had a device on which I could randomize the MAC address and IP, so if someone was monitoring outgoing connections they could have a harder time to figure out who it was.

I didn't do that long enough to really put it to the test, though. Eventually I switched to working on side projects instead, which look similar to what I was normally doing. And worst case scenario, I could argue that it is for training or something, which wouldn't entirely be a lie.

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#78

Post by dijit »

Never underestimate the power of colour on a terminal.

Back when I was first becoming an adminsys, colour in the terminal was pretty rare. Emoji's certainly didn't exist even as a concept in the west at that point either.

However, a senior sysadmin on my team said "when you're writing your management scripts, remember to add colour codes if things are good or if they are not good. Managers freaking love that". He was incredibly right, and though the development team avoided colour codes (they can mess with things like stdout redirection) the admin team leaned into them- and the managers lapped it up like crazy.

"Red bad" is a universal language in our culture, and it makes managers feel like they understand, I guess.

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#79

Post by ionwake »

padolsey wrote: post #47

I remember working for a small agency in London with a bit of a top-heavy management structure. Many times would my shoulder be subtly gazed over to "check on progress". I ended up using IRSSI to chat with friends, wgets to read my fav blogs, and my twitter stream pouring into what looked like an excel spreadsheet UI . I always got my work done in the first couple hours of the day. I will always resent those managers…

After 20 years working in and around London in IT I empathise. Thx for sharing this story.
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