Month: December 2019

Most adults spend 1/3 or more of their working lives well, at work. Because of this you should try and pick a career that you enjoy or at least one that you don’t detest. There is one more part to the equation which is the people you work with. You can’t always get awesome colleagues or bosses but if for some reason it all goes badly, you can always change companies or depending on the firm, change position.

Albert is a responsible guy who has been with the company for years and for the last decade or so he has been supporting the payment system. During his tenure at the company he has seen a number of people cycle through the position as his boss. It is inevitable because to increase your chances to advance within the firm you need to have shown that you have a wide breadth of knowledge of different departments.

You don’t know what you have until you loose it. The “bosses” who have been in this position up until now have been really good but now we have Frederic and he is pretty much a disaster. His background is not IT and nor does he seem to have much interest. His interest is to manage or perhaps better put would be to say his interest is to micro-manage. This may make your skin crawl, but if he at least understood the issues and kept up to date with what is going on it might be tolerable.

In any large company does have its share of political intrigues but it is really saying something that Albert cannot take any more of this. He did some hunting around within the company and has found three possible alternate positions. So without any apparent malice he has simply informed his team leader Frederic that he will be leaving. I was expecting a lot of things, perhaps some promises to keep this support star in the group or perhaps trying to organize a longer than normal handover with some really experienced new comer.

The official reaction was thanks for working with us and good luck. The behind the scenes reaction was, “Wow, this is great. We can actually try and re-engineer this team. Our best bet is to get somebody fresh out of school. Our department will save money and the process will continue”.

Don’t believe the hype, there isn’t anyone who cannot be replaced. Yet in this case it might not be exactly true. Arnold works with Oscar to ensure that the payment system, or more accurately put The Global Payment System, is always up and running.

Oscar has been working with Arnold for the last ten years and there are still things about the payment system that he still doesn’t completely understand. When Arnold went on vacation no new changes were ever implemented on the payment system. I would even be hesitant to say that he even has a true vacation as he must always be reachable. Things will be tough without Arnold but the worst is probably still to come. Oscar is just as dissatisfied with his team leader as Arnold and is also looking internally for a new position.

The spotlight will be on Frederic if anything happens, because it is just as true now as when it was first said by Harry S. Truman

“The buck stops here”

I don’t know how high his visibility in the company is now but if the employee and vendor paychecks fail to go out on time Frederic will get a much higher visibility in the company than he ever anticipated.

We have been installing software, having meetings, and customizing software. The unit testing and integration testing is now complete. The final task is that we need to schedule the go live date.

Uh, nope. That project was canceled about three months ago, didn’t they tell you?

Apparently this exact scenario happened to a colleague of mine when he worked for another company. I thought that was only the type of thing that happened in a Dilbert cartoon.

With the rise of internet, people have more and more passwords. Well, if you are a typical user, you have a list of passwords. It is usually considered bad style to reuse the same password at multiple sites. This is becoming especially important as the user’s login id is usually the email address. Thus if you know one, you know it for a lot of sites. Of course, the IT department either gives you some “intuitive” rules to follow ever time you change your password.

Your new password should …

• • • never reuse a old password
    • Not be a name or a word
    • be longer than 8 characters
    • contains letters and numbers
    • contain one upper and lowercase letter
    • contain at least one symbol
    • never be written down
    • be almost impossible to remember

Well, perhaps not the last one. None of these are terribly difficult to follow, yet as the number of passwords start to get large changing your password every 30 days is more than just a pain but actually to be creative each time gets harder and harder.

Going through this exercise is especially important for important systems, but perhaps such harsh rules are excessive for unimportant systems. While working with one of these rather unimportant systems I did discover a small work around. This bug tracking system actually had all of the rules so you did need a strong password, but it actually did not implement the check for the first rule. Every 30 days you needed to reset your password to a new password but you could reset it to the same value each time.

Thus the password is always the same, easy to remember but perhaps not so secure. I suspect that Harvey forgot to test that prior to putting this system into production. Oddly enough, I never did mention this fact to him.