Category: Around the world

In the movie “The untouchables” there was a scene where De Niro as Al Capone uses a baseball bat to correct a wrong. It was a very vivid moment in the movie but hey that kind of thing can only take place in the movies.

Well, I guess I am not the only one to have seen that movie as there was a real life manager who for a short while started to bring a baseball bat to his meetings as well. Timothy walking around with a baseball bat and patting it on his hand as went walked. The way he did it caused a bit of unease in both the internal and external staff.

This did cause quite a stir and the HR department probably added a new rule to the company manual – “baseball bats are prohibited from all company meetings”, as the baseball bat disappeared shortly from work shortly thereafter.

I was actually involved in supporting a testing environment for a large European bank. The bank was really well funded, they had no money / budget worries to speak of. The goal was to upgrade one of their financial systems and in that sense they had a very good test plan.

They had a list of reports, transactions, and various processes that had to be tested and had to work. Well, everyone had a list of things that have to work but in order to proceed with the upgrade each and every point on this list had to work, and because it was a big client the vendor kept fixing the bugs that they found.

When I was brought into this, I was between projects and the company was looking for some work for me to do. The bank’s IT department was quite busy with other tasks so they gave me the support role for this system. My job was whenever a new fix was available I had to integrate it into the testing environment. I then had to restore their database so they had a known state to begin all of their pre-acceptance tests.

All in all, it was a fairly easy bit of work and gave me a small insight into one of the large banks. The thing that you have to remember is that this testing was taking place not in the bank but on our equipment in our office. The bank actually had very nice production machines and also had very nice testing machines.

Their problem was not that their infrastructure wasn’t good enough, it was actually much nicer than most of our equipment. The bank simply couldn’t quickly and easily get a database restored or have an external consultant install scripts, stored procedures or programs on their own machines. It was simply much more efficient to pay the vendor for their own testing environment and get the tests done in half a day of the change being available.

I wasn’t even allowed to work on one of their internal testing environments without one of their IT people typing in every command for me.

The nice thing about small and local companies and people is that they can be taxed and various fees can be levied. People and small companies cannot so easily change their locale so they must pay these fees to to local governments. The situation is much different for large companies and multinationals, they owe allegiance to their shareholders and can reasonably easily move factories and offices to take advantage of various resources or tax codes.

Governments are not especially fond of this fact being rubbed into their face, but as long as the companies are providing local jobs and some taxes they are to be tolerated. But there is another player who also exists in the play somewhere between honest citizens and tolerable multinationals, the external consultant. These people have the mercenary approach of the multinational and are less favored as they may do things to actually reduce their taxes, but they do not bring in factories or offices.

In addition to this they do not have marketing departments nor lobbyist firms to argue their case, so this is a very convenient group for governments to take focus on – reasonably defenseless and who are trying to reduce what taxes they pay.

So I was not surprised to hear that 2014 had ushered in a new law in Germany which at first I misunderstood. The law was designed in a rather odd way, it was to tax any reimbursed expenses that exceeded a one thousand euros per month.

A few questions later, I discovered that this was actually intended to be for people who were working at a location for 48 months or longer. Yet the other thing was this law was actually aimed at regular employees who simply happen to be working at another company for four or more years. Yup, if you rent a car, take a train, or fly to the customers site and stay in a hotel each week, you would easily exceed this threshold. In effect you would actually be paying taxes on your own expenses for the privilege to work for your employer at his customer.

It is impossible to cover every possible contingency for a lot of reasons. Like programming software you don’t always know what you do not know. It is possible to mitigate some of these situations. If you expect that your data center could be flooded or destroyed by a hurricane you may have a contract with a disaster recovery provider or if you are worried about a system reliability you may have redundant features such as hard disks, network interfaces or controller cards. There is no firm in the world that can afford to have complete redundancy.

During one of my projects we had very ambitious goals for the Treasury, so ambitious that we could not implement it all at one time. Support of the productive system was handed over to a small group of people in headquarters while the project team worked on new functionality. Of course the project team was considered the second level support in case serious problems occurred in production.

Well one of the contingency plans was that if for any reason there was problems in the project building we should all reconvene at headquarters. This would ensure that second level support would always be available. It turned out that nearby the project building was a construction site for a new high-rise.

Germany, like many other countries that have experienced war, sometimes finds unexploded ammunition during construction. During the excavation for the foundation of a new building a WWII bomb was found that needed to be disposed of.

The standard procedure is to bring in a bomb disposal unit to explode the ordinance but first all buildings within a kilometer are evacuated. We were just sitting at our desks when those nice policeman came in and told us that we had to gather our possessions and leave. Just to make sure we followed instructions they stood around to make sure we packed up and left.

Our project management may have known what the contingency plan was, but it was never disseminated to most of the “second level” staff. Even if this had been done most of us did not possess the required pass so we would be allowed onto the corporate campus. It was all for the best that we didn’t go to headquarters as was originally planned because they forgot one more thing. We couldn’t have done any support due to logistics. There were no rooms for us to work in nor computers for us to work on. You cannot plan for every contingency.

I was blissfully unaware and so that afternoon I went to the pool.

Well, with the exception of American politics all political campaigns must come to and end. There will be both winners and losers and the campaign cycle will be over for a few years. After this particular campaign was over I happened to be in the building that contained one of the candidates office and one evening in the lobby was deposited a large¹ trash container which is usually used when people change offices and actually need to get rid of those files, folders, keyboards², mice and all sorts of strange things.

Well the next evening when I once again passed the trash container I saw that there were a lot of campaign “gifts” in the form of wall calendars, year calendars fitting on a single piece of paper as well as small weekly calendar books. Without trying to exaggerate, I can honestly say that the container was half full and was emptied every two days. It was only on the first day did I see the calendars but now I can truly understand that there was not enough “campaign materials” to go around and that it was good they kept very close control over to whom they where given.

1The container was approximately 5” x 3” x 3” in size.

2Yes, I have seen multiple keyboards and mice. Don’t they think they will need to type in the new office?

In Germany large companies have a “betriebsrat”, which is a workers council to represent the employees in the company. Depending on the size of the company depends on how many representatives there will be on this workers council. The representatives for this post are elected from the employees who work at the company. It is a pretty good gig, as once you are elected to such a position, your job is to represent the workers and no longer do your previous position. If your company is really large, then these representatives come from the different groups that make up your company, such as machinists, line workers, etc.

Every year when election time comes time for the voting, just like any good politician these representatives start visiting their constituency with gifts. There is most likely not a very large budget for these gifts so the representatives almost always come with a yearly calendar in hand, showing the different national holidays.

It is actually fairly funny as over a couple week period it is possible to get four or five such visitors with gifts. But by definition, these people are representing the employees of the company. If you happen to be a visitor or even worse an external consultant they don’t want to waste their precious time with you. Well, in some cases they don’t want to shower you with gifts either.

It turned out that one of these representatives came into our room and really didn’t speak with us at all, she was just handing out calendars when one of us make a critical mistake. He thanked her for the calendar whereas she started to questioning if he worked for the company, which of course he did not. This mistake was compounded by informing her that none of us worked for the company at which start came back to each desk and took the calendar back from each of these external contractors. It is probably best that we could not vote in this election as none of us were very impressed with her attitude.

I have met with a lot of people from many different countries discussing stories from a whole range of companies. It wouldn’t really be fair to highlight shortcuts taken by a startup who are almost always by definition are on a shoestring budget. Yet, once a company grows so large that they pretty much dwarf all of their national competition it seems that you should be able to take the gloves off.

I did some consulting through a multi-national telephone company with offices on virtually every continent on the planet earth. I think that they can probably handle some good natured ribbing.

In Germany every few years some company gets sued by one of their freelancers claiming to be an employee. It wouldn’t be a worry for the companies except that sometimes these cases don’t go in their favor and the company is forced to take these people and make them their employee. Thus to prevent such a horrible thing from happening the companies try to ensure that they treat these external resources people in a manner that is not like an employee.

Well, in 2013 in an attempt to really make this a much more stringent process they instituted forms asking all sorts of questions designed to highlight people who might be a problem on the horizon. I understand their concern from a business level but what I found to be too funny was that either the auditors that they were hiring to do this task¹ or the internal staff decided to improve the form from one year to the next.

Rather than consider a new angle of questioning, or a clever rephrasing of the existing questions they took a different approach all together. The form is an adobe acrobat PDF so that the user can edit to include all their useful answers print it out and sign it. The change was to increase the font size for four of the answer fields and adding a version number to the form. Other than this, there appears to be no noticeable change in any of the questions presented.

I guess when a company with only 60 billion² Euros revenue really wants to take something serious they change the font size on a form.

1What do this task themselves? Nah, outsource the task.

2If my figures are correct it was actually 60.13 billion euros for 2013.