Category: Around the world

Have you ever done something that you knew wasn’t quite right but you did it anyway. Perhaps as a child you snuck a piece of candy that you shouldn’t have. Maybe you have parked where it wasn’t allowed using the ages old excuse “I will only be inside for five minutes tops”. I can only imagine that is what my colleague was thinking when he began work on one of his little projects.

His career in itself would would make a fascinating book. Starting out working in electronics back when it was literally a pile of resistors, capacitors, transistors and lots and lots of wires. These parts were simply put together with wires holding things in their place – soldering parts was not yet a method of construction.

Depending on your feelings about intellectual property you may either admire or hate him. To this day it is not fully clear what he did back in the day before the Berlin wall fell, but I do know that he did do some reverse engineering of existing hardware as well as creating suitable replacements for said hardware back in the Soviet Union.

Fast forward to today and his current job is software development and support which is certainly a far cry from his hardware roots. So I guess it is to be expected that waving a hardware project in his face was much like offering an alcoholic a drink – you simply should not start as you cannot stop.

It turns out that Mathew’s colleague Calvin was the one who started it. Calvin was looking for something to do while working out of town and somehow got it into his pointy little head that he would fool around with electronics. He went to the local electronic megastore and it turned out that they were selling electronic kit advents calendars which was basically learn how to make a LED blink one day at a time.

It didn’t take too long before Calvin started to encounter difficulties, part of it was because the language of electronics was not familiar to him but part of it was because the instructions were also in a foreign language. Well, Mathew understood both and was more than willing to help out. Every time I visited their room I saw something new posted on the wall or some scribble laying on the desk.

Only later did I learn that they were also planning a small electronic project that they could hopefully sell on ebay. The project was that of a LED cube. A LED cube is pretty much as the name says, a number of LEDs that have been built into a cube shape where the LED’s blink on and off in various patterns.

To do all of this would require electronics knowledge, quite a few electronic components as well as some tools. You might be thinking that certainly one of them has a basement, a work room or a garage that would be suitable for this task. I failed to mention one small fact, both Mathew and Calvin were external consultants for the company. These guys were hired guns who came in from out of town and were staying in a hotel.

That is what makes this story unique, these guys purchased small amounts of the required materials and tools and brought them to work. So during the day they were Clark Kent working as mild manner computer professionals while at night they brought out the tools and parts to build what might someday, dare I say it, a fledgling company?

Well, it take a lot of time to train up a novice in the dark arts of electronics and before the task could be started in earnest they ran into a small difficulty. The client decided that they would need to provide their services remotely starting next month. This created quite a problem as they had pretty much set up shop right here at work and now they need to shut things down. After all, the client probably wouldn’t be all that happy to learn they were using their premises for unsanctioned activities that in their theoretical worst case could cause a fire. So they began to reverse the tide.

Well, to the uninitiated they just looked like a couple of guys leaving work at the end of the day but if you had x-ray eyes you could see the following items slowly being transported out of the client’s building at the end of each day.

• Oscilloscope
• Dremmel
• Hot glue gun
• De-soldering iron
• Two soldering irons
• Helping hand
• Four different spools of solder
• A small container of kolophonium (wood resin)
• A couple of different types flux
• Soldering paste
• Tips for applying soldering paste
• Wiring pen
• Two jewelers headsets
• Various magnifying glasses
• Safety goggles
• Breathing masks
• A pile of custom pcb’s boards unsoldered
• A pile of custom pcb’s boards with microcontroller and SMD parts
• PCB board cleaner
• Approximately one thousand 5mm RGB leds
• Approximately one thousand 1cm RGB leds
• Hundreds 5mm leds of various colors
• Hundreds of through hole resistors covering quite a few different values
• Bags full with switches, resistors, integrated circuits, and dozens of microprocessors
• IR receivers and IR leds
• Half a dozen breadboards
• Small speakers
• Spray paint
• Exacto knife
• Box cutter
• Caliper
• Hex wrenches
• Screw drivers
• Mini screw driver set
• A few sets of pliers
• Flush cutter
• Eight pair of tweezers
• 16 dc power supplies of varying output current
• Power cords
• ITX mini tower case
• Water cooled cpu cooler
• One raspberry pi
• Several raspberry pi cases
• Several arduinos
• Several different types of AVR programmers

The crazy thing about this story is that this wasn’t something happening at a small mom and pop store, nor was it happening at small regional office that had a lot of autonomy. No it was happening at a Fortune 500 company with a reasonably large international influence.

Although these circumstances are perhaps not overly common, it is the type of story that could only happen at large company. Fancy ISO standards and internal rules is not substitution for a management that is not paying attention to what is happening on its own premises. Too much political infighting to remember that despite the fact they worked for different departments they all work for the same company.

What happened to the consultants you may ask? Well, they eventually went separate ways without even producing a single LED cube. What is happening at your company right now?

I was a bit at a loss for words with what was going on, mainly because it didn’t really make all that much sense to me – but that is a different story. While standing there I was speaking with a friend of mine and we were talking about jobs, well about my job. I was not really at liberty to discuss what was going on there so most of our talk ended up about my friends last job.

He used to be a foreign correspondent who covered the plastics industry. It is not really clear how he always managed to get the “good” assignments, but at least 3 or 4 times a year he would end up in a country where people were literally shooting at each other.

In this instance he ended up at a trade-fair in Iran. Every country has different rules for its visitors. If you are an American flying to Germany or Spain, you can simply flash your passport and come in, but if you are an Uzbekistan citizen visiting Germany you actually need a lot of papers and visa and it bit of luck to get in from the airport.

I am not sure if everyone requires a visa when visiting Iran but American citizens do. David received his visa however there was a small delay at the start of the trade-fair and he could see that his visa would expire two days too early. He did ask about this and was told by the people he was with that this would not be a problem.

Well, of course, when he tried to leave the country the two day difference was discovered and no it was not ok, he was brought to the police station and put into a cell. It turned out that being an American in Iran without proper papers was a problem.

You cannot accidentally get a visa in a foreign country, some countries it actually requires local sponsorship. This was one of those cases and David was invited by a national champion firm which is essentially the government itself (in some countries). Governments are just like bit companies, the left hand doesn’t always know what the right hand is doing and in this case inviting company was furious as this reflected badly on them. It only took an hour for the situation to start to correct itself.

While this issue was being corrected this they instructed that David not be shut up in a cell. Instead David was brought to a bazaar, which is indeed much nicer than a cell, by a police escort until the paperwork was once again in order.

It was that time of the year and everyone got an annual review whether they liked it or not. Vladimir felt this was not going to be time productively spent as Finley who may be a nice guy really didn’t understand IT and that can be a problem if you are leading an IT group.

There had been a number of misunderstandings and downright blunders on Finley’s part but today he was focusing on Vlad. Of all his goals for the following year two stood out. The first was that the team morale had been very low since Finley joined the group and so he wanted Vlad to improve it. The other interesting goal was for Vladimir to hand over his role of leading the interface group to another colleague. This goal wouldn’t be so ridiculous except that the recipient of the task will be taking paternity leave for three months, followed by extended paternity leave for another six months.

All of this was going to to take place in about 5 weeks so by definition this was a goal that either could not be done or could only be done in the most superficial way possible. The final goal was the improvement of Vlad’s communication skills. Finley wanted to give him a zero points on a scale of 1 of 5, but had to change to one point as that was all that the HR form would support.

In addition there was one more task that he wanted to be achieved by the end of the year. As previously mentioned, the team morale was quite low and so Finley wanted that one of Vladimir’s goals for the year would be to improve the team morale.

Finley’s ideas of what a successful review looked like was very different from Vlad’s, the rest of the team and the company standard. In the end, Vlad gathered some feedback from other managers and vendors and it was brought up to the workers council. The workers council were quite aware of Finley’s reputation due to previous run in’s with him and company policies. Thus due to this particular review a new page was added to Finley’s company file.

Finley was the “new sheriff” in town. He was now in charge of Arthur’s group starting on October 1^st. Finley had a rather odd management style and because he was only in charge of the group for two months Arthur asked that his old team leader be included in this year end review as well. It actually was not a terribly unusual request everything considered and so Arthur told Finley that would be fine. Imagine Arthur’s surprise when the meeting invite came only for the two of them.

Finley explained that he had contacted Arthur’s old boss who said that he would refuse to take part in the review. Arthur’s experiences with the new team leader were pretty rocky so he was very skeptical to hear his old team leader would not take part. This was especially true as his old team leader was an old friend of his who had promised him personally he would take part.

Finley “don’t you trust me”

Arthur (thinking not really)

It was because of this specific example not to mention a few other events with the new team leader that caused Carrie to refuse to have her yearly review without a representative from the workers council.

I had a meeting with Vladimir, Ivan, and Zachary. I got there a bit late but I was there to discuss problem ticket 233609. It apparently all comes down to what is basically “dickish” behavior between the support group and IT (er us). They created a ticket 233609 on Mar 18th, and are unhappy that it has taken forever for us to respond/fix it.

Well, as usual the problem is clear to me but in general not clearly described at all, other than “grunt grunt, problem, grunt fix it”. Due to the dysfunctional communications as well as political games between teams this was the best that they could do. I had to write into this ticket what I thought was the problem. I had to do this as Zach is not officially here working on anything except for project Galactica. I entered my solution on this issue as well as two possible solutions based on the problem description.

The second thing I put into the ticket was that one of the three software packages given to us was really only two of them were ours, the third was Bjoern’s package. Well, that makes it the support group’s package or actually the package of Katherine¹ who wrote up the problem ticket in the first place.

We would have responded earlier to this ticket but as it turns out the group that created it, which also happens to be the support group, failed to mark the ticket so it would show up in our view. Thus we really didn’t know about the ticket until they complained about it and we had a problem number to search for.

1Katherine inherited all of Bjoern’s packages when he left the project.

I was tired of the hotel I was staying at and my friend Martin told me about a new Holiday Inn Express that had just been built not too far away from our project. We went to check it out and when compared to the one star hotels that I had been frequenting, it looked like paradise.

The situation was they had free Internet and in Germany that is a huge draw with everything else being equal. I don’t understand how some other hotels manage to charge between ten and twenty five euros per day extra for wifi access, but I digress. The hotel wasn’t that full and the Internet speed was just perfect. Of course some doofus had to ruin it for us. Rather than to pay for a e-book, he or she, managed to find it on the Internet and simply download a pirated version to their computer while at the hotel.

Don’t believe the hype, German has just as many lawyers as America does and they are out trying to make doing just about anything difficult. In this case it was probably justified as when they contacted the hotel to determine which guest did this heinous crime they were probably told, “I don’t know we just rent rooms to people”. I never heard if the hotel ended up paying off the lawyer or if simply changing their setup was good enough although I suspect they had to do both.

The new setup was not that different from any other hotel or airport. You have to register with someone to get a username and password which will then be associated with your room. It didn’t always work as smooth as described but it did work much much slower. Yet this is where it gets a bit more interesting.

Martin worked for a telecommunications company who had a few ideas of their own about network security. You had to put a special card into a card reader on the computer when making a connection to their network. He needed to do this several times a day to pickup his email, enter his billable hours and book his train tickets. The sad thing was that this solution didn’t seem to work unless you had a simple connection to the Internet. So he could use his company laptop from home, but not on the wireless hotspots in the train, a coffee shop, or his hotel room.

His solution was to use the project DSL line at the client site, which actually was a fairly elegant solution for the longest time. Unfortunately, the client decided that to provide this service was making things too comfy for the externals and discontinued the service. In the end, Martin ended up using his personal cell phone to create a wireless hotspot just so he could do his time reporting.

I am glad I never saw Martin’s company provide any actual telecommunications work because they didn’t seem they were even capable of setting up a simple vpn for their own employees.

The bigger the organization the longer things will take to get done, but eventually they do get done. You may have heard stories about the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, and indeed that can and does happen, but sometimes there is misinformation and obstruction for political ends.

One such example was the rollout of a new Microsoft product as a company standard tool. It had been decided to sunset the old groupware product and use this product. There was of course a timetable that everyone should be trying to meet.

There are a couple of ways to rollout new functionality within a company. You can be first and face all the teething issues, you can wait and hope that all the teething issues are discovered and thus have an easier time, or you can be cynical and see if the product will be canceled or reduced in scope.

The problem with being first is that unless your departments usage is the simplest case, you may have problems and the company may not (yet) have the expertise to solve them. Depending on the circumstances you may be working with other consultancies or even other large cloud solution firms who had at least two or three addition levels of support who can hopefully solve your problem.

We were lucky enough to have other consultancies and other fortune 500 firms involved in this new cloud solution. The cost for a single iteration including the internal evaluation, external evaluation and rollout of the farm solution would feed a normal employee for one or two months. As there were lots of these farm solutions at the company I guess it was getting costly to keep this up. So management made the decision to have a six month freeze of all farm solutions that were not live. In three weeks, any solution that was not live would be thrown out and the acceptance process would start all over again middle of next year.

This is a real bummer to say the least as we have been fighting with configuration of our farm solution for months. Our consultants show that the solution works on their servers, the real problem is with our company’s internal networking and security.

We found out about this with only 9 days until the freeze, and when my boss found out he was understandably concerned that he had not heard about this. When he confronted his boss about this he was told that, with a rather sheepish grin, there was no communication budget for this topic that is why he did not send out an email about it.

Well, part of the problem was that his boss was a real idiot who should never have been promoted to a manager position.

Large companies have a lot of bureaucracy which may come in handy when you need a new key to the closets in your new office, or it may be soul crushing at the end of the year getting something approved when everyone is on holidays.

One of the temporary positions that existed at our company was that of intern. It was a position that was usually in sync with the type of study the student was doing. Of course in order to keep this position, you must be a student and copies of various school papers must be submitted in a timely manner for your internship to continue.

Our intern was named Konstance, she was actually a very detail oriented individual had a very well rounded background. She always seemed to have some interesting bit of information about any topic but she was not boastful, and if she knew more than someone else she never showed it. In general a very pleasant individual with a lot of promise.

It was in one of the bi-weekly team meetings that the group leader made a very special point in telling Konstance that he had extended her position for the next year and that she need not worry about it. Some short time later somebody from the HR department sent her an email saying that her internship would be terminated early next year.

Konstance contacted the group leader who said that the reason for this was because she had not submitted all of her paperwork in a timely fashion. Konstance went to the HR people in tears asking what was missing and please please don’t cancel her internship. The HR people informed her that all of her paperwork was up to date, the problem was that the group leader simply did not send his acceptance for her for the next year.

When approached he appeared to be quite surprised that this was the case and promised to send his acceptance to HR. The acceptance forms were never signed, Konstance was forced to leave shortly thereafter. Some of the people who work at big companies are just petty dictators.