Category: Tales from work

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.

I have been around the block once or twice and one of the funniest things I have seen is how self employed people are treated in Germany.

It seems that sometime back, some of these contractors were working side by side with some some regular employees and the inevitable day had come to trim costs. Well, the easiest way to do this is to get rid of some of your not so fixed expenses.

Quite understandably some of these not so fixed expenses wanted a paycheck and were very comfortable where they were. They decided to sue the consulting company that they were working for using the legal argument “no really, we are actually indistinguishable from their actual employees”.

When I heard this initially I thought that it was a joke and there would be a punchline. Well, the punchline is that the court felt that indeed the contractors were treated just as if they were employees. They were given direction, where treated in internal systems (ie email, company address book, etc) in the same way and thus they won their lawsuit.

Uh, well I guess that is score one for the little guy. Not just that company but all German companies did have a bit of an adverse reaction due to that ruling.

Wow, we thought those people were ours to use and get rid of, we don’t want them as actual employees.

The general reaction of the companies was what can we do in order to prevent this from happening again. I guess there must have been a room of lawyers and other big brains looking through the results of the lawsuit.

Well, we could…

• put all contractors through agencies
• don’t list them by full name in our address lists
• don’t talk with them directly.

This did work out fine for about a decade when yet another couple of contractors were to be gotten rid of. The company was a fortune 25 company and fought tooth and nail yet the judge said that yes they were essentially the same as employees and would have to be hired.

This was really terrible, two people were forced to our payroll but who knew how many tens or hundreds might want to join us in the next few years. Besides they are IT specialists, we have very little use for that skill. Right?!?

This time the discussions really began. What corrective actions could we perform to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Well, we could …

• make them wear their badges so they are visibly distinguishable from internal people
• get rid of most of our external consultancies, only having a few larger ones
• we could take away their email addresses and for those in support or projects give them group mail addresses
• send them off site so we don’t have to look at them
• ensure they don’t go to regularly scheduled meetings
• remove entrance permissions from their badges
• simply get rid of all external consultants
• only communicate problems with ticketing systems

Only time will prove if this is enough to keep the consultants at arm’s length but also only time will prove if these limitations the returned value of even using external consultants.

Well, if that wasn’t enough I know of a company that took even more actions.

• All externals were given email addresses that used a different domain than the company email
• All the names of the individuals who used email were removed and replaced with their initials and an arbitrary number (MT14)
• Everyone who could be moved away from the corporate offices to a remote location were indeed moved away

The jury is out if this will be enough but it should definitely be a solution for productivity.

You don’t normally let the software developers out of the dungeon, and very rarely let them visit the client. There are a lot of reasons for this, sometimes they don’t dress quite right for the business world, sometimes they don’t have “the social graces”, but a big reason is sometimes they don’t know when to keep their big mouth shut. Well, lets just say that they have a tendency to say inconvenient truths at inopportune times.

To prevent just this exact thing from happening and to provide all the necessary translation both “business to technical” and “German to English” a guide (erm keeper) was provided in the shape of a salesman. The tech guy and the salesman made the trek to Düsseldorf, and worked on the technical issue and after a few hours working on the issue the developer thought he understood the problem. It appeared that a solution was at hand but needed further testing in the morning when the market was open. Thus the boys had the night off.

It turns out that the handler not only fancied English and Irish pubs and knew all the best ones in Düsseldorf. To prove that point, the two of them spent all evening going from bar to bar. It was more of a “scientific survey” comparing the bars in Düsseldorf against those in Frankfurt.

Well all good things come to an end which is probably what the bar owners were thinking as it was closing time. The boys had to make their way back to their hotel, which as it turns out, was a very upscale hotel. The handler who was well experienced at this started to cross the lobby to a very crabby looking receptionist – yet she was very professional when she discovered we were not looking for the bar but looking for a wakeup call. She smiled like a 1000w bulb and was more than helpful.

The only thing left to do now was to go upstairs and go to bed. Of course they could have taken the stairs but there was an elevator and so they took it instead. It is not clear who started dancing but apparently it was contagious as within seconds both were dancing in the elevator as only a couple of hours of drinking Guinness can inspire. In retrospect that should have been embarrassing, as the elevator was a glass elevator, but perhaps their inhibitions had been slightly reduced. Just to make sure that the dancing fever was cured they took a couple of trips up and down in the elevator.

I can only imagine what the receptionist was thinking….

I used to do a fair amount of travel in Europe and depending on where you were going depended on how you were received. Well, this was due to the shengen agreement which allows for the gradual abolition of border checks within the EU.

The convenient part is when landing in a foreign country from another EU country you were simply waved through the booths where the passport checks were normally performed.

It was on one of these trips that the line was stopped for unknown reasons and we all stood around with not too much to do. Eventually I was bored enough to grab my passport and rifle through the pages and eventually found myself looking at the page with my aufenthalterlaubnis (working permit) only to discover that it expired nine months ago.

The passport hadn’t expired but I suspected that somewhere in Germany there was a government office that wouldn’t be very happy at this revelation. So anyway, I was at the project and my work weeks were only four days long. I decided to use my free day to go to the local government office, but my goal was not to shout out that my papers are expired but rather to find out where is the auslanderamt (foreigner office) is located so I can get this problem fixed.

Ok, ok, little to my knowledge the new local government office supported more services since my last visit so the woman at the desk simply took my passport out of my hand. I don’t think that she was especially angry with me but that didn’t stop her from yelling at me and informing me that with these papers expired all she had to do was to get the police to ship me out of the country.

Well, after being yelled at for a while I made a call to our human resources gal. She was a nice lady who keeps the company papers in order, well, usually. She spoke to the government office worker for a while and promised that she would get my papers corrected next week. The next week I went downtown and got my papers extended for another 90 days. Why so short? Well, it seems that if I had not let my papers lapse I could have now had unbeschranked aufenhaltserlaubnis papers (unlimited living/working papers).

I am sure that I am random statistic and that a large international financial company couldn’t possibly get it that wrong all the time right? Well, I don’t know all people who worked for my company but I do know of another similar encounter.

It turned out that the government people did realize that Paul’s papers were expired and this needed to be addressed. From what I heard, our human resources group was indeed working on it when some rather overzealous boarder enforcement decided to get to work.

Paul was doing a few things in his apartment Saturday morning when the doorbell rang. It seems that two nice policemen were there to bring him to the airport so he could be deported.

Indeed his papers were not in order but both the government and our human resources group knew this. The problem was supposed to be corrected the following week. I wasn’t there but I heard that after a considerable amount of time and some phone calls the police decided to not deport him on the spot. To keep good control of the situation they took Paul’s passport with them. He wouldn’t be getting it back, it would have to be retrieved by our human resources woman in person.

My friend was an intern at a telecommunications company in Bratislava. It was his job to so some minor software development in Java. In retrospect, this turned out to be one his most challenging jobs but not because of the work but because of the equipment.

The computer that assigned to him was slow and quite literally wasn’t quite up for the task. There was enough space for Java, and there was enough space for the development environment Eclipse, but there was not space enough for the source code he needed to change. He was a very clever and industrious developer and copied some code locally a built the rest over the network. The poor hardware was probably due to a very tight budget, which was reflected in other aspects of the company.

That doesn’t mean that his time was completely uninteresting. During his development he did find one super funny piece of login code. The code looked somewhat similar to this.

 Authenticated = false
 try {
    Status = checkpassword (user, password)
    if (status == password_accepted)
    {
        Authenticated = true;
    }
 }
 catch (Exception ex)
 {
    Authenticated = true;
 } 

This pseudo code basically means that if some unexpected action took place while the user was logging onto the program then an exception would be thrown but the exception handler was setting the authenticated flag to true – thus upon serious error during login you wouldn’t need to know the password. To test this theory, my friend disconnected the computer from the network and logged into the software with false credentials. Once the login process was over, he plugged the computer into the network and it turned out he was logged in.

A lot of the actual staff were not employed but were temp workers and in the IT department most of the technical people had a contract that was only for a year. This did provide maximum flexibility for the company but it didn’t inspire much firm loyalty. At the end of his one year internship, my friend was not only one of the most senior people in the group but one of the few who remained from the group he started with beyond the first year.