WorkTales

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.

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.