-

2023-10-31 13:42:05

cstross@wandering.shop

OMG. This is both insane, and rings horribly true: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-accidentally-saved-half-a-million-dollars/

show all 66 comments

2023-10-31 13:51:16

Michael Lucas :flan_set_fire:

mwl@io.mwl.io

@cstross

I worked for a firm exactly like this. This is exactly how it happens.

2023-10-31 13:52:56

Colman Reilly

Colman@mastodon.ie

@cstross competition makes private businesses much more efficient than state run enterprises.

2023-10-31 13:54:32

Poligofsky

brent@thecanadian.social

@cstross Insane or merely vain? That is, the company exists to support the vanity of the "leadership". Most of the world is like this.

2023-10-31 13:56:52

Charlie Stross

cstross@wandering.shop

@mwl I never worked for firms that were QUITE that mad, although I saw them from a safe-ish distance ...

2023-10-31 13:57:51

Charlie Stross

cstross@wandering.shop

@Colman Also: Once SpaceX is flying weekly moon missions for NASA using Starship I have a Highly Profitable Business Plan to use the return flights to import green cheese! We'll make a killing!

2023-10-31 13:58:06

Monica Rooney

monicarooney@mstdn.ca

@cstross and people want to run government like a business because “efficiency”

2023-10-31 13:59:28

JimmyChezPants

jpaskaruk@growers.social

@cstross

I have lived a version of this narrative, several times.

2023-10-31 14:02:05

AndreaCPowers

AndreaCPowers@mastodon.social

@cstross "it's just that this whole department... is some sort of weird political PsyOp to get executives promoted."

I believe this was the real goal of my company where I spent 20 years.

2023-10-31 14:03:03

BashStKid

BashStKid@mastodon.online

@cstross Hits the mark of at least one good laugh per paragraph.

“My team has spun this as a huge cost saving, when really we just applied a fire extinguisher to the pile of money that we had set alight.”

2023-10-31 14:06:25

Michael Lucas :flan_set_fire:

mwl@io.mwl.io

@cstross

I'm in Detroit. The US auto industry is... special.

2023-10-31 14:13:01

botvolution

botvolution@mastodon.sdf.org

@cstross

hahaha it reminds me of Tom Peters' skunkworks only no-one thanked the skunk

2023-10-31 14:24:06

JacobRPG+ 🫘

jaykass@mastodon.online

@cstross can confirm similar bullshit happening daily for me.

2023-10-31 14:26:21

Jim Flanagan

jimfl@hachyderm.io

@cstross @middleclasstool

> My team has spun this as a huge cost saving, when really we just applied a fire extinguisher to the pile of money that we had set alight.

At the company I used to work, there were regular awards ceremonies for things like this, and I have to assume that this was the most common backstory.

One of the awards came with a trophy that was actually a working fire extinguisher!

2023-10-31 14:29:13

Chris Bohn

DocBohn@techhub.social

@cstross One time when I was new to an organization, I had to fly to XYZ city. I was going to meet up with some other people who were flying in and would have a rental car, so the only transportation I needed to worry about was between the airport and the hotel. The hotel had an airport shuttle.

The audit detected that I didn't reserve a rental car, so the travel request got kicked back to me to budget for a rental car. I sent it back saying that I was using the hotel's gratis transportation. I then received a 5-page form that I had to fill out to prove that this was a cost savings.

I learned the fix to this was to reserve a rental car and then cancel the car after the travel authorization was approved.

2023-10-31 14:29:24

Alexander Goeres

jabgoe2089@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

At 4PM on the last day of the week, I ping a chat full of good engineers and no managers to make sure I'm not about to nuke everything, then just do it.

but this is evil ...

2023-10-31 14:38:19

Jeremy Nickurak

atrus@toot.cafe

@cstross "... but the public sector is wasteful!"

2023-10-31 15:06:35

lampsofgold

lampsofgold@veoh.social

@cstross @catsalad the line about how op got punished for making the thing work is both so real and also why orgs like this persist. It’s almost like the business people have figured out how to graft enough tech onto fraud that people can’t see the fraud

2023-10-31 15:19:07

James Davis Nicoll

jdnicoll@wandering.shop

@cstross I am having flashbacks to the web guy who got fired by a certain large British game company, after he had set up what was supposed to be a short-term web access solution but before he could get the much less expensive long-term arrangement in place. Cue hilarity as his former bosses got blindsided by a massive bill they could have avoided by treating employees better....

2023-10-31 15:25:53

Dan Sugalski

wordshaper@weatherishappening.network

@cstross I see this and the request for a raise they know is going to be rejected and all I can think is "Here, give me the raise I'm asking for OR I WILL PUSH THE BUTTON AGAIN!"

2023-10-31 15:30:56

Tony Wells

TonyJWells@mastodon.social

@cstross

I've been out of that sort of environment for a while, but I and many other people over the years will all have a similar story to tell. Oh, my bonus was an expensed meal for two, but the amount was capped to something like a suburban Italian restaurant meal and no wine.

2023-10-31 15:35:53

Gracious Anthracite

anthracite@dragon.style

@cstross

The only real mistake they made was not keeping that around for when they are having a slow week. "I got a little distracted from this week's sprint going down a performance rabbit hole and I saved us another 10% of our hosting spend", they say, as they switch another handful of machines to the new setting.

Ah, bureaucracy.

2023-10-31 15:40:01

dr_barnowl

dr_barnowl@topspicy.social

@cstross In the pre-cloud days, used to pride myself on saving the NHS my annual salary or more by not buying expensive proprietary solutions for which there were perfectly reasonable (usually superior) Open Source alternatives.

Also managed to do the same for the DWP by downsizing the stuff they had running a specific cloud app (from ... high tens of thousands a year to maybe a couple of hundred quid...).

2023-10-31 16:09:31

Charlie Stross

cstross@wandering.shop

@wordshaper Or malicious compliance: put it back the way it was ... by adding that 10 minute delay back. Then do it again! (Whoops, costs double instantly!)

2023-10-31 16:28:38

Jen

JetlagJen@geekdom.social

@DocBohn @cstross that's even more ridiculous than the time we had a ban put on travelling First Class.

There was some kind of offer on, and First was cheaper than standard. It also included lunch, wiping that expense off the claim altogether and saving more money. But the Powers That Be noticed that we plebs were having a nice time and banned it, immediately doubling our expense claims.

They also banned overnights, saving £50 on hotels and costing £100+ more on peak time trains.

2023-10-31 16:32:17

Charlie Stross

cstross@wandering.shop

@JetlagJen @DocBohn Related: I once worked in a Californian multinational's London development centre. Flight time from LHR to SFO was just under 8 hours, IIRC. There was a rule about flying business class: everyone flew economy *except* on flights over 8 hours ... or if they were more than 6'2" tall, in which case they could get the better seats.

So there was this one engineer who was 7'3" tall who always flew business class, while the CEO sat in back in economy.

(Sounds fair to me!)

2023-10-31 16:49:42

kindly shopkeeper

hannah@posts.rat.pictures

@cstross I spent 4 years in a useless data science department and was absolutely terrible at it and the only reason I'm pretty sure this isn't about my company is that I don't think we used MondoDB for anything

2023-10-31 16:55:44

plinth

plinth@infosec.exchange

@cstross I worked with a library from a company that had incredibly bad performance on the Mac compared to PC and we pushed back on that a lot. Nothing happened. Finally, they sent me over to consult with their Mac engineer and when browsing through the code, I saw #define MAC_SLOW_ALLOC 1 or some such thing. I asked what that did and it did all kinds of sanity checking and debug things and it was turned on in release. I asked why that was and he said, "huh. That shouldn't happen" and set it to 0. Face meet palm. Performance improved dramatically. The management was thrilled and bought a sheet cake to celebrate. I told some of the senior engineers there what happened. They fired him a week later. A month after that, I was seeing fragmentation issues because their actual allocator was not very good, so I rewrote it for them as a gift.

2023-10-31 17:00:55

Tane Piper ⁂

tanepiper@tane.codes

@cstross @baldur I keep reading these posts on this blog in both horror and agreement (and some familiarity)

2023-10-31 17:13:17

Lisa the Roo

lisarue@mastodon.geekery.org

@cstross " It's cosplaying as a real business and the board thinks the costume is convincing." SMH, so, so true.

2023-10-31 17:15:09

Danny Boling ☮️

IAmDannyBoling@mstdn.social

@cstross

jfc, I can feel this guy's pain soooo personally

2023-10-31 17:16:42

EVHaste

Haste@mastodon.social

@cstross This is so relatable it hurts:

“…it's just that this whole department, like many departments, is some sort of weird political PsyOp to get executives promoted. It's cosplaying as a real business and the board thinks the costume is convincing.”

Unfortunately, this is doubly so:

“I applied myself for five minutes against my own better judgement, had the greatest success of my career, and have immediately been punished for it. Learn from my mistakes, I beg of you.”

2023-10-31 17:21:48

Marijke Luttekes

mahryekuh@fosstodon.org

@cstross "The subtext is that if we do this all slowly enough, it might seem like it took a lot of effort instead of just clicking buttons that I said had to be clicked almost a year ago."

I have no words to describe the feeling that this sentence gives me, but it rings horribly true indeed.

2023-10-31 17:27:17

cpm

cpm@spore.social

@cstross
utterly credible account
@Selena

2023-10-31 17:53:13

Rob Landley

landley@mstdn.jp

@cstross David Graeber's "bullshit jobs" does not get enough follow up. The vast majority of capitalism's office workers accomplish the same amount as the vast majority of catholicism's priesthood. They look impressive and chant in unison, to nobody about nothing.

2023-10-31 18:16:47

Darren Moffat

darrenmoffat@mastodon.social

@DocBohn @cstross I’ve had to explain to travel audit people that the supposedly cheaper flight the day before actually results in higher expenses because now there will be hotel and more meals.

2023-10-31 18:24:01

Eric Carroll

EricCarroll@cosocial.ca

@cstross With great computing power comes huge bills.

Bad design using lambdas at cloud scale can bankrupt your corp doing mundane processing, badly.

Been there, seen that. Tried to get the team not to do it. Oh well, so sad, "velocity" and "time to market".

What cloud permits is to see the consequences of terrible design in the bottom line, very very quickly.

It used to be that terrible design slowed you down. We have now traded slowing velocity for hugely increasing cloud bills.

2023-10-31 18:27:39

Charlie Stross

cstross@wandering.shop

@darrenmoffat @DocBohn I'm not traveling anything like as much since March 2020, but I insist on organizing my own travel to/from any events I attend or speak at, even if someone else is paying. I know how to minimize both cost and inconvenience—down to which side of the plane to sit on to avoid staring into the sun for half the flight. And I got tired explaining to Americans that, "yes, Glasgow airport is only forty miles away, but there are two major cities in the way and I no longer drive."

2023-10-31 18:55:55

Mark Demeny

mdemeny@contenttechtodon.org

@cstross I often hear the [x] sector/industry is so inefficient. (Where x can be government, academia, private sector, tech, whatever...)

What I have discovered after all these years is the actual problem is that these organizations are filled with people. And people are idiots. (I would include myself in this category).

2023-10-31 19:24:22

Mx Autumn :blobcatpumpkin:

carbontwelve@notacult.social

@cstross that’s a good read, and the whole blog has some great content.

2023-10-31 19:31:33

Ian Brown :verified:

igb@mastodon.hccp.org

@cstross "My team has spun this as a huge cost saving, when really we just applied a fire extinguisher to the pile of money that we had set alight."

2023-10-31 20:45:16

MineEyesDazzle

evedazzle@mas.to

@cstross This is the wildest thing I've read this month, but also I've met O R G A N I Z A T I O N S and believe every fucking word.

2023-10-31 20:46:32

Fred

laubblaeser@ruhr.social

@cstross
> The subtext is that if we do this all slowly enough, it might seem like it took a lot of effort instead of just clicking buttons that I said had to be clicked almost a year ago.

Oof.

2023-10-31 20:58:49

Linza

Linza@kamu.social

@JetlagJen @DocBohn @cstross I pitched taking the ferry plus a train from my non-mainland city of employ to the mainland customer office for an 0900 meeting because less climate impact
I was turned down because they might have to pay an extra day of per diem (65€) and a few hours of travel time (about 120€). Instead, I had to fly in the day before for 200€ more than the ferry and take a hotel at 180€ before the meeting.

2023-10-31 21:52:16

Lon3star

Lon3star@mastodon.social

@cstross no good deed goes unpunished

2023-10-31 22:07:35

🅱🅻🆄🅴🅱️

BlueBee@infosec.exchange

@cstross

Dude... This is how I feel about so many jobs.

I really tried to be clean, but every business I walk into is so on fire that it's impossible to clean up, and even when I do, I don't get the reward for doing it. I just want to speak about things in the realm of reality, but everyone around you is playing some weird social game.

I'm seriously considering just doing pizza delivery and fucking off for the rest of my life. This computer gig is nothing like the romantic images we were painted as kids.

2023-10-31 22:52:26

Tobias Frech

TobiasFrech@ijug.social

@cstross yes! My experience is it's amazing how many people are able to NOT check why something is slow or expensive.

2023-10-31 23:04:37

Jen

JetlagJen@geekdom.social

@Linza @DocBohn @cstross did you hear about the climate scientist who lost his job over refusing to fly?

Edit: article here https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/10/25/im-not-going-to-give-up-on-my-principles-meet-the-italian-scientist-fired-for-refusing-to-

2023-10-31 23:25:44

Samosa Thor

machei@mastodon.social

@cstross “The script that generates configuration files for our pipelines starts with 600 lines of comments, because senior engineers have been commenting the lines out in case they're needed later.” Ow. We do this in our conditional documentation as well. Siiiigh.

2023-10-31 23:52:04

Dylan

Wavebeam@trash.boutique

@cstross @siracusa I just read through this and am moderately convinced that I just left an organization where this guy worked

2023-11-01 00:31:09

Not a convicted felon

sleepyfox@hachyderm.io

@cstross During the NPfIT days I saved the NHS £50m by replacing a proprietary (rubbish) solution with an Open Source solution I cooked up with the help of a couple of other radicals.
My reward? I was fired. The London LSP's CTO (who I was working for) was golf buddies with the proprietary software company's CEO.
No good deed goes unpunished.

2023-11-01 00:42:20

Peter Sommerlad

PeterSommerlad@mastodon.social

@cstross
We had financial and business opportunity losses, because we produced actual working software for our clients in the late 1990s. competitors with same clients who created crappy software were treated as heros, whenever they fixed something and always escalated to higher management beforehand, where they learned about upcoming projects and could bid in them. We just flew under the radar. Only the ops people loved us, because our code didn't give them any heartburn.

2023-11-01 01:22:15

Charlie Stross

cstross@wandering.shop

@JetlagJen @Linza @DocBohn Yes. He didn't lose his job for refusing to fly; he lost his job for deliberately taking months to return to the office after an overseas research job (by insisting on traveling by seeking passage on freight ships). Not quite the same thing at all (and not quite as low carbon as the credulous journalists reporting on it thought). What were his employers supposed to do about an employee taking multiple months off work (while presumably claiming salary)?

2023-11-01 03:19:10

i_give_u_worms

i_give_u_worms@mastodon.cloud

@cstross
Not boosting so protagonist can stay safe

2023-11-01 03:41:00

Jeff Mitchell

squared99@mastodon.coffee

@cstross Have definitely seen this from the outside looking in. Anytime I hear about a project where they are bringing in 'outside consultants' or 'ex-<insert early dotcom company> execs'.

2023-11-01 03:51:29

Jon

oddhack@mstdn.social

@cstross @JetlagJen @DocBohn sadly, business class seating (on any airline I've ever been on, including European and Asian carriers) does not have enough room for a 6'3" person to actually sleep on the "flat bed". Far better than economy, but still not truth in advertising.

2023-11-01 05:52:40

Nick Rogers

nick_rogers@urbanists.social

@cstross

What is it like working in software?:

“The entire thing is stitched together by spreadsheets that are parsed by Python, dropped into S3, parsed by Lambdas into more S3, the S3 files are picked up by MongoDB, then MongoDB records are passed by another Lambda into S3, the S3 files are pulled into Snowflake via Snowpipe, the new Snowflake data is pivoted by a Javascript stored procedure into a relational format... and that's how you edit someone's database access.”

2023-11-01 06:54:58

codefritters

Deunds@infosec.exchange

@cstross lovely story

2023-11-01 08:24:59

lusofreak

lusofreak@mastodon.online

@cstross If you suck at what you do, you'll be promoted higher with good "social skills"... If you're average, you'll get a raise eventually.
If you're really, really good and make a 200% effort, you'll get punished.
EVERY. SINGLE. INSTITUTION.

2023-11-01 09:24:25

Ben Evans

kittylyst@mastodon.social

@cstross When I was an independent, ~50% of my time was spent providing cover for folk like OP to do exactly what they describe.

Management may not listen to their employees, but a *consultant*? Now that's a different story.

2023-11-01 12:08:42

Charlie Stross

cstross@wandering.shop

@kittylyst The job of a consultant—a GOOD one—is to tell management the unpalatable truths their employees can't without risk of getting fired.

2023-11-01 12:55:36

Colette

bellinghwoman@wandering.shop

@cstross @kittylyst The problem I had with consultants (esp. from the Big 4) was that they would send in the good ones to get the business then replace them with wet-behind-the-ears juniors to do the actual work - classic bait & switch.

2023-11-01 16:12:36

cλémentd

clementd@framapiaf.org

@cstross I saw a process leading to this at a former employer. Super smart people all around, but no pragmatism

2023-11-01 18:42:56

foo ✅

slashdottir@mastodon.online

@cstross omg so so real. Most engineers I worked w were highly skilled at bullshit while doing never ending logic pretzel somersaults for management while attempting to prove their own infallability. To the point where if someone (me) who writes a reliable core service that never goes down and never needs oncall attn becomes so ffing embarassing to these legions of buzzword jugglers thay they struggle to make shit up to make me look bad. 1/2

2023-11-01 22:20:21

Travis F W

travisfw@fosstodon.org

@cstross why I don't work in big companies.

2023-11-02 06:57:07

Some Kind Of Anhedonia

Somekindofgarf@mastodon.online

@cstross I can see it all, but my own experience is shouting at me that one line places the whole thing in magical Christmas land: "There are decent managers".

I've been with a global transport company for about a decade and a half, I've lives through like 6 local management restructuring and every single manager or even branch supervisor we've gotten has been a sniveling know-nothing knowitall or...

2023-11-04 12:11:59

Richard

richardvenusfo@fosstodon.org

@cstross Totally believe