To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk The Register understands consuming alcohol is quite a popular way to wind down from the working week, but each Friday we get the party started early with a new and sober instalment of On Call, the reader contributed column in which you share stories about the emotional hangovers you've earned delivering tech support. This week …
It depends on the leaver and their leaving state. I've done exit interviews a few times and mostly they have been useful. Some people who are leaving on good terms will be honest and open, revealing useful things about the organisation that you might not find out any other way. The irony is that those are usually the very people that you would prefer to stay, but that's just life and sometimes there nothing you can do to keep them.
Someone's it's the opposite though, if the leaver isn't in the mindset to be helpful then it's probably a waste of time and possibly good riddance to them.
OTOH an "Exit Interview" can (should!) just be the inverse of the "Onboarding" (puke). Run down the check list: give us back the security pass; the laptop - *and* the backpack, thank you very much; IT has checked you haven't left anything locked[1]; got your papers from HR so you can't claim we owe you for holidays not taken? Good. Now - piss off[2].
Anything other than that is of dubious value to anyone.
[1] remember the days of - was it Source Safe? - when you could bugger up dev by leaving files locked out to your user?
[2] to quote Bernard
Mine was "Would you recommend this company to others?"
[long pause]
"I prefer not to answer that"
(A little clarification -- loved the work & the people I worked with. The "mothership"? Not so much. How you felt about The Company depended a lot upon what you were doing and who you were doing it for. So there really wasn't a yes/no answer to the question)
Have to admit I still have one regret about the exit interview from one of my longer jobs.
The main reason for quitting was the behaviour and attitude of one the senior staff, and although I was able to allude to that issue during the "chat" I couldn't quite bring myself to say out loud "The guy is a [area of genital anatomy of which the first letter is 'c', and the last 't'], and is the reason virtually everyone has ever left this company". Not having the gumption to come out with it openly to the big boss is one of my lifetime disappointments.
However, I think they knew anyway, and the guy was gone within 6 months.
If done correctly, an Exit Interview is the chance for the ex-employee to give candid reasons why they are leaving, which the management should listen to as it can expose problems that may be hidden by people who are still employed and feel their jobs may be at risk if they speak truthfully.
Exactly, most technical industries are relatively small and close knit. It is not uncommon for managers to be friendly with managers at other companies.
Tell some manager in an exit interview, that the reason your leaving is the management strategy or that you think they're all a$$holes, and it's likely to get around that you're a "troublemaker".
Best is to keep it civil, keep it minimal, and get out before your tempted to tell them what you really think...
(Admittedly, this advice is primarily for younger workers, the more senior engineers amongst us, can usually be skilled enough, that being branded a troublemaker doesnt affect hiring, because the skills are needed. But to get to that point, well you have to stay schtum for a bit)...
@Doctor Syntax: ‘OTOH I'd interpret "troublemaker" in light of’ ..
My exit interview took place in the lift on the way out of a Friday evening. Fortuitously they continued to pay my salary until I eventually told them to stop. There was a full-size card-board cut-out of our dear leader in the foyer. One day I'm going back and pee on it :|
A little different to when I'd resigned from a job and one morning met the IT guy in the lift, who remarked he was surprised to see me in as I was supposed to have left and he was just about to go and delete all my accounts. I told him I was leaving but in exactly a month's time, he reassured me he would not do anything until I'd sorted it out with my boss. On getting to my floor, I found my boss was on holiday, his boss was on holiday, there was no one more senior in that building, and HR wouldn't talk to me as their system said I was no longer an employee. I was pretty annoyed as my family had already relocated across the country, and I was staying behind to work out my notice. I didn't know if I was still going to be paid, and considered walking out there and then. In the end I convinced the IT guy to hold off for a few days until my boss came back, who quickly corrected my leaving date, and I did get paid. We were able to laugh about this by the time it came to my exit interview, especially after being treated to one last ribeye in our favourite steakhouse.
"Nah, they didn't give a damn when you were there, and they won't now. Anything you say can only hurt you."
Depends. If the person doing the exit interview is senior enough that they are operating in a bubble disconnected from the realities of the people doing the actual work, it can be an eye opened. My employer, a couple of years ago, ran an "anonymised" survey. Mostly it was genuinely treated as anonymous by the respondents and caused some serious ructions (and improvements!!) in the company because the C-suite had no idea how people really felt. Staff turnover has dropped dramatically in the last year or so.
My company has recently passed around an "anonymous" survey. Of course it's no such thing. For a start the system knows who has and who hasn't completed it because if it didn't it wouldn't be able to send reminder emails and then the "anonymized" data is presented to management broken down by team / department. As some (many) teams are three or four people it's likely that even the dimmest manager would have a fair idea who has sent in which comment.
I’ve only had one company do an exit interview, others have just run through the checklists to ensure everything was handed back access revoked etc.
Well I say that but I had to remind one about returning my PC etc. when I arrived to drop it all off our security lady asked why I was asking for her to get my boss and not just using my pass to go in as normal, seems they’d forgotten to tell her I’d left as well!
The one company who did an exit interview was fun, seems they’d not warned the HR person why I’d left. Got quite a shock when was very clear on why I was leaving and the issues. That company was and still is a B Corp company, the way they treat staff they should not be!
It was during the exit interview that I was asked why I was leaving. When I said "well, two years and not a hint of a promotion", the HR lady was shocked. "But you turned down a really good job in the main computing centre, you never even asked about it. It was going to be a lot more money with great prospects". I was stunned, and said I knew nothing about it. So she showed me the application form that I had "signed" to say I knew about the offer but was turning it down for personal reasons.
Not my signature. It was my bosses signature. He didn't want to lose me so faked a signature.
After that, the exit interview turned into HR gathering evidence for a major disciplinary action about said boss. Mean while I went back to conside my BOFH response to stuff him up. Revenge is disk best served some weeks after you have left, but when served, the recipient should be in no doubt that he has been properly kippered.
Last time I was employed with a full boss I had an exit interview. The "let me go" for no real reason. Guess they thought they would save money.
I had fun ripping people apart, explaining the mess the sales people caused. They would promise features but never tell the devs. Just minor things like promising the Welsh client the software would be multi-lingual... I would go on site and install the product and it would be the first time any of us learnt of the promised and "special" changes required.
Or how the default settings to install the software were leaving companies open to horrendous potential security issues. (I am talking places like Councils / Police / Fire Service...)
Maybe they really didn't realise how much their installation engineer was saving the company from embarrassment.
They kicked me out for no reason... but the most fun part of that interview was when my colleague\head dev\manager called me afterwards and told me how the bosses looked at each other as I left the room and said they had made a mistake. THAT was funny. Extra funny as I knew that head dev was also about to leave... With the two of us gone they would have had no clue as to how anything worked and would need to rely on a six month junior to sort things out.
I've had some success over the years with this approach: At the exit interview I insist that working at "this" company has been heaven on earth, and I am only leaving for a remarkably good opportunity (a promotion!) at "that" company. Suppose I am a lowly level 0 at this company. In the exit interview I let it be known that I'm moving up to level 1 at that company. Then in a year or two this company may possibly offer to hire me back at level 2, since they can't expect to lure me back at level 1, can they? I learned this move from playing Donkey Kong.
In my entire life, I have undergone exit interviews twice. Mind you this was in Europe (EU).
At the first one I was able to honestly state why I was leaving after 9 years of working (as a neurologist in a psychiatric hospital). The employer had not fully complied with the agreements made regarding scientific research to be done there by me. Of course I clearly stated the reason for leaving. Nonetheless, even after years (I live close to the institute in question), relations remained good and (more importantly) they took to heart my advice to stop pretending that serious research was possible with them.
The 2nd was after the takeover of the general hospital, where I worked for years, by a private healthcare entrepreneur. Fortunately for me, I was able to retire early and therefore it was no problem for me to tell that same healthcare entrepreneur, that his policies would send the entire hospital into bankruptcy. He looked at me like I wasn't right in the head, but suffice it to say that this hospital does indeed no longer exist (the government ordered it closed due to mismanagement and debt).
I was supposed to have an Exit Interview but since I had made my opinion very clear to my Manager's Manager (my Manager was a great guy who had been allocated all the 'oddity' teams and openly admitted limited knowledge for most of their work areas) they bottled it and chose not to do have anything put on record. I have never yet heard of a company who take any notice of what people say in such an interview and it seems to be just a box-tick to show they really care even when they clearly don't.
Just to round things out they then closed out my access two days early so I couldn't even do a handover since I was a Home Worker and this blocked Teams (woohoo) and my link to the Corporate phone system. I am in contact with various people who are still there and they are just waiting for the fuse to burn down on the stuff I looked after
My resignation letter at my previous employer made it clear why I was going to such an extent that not only was there no exit interview, all senior management were conspicuous by the absence on my last day in case I told some embarrassing truths in my goodbye speech.
The thing is I toned down my original letter quite a bit and I thought it was fairly safe after a couple of iterations, but any criticism of their decisions wasn't acceptable apparently!
My resignation letter in the Civil Service centred on pay, partly because Scientific grades and partly because I'd been stuck on the top of the SSO scale for several years; the normal expectation would be promotion to PSO but nobody had been promoted for years. The reply rejected this. Just to prove it I was then offered promotion immediately, no interview board or anything. Too late, I was gone. It had dawned much too late that I was the only one there who could program this new-fangled computer thingy they'd got.
Way back in the day, in an annual review, my PSO boss told me that the "career grade" (the one that you would spend much of your time in near the end of your career) was PSO. If you were considered to be a "high flyer" you would make PSO by the age of 32 and SPSO by 40. The longest scale was SO, and some poor unfortunates took 20 years to get to the top; as I recall the increment was ~3-4%, which wasn't particularly impressive when inflation was running at several times that. SSO was bit weird because that was the entry grade for some bright young PhDs, whilst many others were in their 50s, and were probably going to retire at that grade. To put this in perspective, there was a Military Rank equivalent where an SSO/SEO would be considered to be similar to a Wing Commander.
The way our lot rationalised things was that you needed responsibility to be promoted to PSO. Responsibility was defined in terms of direct reports which we didn't. The fact that the SSOs were giving evidence that could put people in prison didn't constitute responsibility. I did occasionally wonder about the possibility of tipping off a defence QC to suggest that as PSO was the career grade someone who hadn't been promoted to it wasn't good enough to give evidence. That would have caused ructions.
In terms of military equivalents I think PSO would have been equivalent to major.
When I worked for MoD, PSO was thought to be between Lt Colonel and Colonel. The bits that I worked in always were run by a PSO, the main difference was the level and difficulty of the workload. Interestingly as I was responsible for ordering materials, I had two 'industrial" reports as an SO, the HSOs and two SSOs didn't have any direct reports. In the HO "forensic expert witness" eligibility was based on academic qualification; for science stuff "a good honours degree" was normally needed. For less academic work, experience was probably more important. When I left the public service at 41, I had just been offered SPSO.
At my last company everyone gathered around the departing person to present a gift (if you were lucky) and to hear you say something.
I had a very large turnout as everyone was expecting me to say plenty of contentious things, after 20 years with the company and through many owners.
I shocked them all by just holding up a banner that said "Thank you and goodbye", blaming it on knowing I would be emotional. I also knew that going to a supplier would mean I might meet many of them again.
A quite senior member of management was retiring and the invite to his leaving do was worded along the lines of "a meeting to debate the motion that name shell be referred to as 'a former member of staff;". Needless to say he was one of the good guys of whom there weren't many.
I was let go in a major Reduction in Force at a Large Telecoms Company. I turned over everything I could think of that I was keeping going. I was told later by people I knew that were still there for something a year after I was let go, various things would need some attention and there was asking around "who used to take care of that?" and my name would come up. I was also told that when the person taking over from me told other people, those people gave him their condolences. Apparently quite a few of those in the trenches knew I'd be a hard act to follow.
is quite a popular way to wind down from the working week
What seems like a casual way to unwind after a long week - grabbing a few pints with colleagues - is actually part of a calculated system designed to keep workers from breaking free. Corporate culture pushes the idea that you "deserve" a drink to relax, but in reality, those pints are preventing you from working on your own side projects and realising your potential outside the company.
When you're inebriated, you're in no state to focus on developing skills, building a business, or reflecting on how you could turn the knowledge you've gained at work into something of your own. The alcohol keeps your mind dulled, your energy depleted, and ensures that any motivation to pursue personal goals fades away with every sip.
This isn't accidental. The corporate machine wants you to stay locked into your role, dependent on the job, and too mentally fogged to challenge the status quo. By subtly encouraging after-work drinks, they ensure that you're too tired and distracted to make moves on your own path. The social pressure to join in makes it seem harmless, but it’s part of a larger plan to keep workers from realising their full potential, ensuring that you stay part of the workforce rather than becoming a competitor or independent success.
Seeing as my job required a *lot* of driving I regarded alcohol as strictly off limits during the working week - in fact I drink more since I retired!
P.S. Not only do I drive a lot less now, but I take my time and avoid the motorways when ever possible - discovering some amazing places in the process.
If I'm not in a hurry I avoid the big roads... Interstates on this side of the pond. As the late, great Charles Osgood was fond of saying, "The Interstate Highway System makes it possible to drive from coast to coast and not see anything".
No doubt your motorways are much like that... if I ever get to drive in England I'll avoid them as much as possible, you have some amazing countryside, but that driving on the wrong side of the road would take some getting used to!
Not a motorway and the way things are going, not even likely to be converted to dual carriageway in the near future.
It always surprises me that Shap peak on the M6 is at about the same altitude as the hill I drive over to go to the local supermarket. As I remember it the old A6 Shap summit was much tougher than that in winter.
Hah! We drive on that side because most people are right-handed/brained and...
Could use their stronger right arm to put the brake on their horse-drawn wagon.
Could use their sword arm without having to reach across their body.
Can judge distance with their dominant eye, so better at passing something coming the other way.
Can change gear with their left hand and control the wheel/steering with their more controllable right, giving a noticeably lower accident rate than 'other' countries.
You're welcome.
That's big brain thinking there, not only do you keep yourself sharp in your own time but you are actively sticking it to the man by sabotaging them and getting paid for it. Though it would work as well if you just did what most office workers do and spend the day randomly surfing the web, stringing out inane meetings for inordinate amounts of time and massive bathroom breaks....
Dude.. whether or not I use IT stuff after work has no relation to whether I've had a couple of pints or not, it's more likely to be based on how tired I am and other tasks that have to be done.
I'll probably be seeing select work and ex work colleagues for a drink this weekend because I like them as people. It hasn't been encouraged by work, it's what happens when you get to know people.
I'd also note that it is possible to do some computer fettling on a couple of pints, it doesn't suddenly remove all your facilities. Ensuring you eat and have sufficient sleep is far more important.
> it is possible to do some computer fettling on a couple of pints, it doesn't suddenly remove all your facilities.
As always there's a relevant XKCD: Ballmer Peak .
I would prefer the birth of Binky (and about five comics beyond that), but then again I would.
That's funny. When the company had me go for Friday night drinkies I put it on my timesheet. When questioned a out it, told them that it was required by my manager, therefore clockable time. When the manager said no, I had a choice, I no longer went. Yes, I had to be paid to associate with those people.
That rant makes it sound like you're an alcoholic trying to shift blame for your inability to find personal success over to the corporation that you're employed by. It's easy to make excuses, but in the time that you've spent creating this conspiracy theory, you could have focused on developing yourself, building a business, or reflecting on how you could turn the knowledge you've gained at work into something of your own.
Responding to your nonsensical preaching has depleted my energy and has reduced my motivation to pursue personal goals. I could have been increasing my fluency in Rust, but instead I was responding to elsergiovolador. Now I'll have to keep using C99 for all of my personal projects. Woe is me.
Disagree. In the 1980's it was quite usual to open the booze cabinet (Yes, every office had one ) if the meeting was going after 5:00.
I started businesses with folk after discussing opportunities over a drink
Some Koreans famously will not do business with people unless they have seen them after they have consumed a bit. They are big believers in ""In vino vertitas" or at least using alcohol to pick up the true nature of someone...
He claimed his Windows NT servers had zero downtime, and each and every of his servers had run for more than a year continuously. Now I had a little experience in Windows NT administration, as I ran a Windows NT 4.0 machine at home (mainly to prevent the missus from performing "spring cleaning" activity, wiping out "unwanted files" such as config.sys). I dutifully downloaded and installed patches as they arrived (almost on a weekly basis), and in my experience, each and every patch required a reboot. I wondered if he had some trick I wasn't aware of to patch the systems without needing a reboot, or whether he had several redundant servers, allowing the services to remain available 24/7. I first asked if he applied every security patch, which he said he did. I then asked whether these didn't require a reboot, and he answered that of course he rebooted the systems after patching. So I suggested that his servers had not run continuously for a year. His answer was he didn't count the reboots for security patches as downtime, because he didn't physically power down the computers.
This was some strange usage of the phrase "zero downtime" I was not previously aware of.
This would have been the correct approach for the OPs boss as well. He doesn't know or care about how security updates get applied, he wants all his services up and available and secure all the time, and this is how he can express it. How the sysadmin achieves that is up to him - extra resiliency, failover, "at risk windows", whatever - the boss doesn't need to know the details, he just needs his services, and how much its going to cost.
Was it not Windows NT that was incapable of endless uptime? I think I recall something in its innards that used the count of total uptime seconds, and if this reached a certain value then bad things happened, so rebooting before it reached that value was something of a necessity.
NT didn't have the limit 95 and 98 had, but I seem to recall one kernel patch for NT claimed to repair 60 out of 300 known memory leaks in the kernel. If it did have this many memory leaks, I would guess uptime was limited due to memory slowly clogging up.
Yesterday evening I was doing a banking transaction for my aged aunt.
I inserted the card in the ATM and entered the PIN. As I keyed in the fourth digit of the PIN I was greeted by a familiar twirling circle and the "Restarting" text from a scheduled (or manually initiated) Windows 10 reboot.
Who the hell at Santander reboots an ATM with a transaction in progress? It was not the middle of the night, it was at 18:05.
Of course there is no method of retrieving the card. Being stuck in the machine, it is not handled by staff ever again. All I can do is sit on the phone for two hours to cancel the card and request a new one, which will be "in about 5 working days". That's a whole week for a 98-year-old to be without
Since the branch closed at 16:00, the mean time between reboots for Windows 10 on Santander ATM PCs must be in the order of 2 hours.
Santander doesn't have unusually awful ATMs in my experience, most ATMs have "issues". I've not seen a reboot at Santander but I have been in the middle of doing banking for an elderly relative only for the thing to give up and spit the card out, necessitating a visit to the counter, more than once. Fortunately I tend to visit during working hours so not a major issue. Nat West machine refused to eat the money I tried to feed it the other day, and Nationwide machine regularly runs out of cash or paying-in envelopes. In-branch staff always very apologetic, but the machines are maintained by an off-site company / service team. In the case of Santander, normally two out of two tellers open, ditto Nationwide, but in both cases one of them is often also being duty manager. Nat West has two teller positions, usually only one open plus a duty manager elsewhere. Co-Op doesn't even have an ATM, which is a bit awkward out of hours, but they always* have two tellers open, and often three plus a duty manager at a separate desk, who can do most things which don't involve cash.
We are in the very fortunate position of having branches of most major banks in our small town (I don't use HSBC or Lloyds, Barclays closed about six months ago, Halifax ten years ago) and having the counter service has proved extremely handy over the years.
M.
*recent short-staffing (Summer holidays I guess) mean that hasn't been the case the last couple of months, but it's usually fine.
NT4 SP6 or W2kSP4 was the most stable of them all...
I miss the glo-ri-ous days of OS/2 and NT flame wars... those were good times. Especially when comparing NT on a quadprocessor setup vs OS/2 on a single CPU :)
Oh, indeed, those were quite worthy...
Nowadays we don't have that anymore, just flat GUI's, malware, and bloated Windows.
"This was some strange usage of the phrase "zero downtime" I was not previously aware of."
Maybe an unusual definition and not the norm, but yeah, I can see his logic. The system/hardware was never down/unpowered even if the OS itself was frequently down :-)
The boss sounded alarming like an asshole.
The boss sounded alarming like an asshole a noisy gobshite*.
There, FTFY it much betterer.
*find the noisy gobshite thread on Reddit, it is in two parts. First part is good, second part is a bit sad. Worth the read though.
====> time to bugger orf and have one at the pub...
> as likely as a tiger in Africa.
Panthera Africa Big Cat Sanctuary
Tygerberg Zoo
Sheba, the 8-year-old female tiger ...in the south of Johannesburg....
Tigers in Uganda at the Entebbe Zoo
According to DFFE,.... request there are 72 facilities/individuals keeping 451 Asian big cats in captivity.
You could say "likely as a tiger in New Jersey" but much of my life was within paw-roaming of either the big amusement park or the woman who collected big cats in rickety cages. "Jackson, NJ....had a higher concentration of tigers per square mile than anywhere else in the world." One was wandering the town. "New Jersey Tiger Lady....could only account for 18 animals, although her state permit stated that she had 23."
For those working unusual hours which I used to, make sure the facilities and security staff are on your side, makes things work a lot smoother and they will help you out if needed.
I side to be in and out of the offices so often I knew them all by name, even the remote sites
It sounded more like "malicious compliance" would have been the solution if it becomes necessary to subvert the system to get your work done.
Anyway, that's a rather rubbish fire drill if there are still people left in the building. The search party should have found them or their names would have not been checked of from the presence list. Someone should have pointed out that they saw you at the office that day but you weren't present at the assembly point. This is why these fire drills happen, after all.
There's no way they could be reported as still being in the server room. It would have been an arithmetic impossibility.
A mathematician, engineer, and a biologist are sitting outside a house they know to be empty. They see two people go in, and three come out.
Engineer : "Our initial count must have been wrong."
Biologist : "They must have reproduced."
Mathematician : "If somebody goes into the house now, it'll be empty."
Well I've been in meetings where the fire alarms went off and the boss said "Anybody who leaves this room is FIRED!!!!". Somebody left, and he was fired for insubordination. When somebody in security tried to bring up the security violation, he was fired. Eventually everybody learned to ignore the fire alarm. Remember, this is the USA and laws are for the little people.
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