BOFH: HR tries to think appy thoughts BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns HR has outdone itself. They've looked at the Company as a whole and realized we need to add AI to our products. If only I'd thought of it myself. I mean, the Company has a fair amount of A already, so all we really need to do is account for the staggering lack of I. The cherry on the …
your comment was just in time for me to fix it, thanks.
But also: could be worst, could be HP or HPE people in the office. Then there will be a half hour wait while they get to a useable state ;)
(No, I haven't ben diagnosing a HP server and having to reboot a lot with their ultra fast UEFI.. why do you ask...)
I can feel a "There's been a terrible accident" about to be uttered, as the truck collecting the skip accidentally makes HR sauce due to the phone owners being do anxious to retrieve their phones that they forget to look both ways before crossing the road
Also: all websites of all universities at the moment.
What I need: where is the building I need to go to? Where can I get a coffee if I'm early? How do I get there? Where is the department of $(fieldofinterest)?
What I get: "oooh, we are so great, the greatest university, look at the shiny pictures of our students, and by the way, we won a prize for (whatever) - now scroll down to even get shown a menue..."
Argh. Yes. A student came to our "Digital Champions" session for some help earlier in the academic year. All she really needed was to be able to find stuff on her uni's website.
What a fucking pile of shit she was trying to work through.
There was the rolling banner across the top of the (phone) web page to start with.Fucked if I know what it was for. Then the flashing side panels extolling the virtues of (something or other) that no one cared about. Then some kind of BS "News" panel underneath. All this on the screen of a mobile phone. So we tried on a laptop. And it was actually worse. Actually finding links to useful information was just about impossible.
One of my old schools has one of those consultant-designed-and-built sites that cost an eye-watering amount (that *could* have paid for some storage that was badly needed at the time -- I know because I was lead sysadmin back then). Even after ten years, the only reasonable way to get to the directory is by typing '${school_URL}/directory" in the URL bar, and I happened on that by guessing.
The company used to have a decent intranet 'news' page, with a menu across the top that would get you to many useful pages... then it got 'updated'.
The news page was shifted to SharePoint (easier to maintain?!?) but, even worse, they signed to company up to 'Workplace by Meta' (faecebook for business) and senior management started using it for their official pronouncements... along with pics from their visits to exotic far-flung outposts... and junior management congratulating Tracey on selling a gross of pencils... and Simon from Lift Maintenance has brought in his dog today... and Health and Safety are running a quiz to win a pair of safety flip-flops... all in triplicate because you are 'signed up' to groups A, B and C
Some people seem to have loved it but I don't think any of them were workers at the coalface... I looked at it a few times but never found anything usefful
(now retired and thankfully FB free)
Client wanted an app to increase engagement and enhance community or something along those lines. They weren't really sure about the specifics.
What does the app do? It replaces an email/phone call to a person with various buttons that send templated emails.
My motives may not have been entirely pure when I suggested that we could "increase functionality" if instead of the email being sent by the server, it opens the user's email client with a draft email for them to send themselves.
The client's initial feedback after being given the app for the first time specifically said they liked how that functionality worked.
The first four words pretty scotch whatever follows.
No accident that for the more discerning gamey is a euphemism for putrid and presumably gamify to mean putrify.
I had never picked up that the PFY was baptised Stephen.
Tossing the tossers' phones into the skip brilliant. Incorrectly entering the screen lock pin or pattern etc to require the puk beforehand would be icing.
Looked at the oldest BOFH-story on ElReg. The PFY is in it. The story dates from 2000
Which is 25 years ago.
Which makes me feel old (I might be old, but there's no reason to actually _feel_ old, innit?)
Edit: found it.
http://www.bofharchive.com/1996/bastard96-03.html
1996.
The PFY could have been in his twenties then. Now he is thirty years older (yeah, time does not work that way in stories, I know).
No, it's the same one, named Stephen, all the way through. I challenge you to find a single example of either of the events you've claimed. You will find a couple attempts by the PFY to leave, which are often reversed in that article or a couple episodes later, and you'll find two attempts by the PFY to replace the BOFH by fire (literally). The challenge isn't serious, as I'm quite confident you won't find it, but you'll read a lot of BOFH stories if you attempt it which is reward enough.
> They are both ageless
Every few years they must return to their Ringbinders of Power, light another Page That Was Intentionally Left Blank and immerse* themselves when the Flame Turns Blue.
* nudity isn't actually required, but Simon has found that leaving a set of clothes crumpled on the floor in the outer office has kept the curious at bay; whether he told the PFY that they were a *spare* set is unknown...
Look. It is because of articles like this, that the boss knows I read, that enables me to fulfil my objectives. Some of these objectives are even connected with our business. The 'ideas-graveyard' is generally foretold by the BOFH together with useful solutions.
Another solution ---->
This comes scarily close to my experience at a former employer.
HR was looking to enrich their jobs. So now, mandatory annual security/harassment/regulatory videos came not only with Q&A, but a "gamification" option. Which I never used. (I'd let them run in a background window and just try the Q&A until I got enough right that I passed)
Also on the HR enrichment agenda: "personal goals", "360 feedback", "achievement badges" (you got one for finishing each mandatory training), and so on. Lots of busy work that kept you from doing your actual job. And the "everyone's a winner" (virtual, not actual -- you could see them on your HR web page) badges were the weirdest thing I have ever seen in my professional career. It was like being back in grade school.
Retired now, and not a moment too soon.
OMG...I was in exactly that place and told them what they could do with their 'gamification' which was not well received. I have a feeling I know which company that was and they decided to 'let me go' when the system I was the only EMEA support/admin person for was in the final 6 months of it's Prod usage. Somehow they assumed that the 10 years they needed to keep the data available for did not need any servers to restore the data onto, who knew?
Our company did some deal with an online training video provider. might have been called Go One
and the crap they presented was all animated, with fake competitions supposedly against other employees where you displayed how much smarter than them you were..
The entire thing was aimed squarely at whatever group of generations are casualties of youtube and social media, and its presumption of stupidity, and overall fakeness was so blatant I found it too offensive to actually do any of the training.
Similar here. HR provide "training" and it's invariably US imported cartoons (that ought to have 1000% tariffs applied to them!) but with a British voice over to make it appear "local", Of course, the visuals and text are a dead giveaway and often a bit jarring when something culturally non-UK is front and centre in the presentation. I've done so many of these over the years that I rarely watch them now and just wait for end (or skip forward if it allows) and do the Q&A at the end. I'm long, long past caring about getting 100% and am content with getting whatever the minimal pass mark is. Having said that, it's not unusual for there to be an 80% pass mark and only 4 questions so the ONLY option is 100% to pass LOL ie yet another example of the lack of care taken in preparing the "training".
Ditto here on the outsourced cartoons. The best part (since they were outsourced) was the disclaimer at the start of each video, saying that the requirements given in the upcoming video may be different than the ones applicable in your company and/or region. On a compliance video. SMH, does anyone in charge actually watch these things? Oh, well, got my badges (one for each video watched, IIRC). Now that it has been mentioned, I do recall something about a "leaderboard" and competing against your fellow employees. But...you only got these compliance videos ever so often, so I'm not clear how (or why) you could do more of them than you were told to do...
And the videos we were required to complete seemed to vary every year. Some years, we had sexual harassment (avoiding, not how-to) training, some years not. Every now and then, we got videos required that were clearly meant for software people (I was a hardware engineer), and I just gave up on them...all about requirements for building software, which process to use, etc. Greek to me. Never heard a word more about it. Did not get a badge for that one.
HR once ran a contest for badges. I kid you not, and I have screen grabs to prove it, which I will not post here. The contest was to see who could award the most badges to fellow employees as recognition for whatever they were being recognised for. It ran for a while and then the HR people running the contest posted the names of the winners. Apparently, these people either worked with a LOT of high energy contributors, or they were really into giving and collecting (virtual, mind you) badges.
One of our guys once tried to create a badge for something relevant to our small development group (might have been Outstanding Effort on a Project That Was Cancelled, or some such). They submitted it to "Badge Central" and got a note saying it would not be approved. Apparently there are standards and this one didn't meet them.
This badge stuff went on as long as I was there. Totally bizarre, it was like getting a gold star on a grade school essay, but virtual. Somehow the number and types of badges you had factored into your promotability (in a way that, natch, was not disclosed). As I was already at the highest non-management level, that didn't matter to me.
For context most of our sales are to quote, we don't have web ordering and at the time several of our customers had only just progressed to sending orders by Fax!
Director: The board have decided we must have an app!
Me: What do you want it to do?
Director: Help the customers! You know, datasheets and stuff.
Me: So basically repeat what's already on the website?
Director: Er, umm, probably.
I go away and do some very brief research.
Me: It'll cost a minimum of £15,000 per platform, and there are three separate platforms* to provide for.
Director:
That's the last I heard of the idea!
*Windows Mobile was still a thing.
HR doesn't need any fancy tools -- they already have the human shredder which is the tool they use to scan CVs.
What they need are actual HUMANS, with a brain, compassion and caring for the good of the employee.
-
Sigh, loks like I've not sniffed enough glue this week, again :(
Because now I'm getting ideas myself:
- An app that connects to the lift controls based on proximity of a beancounter's phone. Call it the Hotel California lift option: you can enter the carriage any time you like but you can never leave...
- Sliding doors and halon releases triggering automatically based on the number of outstanding support requests a user has, once again proximity-triggered
- Camera and microphone linked to servers (TODO: install device file /dev/blackmail on all Android devices, or hook into device files already installed by Chinese home automation apps)
- Remote controlled NFT payment features (the beer fund needs topping up!)
...
This could work...
This reminds me uncannily of a certain colleague - I shall refrain from naming names.
Discussion between unnamed colleague and killjoy me: "We should use AI!" - "Why would we do that?" - "We could use it in our audits!." - "In which way would this be helpful?" - "We could use it for analysing evidence." - "Right. Who's going to train our AI? We certainly cannot send any audit evidence to any third party." - "Ah, okay. But maybe we could do a pilot?" - "?! Same problem." - [more cringe exchange] - "Maybe we can ask AI how AI can help us?"
Just thinking… What kind of nonsense is this? If HR had a concrete use case to help them doing HR work more efficiently, by all means go to some development manager who sends you someone to record your requirements. But the company’s business and what software they create is none of HRs business.
Mandatory sign on with your Company ID (all 19 digits, plus the 4 digit checksum), which you do by tapping on the flying keypads as they cross the screen. This is only intended as a a one-time logon, as once you are in the app will generate a QR code to use next time, but we've noticed most users appear reluctant to use the QR (note: for security, screenshotting is disabled; pencil and squared paper are available in the stationery cupboard).
Within the app you can get the number of a support ticket to work on (playing the Vegas Slots for a three digit number), log time against a job number (wobble the phone to sink the ball into the right hole, quarter an hour logged per ball) or use the geo-caching clues to find where the sheets from the stores ordering books have been hidden around the office. Your emails are presented as crosswords and take-home from payslips are found in the shaded squares after completing the Sudoku.
Your time within the app is shown by the clock at top left and your best time to date is shown on the right. To incentivise productivity, every five seconds over your best results in a deduction from your year end bonus.
As the consultants who prepared the app for us have described using it as "a pure and child like adventure from the comfort of your cubicle, an experience that will refresh and enliven", the CFO has determined that it counts as non-productive time for the purposes of your timesheet and will not be payable. The app will automatically log its usage on your behalf, rounded up to the nearest half-hour per session.
Addendum: Workplace safety has demanded that, in order to "reduce fatigue from excessive screen use", the app will automatically log you out after a maximum of ten minutes usage.
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