Energy drink company punished ERP graybeard for going too fast By Friday morning, techies may need a jolt of energy to get through the final day of the working week, so we deliver it in the form of a new instalment of On-Call, the weekly reader-contributed column that shares your tales of trying to deliver speedy tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Charles" who …
This is anonymous for what should hopefully be obvious reasons, but even so I won’t be discussing anything too specific.
I had to attend a meeting with HR in the summer as an employee rep for an employee who was being hauled over the coals. What was interesting was that the HR woman was clearly following a well laid down process and reading questions from a document. As with a few companies I’ve worked at the rep isn’t allowed to answer questions for, or on behalf of the accused. They can confer with the accused as much as they like but not actually answer questions.
At a previous company I was asking for a break before they answered each question and was effectively telling them what to say. Which unsurprisingly didn’t make me that popular with the HR bloke, He couldn’t tell me not to do it but at the same time was visibly irritated that I was in effect answering the questions. It did result in a much fairer hearing as the employee was very new and unaware of certain rules. At the current company I’d gone one step further and found the lists of questions that the HR team use for different hearings on the intranet.
I had searched for hearings, looking for information on what the employee rep could and couldn’t do and found the questions lists instead. I then wrote out answers for the ones likely to be asked and the accused just read those out when asked. Caused a bit of confusion where they read the wrong answer out to a particular question, oops. I also had them take evidence in the form of emails ready to show, where the team manager had told the accused to do things that violated policy or were close to doing so.
HR woman did get the accused on something very minor, which was so inconsequential it didn’t even get written up in their HR file. They were told not to do it again though and I got a few drinks after work.
I have also been the accused in one myself and I had another employee accuse me of doing something I shouldn’t have done and which I hadn’t. That company had a manager (not yours) conduct the hearing and I went and sat in a room with her and a more senior manager. They read out the accusation and I quickly identified who would have made the allegation which was bollocks. That person really didn’t like me or other members of the team, and had had it in for me in particular for some time. I asked who had made the allegation and she said it was confidential at that stage. I said okay does that unnamed person have evidence to back up their claim?
They apparently didn’t so, I pointed out that having just checked my phone I had found that on the day in question I had left very early through illness (my manager had sent me home as I had been projectile vomiting in the toilets, and one bin) at 10:30am so wasn’t there when this supposedly happened. I had been projectile vomiting in the toilets, and one bin) at 10:30am so wasn’t there when this supposedly happened. I then asked again who had made the allegation and was rebuffed a second time.
So I dropped a bombshell and said it was a defamatory statement that the other person had made, which they couldn’t back up with any evidence. Looked to me like an “open & shut case” and I said I was sure my lawyer would be pleased to be getting the work. The manager looking a bit flustered, told me that there obviously wasn’t a case to answer here and they would talk to the person concerned about their behaviour and attitude. They asked if I would hold off on the lawyers until after they had done that which I agreed to. The other person was subsequently moved to another team and then decided they would rather continue their career at a different company. Nobody mourned their leaving.
I was the "accused" in a meeting involving my boss, boss's boss, and HR once. My first "real" full time job, at a medium sized engineering company (maybe 1000 employees total) about 30 years ago. I won't bore you with the full story of the accusation, but 1) I did it, and didn't try to hide it, because 2) I had the full knowledge and approval of the VP of Engineering whose assets I was accused of stealing. Problem was, he wasn't my boss, who worked under the VP of "IT" (they called it MIS) and he didn't know about it.
Since my work basically was to provide support for the Unix workstations used by the MEs and EEs I worked fairly independently of my boss, who was content to allow that since I was given praise and glowing reviews by the engineering division which reflected well on IT who didn't have the best reputation with the engineers in the past. There was an opportunity to do something that saved Engineering about a quarter million dollars a year, so I worked out the details with the EE application support specialist and the VP of Engineering and made it happen. I was seen doing something that on its face was a violation (taking three engineering workstations out the front door at 5pm on a Friday, placing them in the hatchback of my car parked in the loading zone of the main entrance) but was part of the process. As "crimes" go, it couldn't have been witnessed by more people if I tried.
Once I invoked the VP of Engineering's name, the HR lady said she should confer with him to verify my story, and fortunately she was able to reach him right them and confirmed everything was fine. She said from her perspective the matter was settled since what I was accused of was not improper. My boss's boss was still unhappy, and I'm pretty certain it was because he would have liked to be able to take credit for that $250K/yr savings! In the end I wasn't disciplined beyond "you gotta do a much better job keeping [your boss] in the loop" but I decided then I would look for another job and turned in my notice about a month later.
As a retired Contractor, I used to love being thought of as a "resource"
Why?
It meant I could ignore emails addressed to "All Staff" if I didn't want to do whatever they asked for!
I once had an irate HR person standing by my desk berating me for not filling in one of their Information requests asking for all sorts of personal details that were nothing to bloody do with them!
I pointed out that I wasn't staff, I was a resource "just like that desk over there".
The dept manager shrugged her shoulders and said "I don't care as long as the work gets done"
" HR should stop using the term "resources" which makes the employees comparable to water coolers and printers."
I think that's refreshingly honest talk from a corporate entity: That's literally what HR thinks about employees: Cogs in corporate machinery and nothing more. Better ones don't say that aloud but the attitude is always there: HR can fire you so they're your bosses, at least in their own mind.
Usually because they've no clue whatsoever what people actually do, so it all concentrates to 'they're resources' bucket. And attitude, of course.
HR always has 'we're better than the resources' -attitude.
Yep, as most of us here, I've seen interdepartmental email sent out asking is "resources" can be provided to carry out a job. It's not just HR, it's an all pervasive term at management levels. They just can't help themselves, trying sound all "up to date" with the corporate bullshit bingo, never ever noting the irony of dripping the word human and that to the higher levels, they themselves are also "just" resources :-/
This post has been deleted by its author
Thank you very much for pointing that out, that deserves more than one upvote, but that’s all I can give. I have withdrawn and reposted it anonymously this time, and yes it was a ‘fun’ day for me. I was exceptionally pale with a strong hint of green according to those present. My manager standing well away, took one look and told me to go home immediately and not to come back the next day either just in case.
"No. HR exists to protect the company from the employees.".... Whilst coating themselves with a sugary excrescence for the employees to feed on.
The man with the spanner,
I'd like to point out that while I've upvoted your comment, I also hate you. I've only just finished my lunch, and that was not a mental image I was prepared for. Bleurgh!
Micromanagement is so destructive.
I once worked at a certain large manufacturer or turbine engines in Derby. The lead architect was that very toxic combination of being a sociopath, a micromanager and a hoarder of key information who then took delight in making you basically beg to get said information out of him, lording it over you like a prize to be earned.
In order to get firewall ports opened you had to complete a firewall request form. For 18 months he'd done them as he'd set up all the firewall infrastructure, so if you gave the inbound, outbound ports, protocols etc he knew the correct FW's to traverse.
Notwithstanding he was a single point of failure, often took too long due to workload* it did generally work.
Until I sent him a request at which point, he shouted at me in an open plan office, calling me an idiot and don't I read emails from him?
Turns out he'd had some kind of epiphany and sent an email telling people to do the forms themselves. Except he didn't cc me in. Which then became my fault for not knowing to ask my colleagues...
After 18 months of this kind thing, I flipped. To be so rude in front of colleagues, and the customer was the straw that broke the camels back. For the first and only time in my career I lost my shit with him and told him if he didn't apologise for his fuck up I'd beat the fuck out of him and I meant it. After a few muttered excuses I made a point of making him apologise as loudly as he'd called me an idiot.
I left almost immediately afterwards. Two months after leaving he was asking me to go back. Fuck no.
The cunt still sends me an occasional request to connect on LinkedIn.
*He was proud of the fact he worked 7am to 11pm each day despite being a contractor. You could pack a week's worth of luggage in the bags under each eye.
"The lead architect was that very toxic combination of being a sociopath, a micromanager and a hoarder of key information"
Sounds a bit like my old postgrad supervisor, at least in terms of that role - being fair to him, he was genuinely likeable when not in work mode. But yeah, his take on how to be a good supervisor was one of the few things I genuinely hated about my time as a postgrad, and which made it so much easier to decide to turn my back on that phase of my life without any doubts or regrets.
I know quite a lot of people who work / have worked for a certain big engineering company with buildings dotted around Derby.
Slow cumbersome fully documented / accountable "paperwork" trails are everywhere.
Obviously in many areas it is vital (e.g. don't fancy the idea of dubious undocumented processes taking place in the areas where radioactive substances involved (not just the nuclear reactor buildings)) - despite that they did manage to lose some radioactive material over a decade ago (info in public domain, no secrets revealed) & lots of local disquiet about how low level & how safely disposed & contained the radioactive waste dumped in Hilts quarry really was.
But that mindset did seem to have side effect of needless bureaucracy in situations where it was not really required. But you can see in context why it was easier to have full audit trails across the board as a flaw in a turbine, reactor etc. could cost lives (& reputation).
.. I have known quite a few people leave, although there was interesting & exciting stuff, because it was so slow & bureaucratic there was so often a huge amount of "thumb twiddling" rather than being fully productive & only really suited those with a relatively patient mindset.
Full disclosure: Never worked for them myself, but have worked for various companies in Derby/Derbyshire & socialized a lot in Derby/Derbyshire, so met many workers / ex workers of aforesaid company via work or social life,
Yeah, about that - you try working while your boss is never more than five meters away from you, unerringly coming over to ask "are you about to finish?" half an hour after tasking you with anything (especially if "the thing" takes several days to do ANYWHERE sane), going "hey, I need you to do this other thing right now" ten minutes after the last "this is more urgent, get on it instead!" call (all of which you should push in a stack, because you're FULLY expected to return at every level from a call stack at least SEVERAL dozens deep). Well, if you ever wondered how mild-mannered shy folks get turned into full-blown homicidal maniacs - wonder no more...
Sounds like my first job (and I think I've mentioned this before) where I'd got my hands on a DEC Alpha and LN03 laser printer so could do rudimentary word processing and print out the result - to put in the internal email to the typing department who'd return it three days later with added typos.
I recall around DEC OSF/1 3.0g there there was Wordperfect (4.2?) for Unix on one of the the Associated Products CD so possibly not so rudimentary.
Wordperfect actually ported to Unix which then formed the codebase for all platforms. There was an article in DDJ by one of team that discuss the problems and the benefits of the porting effort on the quality of code.
I still have a license key and CDs for the Linux version which was actually fairly good twenty plus years ago but more of a vi + troff person never I really used it.
Make that 25 years plus. Back then the only alternative on Linux was an alpha version of abiword, IIRC. In 2005 there already was a Linux port of Star Office 5, distributed, IIRC, by SUN. Star Office then mutated to OpenOffice and when SUN got bought by Orkle, LibreOffice was created as a fork.
Back then the only alternative on Linux was an alpha version of abiword, IIRC.
The WYSIWYG HTML editor that came with Netscape Communicator ("Composer") was my preferred document editor on Linux, years before AbiWord and for years after. While printouts were most common, nobody I sent docs to could claim they couldn't read them, whereas the world was a mix of Microsoft Works, Microsoft Office, WordPerfect/Quattro, iWork, etc. HTML seemed the sane way to go. Much like PDF export is, these days.
The buzz around AbiWord was its (rather iffy) Microsoft Office file compatibility. That mattered quite a lot at the time (much more than today). Older versions of WordPerfect didn't offer that. And if you didn't need to read/write MSOffice file formats, there were MANY office suites for Linux to choose from. I remember trying half a dozen on Linux, small and large, of varying stability and feature-completeness, before Sun open sourced StarOffice and everyone focused their efforts there. Incidentally, KWord (KDE) appeared at the same time as AbiWord (adopted by GNOME).
I used EVE when I needed to do complex things, but general programming and editing was always in EDT as it was lighter and faster. IIRC, and this was a very long time ago, to avoid the long start up times of EVE, I kept it in a SPAWNed subprocess and ATTACHed to it when needed, reading and writing files I was interested in.
Was EVE ever available for OSF/1 (mentioned in the comment).
I would point out that Uniplex was available on the Alpha running OSF/1 and Tru64 Unix.
I would have stuck with troff myself. Don't know about what was available on OSF/1, but before this time I had a LN03 attached to an Amdahl 5890 running R&D Unix 5.2.6, and used the psc backend to di-troff to drive it. Produced beautiful output, just a bit slower (and single sided) than the large channel attached Xerox 9700 printers that did most of the printing at that site.
Of course, I meant the Extensible Vax Editor, one face of TPU on Vax systems, not the online MMORPG game.
And I hate it when my memory fails me. The Xerox printer at the location I was working at was not a 9700, but it's (slightly) smaller sibling, the 4050. Still a channel attached, duplex, 50 imprint a minute printer the size of two desks with a PDP11 minicomputer running either RT11 or RSX11 in it.
I used to do a Friday Funny email at a previous workplace. It was a rather harmless "X said something funny" kind of thing, if there was anything that had happened worth telling that week.
It got a good reaction and people enjoyed it.
I stopped because after a change in management people with absolutely zero sense of humour clearly didn't want a single non-business email being sent whatsoever.
The same people who stopped a trade magazine subscription that was put in the staffroom, who took a television out of the break room, who turned Christmas lunch from an amazing community event with everyone dying to go to it (crammed in against each other elbow to elbow), in lovely surroundings, with great food, party games, music etc. into "there's a chip van in the yard, you only get something if you pre-booked on Google Sheets", the same people who basically destroyed any sense of humanity in the place. The same people who literally told me off as a manager repeatedly because - on their/our break! - a cleaner would come to our office by choice because he loved socialising with us. They literally tried to dictate who could come have a cup of tea with us when we were all on break. (I responded appropriately to this, which consisted of building that small 3-person quick tea into a gathering of 5-6 people including some senior management and utterly ignoring the repeated instructions to disband it). Oh, and that's not forgetting all getting invited to a huge posh "glad-handing" event with clients, on a Saturday, where they were charging £150 per head. Including staff. Yes, charging staff. Some of whom they said attendance was compulsory. And then they stuck ALL the staff on a table out the back where they couldn't be seen, and made them clear up after everyone had gone.
Oh, or the time that someone was leaving and NOBODY liked them (and they'd only been there five minutes) but the employer told everyone that they were going to take £10 out of their salaries to pay for that person's leaving gift and it was "opt-out" not "opt-in". Literally everyone opted-out. Sorry, but you're an employer. Why don't YOU put £10 into a budget every year for each employee so that you can afford to buy them a leaving gift when they go.
Oh, and the time they literally HIJACKED a social event that I created because THEIR social event was entirely unplanned and they only realised when they didn't have time to plan it, and my little "gang" (as they were referred to) had decided weeks before that we really didn't want to be part of their nonsense so we organised our own private thing instead. And then they literally invited the staff to it. They invited everyone to OUR private event. And *then* complained when it wasn't what they wanted it to be and that I shouldn't be allowed to organise "next year". Don't worry! I didn't organise THIS year. Not for you guys, anyway!
Oh, and the time their longest-running member of staff retired and they literally couldn't be bothered to give them a decent leaving gift so they tried to hijack our leaving gift (we'd had film photos taken and developed of the entire workplace - not easy in this day and age! - and spoken to the person to get all their memories and take photos of all the people they liked, and all the places those stories took place, etc. and had it artfully presented). I told them to get lost... they weren't hijacking our PERSONAL gift to this specific person. I literally withheld our gift until after they'd done their little leaving do. Which was a dozen people, most of whom didn't know the person, a quick drink, presented her with a glass bowl (found in a cellar as an unwanted gift that they'd tried to give one of the previous bosses years earlier), and then everyone back to work.
And then they had the cheek to repeatedly complain that nobody was willing to attend social events, that the friendly culture of the place was disappearing, that people weren't networking enough, people where going home at the exact time their shift ended, etc. etc. etc.
I've honestly never seen a friendly work culture so meticulously dismantled piece-by-piece and then the result complained about.
longest-running member of staff retired
I had one at a previous employer. I'd been brought in as IS Manager over the existing DP manager who'd been there a long time and couldn't cope with changing technology (he maintained manual stock cards for printer cartridges!) A few years later he decided to semi-retire and take on the evening operator role, which suited me; he was offered the choice of a retirement "do" then or later when he fully finished and opted for the latter.
Roll on another few years and there was a round of redundancies to meet a corporate target so it seemed a good time for him to take his retirement with an added redundancy payoff. When I enquired about the promised leaving do I was informed that, "The company does not provide recognition for people who're made redundant!" On the same day he left, with a very brief presentation ceremony and gift that a few of us had organised and paid for, there was an official company event, with free champagne and nibbles, for someone who'd been offered a role with the corporate in the US. I was asked why I didn't attend the latter - my response was fairly blunt.
Our product was sold off to a competitor. Part of the (supposedly secret) agreement was that no-one from our company would be taken on at the new one. Redundant, leaving the offices for the last time, I chatted to the no-longer-needed Sales Director. He'd worked for the company for fifty years, brought in millions of pounds worth of business. He was sad in that he thought "Someone from management would at least say goodbye". Of course they all stayed under their stones, not to be seen in daylight.
We both left with the statutory minimum payoff.
You're not going to believe this, a group of us started a new enterprise, guess which company is still in business?
"Someone from management would at least say goodbye"
One of a client's salesmen (desk at the opposite end of the open plan office) asked me for a report from the system. An hour or so later I'd got it ready and went over to his desk with it. He wasn't there. I was told "he no longer works here." I suppose somebody in management said goodbye.
"with absolutely zero sense of humour clearly didn't want a single non-business email being sent whatsoever"
Or just a short joke in a status mail to my boss CCed to the rest of the project group, that spent 10 hours on a weekend, and had to roll back, because stupid big corp reason we could not control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfzlXcFbQ9I
(Not that exact link; Firefly "that went well".)
Most responded with [smiley] or [thump up]. Except the PM sent a nastygram to my boss. Who had already sent me [smiley] (*).
(*) "The post contains some characters we can’t support". Like unicode?
I'm reading all of these comments and wondered who exactly gets promoted to manager and why.
Then it struck me (remembering the good old days of being naughty for the government and how it promotes people)
They are promoted for one reason only.... they are fucking useless
Icon.... for what they are in reality
There is a famous book on this titled "The Peter Principle". It's premise is that people get promoted because they were competent at their previous assignments. This continues until they are promoted into a position for which they are INcompetent. Since promotions require demonstrated competence, they then stay there, being incompetent.
I uploaded "<ModuleCode> Assignment.pdf" to the university online submission system instead of "<ModuleCode> Assignment Report.pdf". I had gotten complacent by the final year and this was literally the first time I uploaded an assignment without then re-downloading to check for corruption.
I am glad I haven't had any employers monitor me closely enough to be aware of the fact that certain emails might take 15 minutes to write, and another 45 minutes to click send...
Fortunate otherwise you might now be married to your boss.
A sense of humour and of perspective makes life more pleasant for everyone.
Although if I were your boss the temptation to occasionally quote a particularly soppy but SFW line from your steamy missive might prove irresistible.
It's a dumb thing to send an email "Subject: Here's my CV" from a work account. I know someone who did. But you absolutely must then check that To: address. Sending it to recruitment.co,uk may look OK. But did you see the comma there? I bet you noticed the email bounce from "recruitment.co" and then realised that the "uk" part of the mangled address has gone to the company email alias that is everyone in the UK. At least your CV was all ready to go.
I once handed a stack of documents to my boss to address a client escalation, what I failed to realise was that stack also included a copy of my CV and notes I had prepared for an interview. We sat through a 2 hour conference call, each referring to our documents. It was only at the end of the call that he passed me my CV and interview notes back, and asked me why I wanted to leave. We had probably the most open conversation we ever had, my role changed to something better, and I stayed on. Positive result from a situation that could have gone the other way!
Years ago a colleague of mine had a clever idea, his plan was to accidentally leave a copy of his resume in the Xerox machine closest to the boss’s office. The hope was the boss would find it, want to hang on to him not lose him to a rival and therefore give him a raise. Sadly when he was summoned to the boss’s office and tried to say it was an accident the boss wasn’t fooled, he said if the guy wanted to leave he should go right ahead. Then said he wasn’t getting a raise or anything else for the oldest trick in the book.
<cough> HR sent top man's bonus letter to 'all'... message recalled... followed by our local CA personally checking all our computers to confirm they had been deleted
Unfortunately it had been sent outside office hours and few got to see how much the company thought of him
What I do, particularly if it's going to take a while to write the email and/or it has complex or sensitive content, is to leave filling in the 'to', 'cc' and 'bcc' fields until I am ready to send. That way, if I click 'send' before the thing is truly ready I get a second chance.
Alternatively, if it's possible, set the email client to "send manually" so even if I do click send, it sits in my outbox until I click "send/receive" on the outbox.
Doesn't catch all stupidities, but handy for many :-)
M.
The reason we had to have catch-all and no one was ever allowed to send any emails to more than 10 recipients at one place I worked, was that one sunny Friday afternoon when a sour employee who was leaving anyway, decided to send a company wide email that read:
"You're all f**ked! This place it s a shit pit and I hope you all rot in hell! I've got a contract in a very sunny location away from all of you, so go f**k yourselves!"
( I added the asterisks! )
There was a massive management panic as they got the email admins to recover it but 1500 people already saw it, employee who sent it then barged past management and security who were trying to stop him leaving the building! It was the funniest thing I've seen. 2 days later from HR:
"It was unfortunate that an ex-colleague saw fit to abuse the email system during departure. From now on anyone wishing to send emails to more than 10 people will need management to read the content and grant permission. We apologise for the inconvenience."
[slow saxophone music]
The meeting will be in room 12 at 9am
Dress code is smart but sexy
That means wear your slinky dresses ladies! Guys in the tightest of trousers - we want to see those buns!
The agenda is how to spread sweet, sweet luurrve all around the company
Also paperclip distribution policy document A must be finalised.
But there'll be a happy ending
Lunch at 1.
Orgy starts at 3.
Dogging in the car park at 6 - for anyone who's still got the stamina.
Well out of that. It's always odd when companies recruit a contractor to do a job and then act as if getting the job done is unimportant.
Back during Covid, a UK telecoms company sacked its team of cheap-but-useless Indian software developers. A bit later, some manager noticed that the development project was no longer progressing. Strange, that. In a panic, they offered a decent contract rate, and assembled a team. All UK, and indeed excellent people, plus me. Things started to happen. So... they scheduled multi-hour meetings of the whole team, three mornings a week, more in the afternoons. Which neatly prevented the excellent team from working. The developers complained, but the management was implacable. The contractors had to sit there, listening to a handful of people doing design by talking diffusely. Indeed one young permie, assigned to "mentor" these professional contract developers - none with less than 20 years experience - actually told me that, if they did enough design, then the code could just be knocked off in between (!).
The development did not prosper, curiously. Higher management then sent in another manager whose first act was ... to create more meetings. I left after 6 months. I doubt that anything was ever delivered.
"a UK telecoms company sacked its team of cheap-but-useless Indian software developers"
Managers liking the sound of their own voices certainly rings true but sacking a team of cheap-but-useless Indians without replacing them with cheaper and more useless just goes to show what strange things happened during Covid.
Back when companies had a sense of humor, my Dad submitted the following Inter-Office memo in support of his friend's promotion:
I have worked with <redacted> in one capacity or another for 25 years and I recommend his promotion to professional status for the following reasons:
1. His average golf score is greater then his average bowling score.
2. He has a professional's sense of priorities since he allows golf outings to take precedence over <redacted company name> work assignments
3. He insures that his checkout people don't read engineering manuals. Reliance on a reference is the hallmark of the novice and the coward.
4. He insists that his department never writes any quality specifications. He feels our customers should consider themselves lucky to get any Liberty systems at all and take what they get.
5. He never reads the customer configuration orders. He feels he knows what the customer needs better then they do.
6. He doesn't use schedules. Schedules are for manager's toadies. Professionals like to keep their manager in suspense.
7. He feels that professionals think better when playing adventure.
8. He disdains checkout procedures. He feels checkout procedures are for compulsive, prematurely toliet-trained neurotics who wear neckties and carefully line up sharpened pencils on an otherwise uncluttered desk.
9. He has no use for managers/ Managers are a necessary evil. Managers are for dealing with personnel bozos, bean counters, senior partners and other mental defectives.
10. He doesn't believe in schedules. Planners make up schedules. Managers "firm up" schedules. Frightened workers strive to meet schedules. Real professionals ignore schedues.
11. He likes vending machine popcorn. He uses the heat given off by the cpu to pop it and can tell what test is currently running just by listening to the rate of popping.
12. He makes a conscientious effort to arrive at work in time for lunch.
His friend got the promotion.
RIP Jerry and Marin
Companies that hire contractors generally have problems that have nothing to do with lack of people.
I was expecting this story to be the usual "nobody actually wanted things to get better and were very offended when they did". Instead it was a landmine story. These can be quite varied as no two minefields are alike. The typical mine involves a manager who gets politely told not to interfere, or a suit who doesn't think things were explained with enough respect. My last landmine involved using a feature I had not been told not to use. Thankfully it was a long time ago.
I joined a Fintech once who lauded the fact they didn't micromanage.
On the face of it, they didn't micromanage. In practice they did.
On one hand, 'we trust you not to break the system', then a week later 'you affected the performance of the system'.
Followed by being paired with the contractor who originally implemented it, who should validate everything I deployed.
That same contractor validated what I was to run, ok'd it, it caused performance issues, I got blamed, They let me go, they kept the contractor..
On the 'exit' interview, when they said I didn't follow the validation procedure and I pointed out it was run with the contractor validating they said 'we didn't know that',
At that point I realised it was a basketcase of a company, so wasn't too disappointed by the scenario.
The bullet wasn't dodged, it winged me.
Has email ever got you into trouble? Yes, it has. I got a 6 week temp provisional job on the helpdesk, at the IT department (it had some fancy academic name but that's what it was) of a University in Brisbane, and made the massive mistake (inexperience) of using the Uni email to send advice and instructions and such to uni students, that I was pretty sure would not be frowned on by the uni, and using my private gmail to tell them things I had some doubts about whether the uni would want me to say that, or tell them that. It took about a month for the first one of these off the record emails, to get forwarded to my supervisor by somebody who wasn't happy, and the sky fell on me. A couple of years later, a certain former First Lady got the sky fall on her, for doing pretty much the same thing while she was the Secretary of State of the United Steaks. I would have rather she won that election myself, but ~ I did sympathise about the emails. I knew exactly what that one was like. I've been there, got the T-shirt.
Do not EVER ~ EVER use any email for work stuff, but the one they give you.The sin seems very small and insignificant when you do it, but the piece of sky that comes down ~ it can change US political history. That's a dinosaur killer.
At Uni, I discovered that all of the University students were on a mailing list. Being the young niaive thing I was in 1994, I sent a "Happy Christmas and Happy New Year" email to all students., and went home for the Holidays.
It did not go well.
For one thing, I didn't factor in that not everyone celebrates christmas. I also didn't factor in that some people get offended at the thought you might be accusing them (or others) of celebrating Christmas. I got a lot of abuse, both in email and in person for merely wishing that everyone had a nice time (for that was the intention).
The second thing is that I left both delivery and read reciepts on. So, when I got back, I logged in. The computer moaned I was out of space in my home area (they gave us about 2 meg at the time). I didn't know where the space had gone, but thenn I found that the my mailbox was taking up all the space. So, I logged into email, only to get told my Mailbox was out of space. I had over 500 unread emails in my inbox. I read a couple, realised what had happened and started deleting them. As I deleted emails, more arrived. Eventually, after a couple of weeks, I was starting to get control of my mailbox back. At some point, I was called into the Computer Lab manager to explain what had happened. I did, and while he was a little irritated, he said I hadn't actually broken any rules and he could see I was trying to be nice, so he told me to carry on, but that I should delete the emails manually, so I learned not to do this sort of thing again.
The good thing was that the Uni locked down access to the mailing lists, so only nominated users could send to them.
In all, I think I deleted over 36,000 emails.
Our team works with HR and Legal a lot, it used to be the case the HR *loved* to snoop on what employees were doing and would regularly send requests, some of which were essentially fishing expeditions.
Come GDPR and all such requests have to be approved by Legal, and Legal are a lot less keen on allowing snooping and usually say "no" unless there is something serious going on. HR still don't get the message and keep trying it on, to which the reply is that any investigation of a *person* has to be approved by Legal. This makes them grumpy.
I'm not going to be too harsh because we know from the work we've done that a lot of employees are absolute shits.
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