Execs unethical? Shocker!
Subject says it all.
564 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Mar 2010
I had a gig where I was setting up a system for a major financial player. They had four large, critical production systems with "DEV" in their system names, because they kept putting production data in the test setups and never made plans to migrate onto actual prod. When I was younger, I might have been shocked, but now, I just laugh, and wait for things to fail. IAPTS.
As conservative as I am, this is insane. Due process? What's that? As usual, terrorism is being used as a bugaboo to render people's rights null and void, while no actual terrorists will be impacted by this in any way, shape, or form. It proves my theory of government: If a politician says it's "affordable", it isn't, if they say "it's for your own good", it makes them rich, if they say "we want to protect you", they want you as their sole victim, and if they say they want to tax "some other guy", they want to tax you in specific.
Your assumption about who training is actually for and what it actually does is as invalid as assuming HR is there to protect you. HR is there to protect the business from the employees, and training is to ensure that they have valid reasons to discipline/terminate, as you become accountable for the subject of the training. The training has no need to be connected to reality or education in any way, shape or form -- if there is unpleasantness, and you were at the bottom of it, they have proof in writing that you know better, and so they have a legit right to get rid of you. This, even if the actual training had absolutely nothing to do with the title of the course. If the course title is "Internet Security", and the instructions are simply how to make a bacon sandwich, you now are responsible for internet security in spite of the material presented -- and the training would actually be useful (for once). Did you *really* think a swarm of HR drones could make useful internet security training, anyway?
The last place I worked had their performance goal-setting site made inaccessible. After many complaints and requests for help, I gave up and just concentrated on my actual job. They then let me go because I "was not meeting goals" and did not respond to an email they never sent. It was all a scam to deny me UI and save salary costs IMO.
You know, the "Let's explore the abandoned house next to the unkempt cemetery where the wind makes a funny screaming sound at night. Alone. With 3 high school kids comprising a jock, an nerd, and a hot chick." After all, it's not like they haven't done all three operations on every previous technology they've started the "embrace, extend, extinguish" sequence on in the past.
I think that I can answer the question "how badly have we fucked up". I have a sibling that went through journalism school in the 80's. At the time, there were three main TV news networks in the US, and their reports were basically viewed as gospel. I won't go into why that was, but the journos I knew at the time were all about the ethics of journalism, how they stood up to the powerful for Truth and Justice, with a capital 'T' and 'J'. I found that absurd even then, as Juvenal's phrase "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" has remained relevant for a long time. They could be forgiven, as the young are often guilty of enthusiasm.
Even into Desert Storm with CNN, there was a lot of faith in journalism that was as unwarranted as that in the Big Three networks' product. There has always been bias in news -- the only real barrier to setting up a news outlet was cash. It doesn't even have to be a conscious bias -- for example, a journalist may put a lot more effort into digging up dirt on political adversaries than they will for their friends. This reinforces itself until all credibility is as lost as that on a product trial that says Microsoft is the best in an independent study that is hosted on a MS--owned domain.
People tend to believe things in print simply because they were in print. Now that we live in a communication age, where the barrier to publishing your bastard brainchildren is an opinion and the motivation to post it, there are a lot more competing sources for information. Not only that, there are enough relatively (say that with a straight face...) respected opinions/sources that this bias, conscious or unconscious, is exposed.
There has been numerous examples of academic journalism fraud, where the lower barrier has meant that garbage has made it into the pages of formerly respected publications. Remember cold fusion? In fact, editors are human, too. They want to see their employer succeed, and may make questionable decisions to favor the sensational, especially if they think that they need to act in a hurry to be on top of things.
People see this, and then when they go to a publication and find their political ox has been gored, assume that means a prejudice against their politics. They may even do some investigation, but it's investigation on the flawed premise called confirmation bias. A truly fair publication will wind up goring everybody's ox from time to time, but they'll lose readership in so doing.
We live in a different age now. Journalists have been exposed as human beings with opinions and biases of their own. The only thing I find shameful about that is that they are not open about it. There's a lot to be said for listening to other people's opinions, and as long as you understand the source, you can make useful assumptions about their content. I see a lot of people bagging on purportedly liberal and conservative outlets like the Guardian and Daily Mail; however, I don't think that either of them is as monolithic in their politics as believed.
In the DM's situation, I see it more of a tendency towards sensationalism than solid fact-mongering, and coupled with a hilariously poor editing and quality control (honestly, they must be paid by the word to go through the clickbait so we don't have to), provides more of an entertainment product than what used to be referred to as "hard hitting" journalism. When the article veers left, the cons complain, and when the article veers right, the libs complain. Me, I'm just there to wind people up, so I consider my entertainment dollar well-spent.
People say that Fox is bad, and others say that CNN is also bad -- I just see them as two competing mutual masturbation societies, each operating in their own little bubble of opinion. Both are laughably incompetent, and both pretend to be the last bastion of journalism, holding back the howling mobs of ignorance and prejudice. Respecting one or the other says more about your politics than it does about their competence.
Frankly, they're both journalistic train wrecks, with idiotic sensationalism, opinion masquerading as fact, and carefully selected outrage at carefully selected and maintained targets. The main reason to read either is to go to the comment pages and emit/observe snark. Sadly, they're still better than the garbage we have in the States.
You'd need an advanced degree in bullshitology to dejargonificate the obfusticationization of mundaneological nomenclature declamated here. The amount of craptological terminoligification is rarely exceeded outside of airport books that functionally illiterate execs pick up and inflict upon their direct report casualties.
Yes, that's how chickensh*t LEO's handle it when they think it ought to be illegal, but it isn't. It's also called 'selective enforcement', as I'm sure the law is applied the same for every package sent to a UK address from international addresses. Oops. Sorry, my sarcasm is acting up again today.
Let's connect all these systems together using mandated legislation nobody ever read, voted in by politicians that don't know the difference between an email client and server, and are not able to tell "Classified Top Secret" data from unclassified personal emails, even though it was two separate computer systems, one of which was clearly labeled as a secure network, so the only way to take information off is to manually key it in.
I'd say that no one's that stupid, but, hey, it *is* the law of the land these days.