Over the course of a few years I spent a lot of time in a secure environment in a DoD facility to which I had to travel multiple times for a project. The environment, a maze of cubicles filled with computers, had been installed inside a historic building. For historic preservation reasons, the exterior windows were kept as built. For security reasons, there was a sheet of plywood painted white inside all of the windows. The building allowed no natural light to enter and emitted only a diffuse glow. It was a miserable place to spend long days, illuminated only by flickering fluorescent light.
We had some serious storms come through while I was there. A lot of the permanent residents went home. As I was a visitor and there just for as long as it took me to fix some problems, I was encouraged to stay and work late. I was assured that we would not lose power because the building had been recently equipped with a generator.
A storm came through and the building lost power. It was almost entirely pitch black in the building full of computers, which all went dark, fans and disks suddenly silent. A small fraction of the emergency lights came on. Most were in disrepair and never lit up. It turns out that in a secure environment, one has to make special arrangements to have someone inspect the emergency lighting. We heard the generator spin up. Still no computers, no lights.
In the darkness, one little nook came to life. This nook contained the coffee pot, microwave, and refrigerator. Apparently this organization considered only one piece of equipment important enough to be connected to the generator. We thereafter referred to it as the mission critical coffee pot.
Your story reminds me a little of Ed Snowden's description of his experiences working in secure environments in Permanent Record.
Each individual measure may make sense in isolation, but just like with any long-lived project, the sum total of all of them can absolutely still add up to absurdity.
Many years ago I worked as a contractor at a financial institution that was a little full of themselves. I had to be escorted from the entrance, through the main office, to a smaller, "less secure" room inside the main office. The bathrooms were a short walk away from the less secure room through the main office so I had to have an escort to go to the bathroom. The escort would wait outside the bathroom for me and escort me back to my desk. While annoying and inconvenient (and ridiculous) it wasn't really a big deal until I came out of the bathroom one day to find the escort had disappeared. (I later found out he had someone kind of family emergency and had to run home, I guess dire enough that he didn't have time to inform me.) I asked around the office where my escort had gone but no one knew so I walked back to my desk on my own.
The next day the CTO called me into his office and said he should have me fired right then and there for violating security protocols. I explained what had happened but he didn't care because it looked bad for him. Apparently I should have had someone call security to escort me back to my desk.
Two months later they started construction on the room I was in to provide a path to an exit that didn't go through the main office. To use the bathroom I had to go through that exit and leave the building, walk outside to the main entrance and use the "non-secure" bathroom and then be escorted back to my desk through the office.
if you spend enough working in, around or near a SCIF it becomes pretty mundane.
the windowless rooms and sterile environment are actually not much different from commercial telecom stuff, like if you meet a person who works for an ILEC and has a desk in a CO.
stick your cellphone in the little shelf box outside the entrance to the secured area, pick it up when you leave, etc.
I’m reminded of a Hyderabad office building that had half of the outlets backed by UPS. I thought it was smart, until the day every UPS outlet (and every desktop) went dark simultaneously. The other outlets still worked.
I heard a legend once that someone at IBM in the "blue suit and tie" days found himself to be irreplaceable. So at his next contract negotiations, he politely demanded the dress code be removed from his contract.
And then he never shaved again, or wore anything more formal than a Hawaiian shirt. Much to the anger of his entire management chain.
I read this. I loved it. I remember it. But I cannot for the life of me find any references to it online and worry that I dreamed it all.
I would love if someone here has a reference to this and can share it with me. Or tell me I am truly crazy.
He lead the teams that created the world's first disk drive and the floppy drive. He later founded Seagate.
I did not find a reference to this incident, but he did have a love for Hawaiian shirts, and he did things like try to get his dog elected to Congress, so it would not seem too far fetched for him to do something like what you are describing.
My next headline element is "Al," as in Al Shugart, who passed on the other day. His passing was definitely an event that gave me the urge to post. While the world remembers Al as a tech industry pioneer, his significance for me was that he transformed my name from the obscure to the instantly recognizable, a fact which has required me with predictable regularity to respond to many of those to whom I am introduced, "no, no relation." Sometimes, especially at industry functions, I felt like wearing a sign.
I posted a humorous incident about this state of affairs back in my early blogging days. It was right after Paynter was just getting started with his well-known series of blogger interviews. I had the honor of being his first male subject. The immediate aftermath was a rash of "are you related?" emails. So I put up a post to set the record straight.
Anyway, Al Shugart was my kind of guy--brilliant, creative, irreverent, fun-loving, and dismissive of the establishment. This guy was wearing Hawaiian shirts to work decades before it became a hip way to show that you or your organization were leading-edge.
Al, who started out as an IBMer, was able to get away with thumbing his nose at the rigid IBM dress code of the fifties and sixties. That may not mean much to Gen-X or Yers, but if you were around in those days, as I was, and remember how quasi-militaristic things tended to be in the big business sector, including high-tech, you have to be impressed with Shugart's chutzpah. I'm proud to bear his name. Rest well, Al.
On being acquired by IBM things went downhill at the company I was working at - no kettles or coffee machines allowed and you had to buy your tea and coffee from the company store/machines (UK - probably run by Serco or some similar awfulness). All the cool computers taken off the desks and stuck in server rooms and you had to use a managed windows PC which in my case managed to crash once or more times a day thanks to some aspect of the Rational Clearcase filesystem driver.
I remember all the lectures from overconfident bullshitters with shiny shoes. A company run by salesmen. It is SO SO nice that IBM got eclipsed by the internet tech companies. Even if they are arrogant/difficult in their own way it was a victory for the technically and ethically competent.
It seemed then that IBM was where software went to die.
I did two separate stints at IBM, the most recent being back in 2017 or 2018 or so. I was part of the "Watson Health" <strike>organization</strike> debacle. And when I first got there one of the things I immediately noticed was that there was no longer any free coffee available. The only coffee availability was from the little embedded Starbucks stand near the lobby. Which both cost $$$ and conveniently closed well before most of us were done drinking coffee for the day.
Eventually we had to resort to the time honored tradition of buying a cheap Keurig style machine, and having a "community pot" in our area to buy k-cups, those disposable creamer packets, etc. This was the point where I realized that IBM is probably in its terminal phase.
Shame. I rather liked IBM at one time. Heck, my dream when I was in college was exactly go to to work for IBM and go to Boca to work on OS/2!
I wish I knew what the deal is with coffee and businesses.
I worked at one F500 company that eliminated the coffee for cost-saving reasons. The coffee was terrible, so I didn't exactly cry, but for this company it couldn't have cost more than, maybe, a million or so a year. I mean, I wouldn't want to write the check myself, but as a budgetary line-item, it would have been a rounding error.
I've worked at an office that dumped their Bunn drip machine that had worked since 1837 for a Keurig, because they didn't like the big twice-yearly bills for the coffee service. The Keurig has been replaced twice, and the cups fill the waste bin, and I guarantee they're paying more for coffee now.
It's really weird how people get hung up on the Coffee Question. I assume they're all tea drinkers and are being spiteful.
It's funny since IBM today seems totally different than what a lot of people are used to. Now we have GE refrigerators with built-in Keurig coffee makers along with the ice/water dispenser. Free coffee brewed daily in the breakrooms along with snacks and pre-covid, fresh fruits. At least two food trucks every Wednesday since the offices opened back up several months ago and it's free (for now). They still have some draconian rules and red-tape, but what large corporation doesn't these days? I'm sure Microsoft is the same now.
IBM took away in-house coffee in Australia about 10 years ago. Cost-cutting. What's coffee, cents a day? Great. So now all your consultants spend 45 minutes every morning going out for coffee.
Before I worked for IBM I asked a friend what it had been like. "Unbelievably bad", they said. "Worse than everyone had said it would be."
So I thought, it can't be that bad. How could it be? And when I worked there it was worse! So when the next friend who got approached asked me I said, my god, remember how bad friend -1 said it was, well, it's worse! And that friend thought, no, it can't be that bad. And then they worked there and found it worse than even I had explained.
It can't be that bad, maybe I should go work there... :-)
Seriously though, I see people in the office talking and when someone says "Yeah, I worked at IBM for a while." There seems to be a quiet exchange of knowing looks.
Ugh. I worked at a place that used Clearcase. It seemed to cause more problems than just dealing with the annoyances of other source control systems. I'm pretty sure companies that use it need to hire someone just to manage the thing. I've passed on job postings and offers at the mere mention of "Clearcase experience a plus" or similar.
Actual security issues like not swiping to enter a secured area are one thing, but I'll never understand the obsession with dress codes and small appliances. It just feels like power tripping or laziness. There can be problems with some devices and with what people wear (and hygiene in general), but I'd much rather work at a place that addresses those issues only when needed while treating everyone like adults instead of like children who can't be trusted to pick out their own clothes.
The small appliance thing is at least a little bit quasi-legitimate. I mean, true, very few modern small appliances are just going to randomly burst into flame, and that's as true whether they are sitting in your kitchen or living room, or sitting in a corporate break room, or at your desk. But... the devil is in the details. From a fire safety perspective, I'd cite two things that cause me to say "quasi legitimate" about this:
1. Putting appliances in random places (like your cubicle) can sometimes lead people to running extension cords to power these additional devices. And excessively long, or poor quality, or "excessively long, poor quality" extension cords can absolutely be a fire hazard. This is especially true when people don't understand "current carrying capacity" vis-a-vis wire gauge and choose the wrong cord for a given load.
2. Space heaters. If you include space heaters in your definition of "small appliance", then there is a fairly real risk. First, it's very easy for flammable materials to simply get too close to the heating elements of the heater, and catch fire. Second, space heaters tend to draw a LOT of current - typically more than can be handled by your generic power strip. And people don't understand this, and will happily plug a space heater into a power strip, which will then melt, short out, and catch fire.
On balance, the odds of having a fire caused by most small appliances in offices is still probably fairly low, but the risk is non-zero. And having a blanket ban, instead of trying to distinguish "well, your blender is OK, but the space heater has to go" is just the slightly lazier way to dealing with it.
I suspect that the risk of power strips/cords melting is substantially higher when you’re only on 110V compared to 230V.
While 110V might be less of a shock risk compared to 230V, I have to wonder how much of a difference it actually makes in practice, like how much less likely are to die from the lower voltage?
Because on the other hand, the lower voltage increases the fire risk.
If a small appliance catching fire is enough to endanger your office, your office is wrong. Go fix it, and stop with the security theater. An appliance consuming too much power should never be a fire hazard. A bad extension chord should not be a fire hazard in any usual space in an office.
And by all means, if you have some high-risk area (storage rooms are quite common ones), do make special policy for it. But if you insist on the same policy for every area, you are actually endangering people.
These are all things people do constantly in their own homes, and are willing to accept the risk. It seems inefficient that people go to work and accept all these risk-averse mandates (no consumer coffee machines -- they might burst into flames!) then go home and fall asleep to their 1500W space heater plugged into the same power strip as the 50" poorly mounted TV they fell asleep watching.
> I mean, true, very few modern small appliances are just going to randomly burst into flame
Assuming that 10 dollar phone charger that Joe from Accounting got on Amazon or the airport store on the last vacation was not a dangerous counterfeit, that is. A sensible IT department will buy original chargers directly from the manufacturer or at the very least name brands such as Anker.
Dress codes have never had anything to do with treating people like children, they have to do with cultural adhesion.
We laugh at pictures of managers wearing near-identical suits and ties, and then we can look at a bunch of techies wearing near-identical tee shirts and hoodies and somehow not see a culture using clothes to signal belonging to the tribe.
There will always be tribal signals. It's clothes whether suits or plaid flannel, it's drinking bourbon or craft IPAs, it's playing golf or ultimate, it's being clean-shaven or bearded, it's driving a Tesla or a Caddy.
Some of us are not "joiners" and chafe at the idea of carefully selecting our clothes, grooming, music, possessions, and neighbourhood to signal that we want to fit in. But we should at least understand and empathize with why others may find these things comforting.
I totally understand the reasons people want to dress a certain way and don't care at all if one coworker wants to wear a suit to work and another prefers a hoodie.
The issue is when people want to impose their dress code on others, especially for non-client/customer facing roles.
Putting a large emphasis on the dress code has downsides as well. The more focus people spend worrying about their attire and judging others, the less focus they have for more substantive matters. It's an easy crutch to dismiss someone for dressing "wrong", a crutch which plenty of lazy employees and managers are happy to latch onto.
I think de-emphasizing dress codes encourages a more productive workplace.
A long time ago, we had a meeting with a Head Architect. He would be accompanied by a server tech.
We sit in the meeting room, and 2 people enter. A distinctive gentlemen wearing a suit and tie, talking in a calm, authoritative voice. Next to him, a hyperactive tshirt wearing creature, think Adam from Mythbuster, talking excitedly about all sorts of tech, while making excessive arm gestures. My colleague whispers a joke comparing him to a monkey swinging from tree to tree. We both immediately knew who was the architect and who was the lowly tech.
Wrong, it turns out. Gentlemen spends his time in floor crawlspaces pulling cables between servers, and had dressed up for the meeting. Monkey Head Architect was just his manic normal self.
When I started at CurrentCompany, the dress code was described to me as "business casual." So after accepting the job offer, I emailed my contact in HR about what constituted "business casual." They gave vague instructions that basically said it was up to my boss. My boss didn't really care much except that we couldn't wear jeans or t-shirts, unless we were working in the datacenter.
Now we're midwest through and through. In the Before Times, the women tended to wear out of fashion clothing, while most of the men wore golf shirts and slacks. And if you wore something slightly out of the norm, people would sniff and tut-tut you.
Then COVID happened, and CurrentCompany went 100% remote. Then vaccines came out, cases dropped, and the whole RTO movement started up. And CurrentCompany realized that everyone was used to working in WhateverTheFuckWeWantToWear. And actually made a good decision. We could now wear jeans. Or shorts! OMG shorts! That was previously treated as if you were coming to work naked. And t-shirts were allowed. Sneakers/tennis shoes too! Anything to get people back in the office.
I'm 100% remote, but every now and then I need to pick up something, or PushLargeButtonInDataCenter, so I go visit those who are hybrid. And what do the majority wear? Jeans, golf shirts, out of fashion women's clothing, and very rarely, t-shirts.
It takes a long time to turn around a company that has been operating for a century.
> we can look at a bunch of techies wearing near-identical tee shirts and hoodies and somehow not see a culture using clothes to signal belonging to the tribe.
No, casual dresscode allows for a much wider variety of clothing and goes in the opposite direction than "signal belonging to the tribe".
> We laugh at pictures of managers wearing near-identical suits and ties, and then we can look at a bunch of techies wearing near-identical tee shirts and hoodies and somehow not see a culture using clothes to signal belonging to the tribe.
one of the reasons for no small appliances is that some people will bring in a $45 portable 1500W electric space heater and put it under their desk, because they feel cold, and they have totally no idea of the problems and difference that adding a 1500W resistive electric load (vs like a 25W desk lamp) to the shared 15/20A 120VAC circuits in a cubicle farm can cause. those things are absolute fire hazards when used in the wrong environment.
My employer sent a reminder of the guidelines on this topic recently.
Specific examples of prohibited items in office spaces include:
- Hotplates
- Hair dryers
- Cooking devices using an open flame, including propane, butane or wood.
- Car batteries and chargers.
There’s then a list of about 30 items that require a permit.
We were joking about the oddly specific nature of the items. I’m assuming some lunatic at one time had a camp chef or Weber Q in his cube cooking up some lunch.
Bonus points if the person using the heater sits right next to the thermostat, causing the thermostat to think that the ambient air temp needs to be even lower..
Regarding dress codes, I worked at a three-letter company in the 90s that changed their dress code to allow us to wear shorts, as long as they were "tasteful." And that worked well at the start. But then a couple of the rebels, who were more than happy to be considered rebels, started wearing the moral equivalent of running shorts, which back in those days went above mid-thigh.
That lasted about a month, and then shorts were no longer allowed.
I worked in an office with a fire hazard coffee pot.
One of my coworkers wanted a coffee pot on his desk. He found an automatic drip coffee maker at a garage sale. It had a broken switch. Being a frugal engineer, he routed a wire past the switch and just turned it on and off by connecting and disconnecting it from the wall socket.
More than once, I was working late and noticed the smell of it burning through the last dregs of the pot because he had forgotten to disconnect it. The first few times, I disconnected it. Finally, I threw it in a garbage can and probably saved the building from an eventual fire.
I know it is annoying to have rules, but there are reasons for fire codes and facilities managers. I know too many people like my previous coworker.
I don't know if this is what you intend to imply, but it sounds like you're justifying the "all coffee makers are fire hazards" rule with an anecdote about a jimmy-rigged coffee maker (which never actually even caught fire, although I wouldn't necessarily be surprised if it would have done). Certainly permitting coffee makers increases the risk of fire above "no coffee makers", but both are in a completely different risk ballpark to "jimmy-rigged coffee makers". I also don't know if coffee makers are expressly forbidden in building codes or if it's just an over-zealous facilities manager policy (and perhaps in either case it's a legacy from a bygone era where these things caught fire more frequently than today).
If I still owned a physical office, I would not want my facilities manager to inspect every coffee pot to determine the risk. I would make sure to provide the caffeine some other way.
In that same building there were some desks with fans because it was too hot and space heaters because it was too cold. (I saw this ridiculous waste of electricity in many facilities.) I don't trust most facilities to have good AC, ventilation, or wise inhabitants.
So, has anyone here ever, like... worked in a regular office? Not the Apple Mothership or anything like that, just like a small office for a business with like 50 people in it?
If you go into the break room in a place like that, you're going to see consumer grade coffee makers. Again and again. They're totally normal.
Most of them are in good working order, UL approved, and not bought at a garage sale and improvised to run continuously. You cannot trust your coworkers to put a heating element on their desk.
Every office I've worked in either had a commercial grade Bunn coffeemaker or we had to go buy our coffee from the cafeteria downstairs. Most offices were free. The government office I worked in for bit had us chip in a couple bucks a week to pay for the coffee on the honor system.
Worked in 2 offices like you described, first one had a Bunn commercial brewer and the second had a Jura for the fancy coffee drinkers and a medium-duty Keurig for the “anything with caffeine” drinkers. I’m sure there are 50 person offices with a single $20 Mr. Coffee but I’m sure they wear out quickly.
How does an over-heated pot of glass and plastic catch fire? If coffee-making machine are fire hazard, most homes in the world must be regularly burning.
Given that the overwhelming evidence, for example the fact that no house has burned in a large radius around my home, I'd say your and IBM's assessment is wildly off-target.
I assume in that bypassing the switch, it also bypassed the automatic shut off.
Coffee makers are relatively simple designs. They're basically hotplates with a one way valve underneath for the water.
Without the shut off, the thing would just keep getting hotter. And while heated glass will not catch fire, it can shatter violently. And those heated shards can then catch things on fire. And that's outside the fact that just faulty wiring can cause sparks and fire itself.
In my experience, coffee pot fires happen when there is a small amount of coffee left in the pot. It dries out, leaving a dark residue in the bottom. This residue catches fire.
As long as it wasn't a very old coffee pot, and just the switch was bypassed, it was probably still very safe. Coffee pots that meet UL standards have one or more safety mechanisms, and likely a thermostat on top of that.
Because I had to intervene multiple times after it had clearly been heating the pot continuously all day and the smell of burnt coffee was evident on the entire floor, I don't think it had any safety mechanisms remaining, if it ever had any.
Worse, I personally watched one person see it as a problem, flip the switch assuming that would fix it, and walk away. I had to point out that the switch was not involved and was just a decoy. That made it even worse from a safety perspective.
This is why rules are often not enough to create a desired outcome. Beaurocracy fails when it doesn't account for human motivation.
In this case, the best option would be to involve management or HR, or even facilities management in the positive step of buying a better coffee maker for the office. Failing to provide access to safely brewed good coffee was the bug here.
I completely agree that the incompetence of the organization was greater than the carelessness of my coworker. Regardless, he should not have plugged in a heating element without a switch.
This is HN, so I feel free to nerd-pick: IBM was right about the coffee maker!
Really, consumer-grade coffee makers aren't intended to stay on for days at a time. You need commercial machines for that, all metal and glass, that won't be a fire hazard or have melting plastic. Some facilities have strict rules about that.
When corporate offices gripe about employees bringing in home items the reason it isn't received well isn't because the rule is ridiculously illogical.
The problem is that those companies are notoriously cheap. They won't buy coffee makers or poorly maintain them and their managers are trained to act like callous idiots when questioned about it. Really, in general, most employee disatisfaction comes from managers and executives acting like callous idiots instead of actually trying to solve problems.
> Really, in general, most employee disatisfaction comes from managers and executives acting like callous idiots instead of actually trying to solve problems.
Managers and executives are usually trying to solve problems, but generally not the problems of people below them on the org chart.
There’s delicious irony in the fact that putting a (useless, if not for IBM’s rules) cardboard box over a coffee maker slightly increases the fire hazard.
1. If they're not meant to stay on how come most of them have clocks?
2. Many machines no longer warm the coffee by using a heating element underneath a glass carafe, they've switched this out for insulated carafes (no glass) which tend to work better anyway.
I don't think the second point applies here, as the story in question takes place in the late 80's, before this change occurred. I don't know if coffee machines had clocks in that era, either.
>Really, consumer-grade coffee makers aren't intended to stay on for days at a time
Surely a coffee maker would get a break in the afternoon/evening? I agree that using it at a duty cycle higher than it was designed might be an issue, but unless you have the entire floor share one machine it should be fine.
It really depends on the office. A Mister Coffee won't survive long serving the Mongolian army. Switches wear out, spills happen, stuff breaks, you need parts. For that you need something like a Bunn (https://commercial.bunn.com/38700.0011).
My circa-2002 Mr. Coffee brand drip coffee marker has an automatic cut-off. I have never bothered measuring it precisely, but I think it cuts off at around an hour and a half or two hours after being turned on. Believe me, there have been many times I put on a pot of coffee, got "in the zone" working on some code, got up a while later, walked in the kitchen, and found the pot of coffee stone cold. Much to my dismay. Although as a former firefighter, I do understand the intent behind this, and I can't really be mad about it.
Except for (the complicated mechanical mess that is) Black & Decker, the cheap ones I've encountered don't have any one-time-only control mechanism, they just cycle the thermostat if left on long enough, which means the heating element is powered long enough to pop the thermostat again. Then they put thermal fuses in to deal with any heat buildup.
Mine has one, but something is causing it to get stuck in the on position. We know about this because it repeatedly clicks while trying and failing to turn itself off.
I've got to be honest with you guys: I know you think all these things are "dangerous" and a "fire risk" but my closer network of startup engineers extends to 200+ and zero of them have been involved in a company with a serious emergency despite all the things we did.
This is also sort of why I like startups. You can have cultural cohesion. If you get a 10k person company, everyone has to conform to the one guy who believes that you can't have a vim pedal because the cable under your desk will cause you to fail to be protected in an earthquake.
No, thanks, I'll take the risk of tripping on the cable while the earthquake is on.
Haha, no, I made up the vim pedal story as a positively outrageous example for humor's sake. I thought I was all the way into insanity and so it would be obvious as a joke. My bad.
When I worked at EA, someone brought his own coffee maker to their cubicle because he liked brewing his own and having it just they way he liked it. No one had any problems with this as far as red tape or corporate policy goes.
However... we were a bunch of game developers. So everyone had a high-powered Windows PC and one or two console dev kits in their cube. The PS3s were so notoriously power hungry that in summer months people would run box fans to try to blow off some of the waste heat.
Each circuit in that poor building was heavily loaded. The coffee maker had to go once someone finally realized that turning it on was the straw that broke the camel's back and caused the circuit for that row of cubes to trip and everyone's UPS to kick in.
Readit News
We had some serious storms come through while I was there. A lot of the permanent residents went home. As I was a visitor and there just for as long as it took me to fix some problems, I was encouraged to stay and work late. I was assured that we would not lose power because the building had been recently equipped with a generator.
A storm came through and the building lost power. It was almost entirely pitch black in the building full of computers, which all went dark, fans and disks suddenly silent. A small fraction of the emergency lights came on. Most were in disrepair and never lit up. It turns out that in a secure environment, one has to make special arrangements to have someone inspect the emergency lighting. We heard the generator spin up. Still no computers, no lights.
In the darkness, one little nook came to life. This nook contained the coffee pot, microwave, and refrigerator. Apparently this organization considered only one piece of equipment important enough to be connected to the generator. We thereafter referred to it as the mission critical coffee pot.
Each individual measure may make sense in isolation, but just like with any long-lived project, the sum total of all of them can absolutely still add up to absurdity.
The next day the CTO called me into his office and said he should have me fired right then and there for violating security protocols. I explained what had happened but he didn't care because it looked bad for him. Apparently I should have had someone call security to escort me back to my desk.
Two months later they started construction on the room I was in to provide a path to an exit that didn't go through the main office. To use the bathroom I had to go through that exit and leave the building, walk outside to the main entrance and use the "non-secure" bathroom and then be escorted back to my desk through the office.
the windowless rooms and sterile environment are actually not much different from commercial telecom stuff, like if you meet a person who works for an ILEC and has a desk in a CO.
stick your cellphone in the little shelf box outside the entrance to the secured area, pick it up when you leave, etc.
And then he never shaved again, or wore anything more formal than a Hawaiian shirt. Much to the anger of his entire management chain.
I read this. I loved it. I remember it. But I cannot for the life of me find any references to it online and worry that I dreamed it all.
I would love if someone here has a reference to this and can share it with me. Or tell me I am truly crazy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Shugart
He lead the teams that created the world's first disk drive and the floppy drive. He later founded Seagate.
I did not find a reference to this incident, but he did have a love for Hawaiian shirts, and he did things like try to get his dog elected to Congress, so it would not seem too far fetched for him to do something like what you are describing.
> In 1996, he launched an unsuccessful campaign to elect Ernest, his Bernese Mountain Dog, to Congress.
I like this guy.
My next headline element is "Al," as in Al Shugart, who passed on the other day. His passing was definitely an event that gave me the urge to post. While the world remembers Al as a tech industry pioneer, his significance for me was that he transformed my name from the obscure to the instantly recognizable, a fact which has required me with predictable regularity to respond to many of those to whom I am introduced, "no, no relation." Sometimes, especially at industry functions, I felt like wearing a sign.
I posted a humorous incident about this state of affairs back in my early blogging days. It was right after Paynter was just getting started with his well-known series of blogger interviews. I had the honor of being his first male subject. The immediate aftermath was a rash of "are you related?" emails. So I put up a post to set the record straight.
Anyway, Al Shugart was my kind of guy--brilliant, creative, irreverent, fun-loving, and dismissive of the establishment. This guy was wearing Hawaiian shirts to work decades before it became a hip way to show that you or your organization were leading-edge.
Al, who started out as an IBMer, was able to get away with thumbing his nose at the rigid IBM dress code of the fifties and sixties. That may not mean much to Gen-X or Yers, but if you were around in those days, as I was, and remember how quasi-militaristic things tended to be in the big business sector, including high-tech, you have to be impressed with Shugart's chutzpah. I'm proud to bear his name. Rest well, Al.
Deleted Comment
I remember all the lectures from overconfident bullshitters with shiny shoes. A company run by salesmen. It is SO SO nice that IBM got eclipsed by the internet tech companies. Even if they are arrogant/difficult in their own way it was a victory for the technically and ethically competent.
It seemed then that IBM was where software went to die.
Eventually we had to resort to the time honored tradition of buying a cheap Keurig style machine, and having a "community pot" in our area to buy k-cups, those disposable creamer packets, etc. This was the point where I realized that IBM is probably in its terminal phase.
Shame. I rather liked IBM at one time. Heck, my dream when I was in college was exactly go to to work for IBM and go to Boca to work on OS/2!
I worked at one F500 company that eliminated the coffee for cost-saving reasons. The coffee was terrible, so I didn't exactly cry, but for this company it couldn't have cost more than, maybe, a million or so a year. I mean, I wouldn't want to write the check myself, but as a budgetary line-item, it would have been a rounding error.
I've worked at an office that dumped their Bunn drip machine that had worked since 1837 for a Keurig, because they didn't like the big twice-yearly bills for the coffee service. The Keurig has been replaced twice, and the cups fill the waste bin, and I guarantee they're paying more for coffee now.
It's really weird how people get hung up on the Coffee Question. I assume they're all tea drinkers and are being spiteful.
Deleted Comment
Before I worked for IBM I asked a friend what it had been like. "Unbelievably bad", they said. "Worse than everyone had said it would be."
So I thought, it can't be that bad. How could it be? And when I worked there it was worse! So when the next friend who got approached asked me I said, my god, remember how bad friend -1 said it was, well, it's worse! And that friend thought, no, it can't be that bad. And then they worked there and found it worse than even I had explained.
And so it goes.
Seriously though, I see people in the office talking and when someone says "Yeah, I worked at IBM for a while." There seems to be a quiet exchange of knowing looks.
this made me laugh, thanks
Ugh. I worked at a place that used Clearcase. It seemed to cause more problems than just dealing with the annoyances of other source control systems. I'm pretty sure companies that use it need to hire someone just to manage the thing. I've passed on job postings and offers at the mere mention of "Clearcase experience a plus" or similar.
1. Putting appliances in random places (like your cubicle) can sometimes lead people to running extension cords to power these additional devices. And excessively long, or poor quality, or "excessively long, poor quality" extension cords can absolutely be a fire hazard. This is especially true when people don't understand "current carrying capacity" vis-a-vis wire gauge and choose the wrong cord for a given load.
2. Space heaters. If you include space heaters in your definition of "small appliance", then there is a fairly real risk. First, it's very easy for flammable materials to simply get too close to the heating elements of the heater, and catch fire. Second, space heaters tend to draw a LOT of current - typically more than can be handled by your generic power strip. And people don't understand this, and will happily plug a space heater into a power strip, which will then melt, short out, and catch fire.
On balance, the odds of having a fire caused by most small appliances in offices is still probably fairly low, but the risk is non-zero. And having a blanket ban, instead of trying to distinguish "well, your blender is OK, but the space heater has to go" is just the slightly lazier way to dealing with it.
While 110V might be less of a shock risk compared to 230V, I have to wonder how much of a difference it actually makes in practice, like how much less likely are to die from the lower voltage?
Because on the other hand, the lower voltage increases the fire risk.
And by all means, if you have some high-risk area (storage rooms are quite common ones), do make special policy for it. But if you insist on the same policy for every area, you are actually endangering people.
Assuming that 10 dollar phone charger that Joe from Accounting got on Amazon or the airport store on the last vacation was not a dangerous counterfeit, that is. A sensible IT department will buy original chargers directly from the manufacturer or at the very least name brands such as Anker.
We laugh at pictures of managers wearing near-identical suits and ties, and then we can look at a bunch of techies wearing near-identical tee shirts and hoodies and somehow not see a culture using clothes to signal belonging to the tribe.
There will always be tribal signals. It's clothes whether suits or plaid flannel, it's drinking bourbon or craft IPAs, it's playing golf or ultimate, it's being clean-shaven or bearded, it's driving a Tesla or a Caddy.
Some of us are not "joiners" and chafe at the idea of carefully selecting our clothes, grooming, music, possessions, and neighbourhood to signal that we want to fit in. But we should at least understand and empathize with why others may find these things comforting.
The issue is when people want to impose their dress code on others, especially for non-client/customer facing roles.
Putting a large emphasis on the dress code has downsides as well. The more focus people spend worrying about their attire and judging others, the less focus they have for more substantive matters. It's an easy crutch to dismiss someone for dressing "wrong", a crutch which plenty of lazy employees and managers are happy to latch onto.
I think de-emphasizing dress codes encourages a more productive workplace.
We sit in the meeting room, and 2 people enter. A distinctive gentlemen wearing a suit and tie, talking in a calm, authoritative voice. Next to him, a hyperactive tshirt wearing creature, think Adam from Mythbuster, talking excitedly about all sorts of tech, while making excessive arm gestures. My colleague whispers a joke comparing him to a monkey swinging from tree to tree. We both immediately knew who was the architect and who was the lowly tech.
Wrong, it turns out. Gentlemen spends his time in floor crawlspaces pulling cables between servers, and had dressed up for the meeting. Monkey Head Architect was just his manic normal self.
Both were incredibly competent, BTW.
Now we're midwest through and through. In the Before Times, the women tended to wear out of fashion clothing, while most of the men wore golf shirts and slacks. And if you wore something slightly out of the norm, people would sniff and tut-tut you.
Then COVID happened, and CurrentCompany went 100% remote. Then vaccines came out, cases dropped, and the whole RTO movement started up. And CurrentCompany realized that everyone was used to working in WhateverTheFuckWeWantToWear. And actually made a good decision. We could now wear jeans. Or shorts! OMG shorts! That was previously treated as if you were coming to work naked. And t-shirts were allowed. Sneakers/tennis shoes too! Anything to get people back in the office.
I'm 100% remote, but every now and then I need to pick up something, or PushLargeButtonInDataCenter, so I go visit those who are hybrid. And what do the majority wear? Jeans, golf shirts, out of fashion women's clothing, and very rarely, t-shirts.
It takes a long time to turn around a company that has been operating for a century.
No, casual dresscode allows for a much wider variety of clothing and goes in the opposite direction than "signal belonging to the tribe".
Deleted Comment
Who is "we" here?
Specific examples of prohibited items in office spaces include:
- Hotplates
- Hair dryers
- Cooking devices using an open flame, including propane, butane or wood.
- Car batteries and chargers.
There’s then a list of about 30 items that require a permit.
We were joking about the oddly specific nature of the items. I’m assuming some lunatic at one time had a camp chef or Weber Q in his cube cooking up some lunch.
That lasted about a month, and then shorts were no longer allowed.
When there’s no clients it can be a bit silly. But if one department has to toe the line all of them will.
One of my coworkers wanted a coffee pot on his desk. He found an automatic drip coffee maker at a garage sale. It had a broken switch. Being a frugal engineer, he routed a wire past the switch and just turned it on and off by connecting and disconnecting it from the wall socket.
More than once, I was working late and noticed the smell of it burning through the last dregs of the pot because he had forgotten to disconnect it. The first few times, I disconnected it. Finally, I threw it in a garbage can and probably saved the building from an eventual fire.
I know it is annoying to have rules, but there are reasons for fire codes and facilities managers. I know too many people like my previous coworker.
In that same building there were some desks with fans because it was too hot and space heaters because it was too cold. (I saw this ridiculous waste of electricity in many facilities.) I don't trust most facilities to have good AC, ventilation, or wise inhabitants.
If you go into the break room in a place like that, you're going to see consumer grade coffee makers. Again and again. They're totally normal.
It’s one of the endearing aspects of HN and the large cohort of California based tech company people.
Given that the overwhelming evidence, for example the fact that no house has burned in a large radius around my home, I'd say your and IBM's assessment is wildly off-target.
Coffee makers are relatively simple designs. They're basically hotplates with a one way valve underneath for the water.
Without the shut off, the thing would just keep getting hotter. And while heated glass will not catch fire, it can shatter violently. And those heated shards can then catch things on fire. And that's outside the fact that just faulty wiring can cause sparks and fire itself.
https://www.electrical-forensics.com/Coffeemakers/CoffeeMake...
Worse, I personally watched one person see it as a problem, flip the switch assuming that would fix it, and walk away. I had to point out that the switch was not involved and was just a decoy. That made it even worse from a safety perspective.
In this case, the best option would be to involve management or HR, or even facilities management in the positive step of buying a better coffee maker for the office. Failing to provide access to safely brewed good coffee was the bug here.
Did you take his red stapler, too, Lumbergh?
Really, consumer-grade coffee makers aren't intended to stay on for days at a time. You need commercial machines for that, all metal and glass, that won't be a fire hazard or have melting plastic. Some facilities have strict rules about that.
The problem is that those companies are notoriously cheap. They won't buy coffee makers or poorly maintain them and their managers are trained to act like callous idiots when questioned about it. Really, in general, most employee disatisfaction comes from managers and executives acting like callous idiots instead of actually trying to solve problems.
Managers and executives are usually trying to solve problems, but generally not the problems of people below them on the org chart.
1. If they're not meant to stay on how come most of them have clocks?
2. Many machines no longer warm the coffee by using a heating element underneath a glass carafe, they've switched this out for insulated carafes (no glass) which tend to work better anyway.
https://www.nbcnews.com/select/shopping/best-coffee-makers-b...
Specifically so that the machine is not on until a set time.
If you wanted the heating pad to be perpetually on, there would be no need for a clock. The clock is so that you can have it start brewing later.
The hand wringing is not necessary.
Surely a coffee maker would get a break in the afternoon/evening? I agree that using it at a duty cycle higher than it was designed might be an issue, but unless you have the entire floor share one machine it should be fine.
I know a lot of people who drink coffee all afternoon. Plus, they won't hesitate to dump and rebrew a pot if its been warming too long.
My circa-2002 Mr. Coffee brand drip coffee marker has an automatic cut-off. I have never bothered measuring it precisely, but I think it cuts off at around an hour and a half or two hours after being turned on. Believe me, there have been many times I put on a pot of coffee, got "in the zone" working on some code, got up a while later, walked in the kitchen, and found the pot of coffee stone cold. Much to my dismay. Although as a former firefighter, I do understand the intent behind this, and I can't really be mad about it.
Edit: In the US, for sure. Like most of the ones on Amazon right now that are under $30.
The plants had large office staffs, so having different rules for offices was more complex, and the culture of uniformity was a thing for them.
This is also sort of why I like startups. You can have cultural cohesion. If you get a 10k person company, everyone has to conform to the one guy who believes that you can't have a vim pedal because the cable under your desk will cause you to fail to be protected in an earthquake.
No, thanks, I'll take the risk of tripping on the cable while the earthquake is on.
However... we were a bunch of game developers. So everyone had a high-powered Windows PC and one or two console dev kits in their cube. The PS3s were so notoriously power hungry that in summer months people would run box fans to try to blow off some of the waste heat.
Each circuit in that poor building was heavily loaded. The coffee maker had to go once someone finally realized that turning it on was the straw that broke the camel's back and caused the circuit for that row of cubes to trip and everyone's UPS to kick in.