Readit NewsSo they’re asking their employees to donate as well, when they don’t need to.
I highly recommend his book “Managing Humans” to anyone who’s looking to be in Engineering Management.
I was once in a meeting with one of the senior executives at JPMorgan, where the guy smugly told me he felt they were “doing a service for the community” by charging people overdraft fees. After leaving the meeting, my very senior colleague said, “I had to hold myself back from throwing that guy out of his window.”
These sorts of articles — half PR, half history lesson — tend to leave out these sorts of politically inconvenient but important bits of history. It’s so much work to unpack the bias...
One of my most memorable conversations was with a rep from one of the core processors about how she makes it her mission to make sure everyone in her family opts out of overdraft protection.
Banks spend so much time on the wording to make it sound like they’re doing you a favor, I’ve had to convince my wife not we didn’t want it.
There is now some pricing overlap that never used to be there.
We once had an error with Azure MySQL and AKS, where it would just stop dropping packets with basic instance types. Support could never fix it, we ended up just upgrading to standard because that worked.
I will say this - the manager of the team at Azure did comp our upgrade, because they couldn’t figure out why it was happening. I tried very hard to get our project off Azure, but because it was negotiated as part the Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft, it was “free” so the CTO wouldn’t budge. I assume this is how many people end up needing to deal with Azure.
> So then I started reading along, doing my best to do a 'diff' in wetware, and found that they had actually added some clauses. One of them amounted to 'taint' for your personal devices. Basically, if you signed in to your corp gmail from a device, they claimed the right to audit it at any point in the future.
This kind of psychotic behavior is one reason I'll never work at a megacorp. I'm sure some smaller companies do it too, but it seems less common, and they won't have as many lawyers on retainer just waiting for the chance to justify their salary by pursuing it.
And if I ever did find myself at a company that tried to pull something like this, I'd probably quit on the spot. I won't work in an environment where I'm having to constantly watch my back.
I had an employer do this - I was working there a few years, owner came in and said “we’re doing background checks, fill this out and sign it”. I asked what happened if something came back on it, and he said that I’d be fired.
I was young, and super excited to have a job in software while still in school, building things. Only much later did I realize that multi-level marketing (pyramid schemes), pay day loans and companies selling bath salts to smoke, all hurt people.
I was removed enough from the problem that I didn’t see it at the time, and it all seemed so exciting, but I certainly have lots of regrets from that time.
My boss came up with the idea of replacing the drives with industrial flash drives, so as the drives failed we replaced them. We had some issues getting drives that were small enough, as there was an issue with the BIOS and drives that were too big, but we were able to keep the systems running so we could eventually replace the whole networks while equipment was getting upgraded.
We had an even older system that was an entirely custom mainframe computer with 10" hard drives and modem banks that we all stayed far away from. It wasn't as critical, so it was even slower on replacement.
Eventually word got out to the controls department that some student worker knew a ton about the controls system, and I got moved there. They had an issue that they wanted to know the forecasted weather, so we could get the central plant going before demand started kicking in, and the vendor kept telling them custom development was coming in a couple of years. I ended up writing a server for BacNET/C that did it for them, and it ran under the desk for years.
Out of curiosity, after they didn't provide the right software a few times, I asked the guy how he was validating they were securely sourced, etc. His reply was "Oh I just googled it and grabbed the first one." After that, I at least sent him the links of where to download it from, but I couldn't convince any of the IT executives that this policy is pretty useless if they're just grabbing and installing.