So I started setting up the management tools and noticed after a few days that nobody really came around much. Then I noticed that nobody was ever logging into these systems. Ever. It was a ghost datacenter running some WAN management stuff that nobody knew about -- some consultants set it up and left -- nobody knew what it was.
In my case, I did my job to the letter, I setup the management tools, got the servers and databases humming, etc. But the actual equipment was serving no discernable purpose. Total investment just in hardware and software was probably $5-6M
At least, that was the excuse they used when they fired him. I think the actual reason was that he was hard to get along with. However, it's difficult to fire him for that reason. Much easier to fire him over misuse of corporate equipment.
The guy told everyone about his MP3 server. Including summer interns.
Are you able to elaborate on this? I've always wondered how the warez scene functioned; residential Internet connections are obviously insufficient, hacked resources too risky, and warez groups turn their nose up at any form of legitimate resources (e.g. dedi/colo hosting)
This leaves corporate infrastructure. All it takes is a small IT team with a big budget, lots of hardware and network resources, and management who neither know nor care how their resources are being utilized.
It's terribly romantic.
Hacked resources are used as well. I worked at a place that used an old SGI Indy as a mail relay. It wasn't really managed, and somebody rooted it to use as a distribution server for warez and porn. I suspect the admins kept it running as a source for their own warez and porn needs.
I got involved when a spammer got in and sent millions of emails, flooding our puny T1 with bounces.
Think about it this way:
If a need comes up, it's going to take months to get all the paperwork done to get new hardware.
If you have idle hardware, you're ready to go ASAP.
It's also a form of redundancy, albeit a primitive one. If equipment goes out, you have stuff you can swap out immediately.
Slightly related, this reminds me of the 400,000 euro costing MRI-like machine my employer bought, without checking if it could connect to our healthcare software. It didn't.
So, Thursday comes and I try to get on the server... no response. A little more testing and the server looks like a dead box. I ring up IT and ask them to look into it, getting an email a few minutes later stating that the machine had a crash on Sunday night (4 days ago) and just hadn't been properly rebooted. As I logged in to do what I had intended to, it dawned on me that the department right next to mine had literally no other tasks right then except to be testing software on this server. Yet I, who had been putting off doing the work for 4 days, was the first to find out the server hadn't been working all week.
This sort of stuff is what makes small companies where your contributions matter feel even more rewarding.
Testing is so easy to fluff over. I did a mobile banking project (Project A) for my current employer and the business area said they needed 3 weeks to test it. The person assigned to test it was also assigned to test another project simultaneously (Project B). She would tell me she didn't have time to test Project A because she was testing Project B, and she would tell the Project B people she didn't have time to test because she was testing Project A.
In the end, I looked at the usage logs on the test site... she logged in on the last day of the three week period, futzed around for 5 minutes and then signed off on the project as "fully tested - no issues".
Good testing leaves artifacts, bad testing is easy to fluff over.
One guy in particular had a "birthday cake club" that he managed with ruthless efficiency; if you were a new starter you had to tell him your birthdate and he would allocate you a date where you'd bring in cake for everyone else in the office. He had a spreadsheet and everything. When it was somebody's turn to give away cake he'd go into each wing of our office and announce that cakes were ready, then bolt back to the kitchen to have first dips. Very strange guy - nobody knew what he really did beside that.
One day he was gone -- early retirement -- and the cake club, and spreadsheet, left with him.
"So, apart from reprogram dongles, what does he do?" > "I don't know either"
"No, I'm not trying to be funny here, you work with him, what does he actually do?" > "I'm not being funny, I actually have no idea what he does with his time"
As a manager of a software team, my goal is to make sure that everyone on the team is completely unblocked to do their job, so even though I only had 6 one on one employee meetings a week, I have meetings with managers, meetings for updates on projects, budgeting meetings, meetings to report to the company executives, getting all the signatures required for large purchases, meetings to discuss planning for future projects, meetings to plan our new process integration, meetings with higher ups to try to correct issues for my team. At one point I had 6 hours of meetings a day, so I think it adds up quickly. I'm not saying my company was efficient, but that's the reality of even a midsize company.
I knew someone who was put into a partial-managerial role, i.e., still did real work, but counted as only half an FTE for the purposes of project planning. The management role was to oversee two people.
So if half a manager is for two people, it's not that great a leap to get to a full-manager for six people.
Whatever you do in the future, remember the spirit and work ethics of the microbiology lab. If you find yourself working somewhere lacking that spirit but having the 'corporate' attitude instead, quit right away. Seriously. You'll thank me later!
So yes, try to work in environments with that attitude as long as you can!
This kind of thing is more frequent than I realized.
Last week I was reading a series of posts about how common it was for workers in machine shops to be doing work for themselves on company machinery. In a few cases, guys working the night shifts were basically running their own small businesses out of their "day job" often for years without the owner knowing about it.
Managers have to hit deadlines. Managers also write their own deadlines (to a large extent).
So they do what any rational person (or at least, anyone with the savvy to become a manager) will do - they write deadlines which can't possibly be missed. Lots of abstract terms (review methodology, test, design, etc), without links to concrete deliverables. Since there's no "real" outputs, no-one can check whether the work has been done. Obviously, there'll be a crunch at some point (quick, we have to actually build the web page we were designing!), but most of the time it doesn't matter whether people are feverishly working, or just letting the wheels spin.
I offered to help out other people (who were very busy) but was given strict instructions by my boss not to do so. I have no idea why.
It meant I had about 9 months of 40 hour weeks where I'd do maybe an hour per week of actual work.
At organizations like this you'll often have "re-orgs" where a few people are laid off (relatively speaking) but the "managers that matter" (those with the most power) come out having the same number of people beneath them. It will seem completely arbitrary to the people at the bottom of the org chart why their boss's boss's boss changed but the truth is that it happened because that guy used his influence to finagle the org chart in such a way as to keep the same number of reports.
I started working in 1998. Fresh out of school, I had this romantic idea about jobs being places where you go to perform a specific set of predefined tasks. 15 years down the road I learned about the waste, the fluff, the inefficiency, the incompetence of some managers, the politics and the corporate speak. They never teach you those things in school...
We had people who weren't entirely useless, but were paid an awful lot for the kind of work they did.
You could well have been adding value with the help you were giving, depending on how messed up their information flow/systems were.
Only 50%? I believe 80% or higher is a better number.
I remember a post here about only getting 2 hours of "real" work done each day in a big bureaucratic company.
I'd quit my job in a heartbeat if I wasn't saddled with debt. Don't be me, don't get in a big debt, else you'll live in bureaucratic hell. Hopefully I'll get out by next year (and I do have a few side projects).
After a while, I began coding my own projects. Which was a bit of a challenge, since IT wouldn’t let me install software. I did have Notepad, and a WAMP-server on my USB thumb drive. Mind you, I did not have an office of my own, it was basically an office garden. Co-workers (testing, helpdesk, project management, not too technical stuff) could watch my screen directly. So I had to disguise my project websites as a corporate intranet page. Every once in a while someone would say ‘wow, that looks difficult’ and I would say ‘well, you know’. Mind you this was just basic HTML and PHP stuff.
The next problem was internet access. They did have internet there, but most websites were blocked by IT, and they were monitoring internet traffic, too. So I learned how to set up a proxy server, and figured that if I kept the amount of traffic down I’d be allright. Besides, I couldn’t have my coworkers seeing me browse SO all day, right? It’s amazing how resourceful you get when your resources are limited!
The funny thing is that when you look busy yet can still ‘find the time’ to help others, people hold you in high regard. They even sent praise about me to the IT manager, who came down to me once and told me he heard great things about me, and he passed the praise on to my outsourcing company. After a year or so I learned a great deal about web development, and finished a couple of side projects. I started to get some remorse. As funny and unique as the situation was, it didn’t feel right at all. Eventually I quit (to everyone’s surprise, because I was doing such a great job!), moving on to more challenging work, and above all a more ‘fair’ way to make money.
What struck me from those days is that nobody in my department actually knew what the others were doing. For all I know everybody was coding up their side projects in the boss’ time. And that was just my department, let alone the whole company. Large corporations (I’ve worked for several) are just so inefficient, I think that at least 50% of all employee hours is wasted on politics and sherades. The number is even higher if you count in useless meetings.