Gregory's ServerOMG. This is both insane, and rings horribly true: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-accidentally-saved-half-a-million-dollars/
 62 comments
 @cstross competition makes private businesses much more efficient than state run enterprises. @cstross Insane or merely vain? That is, the company exists to support the vanity of the "leadership". Most of the world is like this.  @cstross The whole world (except a few of us) do exactly that.   @cstross "it's just that this whole department... is some sort of weird political PsyOp to get executives promoted." I believe this was the real goal of my company where I spent 20 years.     > My team has spun this as a huge cost saving, when really we just applied a fire extinguisher to the pile of money that we had set alight. At the company I used to work, there were regular awards ceremonies for things like this, and I have to assume that this was the most common backstory. One of the awards came with a trophy that was actually a working fire extinguisher!  @DocBohn @cstross Getting my (Texas based) org to book an intercity train within the US is nigh impossible, there just isn't a procedure. However, if you book a train anywhere outside the US (even Canada) they won't bat an eye and will approve it. And I've used the "book and cancel a car" trick a lot, especially when I specifically booked a hotel across the street from where I'm visiting... @DocBohn @cstross Sometimes what looks like bureaucratic insanity has a reason. A friend was sent from Edinburgh to London for work. When she returned, the finance person asked about her hotel expenses. She explained she'd stayed with her parents, so it cost nothing. He made her submit a claim anyway. He explained: “If you can stay for free in London, then management will always send YOU in future. That's not fair to others. So we have to make your trip cost the same as anyone else’s.”  @angusm Thirty-five years ago I had to spend six weeks out of town on a business trip. As it happened, I could stay with my dad, so the company incurred no hotel expenses (comparable expenses today for that city are $375-$400/night, as I found on a shorter trip a few weeks ago). But I DID have a fine Cajun meal, accompanied by three beers, every single night. I ate at the bar, so the bartenders and the owner got to know me very well. @DocBohn @cstross @angusm @DocBohn @cstross In the early 2000s, I was sent on the first of many trips from London to a business park outside Wash. D.C. and assigned a self catering apartment. I bought breakfast foods and some basic groceries from Wholefoods on my company Amex card. Returning home, I was called to account for the 'personal shopping' I had charged to the card and, when I explained, I was told I was meant to use it to eat out at restaurants, not make healthier food for myself. 1/2 @angusm @DocBohn @cstross The same company threw a fit when, after reading the policies very carefully to make sure I wasn't breaking the rules, I later used the company car allowance (entitled the Travel Allowance) to buy a folding bike and a rail pass for my daily commute. When, again, I was called on to explain my reason (cost/health/environment), the finance person's final plea was "But...but...you're a senior manager...you HAVE to drive a car - what will others think!?" 2/2 @DocBohn @cstross that's even more ridiculous than the time we had a ban put on travelling First Class. There was some kind of offer on, and First was cheaper than standard. It also included lunch, wiping that expense off the claim altogether and saving more money. But the Powers That Be noticed that we plebs were having a nice time and banned it, immediately doubling our expense claims. They also banned overnights, saving £50 on hotels and costing £100+ more on peak time trains.  @DocBohn @Affekt @DocBohn @cstross ah yes I learned that the hard way. Flying home via Edinburgh airport, I grabbed a bottle of water, the assistant helpfully scanned a copy of the Telegraph as they had an offer where you got a free bottle of water. My expense claim was rejected as the company didn't pay for newspapers. The rest of the year I paid full price for the water. @darrenmoffat @DocBohn @cstross Once upon a time I was supposed to travel from Berlin to Munich for a meeting at 9am on Monday. 1st flight in the morning would have got me there too late. HR suggested flying down on Sunday evening & staying in a hotel, which meant leaving at 5pm and cost a fortune. The hassle I had getting them to approve a night train (leaving at 10, arriving at 7) using my own BahnCard in 1st class & saving the org. about €400… I worked at a company that required transportation costs to/from an airport. I lived 200m from a free city-run airport bus stop, that ran every 10 minutes most of the time. I learned to just put a cash $15 taxi to and from on every expense report.  > At 4PM on the last day of the week, I ping a chat full of good engineers and no managers to make sure I'm not about to nuke everything, then just do it. but this is evil ...  @cstross No good deed goes unpunished. Here's the lesson: Never expect to be rewarded for saving the company money. Greedy bastards.  @cstross Yep. I've done things like that before, but on a smaller scale. "Hey, boss, can I have $150 to buy this widget? It'll prevent $3,000 in damages." And then I'm proved right next time the bad thing happens. I do not receive any bonus for this.  @mooklepticon @cstross Bonus points when the collective salary time of the discussion about whether to spend $150 exceeds $150. @donaldball @mooklepticon @cstross Reminds me of the time I tried to get a previous employer to buy me a €35 backpack instead of the standard issue shoulder bag, and spent 4 paid hours doing so. I know it was 4 hours because we spent a lot of time doing meticulous time tracking. After that they gave me a €300 / month no questions asked equipment budget, because that was easier.  @cstross I am having flashbacks to the web guy who got fired by a certain large British game company, after he had set up what was supposed to be a short-term web access solution but before he could get the much less expensive long-term arrangement in place. Cue hilarity as his former bosses got blindsided by a massive bill they could have avoided by treating employees better....  @cstross I see this and the request for a raise they know is going to be rejected and all I can think is "Here, give me the raise I'm asking for OR I WILL PUSH THE BUTTON AGAIN!" @wordshaper Or malicious compliance: put it back the way it was ... by adding that 10 minute delay back. Then do it again! (Whoops, costs double instantly!)  I've been out of that sort of environment for a while, but I and many other people over the years will all have a similar story to tell. Oh, my bonus was an expensed meal for two, but the amount was capped to something like a suburban Italian restaurant meal and no wine.  The only real mistake they made was not keeping that around for when they are having a slow week. "I got a little distracted from this week's sprint going down a performance rabbit hole and I saved us another 10% of our hosting spend", they say, as they switch another handful of machines to the new setting. Ah, bureaucracy. @cstross In the pre-cloud days, used to pride myself on saving the NHS my annual salary or more by not buying expensive proprietary solutions for which there were perfectly reasonable (usually superior) Open Source alternatives. Also managed to do the same for the DWP by downsizing the stuff they had running a specific cloud app (from ... high tens of thousands a year to maybe a couple of hundred quid...).  @cstross I spent 4 years in a useless data science department and was absolutely terrible at it and the only reason I'm pretty sure this isn't about my company is that I don't think we used MondoDB for anything  @cstross " It's cosplaying as a real business and the board thinks the costume is convincing." SMH, so, so true.   @cstross This is so relatable it hurts: “…it's just that this whole department, like many departments, is some sort of weird political PsyOp to get executives promoted. It's cosplaying as a real business and the board thinks the costume is convincing.” Unfortunately, this is doubly so: “I applied myself for five minutes against my own better judgement, had the greatest success of my career, and have immediately been punished for it. Learn from my mistakes, I beg of you.”  @cstross "The subtext is that if we do this all slowly enough, it might seem like it took a lot of effort instead of just clicking buttons that I said had to be clicked almost a year ago." I have no words to describe the feeling that this sentence gives me, but it rings horribly true indeed.   @cstross David Graeber's "bullshit jobs" does not get enough follow up. The vast majority of capitalism's office workers accomplish the same amount as the vast majority of catholicism's priesthood. They look impressive and chant in unison, to nobody about nothing.  @cstross With great computing power comes huge bills. Bad design using lambdas at cloud scale can bankrupt your corp doing mundane processing, badly. Been there, seen that. Tried to get the team not to do it. Oh well, so sad, "velocity" and "time to market". What cloud permits is to see the consequences of terrible design in the bottom line, very very quickly. It used to be that terrible design slowed you down. We have now traded slowing velocity for hugely increasing cloud bills.  @cstross I often hear the [x] sector/industry is so inefficient. (Where x can be government, academia, private sector, tech, whatever...) What I have discovered after all these years is the actual problem is that these organizations are filled with people. And people are idiots. (I would include myself in this category). @cstross I'm unconvinced that this isn't just all businesses: "it's just that this whole department, like many departments, is some sort of weird political PsyOp to get executives promoted. It's cosplaying as a real business and the board thinks the costume is convincing."  @cstross "They hired some incredibly talented people to make this happen, and then like five times as many idiots." A distillation of how the world works. @cstross "My team has spun this as a huge cost saving, when really we just applied a fire extinguisher to the pile of money that we had set alight." |
@cstross
I worked for a firm exactly like this. This is exactly how it happens.