Killing Motivation #13: The Employee Survey

Why are so many people leaving? Do you care? Of course not. But you want to stem the tide since you are loosing money due to productivity lost by departing disgruntled employees. So what do you do?

You have an employee survey.

Now, don't get me wrong. You really don't care what the results are. What you want to do is show to the remaining knobs (re: suckers) that you "care". You don't care of course but you just need to fool them to think you do and that its worth staying so you can squeeze another pound of flesh from them to meet your quarter/fiscal results so you can profit from the uptick in stock.

So, you create a feel good caring and sharing (the Care Bears where laid off years ago) survey and circular file the results. I am sure you will get a boat load of angst. But again, why should you care? The results are worth less than a conservative voter suppression bill.

But what happens next is the real act (please do not read further if you are eating) . You generate a PR marketing worthy result document on an internal website about how employees feel empowered to help the customer realize their dreams. You gibber on incessantly about how the slaves feel the team spirit in the "New" organisation.  And how we will all achieve success with the "New" organisation.

Has anything changed?

No.

Is the organisation still clueless?

Yes.

But the sheep you still employee may just be fooled to hang around another quarter.

The Stupidity of an Emerging War

So we all can accept that Ukraine was and is in a mess. The former President Viktor Yanukovych was not a good guy. There was a barely palatable agreement for Ukraine to transition to a new government and elections in a year. Europe and Russia also agreed to this.

But then the radical right got involved  and since then  everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. The West has been complicit in by pulling out of an agreement with Russia, the new Ukrainian government is also complicit in stupidity by bringing in the fascists into cabinet and demanding the removal of language rights for ethnic Russians, and Russia, well, Russia does what Russia does and therefore is also complicit in stupidity.

The press is along for the ride and on all side media is controlled to manipulate and pander to the public.

And all this will cause lives to be lost on an an unnecessary and contrived war.

Will people allow themselves, their sons and daughters be sent to another useless slaughter? Is this just a distraction from something else?

And the Canadian Government, that dot in the letter "i" of the word shit parrots what its allies want to hear to gain political point for votes sleepwalking to disaster.

An inability to configure correctly on your part does not consistute a bug on my part

Ever wonder how, in an organisation that is constantly laying off people, how some manage to not be touched by that layoff when they clearly are depriving a village of an idiot?

 I was recently reminded of this when a well known individual (lets call him Raoul) insisted our software had  a bug even though this was clearly a misconfiguration.

Now, please do not misunderstand me, I like helping people. I especially like helping people who try, who try to understand, who do their homework, who listen. But eventually my patience recedes like a middle aged male hairline for those who constantly ask the same question, who, despite repeated explanations, with diagrams, and sock puppets just continue down their blind alley. I finally in the end give up, and put them on my block list.

And so, Raoul emerged again. I had been down this road before with him, and it reminded me, of previous encounters he has had either directly with me, or with my other colleagues.

An issue was presented to me from another colleague, little did I know who was the cause at this point that SSL was the cause of the bug. Here was my first warning.

Beware of people who present answers to you when they are asking you questions.

I have had to endure this before, when something does not work it must be that thing we do not know or understand, in this case, it was SSL. Lets ignore for a moment that they could connect, get almost everything working over SSL, yet for this one item, it did not work, so it must be SSL. Many do not understand that with SSL, the coms are working, or not. There is not "kind of". Its like being "kind of" pregnant.

The problem was caused by the configuration of a load balancer. This thing was configured to key off a hostname but they neglected to include a domain name. In addition, as a flaw of the device it read the HOST HTTP header. The RFC states that the host header can have a HOST and PORT but the port can be omitted if it corresponds to the protocol default. However, it should expect an explicit port definition. In this case, it could not.

This was not a problem with our product. This was a misconfiguration at best and at worse a load balancer that is not RFC compliant. Yet despite frequent explanations, references, displays of traffic, Raoul insisted it was bug. Ok, lets takes this to a logical progression. A bug is raised, but what can we fix in our code?

 And then, how much time do I have to waste when someone either cannot or will not attempt to listen and learn?