Crowning moment of WTF...

[jecook]

In a shameless attempt to revive this old, dusty place, I want to know what your crowning moment of WTFery at the workplace you've experienced. I'll start.


I've been at $company for nearly ten years. This is somewhat strange for this particular industry (Tribal Gaming) as usually people get fed up with management, fed up with the pay(1), or just want a change of scenery.

I think the worst WTFery I've seen was last summer. We had seen a couple incidents of Cryptolocker poking around, and I had taken initiative to lock things down via a group policy so that I didn't have to spend several hours every couple days restoring department shares because some turkey borked their machine.

The CIO commended me for doing this. My direct boss forced me to undo those changes a few days later because I 'didn't perform a full risk assessment of the effects of locking down the machine's ability to install harmful software.'(2)

The fecal matter hit the fan shortly thereafter which ended with the CIO ordering me to re-implement my changes after a final infection damaged one of the front of line applications and took it offline for several hours before a weekend.(3)

Haven't seen a single instance of cryptolocker affecting the systems since.

Your turn!


1. The company has a *lot* of cash for buying pretty shiny hardware; not so much for retaining the talent to drive it.
2. Boss's way of saying "You didn't say 'mother may I' before taking steps to maintain system integrity", the buttplug.(4)
3. I don't *think* that final incident cost us any revenue, but it gave the boss a nice black eye.
4. And that's being insulting to all buttplugs. At least those don't drive people to mental breakdowns in front of their co-workers.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Complain about turnover, and how departments don't cooperate with each other, especially not disparate groups of engineers or any engineers and User Experience.
Come up with ineffectual schemes to increase inter-department socialization (ask managers to set up lunch dates for their teams) on the grounds that all inter-department cooperation is based on personal relationships (which is true as far as it goes).
Impede personal relationships by never rehiring to replace the team maintaining the working infrastructure, and implementing new and "awesome" infrastructure that doesn't actually structure. (Skype for fucking Business, I ask you. But not the voice calls, just the text.) (The people who are likely to have a Windows machine are Legal and Sales. Dev likes their Linux boxes, except those who prefer Mac. Design prefers Mac. Skype for Business on Mac doesn't have persistent group chat.)
Replace a transparent ticketing system (which engineers can search for precedent to self-service their own problems) with an opaque ticketing system (which engineers cannot search).
Complain that several groups of engineers have started cooperating with each other and the User Experience department (for the purpose of bringing down the new ticketing system and documenting the failures of the current MS Office suite).
Presumably as a cost-saving measure, start hiring contractors to staff several layers of the IT department, as well as department assistants at all levels.
Keep the good ones as long as they'll stay (as contractors).
Observe with some alarm the lawsuits around companies who are abusing their contractor privileges by permatemping.
Rotate contract manager companies to use one that doesn't give their people paid health insurance until they've been there a year, while instituting a one-year-max policy.
Don't bother to take on any of the IT contractors as permanent (apparently).

I am not there anymore to see in person what the hell is happening after the Great Culling, and I'm not sure whether contractors in the non-US offices were culled as well. I don't imagine that good things are happening now...

[jamoche]

19 invites to the same all-hands meeting, without the "don't want responses" flag set. That admin's email must be overflowing by now.

[azurelunatic]

That's the sort of mistake that happens once.

Apiece.

Per new contractor.

I hope they have fun next year...