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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

For a while I worked with some products that were popular with municipalities, and school districts in a previous career. The scale of under funding, and incompetent leadership in those roles is staggering, and sadly not surprising to me.

Internal politics are always an issue of course, especially at schools where a handful of luddite teachers / administrators can kill good idea, but that's also an issue of IT leadership too.

I was glad to move away from those products.

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I briefly worked for a school district that had 8000 Macs to support. They fired the entire technical team (for reasons unknown) except for me and then proceeded to hire people who had never used a Mac in their life. The woman in charge of the department was like Lorraine Bracco’s character in Hackers - extremely overpaid, could barely figure out how to work a computer, and used God as her password. I’m still disgusted when I think about how corrupt and incompetent that district was and likely still is. A few of the fired guys wound up with a nice settlement, I’m sure the webcam recordings of the superintendent exchanging teaching positions for “favors” probably worked to their advantage.

Reasons unknown? For starters, they were conspiring to covertly spy on their employer.

Nope, the district had no idea they were doing that until after the firing. I did hear the actual reason was because they were considering joining a union, but I didn’t stick around long enough to dig any deeper.

Conspiring criminals tend to do lots of conspiracy-ish and criminal-ly things. If they secretly installed webcams, they likely also were reading users' email and viewing confidential documents like performance reviews, budgets, salaries and student test scores. Their firing was likely highly justified.

Since you seem to know all kinds of facts that discredit the school district, the superintendent, and the IT supervisor, yet "didn't stick around" to absorb info that might look bad for the group of employees, makes you a narrator who is difficult to believe is being objective and non-biased.

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