Maersk prepares to lay off the Maidenhead staffers who rescued it from NotPetya
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
I highly recommend it, it’s a very good read. And also makes you realize what cyber warfare looks like or how it can shit a country down (as it did Ukraine: no power, no ATMs, no way to pay for food...)
It covers Maersk, lots of infections that paralysed Ukraine, along with the whole Iran mess that was instigated by the US.
Very interesting book, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Certainly make for a faster education in transition.
Issue is not offshoring, issue is the loss of business knowledge and experience and a pattern that's played out many times when things are offshored. The whole RBS bank disaster being one of many examples.
https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/all/2012/06/28/rbs_jo...
This adage always goes so well! Truly one for the modern times.
But it's just short-term thinking allowed to play out as it looks good on the balance sheet and dividends. Death by accountant is a thing.
[EDIT SPLNG]
How would I act, well, if you was good, I'd vocalise that and your replacement would have a hard time filling those shoes. But again, why would a company let a good manager/CEO leave due to some fixed term contract?
Equally I get that people get bored at all levels and move on, even if the company tries to retain them.
It's not a label liberally bestowed upon all people just because they are not there long. You generally find bad management are brilliant at being seen to be doing their job, over actually doing it. Equally, you can find good management can and do get shafted and seen that happen.
Though I will add that I've not worked for a company that employs CEO's for fixed terms as you outline and do find that curious as it does seem somewhat counter productive upon all levels.
Or the small onshore team they kept burning themselves out trying to hold the ship together.
It’s like they are looking to for trouble in order to save a few bucks now.
You would expect that a a company operating real-life things like enormous container ships with all logistics and safety requirements would understand risk.
Also, as someone who used to work at Maersk, I can attest to the fact that for a Danish company it is extremely hierarchical. Decisions are not made by anyone with any technical competency.
It seems to me the gap in time between reducing staffing and disaster is perhaps too long for intuitive connections to be made, but that seems overly simplistic to me too.
Many companies do things in a way where miracles aren't required - but the values perceived by those departments still don't seem in line with value delivered.
And after such an attack, you decide lowest cost is the primary IT driver?
Not that they need to achieve high mastery over it but a little understanding goes a long way.
I've seen it time and time again, since they don't get it they fear it and the seeming power it has over their company. They treat it like a force of nature -- something that just is instead of another business domain to learn something about and so when things break there is this weird abdication of self determination like there was no possible way to have prevented things from going down or reaching a point of no recovery.
This all in turn leads to the lower valuation of tech instead of say sales or marketing.
They hired a British company to oversee the recovery from a disaster?
I am pretty certain this is a typical post-Brexit piece about the EU not needing these British companies.
Also Maidenhead is a corporate paradise, not some village in the middle of nowhere afraid of loosing jobs.
"Those teams rebuilt around 4,000 servers and 45,000 PCs and other devices" over 10 days (according to another article), while the company "ground to a halt".
I don't know about you, but if I had a team that pulled that out, I would have a deep respect for their service and contribution to the business.
Maybe I am missing something, but I didn't see anywhere where this was a company brought in, I am under the impression it is the company's internal staff recovering from ransomware, and now being laid off.
My broad (20 years) experience is that IT is usually later than forecast and often the 'business' make up the shortfall by producing miracles/take the pain.
Technology is often not a cost centre and can be a competitive advantage for the right company, but Maersk is not and probably doesn't need to be a tech company (although I guess they could have a tech-forward strategy).
IT, as in, what it takes to have a computer per employee that they can use, phones, productivity software, etc, is almost never going to be a competitive advantage. It's almost always going to be a cost-centre, definitely so for a company like Maersk.
However, when technology is called upon to interface between the deeply technical (operations analysis for solving efficient container shipping and fleet Management), the thousands of people and manual handling and data entry operations per day, in just about every country and climate possible, then your IT operations are non-standard.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2527153/opinion-the-un...
Invisible == worthless to the Harvard business school types.
Maersk is probably more concerned with survival.
Perhaps, but it's only ~150 IT jobs which were proven to be critical during an epic cyber attack. Is Maersk really hanging by a thread that thin?
I think there's a more obvious problem that it feels like everyone is blind to. Do we really think these IT staffers are seen by their management as heros? For sure they aren't. Maersk was nearly unique in how badly it was taken out by that virus. Job number one of any IT department: don't let a virus destroy your network. They completely failed at that and the business paid a huge price. The causes were as you may expect - not keeping up with Windows updates, all the usual stuff. Not having any offline backups of critical infrastructure. Things they were trusted to get right.
Are maersk management likely to be losing sleep over replacing this team? Probably not. What are they going to argue exactly - the Indians won't do as good a job as they did?
I know it's harsh. I'm sure pointing this out won't go down well. But in the end they're not in a strong position to argue for their jobs.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-...
Penny wise, pound foolish.
- Train my replacement.
- Register down at the jobs office.
- Lie on the floor and cry. Have a nice cuppa tea.
- Write ransomware targeting Maersk, using insider knowledge of networks and procedures.
- Short Maersk stock or buy put options.
- Release malware.
Ask so when does consultation begin (call your union rep if your a member) and make sure you all get an enhanced pay off
Start looking for a new job - experience in fighting a big attack like this might be of interest to various TLA's (assuming your grandparents are native born citizens)
I you find out early take your annual leave
Make sure to take your laptop home if you have one
The last two are in case mersk do what some other big European companies have done and try and avoid paying out - one case I know of was a uk subsidiary being made bankrupt
In case anyone needs a Poe's Law check, this was all insincere. I was just trying to draw attention to the fact that Maersk is essentially drawing a huge target on their back for aspiring malware authors, by firing the people that pulled them through their last crippling encounter with malware. It is extremely unlikely, when they get hit next, that any of their former employees will be involved. (And even less likely that any of those people will still be around to pull their asses out of the fire again.)
"The Maidenhead recovery center was being managed by the consultancy Deloitte. Maersk had essentially given the UK firm a blank check to make its NotPetya problem go away, and at any given time as many as 200 Deloitte staffers were stationed in the Maidenhead office, alongside up to 400 Maersk personnel."
Everyone contributed to the recovery.
100% more Maersk people. Good enough for me. YOMV.