Comment by quitit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quitit | Hacker News Reader

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This is also a common side effect of corporate policies that favour short term profits rather than retaining staff for the long term.

I see this scenario play out constantly:

1. A team or staff member has a project's data located on their user account or hardware.

2. The team or staff member are made redundant when there is a dip in earnings.

3. IT make a backup of the user account/s and wipe the hardware, and because it's older usually move it on.

4. Months or years later that data is needed and at this point no one at the company actually knows where the data is - and even if they find something, they don't know if that's the latest or the full version.

Now this wouldn't be a problem if there was a decent overlap in staff retention, but that simply isn't the case these days.

Writing better storage policies doesn't help - it's the understaffed nature of their businesses which mean that there is no time for staff to keep up with basic data housekeeping.

The types of data that clients should have on hand, but nevertheless have asked me to supply, are frankly embarrassing.

When I get frustrated enough to consider putting a kill switch in my work, I cool off by reminding myself that would prompt them to make a huge effort recovering from backups and have someone go through my code to get it working again. If I just do what they ask me instead, it will slowly decay without anyone having any idea what it even does, until its too late to fix or recover anything.

There's been discussion on HN of "smuggling" the lost information back into the organization: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42235452

What company is allowing employees to have so much data locally? Almost all work is stored in a cloud now. Documents, spreadsheets, design docs, code… If you really are constantly seeing this then that says a lot about the corporation using severely outdated practices.

> If you really are constantly seeing this then that says a lot about the corporation using severely outdated practices.

They probably just used now-outdated practices before those practices were outdated. This happened in the past, remember. Sure, the cloud is a thing today, but was the cloud such a thing 5, 10, 20 years ago? Do you really think it's their fault for not knowing in advance how much of a thing the cloud would one day become? Oh, how outdated. Sheesh.

> Sure, the cloud is a thing today, but was the cloud such a thing 5, 10, 20 years ago?

Yes, yes, and no.

For example, https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/908:_The_Cloud is from 2011.

The Onion also made some pretty good cloud parodies back in 2012: https://youtu.be/9ntPxdWAWq8

Old animation though I wouldn't necessarily expect to only have been 10 years ago, and 10 years ago I wouldn't expect to be scolded for not using the cloud.

I would think policies should also be updated every X years in light of new regulations, new possibilities, new limitations... but who enjoys policies and even updating them? So here we are, everything done "by the book" and losing data because of that.

> located on their user account or hardware

Clouds have user accounts too. I have seen dead links to documents in a former employees space on sharepoint, confluence, and google docs.

Exactly. In fact, I still regularly get sharepoint "request for access" notifications in my email for some presentation I did a year ago. Even though I swear I've opened it up to the entire org.

Who knows what happens when I've shuffled away from my current company.

Dead links are also incredibly common, particularly because we are on our nth port from sharepoint to confluence to whatever back to sharepoint. Generally, because C levels don't want to pay for this year's price hike.

Why locally? In practice many companies never lose any data. What they lose is the knowledge what the data is and/or how to use it.

Any company where you're not allowed to force-push to a public branch.

Local git repo checkouts?

Well, the typical setup with OneDrive in MS365, is that the overworked manager get’s an email when an employee account is deactivated. The manager has 90 days to search through their OneDrive and copy anything out that they think is needed, possibly to the central SharePoint or to their own OneDrive. I’m sure there are similar policies and procedures in place for enterprise dropbox, box.net, and Google Drive. So typically employee leaves and the manager never gets around to copying data out, 6-9 months later they need something that employee had, and yell at IT to recover it. IT laughs and laughs and then cries.

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