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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

They must have learned from your experience. When we were acquired by HPE they did not let us choose and our director of engineering got an email address that misspelled his name... fixing it involved him being locked out of all systems while the people trying to fix it emailed someone else with a similar name about it. His advice for other team members in the same spot was "if you don't like your email address, do not attempt to fix it."

HPE was truly a trip. I paid $2000 to be able to disparage them online and it was worth every penny.

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Same story for me at a game studio bought by Microsoft. It was simply not worth the hassle. As an employee I still had to sit through the same customer support as anyone else, talking to some person at an Indian call center with a bad line. After some failed attempts I just gave up and lived with my misspelled address.

My spouse is principal architect for a platform made by a large cloud vendor.

It takes an Act of Congress, a Papal Conclave who produces white smoke on the first vote, Divine Intervention, and Interdiction by a Vice President, all offered in triplicate upon the altar of subpar IT support organizations, to get a ticket closed -with- a resolution in less than a year. If it’s not something they already have a script for it’s almost certainly impossible as far as IT support is concerned.

The company makes billions of dollars a year, employs tens of thousands of people, and they still can’t craft a competent and empowered IT support organization. Even if just for their own developers and technical experts.

Yeah, this has always bothered me. I don't really know what the issue is. One possibility is that IT is a "cost center" and so by making it cost as little as possible, you are doing a good job of running the company.

I look at it more like a "productivity multiplier", where spending money wisely can make other departments more cost efficient beyond the cost you put into IT. I guess they don't teach that in business school, or everyone is already as productive as they can possibly be. Somehow I doubt it, though.

I was once issued %%my full first name and last name%%@company.

It was insane to type that, and no one could really work with it. And we had several alias domains.

An IT director actually came to me and said “we can shorten that if you’d like”.

Sure. I ended up with lastname@company. That created a lot of chaos for a few days because my initial username had already been fully propagated. These were the days before niceties like SCIM, so everything was in-house glue, manual work, or obscure third party solutions.

I’d do that every time I get a chance! Ex-HPE black label on my resume from a startup I used to work in that they bought. That company is a complete horror show.

It was weird. It makes me sad because the startup I worked at was really gelling despite the HPE interference. Then they just laid everyone off one day (multiple senior leadership changes later) for no apparent reason.

All the code is Apache 2 so I guess if I really cared I could just revive it... and as it turns out, I don't care that much. Other stuff to do.

Everyone in my entire team - best of engineering as well as every manager left. Underpaying and over subscribing people has become a hallmark over there - it's just a body shop now. Engineers are just numbers on a sheet, to be exploited, chewed and cast aside when they eventually burnout. Upper management has no vision and everyone's constantly firefighting and struggling to catch up with competitors who had long term vision to invest in engineering teams, tooling and infrastructure to scale up the products and people. They want to do in 2 years what took Google and Amazon a couple of decades. Result post-HPE: poor quality, unscalable, cobbled together, barely functional codebase. Before, the startup I worked for had a well balanced rare combination of high performance, modular and well architected codebase. Later the constant push to ship as fast as possible to catch up with competition, completely destroyed the whole thing - teams, codebase and infrastructure. All because they only know how to react and have no idea how to stay ahead of the curve. Buying startups has become their only means of survival as talent stays away from their brand and the only way to justify value to shareholders is to jump from one rock to another, hoping the new one will rocket them away from the black hole they are spiraling into - all they manage to do is stick to the new rock and pull it with them as fast as they were going into the hole they will eventually vaporize in.

Wow

"Engineers are just numbers on a sheet, to be exploited, chewed and cast aside when they eventually burnout."

This is exactly how Epic the Electronic Medical Record company operates, but on new college grads instead of Engineers.

Most of the industry and most series C/D startups are like that. It’s a sad state boys and girls. Once you’ve been here long enough, disillusionment sets in. Corporate greed, (em)powered by shareholder greed, takes top priority.

What do you do then?

I’ve been out of the work rat race for over 3 years now, but I’ll have to go back within a year… and I’m dreading it.

It’s my most valuable skill set, I just want to throw up when I see what the industry has become and I don’t know how to deal with it.

I'm always a little embarrassed when I go to the doctor and tell them I'm a software engineer. I know your EMR system is terrible but if I had done it it would have been better. Sorry :(

(My primary care doctor's office was venture-funded at one point and they actually have a great system. But all my specialists are on MyChart and everything there is always a disaster. Doesn't even have a "preferred name" field, so it has to be noted on my records on a case by case basis and it's ... inconsistent.)

What was it? Since the source code is open source, you probably wouldn't mind telling?

That’s so Brazilian, in the sense of the film[1] not the country.

There’s something of Bob Hoskins’ heating engineer in what you’ve described.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

I have a Brazilian (the country) email story.

This company had a rule where the mail was first name + last name initial. So, timc@company.com if you're Tim Cook. Naturally they ended up hiring a customer success person called "Ana Lopes".

She of course noticed on the first day and complained, but IT dragged their feet until some high-profile customer saw "reply to ANAL" in the automated ZenDesk email and send an angry email to the CEO.

I still raise a glass occasionally to good old William Anker.

What were the details of paying $2000?

Not the commenter, but I would assume forgoing an exit bonus/severance payment that was contingent upon signing a non-disparagement agreement.

Yup exactly. I got my retention bonus and 2 months pay and all that stuff without agreeing to anything, and they offered a little bit more to agree not to disparage them. I'm pretty chatty so decided it wasn't worth it ;)

Question is, how many zeros would it take to convince you otherwise.

Some number, absolutely. I don't have that much integrity ;)

As long as the first digit wasn't also a zero.

Unless that was the strike price

2000 is a pretty low amount. presumably theyd have to spend way more than that to enforce it, so they would NOT spend it, in which case its free money that you shouldnt have turned down because it was way too small for a gag order

I friend of mine was an MD advisor to a bio-tech startup. They wanted her to sign off on things that she didn't feel comfortable signing. I guess she wasn't too happy with them as she gave up a $30K severance so she could disparage them. :-)

Sometimes the knowledge that they’re sweating after you reject the offer is worth quite a lot.

and maybe they change their behavior :) the sacrifice does have value.

>you shouldnt have turned down because it was way too small for a gag order

You're saying that if someone offers me a small amount of money I should accept it, but if someone offers me a large amount of money I should maybe reject it?

That sounds backwards to me.

I think the idea is, assuming you have already resolved to disparage the company

in that case, rightfully you should not take the money regardless of the amount.

but, if it's a tiny amount of money (tiny enough to indicate that the company probably isn't going to bother coming after you in court) then you can maybe consider taking it anyway and accepting the miniscule risk

whereas receiving a vast sum of money would carry a much larger risk of legal action

yeah just game theory. their money was so small that it was meaningless for its intended purpose.

When NCC Group fired me, they characterized the payment for a nondisparagement agreement as "severance", and didn't offer anything else.†

So now I'm free to tell people that they fired me with zero days' notice and zero severance. That's just the way they roll.

I find it funny that their nondisparagement policy specifically causes disparagement that otherwise couldn't have occurred.

† They also gave me an explicit reassurance that I shouldn't worry about my health benefits, because those would remain good until the end of the month. I didn't find this particularly reassuring, since it was Halloween.

> bonus/severance

bribe?

As a European, it is absolutely WILD to me that this is legal.

Non-disparagement clauses are generally legal in Europe, too. In addition, defamation laws may apply to what is said/written about a company, so one should be careful in any case.

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