Comment by general1465 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by general1465 | Hacker News Reader

I still remember when my previous employer has lost domain for like 3 months. Boss and his business partner have setup company and I have joined later. Business partner left.

- I was trying to figure out who have access to domain X? It is not on AWS and by whois it is under some random registrar in Europe. I got just shrug from boss. Everything works so why bother?

- After 3 years of scratching my head and try to repeatedly get it to attention we finally lost the domain (card probably expired), everyone is panicking, because emails has stopped working, so email based 2FA are not working either which has cascading impact on all services. And I am just raging in my office because I was trying to prevent this situation for 3 years to no avail.

- The European registrar did not cooperate at all. We have offered them good chunk of money, no response (weird?), eventually domain got moved around and reregistered by various bots and domain companies and I was able to get it again via domain backorder.

I have left shortly after because this was just ridiculous lack of care with good amount of reactive behavior as a cherry on the top. My take away from this is that you can't change the culture. If top is bunch of sloppy clowns, whole company is going to be the same.

> My take away from this is that you can't change the culture

I've seen the culture changing in some special circumstances a couple times in previous companies, and honestly all of them were ugly: 1) Demographic replacement (having more people saying yes and out-vote the legacy employees)

2) Hired guns from the top to the bottom to shake the system (we called in a company those managers "007" because they used to have licence to fire).

3) Non-compliance stable as a discipline method for the "legacy employees" (very adopted in Central Europe)

4) "Train-your-replacement" as a coercion method for collaboration

5) Some modified version of the "madogiwa-zoku" but instead of looking to the window, they push people to go for the "metawork," like organizing events, being a developer advocate in conferences, assuming roles as "community managers," or being used as a "donkey token" to be used in conferences or panels of "_______________ in tech."

The last one made me chuckle. Worked in Japan, didn't see many madogiwa zoku (probably because I only worked at startups) although it was talked about a lot. But I guess community manager-esque position did exist, and now it makes sense why so many big company blokes that went to tech meetup came off as very incompetent

I'd love this. I honestly need to train my spirit, and "please stare at the wall" would be amazing for my dopamine-fried brain.

> Non-compliance stable as a discipline method

Can you expand? I don't understand what this means.

It's some low-risk/consequence project/initiative that is designed to receive people that will be fired due to lack of compliance and/or collaboration with the new management.

Once we had a German colleague that was not so collaborative in sharing the knowledge about some specific parts of the application, and the Tech lead replaced her MacBook with a Windows 10, and she only can write PRs related with DocStrings.

This seems kind of childish to be honest. Why not just fire the person?

Psychotic IMO. We will fire you but only after you've been publicly humiliated? Who thinks to do this kind of shit?

As has been stated above, I’m guessing in this specific example it would’ve been due to the rather strict labor laws, which I’m not going to comment my opinion on, just to clarify/explain: Here (Germany), you can basically not fire someone if your company has >10 full-time employees, and they’re not actively misbehaving (or under trainee/probationary status). Yep, this statement means exactly what it reads.

So I’m guessing that’s the reason for this “passive firing” method.

I mean I'd guess it was because it's somewhere with a higher bar to firing. Redundancy or dismissal are both much more complicated (expensive) than simply making it very clear you'd like someone to leave.

Because firing people in Germany is a multi-year process that requires (among many other things) paying for a complete training course in all job-relevant skills under the assumption that any incompetence is caused by insufficient training.

What you say and what they think are not the same, usually your meaning and intention is drowned out by their pre-existing assumptions and incentives/motivations. You have to resonate with their assumptions and incentives for them to "hear" your meaning and intention.

I’ve seen 3 and 4 in Europe, 5 is the perfect encapsulation of shelving disguised as a sh*it sandwich. 1 and 2 are difficult to pull. YMMV

>>If top is bunch of sloppy clowns, whole company is going to be the same.

This happens so often at big companies as well. Management is always assumed to be correct, and the pay grade argument always kicks in(They are paid more because you are beneath them). And this starts to show up everywhere. You can't take any initiative without sanction from the top, and they are often clueless as to what the ask is. Most of the times its rejected just to assert authority, and not on the grounds of merit.

Top bosses are also very envious and proactively trying to kill rising talent out of fear- people better than them, will replace them. To that end no good thing ever happens, if you push too hard you will be eliminated in interest of self preservation.

So by and large no good thing is ever suggested, or tried or happens. Eventually until whole business(es) die out. This happens in every company, no matter what companies claim about hiring, retaining and promoting talent. This is just how every place works.

No one person can save a company, but... one person at the top can certainly sink a company.

>And I am just raging in my office because I was trying to prevent this situation for 3 years to no avail...... My take away from this is that you can't change the culture.

This happens a lot in large company. And isn't just a singular case or a company, but any organisation or even countries. Just look at governments around the world.

You cant help those who dont want to be helped.

The biggest problem of any problem is people dont think it is a problem.

And may be controversially, you cant stop the pendulum from swinging and change its direction. The only way to fasten the cycle is to help it swing to its extreme before it swings back.

IDK, I think this is too negative a take. It's easy to blame those in charge for not realising that your problem was the important one but ... how many problems were they being presented with?

Sure, in this instance, they prioritised the wrong problems. But perhaps the case wasn't made clearly enough to make it apparent why this was as big a deal as it was.

I think Occam's razor explains this: the majority of people are incompetent.

People get to positions of power through many means and very few of those are related to competence. Be it nepotism, boot licking, friendship, inheritance, people failing upwards or just plain luck, these all lead to the same result: incompetent people making decisions.

Add to that the fact that it's very easy to hide incompetency in large organizations and we have the perfect recipe for these kinds of disasters.

Even on small organizations this is common. I've seen plenty of incompetent people getting funding for startups making all the wrong decisions. They're good at selling some BS to investors and that's about it, but now they're at the helm of an organization with people under them. Another good example is people opening businesses from their successes in other areas (I made money here, now let me open a restaurant with zero experience in this industry) or even out of their parent's pockets.

Incompetence is almost always the culprit.

No real sysops there?

This, many times this. If you encounter pushback from everywhere – leave, don’t spend your life energy fighting bullshit.

I won't add much, but if this happens you must leave. Raise the risk. Document it. Document your recommendation and their decision, even if not replying or not making a decision was their decision. Tie it up with a bow on it, keep a copy, and leave.

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