Have you ever encountered something at work so mindbogglingly stupid

[Untcay]

Was she a hot receptionist or an ugly receptionist?

She didnt get a warning, and nobody gave out to her.. so do the math

 

[Ns1]

Daily 15 minute status meetings.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I work for a major telco company, so I see mindbogglingly stupid things all the time.

Don't get me started with the inconsistency of processes between different regions/parts of the company. "oh for that site, this process is this, for that site, it's another process". Exceptions upon exceptions on how to do things just pisses me off. There should be 1 process for 1 thing, and it should apply across the board. On the other hand, the more complicated and stupid things are, the harder it is to outsource the jobs, so there's that.

 

[snoopy7548]

Yeah, but then I just tell myself, "at least you're still getting a paycheck."

 

[zinfamous]

Daily 15 minute status meetings.

I would probably shoot that boss. Just saying.

OK, or maybe kill them slowly by offering them artery-clogging Taiwanese popcorn chicken every day.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah, but then I just tell myself, "at least you're still getting a paycheck."

That's pretty much my attitude with work BS. I don't let it stress me too much. I'm just there for the pay cheque, as long as they keep paying me, I'll keep showing up. Unless of course it's BS to the point of inducing stress. Like being personally attacked etc. Then it's time to find another job. It does not take a strong person to put up with an abusive and stressful environment, it takes a stupid person.

I would probably shoot that boss. Just saying.

OK, or maybe kill them slowly by offering them artery-clogging Taiwanese popcorn chicken every day.

Or kill them by using their BS against them. I had a manager who decided he wanted a daily status log of our minute to minute activities. He basically did not know what we did all day and wanted us to justify our time.

I went into full details, including bathroom breaks. I used to make couric estimations of how big my poop was.

4:17pm-4:26pm: Bathroom break, #2, around 5 courics, minimal wiping. Washed hands with soap.

This log could have pretty much been used as a health study because I included all my meals, coffee etc.

They had to be on paper in a binder and he'd pick them up at end of each week and give them back on monday.
After about a month, he stopped coming to collect them. He probably saw how retarded it was.

 

[Kaido]

And they are fighting me on changing this.

This is exactly why I left corporate work & went back to freelance. I wanted to be held responsible for my plan, not someone else's idiotic implementation (no sugarcoating it here! haha). This way, I can pick & choose what projects I want to take on, especially because there's always an endless supply of people who need help with their computer systems. It's the beeeeest when people are willing to choose your option for how to approach a project they want completed! And it's usually situations like yours, where they're fighting you on really awful implementations that should absolutely NOT exist, lol. Makes you feel like you're being punked!

I'm in the unique position that I don't have to shill for products or have any kind of agenda other than wanting to put in a good, solid system for whatever problem needs to be solved, so managing it & maintaining it down the road become easy because it's setup properly up-front. It can be very, very difficult to do that when you're not an outside contractor because committees happen, people with agendas happen, people who aren't qualified to make the right decisions happen, etc. And then you're the one stuck taking the blame when things go wrong.

One of my motivations for flying solo is that I had a boss who was paranoid about antivirus software & thought it was all a conspiracy where those companies created the viruses themselves in order to get people to buy their products. Maybe that's true, but you still need to buy antivirus if you're running a business system with private data that you don't want to get hacked. He refused to buy any sort of protection for their server fleet or personal desktops, citing that people should just have better browsing habits & then installing a website tracker (but no anti-virus!) on each computer. That was one of those situations where the decision-maker wasn't qualified to be making the decision, because he didn't understand banner-ad hacks & zero-day exploits & all that baloney. Yeah, they got hit pretty hard down the road, and fortunately, it was after I had left. Really unfortunate, but I'm super glad I didn't have to take the blame for that one...

 

[lxskllr]

The draftsman...

 

[Skyclad1uhm1]

Yes. Lean & Agile.

 

[mikeymikec]

By "own Microsoft account" do you mean their personal one or a work one? While you could use a Microsoft account as a work account IMO there is a better way for at least decently sized organizations. Instead it should be setup so they go to the appropriate portal, sign in with their work account (so John@company.com not John@outlook\hotmail.com) which is validated against the company's directory service and they are then given access to appropriate documents, servers, configs etc. This allows easier account management since you have one authoritative account control (in this case AD) that you can use across cloud providers and don't have multiple places to manage account access (O365 users\groups + Azure users\groups + On prem users\groups + AWS users\groups). This also makes it easier for users in that they can use the same credentials when logging in regardless of whether its office.com, portal.azure.com, signing onto their laptop, or aws.amazon.com/console (although there are some potential caveats to aws)

I meant a personal one.

 

[hardhat]

I had one manager change the vacation request system three times in two weeks, then chew out a coworker who put a request in correctly because they didn't follow the older system.

 

[Exterous]

This is exactly why I left corporate work & went back to freelance. I wanted to be held responsible for my plan, not someone else's idiotic implementation (no sugarcoating it here! haha). This way, I can pick & choose what projects I want to take on, especially because there's always an endless supply of people who need help with their computer systems. It's the beeeeest when people are willing to choose your option for how to approach a project they want completed! And it's usually situations like yours, where they're fighting you on really awful implementations that should absolutely NOT exist, lol. Makes you feel like you're being punked!

I mean on the positive side I don't have to deal with it or get them to fix it. I could just leave it as "Ok yeah fine just use your regular account for admin stuff and try not to get phished or hacked" but it seems bad enough that I'll at least leave a doc thats "This is terrible. Please do this to fix the terrible". I've got a few days before I need to decide if I know them well enough to send it right to the CISO

I meant a personal one.

Yep it allows personal use. And probably anyone else in the world with an email account.

 

[mikeymikec]

Yep it allows personal use. And probably anyone else in the world with an email account.

So any personal Microsoft account / e-mail account that is listed on that client's corporate domain as having access could be hacked into due to whatever shortcomings in the setup of that account / provider's security policy, resulting in access to corporate data from anywhere? Not to mention the mixing of personal and business data / metadata in a user's Microsoft account.

While I'm not a fan of cloud integration, and while corporate Microsoft accounts could also be hacked resulting the same level of access, at least the admins at that corporation have more control over the security of those accounts and there's no mixing of data, and more access restrictions could theoretically be applied to corporate MS accounts accessing corporate resources.

What happens when an employee who's been using their personal MS account to access corporate stuff, are any efforts made to 'de-corporate' it, or is a laissez-faire attitude adopted such things? Just aside from not knowing just how much data gets hoovered up by MS that unauthorised users could potentially rifle through at some point.

Please correct me if I'm wrong (and if there are points I haven't mentioned that are just as valid), this is a topic I haven't given consideration to before (because nothing like it has come up for me).

 

[Exterous]

So any personal Microsoft account / e-mail account that is listed on that client's corporate domain as having access could be hacked into due to whatever shortcomings in the setup of that account / provider's security policy, resulting in access to corporate data from anywhere? Not to mention the mixing of personal and business data / metadata in a user's Microsoft account.

Yes although the scope of that data access will depend on how the corporate environment is setup. O365 is also more problematic than Azure. MS expects Admins will take appropriate steps to setup the service. If they do not then defaults make it incredibly easy to save files to OneDrive or an internally 'public' SharePoint site. Both of those options take the place of local storage at the top of O365/Office 2016 "Save As" options so we see people pick them by habit all the time. This is more problematic at Universities since many allow alumns to keep their email addresses - which are often federated into their O365 environment. So those Personnel Review files you thought you saved locally? You just saved them to your SharePoint site which is open to anyone who currently works there, ever attended school there, and potentially external users. There are also all kinds of really insecure things you can do in terms of inviting guest users, allowing anonymous links, allowing external users to request access etc.

In Azure they would need to actually be added as an owner of a resource. But since the people in my OP are required to use their non-admin account to do admin stuff in Azure it is much easier to compromise an account, get access to Azure and then add yourself as an external user to their entire Azure environment. So even if they fix the compromised account they still need to find all the accounts you added. I mean sure you could always do all kinds of bad things with admin access but now all you need to do is add myaccount@yahoo.com to everything which is way easier than messing with ports, installing backdoors etc.

You could also very easily accidentally give someone access. So you type in john to give access and hit enter "knowing" that that is the correct john account to add since its the only one in AD. But it actually resolved to john@gmail.com first so you just gave an external user access.

What happens when an employee who's been using their personal MS account to access corporate stuff, are any efforts made to 'de-corporate' it, or is a laissez-faire attitude adopted such things? Just aside from not knowing just how much data gets hoovered up by MS that unauthorised users could potentially rifle through at some point.

In certain situations you can have two microsoft accounts under the same email address: A work one and a personal one. When you log in to certain areas MS gives you a prompt to select the one you want and directs you to different document\site\etc repositories. I'm not entirely sure when that is possible - usually its setup so people are just directed to a federated login page and its all corporate all the time.

 

[snoopy7548]

This is exactly why I left corporate work & went back to freelance. I wanted to be held responsible for my plan, not someone else's idiotic implementation (no sugarcoating it here! haha). This way, I can pick & choose what projects I want to take on, especially because there's always an endless supply of people who need help with their computer systems. It's the beeeeest when people are willing to choose your option for how to approach a project they want completed! And it's usually situations like yours, where they're fighting you on really awful implementations that should absolutely NOT exist, lol. Makes you feel like you're being punked!

I'm in the unique position that I don't have to shill for products or have any kind of agenda other than wanting to put in a good, solid system for whatever problem needs to be solved, so managing it & maintaining it down the road become easy because it's setup properly up-front. It can be very, very difficult to do that when you're not an outside contractor because committees happen, people with agendas happen, people who aren't qualified to make the right decisions happen, etc. And then you're the one stuck taking the blame when things go wrong.

One of my motivations for flying solo is that I had a boss who was paranoid about antivirus software & thought it was all a conspiracy where those companies created the viruses themselves in order to get people to buy their products. Maybe that's true, but you still need to buy antivirus if you're running a business system with private data that you don't want to get hacked. He refused to buy any sort of protection for their server fleet or personal desktops, citing that people should just have better browsing habits & then installing a website tracker (but no anti-virus!) on each computer. That was one of those situations where the decision-maker wasn't qualified to be making the decision, because he didn't understand banner-ad hacks & zero-day exploits & all that baloney. Yeah, they got hit pretty hard down the road, and fortunately, it was after I had left. Really unfortunate, but I'm super glad I didn't have to take the blame for that one...

This is the primary reason why I eventually want to go into business for myself, though it's probably unlikely. I want to be in control of my success or failure, and actually have a say in the direction of everything. I see dumb decisions being made all the time that will cost us time and money down the road, but the people making them have more authority than me and are more likely to be listened to.

 

[Darwin333]

Architects, nuff said.

Granted there are a few good ones that don't mind admitting that they don't know what they don't know but they are relatively few and far between. The rest have a "fake it till you make it" attitude and that just doesn't work out very well.

 

[IBMJunkman]

When I started to work for a County I heard talk of running ‘payroll’. I thought it was our paychecks. Wrong! It was the welfare checks.

 

[ElFenix]

My boss claimed that vodka was a type of whiskey.

 

[clamum]

My boss claimed that vodka was a type of whiskey.

Lmao, oh billy

 

[IronWing]

My boss claimed that vodka was a type of whiskey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H5uWRjFsGc

 

[TheVrolok]

Every. Single. Day.

 

[ultimatebob]

Yeah... you don't really need to fight a customer on stuff like that. You just document your findings in a straightforward manner in your documentation... and then wait for them to fail their next security audit when they discover what you just discovered.

If you're lucky, they'll bring you back to fix the issue when try are forced to by the auditors

 

[brianmanahan]

what the heck, exterous is a supermod now?!