Management material
Fuck it up, make it someone else's problem, take the glory and leave before you are really found out.
Yishi has managlement potential
Icon: If only this was a joke
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Absolutely not a joke. In education ( in the UK at least, don't know about Japan) it's a career path.
I long ago lost count of the number of ambitious (don't really want to be) teachers and exteachers-turned-advisors who arrived in a school, launched a shiny new panacea then buggered off to bigger and better things leaving the actual teachers to clear up the mess.
There was even one such who actually stayed with the same authority, moving on ever upwards, who could look a room full of experienced teachers in the eye and without a hint of a blush explain why the latest new thing was brilliant and the old thing was obviously rubbish from the start, even though a few weeks previously she'd spent her days actively promoting said rubbish and explaining why the programme previous to it had been obviously rubbish, even though...... (rinse and repeat scheme after scheme).
Absolutely not only in education. Pretty much anywhere with a division between management and workers there's scope for people who have never done the work to tell you how you're doing it wrong and they know better.
Outsource, offshore, inshore, I source.
And those people who fail upwards, promoted where they supposedly can't cause any trouble.
Oh yes. We had a management consultant of the of the "If he's that good why isn't he managing a major company" variety ( The managerial equivalent of people who sell courses on how to get rich - but why then do they need to sell courses.....).
Said consultant thought that "Management is a profession in its own right and you don't need to know anything about the business". Nice chap. very enjoyable afternoons away from the job. And it was useful talking to him about specific staff issues. But I wouldn't have let him manage an ice-cream machine in winter. Let alone a bunch ot truculent, experienced, highly trained specialist teachers.
I remember in uni (early 90s) helping a fellow student recover is work from the Temp folder in the public use computer after he somehow deleted it from his private network space.
Although thankful for my help, he was horrified his entire work was available to all and sundry, if so inclined.
Having worked in a university in the late 90s, if a student had a "private network space", then it would have been backed up. While getting it out of Temp probably retrieved more of the doco's recent edits, calling on the student support helpdesk would probably have resulted in a restore from backup, at least from the previous night.
I lost count of the times students came to me with a mangled 3.5" floppy pleading for me to help salvage their work .
"Why is your only copy on a floppy" I'd say
"Teachers told us to"
"Why is your their only copy on a floppy" I'd say to the teachers
"Because learning to use a floppy disc is part of the syllabus" they'd say
.
Try as I might I could not convince any of the teachers of the stupidity of this or the benefits of the network home drive that each student was equipped with.
I used to get students. "My dissertation was on this, but it's gone!"
I think I would get about half of them. Sometimes off the floppy, sometimes from other places and a couple of times by OCR'ing a draft.
The funniest one was he had lost an opening photograph of his place of education. I used a well known Photoshop alternative. I had to replace whatever mess was at the front by extending the brickwork. Apparently, later, someone asked him why he had bricked up his university front entrance!
Soldered a lot of plugs back on to USB memory sticks for this reason too, student’s coursework deemed sufficiently important to justify this use of my time. Learned to just pull the data off and throw the stick away otherwise I’d find them still using it weeks later!
The ones with snapped circuit boards were a particularly good challenge, which to be honest I used to enjoy. Nice break from resetting passwords and putting keyboards back to their correct layout.
This.
We provided students with plenty of filespace, dutifully backed up to various products.
Did they use it? No.
Trusting their work to single instances of floppies, then USB sticks, with disks contaminated with dust, liquids of dubious origin, and other such aids to lose data, we were often challenged as to why we didn't back their floppies/USBs up. Many of them forgot their induction paperwork that stated. "We backup all network drives, but we can't backup your removable media. Please, Please, PLEASE store a copy on your network space, it will save you a lot of hassle and tears in the future."
It wasn't just limited to students. We've had admins that saved all their work to a local drive, which promptly died, a professor who managed to delete a lifetimes work, rather than use the ample network storage (we realised that this would happen, so a copy of Retrospect and a lot of disks connected to the server meant we could recover his work to the previous day.)
We tried in that battle, but we knew that for every scenario we dreamt up, the users would find new and improved ways to ignore it.
I now only have to worry about my family and their flagrant disregard of backups. Even they don't listen, till it's too late.
A coworker had a Win10 update this week and lost all his OneDrive files. Including both recycle boxes and the retention hold library (policy is for all deleted items to be kept there, period). Of course, he had followed IT recommendations to keep everything in OneDrive, since it's backed up. Turns out IT can't restore OneDrive, as they were relying on Microsoft to be doing those backups...
The IT of your company must be REALLY bad, because Micros~2 communicates clearly in all admin-targeted and sales-targeted information that you NEED to have an extra onedrive backup, whichever backuplan you use. It does NOT state that onedrive is backup up by itself. But Micros~3 does state that all data is at least stored three times. But triple-mirroring is not a backup, which your IT should know. And even if they had an extra backup tool or backuplan: Did they ever test it? Is it monitored? Do backup failures generate an alarm to be ignored?
Sorry for your coworker, but that blame is not on Micros~4.
Of course, he had followed IT recommendations to keep everything in OneDrive, since it's backed up. Turns out IT can't restore OneDrive, as they were relying on Microsoft to be doing those backups...
We are currently being migrated to the abomination that is Windows 11. Next up is our home drives - the content to be moved over to OneDrive.
I was on a support of a customer where they reported that the system kept losing data (money transfers). They were very upset and demanded some come and fix it - bearing in mind if it was a bug, we could not fix it if we were on their site - they just wanted a hostage so they could tell senior management that the problem was being worked on.
We got the data logs, and I could see that every midnight a userid was issuing the purge command.
When we told them it suddenly went very quiet.
A week later we had a phone call with them and they apologised and said that someone in the test team had put in automation for that command in for the test systems, and it had accidentally been copied to production.
"Several people have had parts of their anatomy removed and hung on the wall for all to see"
Good gracious, who sets up an automation that contains the word "delete" or "purge" without triple checking everything and pressing enter with the sweatiest palms the world has ever seen?
Especially because he should've checked the test system and would've seen nothing was being purged. That's a huge red flag.
> Good gracious, who sets up an automation that contains the word "delete" or "purge" without triple checking everything and pressing enter with the sweatiest palms the world has ever seen?
Oh you poor sweet summer child. Unfortunately, LOTS of people. "it's just a purge job, nothing to worry about"
> Especially because he should've checked the test system and would've seen nothing was being purged. That's a huge red flag.
Nope, he just shrugs his shoulders and says the purge job isn't working, and walks off. "I'll fix it next week"
BTDTGTTS. Hell, I have half a closet of those t-shirts.
One of the very few good decisions Perforce has made is that the "delete from database" command is "obliterate".
It's long, and carries a very clear meaning.
Shame about the rest of the product. It's sad how many times they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Especially because he should've checked the test system and would've seen nothing was being purged.
From TFA; the purge job was copied from the test environment. So presumably it was working as intended in test.
I, of course, have never copied anything from my test environment into prod. Erm, except for that one time when I ended up changing a name to "test" across everything. Oops, at least it was a quick fix.
Just make sure your comprehensive and regular backups work, then you can restore purged data if it's required.
Any checks and balances you put in will create a false sense of security that will come back to bite either you or one of your decedents later on.
If you're purging data that might need to be restored without a backup then you're probably doing it wrong.
Storage is cheap.
Purge & delete is a good practice for garbage collection. Especially when dealing with something important...like financial information. The more stuff that ends up stored for a 'just in case', the more likely it is to be purloined by a threat actor and ransomed off.
Backups go where backups are supposed go. Leaving copies of stuff laying around is not a viable backup strategy. It doesn't matter that storage is cheap, delete it.
This. 100 times. Where I work GDPR is something we have to be very aware of, yet I'm still having to hammer in to people that keeping large chunks of personal data "just in case" isn't clever. If (, well, 'when' should be the assumption) we have a security breach there should be as little as possible there and it should be as hard as possible to get to it.
100%
You should never store data you don't need.
The point I was (badly) trying to make is that you also shouldn't based deletion of that data on arbitrary rules (such as a test system will never have more than x rows).
It's much better to use technology to your advantage, storage is cheap, so make use of that. Backups these days can take many forms, you can snapshot even very high traffic systems quickly, they can be done frequently, and don't have to live too long, maybe a day or less.
This means you then don't need arbitrary rules around if you do or don't delete, as you have a day 'oh shit' buffer for that one time someone's muscle memory clicked 'yes' when they meant 'no'.
I think it was Oracle 5 or 6 where I learnt (the hard way) to do a SELECT COUNT() from table where something; before using the magic of the the copy/paste buffer to replace the select clause with DELETE FROM or UPDATE —- SET —-. After another brain fade or two I learnt to put the delete/update statement after BEGIN TRANSACTION, then check the table with a select statement before committing (or rolling back) the transaction…
An even better tip:
Before running a new DELETE or UPDATE, just replace the first word with SELECT and inspect the result.
Even just checking a few hundred rows usually flags any errors.
As does the Temp space barfing on what was was supposed to be a precision strike :) (Monster predicates: 2 step: take just a # of rows AND precede with the same statement with COUNT(..) wrapping the col.list.)
Done that for 30 years +, along with, and this is particularly useful.
NEVER SCRIPT EDITS IN SQL SERVER
Instead script creates and make edits in them. If you hit the run button by mistake the create will fail whinging about object already exists, and once you are ready simply change the create to an edit. Saved my ass often enough to be worth the small amount of extra effort, particularly if some bugger interupts you in mid flow.
And speaking of mid flow, never stand next to a co-worker in the urinals. That way neither of you will be disappointed.
If you think that including purge/delete in a test system and then migrating it to production is bad, try this: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2019/11/08/False-alarm-1979-NORAD-scare-was-one-of-several-nuclear-close-calls/7491573181627/. Starting a war games scenario on a production machine was so spectacularly stupid that even a legendary idiot such as Leonid Brezhnev was able to correctly point out just how appalling it was to the US prez.
Yes that would often work, on the basis that the licence key software was set to expire on a certain date as measured by what the PC ‘told it the date was’. Roll the date back, the software assumes that the licence is still valid and, well happy days!
But assuming that changing the date on the PC would somehow and magically revert the HDD to an earlier point in time, is really a whole new grade of ‘not actually understanding how this shit works’ level!
My guess would be that he heard someone say "I had to restore my PC back to last week" (e.g. "System Restore" or similar, older, third party mechanism like "Go Back" from days of yore, or he may have heard of "Mac Time Machine" or something). That's about as generous as I can get here lol
"I do have a dim memory of changing the date on the pc in order to get an old licence key to work or something ...."
Yes indeed, have seen that. A "critical" utility (probably could have been replaced by a macro or something) that couldn't have its license renewed because the author had gone out of business many years before. SOP was to set the system clock back before launching the utility. Unfortunately it was also SOP to forget to undo the clock change, so all hell broke loose in the main application when customer orders were processed and calculations were made off the system date. I don't think anybody ever sent out paperwork with such a wrong date, but it wasn't a simple fix because the database did a lot of updates that were not easy to undo. Call support.
These days with all the certificate checking it's possible to render a system unbootable by changing the system clock. Hopefully someone has the BIOS password handy.
One way to force "hardware locked" key servers to work on other hardware, was to source a (mostly identical) machine, and then change the MAC address to match whatever the license server used to have.
Since you're generally only doing this if the previous hardware went down in a very specific manner, at a time the license server provider can't update your information, that MAC won't be in use anywhere.
Now that motherboards tend to have software visible serial numbers stored somewhat securely, that "fix" is more difficult if not impossible.
What? You thought "Trusted Platform Module" meant _you_ could trust your computer?
I was on support for a Dealer Management System. ERP for car dealerships.
I was supporting an application on VMS.
It had a report scheduler that allowed you to chedule a report to be run at a particular time or on a repeating schedule.
Think cron.
Customer called in one day wondering why a report was taking so much time to finish.
She new it would take an hour or so to finish running but she scheduled it a few minutes before with a start time of a couple of hours ago so it should have had the time to complete by now.
I explained to her that VMS is a very capable OS and our software had some cool bells and whistles, but time travel was not implemented as available functionality.
She was apprpriately embarresed.
Many times over the years following I asked her how the weather was on Gallifrey.
Dry old hole if "Hell Bent" & "Heaven Sent" are any indication - doesn't look like it had rained in those last 4 billion years.
Not exactly a holiday destination I would have thought. Full of portentous, self important effete berks flouncing about in fancy dress which is a bit like the UK when I think about it - equally appalling weather too.
Rassilon...Rishi next.
Not heard about changing time and date for restoring files, but have used that trick in the past when dealing with evaluation licences.
Also, in the past, we had to use McAfee Endpoint Encryption software. When there was a problem and we had to decrypt or sort out something, McAfee had this "code of the day" feature. In practise we had to ask the boss' son to call them and get the code - whcih could take ages. I did set the date in the BIOS to a previous day that we had the code for - and it worked!!!
Anyway, son goes to McAfee for a training course and blabed about my workaround and they weren't too pleased aparently!! Not that I cared much - on a bad day I will often watch John M's video about removing the anti-virus software
30 years ago, my Reserve unit was tasked with completing a 2 hour CBT course. The proof was a 'certificate' printout in our file. We had two PC's, 40 people and a weekend to do it in. My warrant told me to make it happen.
The certificate file was easily edited, but after I did so, it wouldn't print. I spent a while playing around with different ideas, and finally noticed that the original file had a date of 1/1/80. Aha! I took my copy, changed the date, and it printed away. An hour later everyone had their certificates.
Beer because I never did get that beer the warrant promised me. He claimed I was futzing around until he offered that as a reward.
A certain North-East England ex-council housing firm has the same sort of fail upwards crap.
Basically a horrible woman decided "poorer" residents would have their yards and gardens taken off them for "development" and they could 'rent' them back for a modest fee...which wouldn't be covered by housing benefits basically. She tried to create a top/lower tier of residents.
She also tried to get people who needed fence replacements in private houses adjoining association houses to pay her cheques made out to CASH or cash itself (elderly people asked to basically put £750 in her pocket) or they'd make sure the house next-door continued to have a ratty old fence.....
She's a director with them now, because she stepped on dozens of peoples faces to get there.