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When Babysitters Try to Manage Adults
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Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ of the past 4 years has been somewhat of a farce at the top; people with neither skills nor experience in management (far from it!) try to hide their incapability and insecurities by mostly bullying the staff, misusing/abusing authority that was never deserved in the first place

THE recipe for disaster was right there in Sirius for nearly half a decade, i.e. around the company had turned 20 (it was founded in 1998). Managers were appointed not based on skilled but based on nepotism and blind loyalty. When challenged (regarding failure to perform the job or follow the law) the reaction would often be nasty bullying, false accusations, and anything else that can humiliate technical staff, including people who spent many years in the company and did a lot for the company. They stayed up all night, solved issues, didn’t just munch cookies all day long.

I heard similar stories about other companies (even the EPO), but I don’t know these companies firsthand, so I cannot explain how and why they collapsed. The above is my own story and some secondhand account of my wife’s story too. The lesson of the story is, never work for companies where people who aren’t qualified at anything relevant (not managerial skills, not technology, let alone Open Source) rise to positions of power. We recently learned that Elodie Bergot climbed up the ranks again, probably owing to her husband, a longtime friend and ally of Frenchman Benoît Battistelli and Frenchman António Campinos. When it ceases to be about skills and capacity to perform the job (like Mr. Kink bringing three sexual partners into the company) the jobs won’t get done, the pensions won’t get paid, and even very basic things (like holidays) won’t be handled properly. Managing a company of adults isn’t the same as babysitting toddlers; doing the latter is not suitable experience for doing the former, or [cref 167181 managing an office that does not even exist]. Ganging up against innocent people may seem ‘fun’, but these adventurous campaigns of hate mostly drove away key (technical) staff, rendering the company “dead man walking” (far too much debt, nothing left to sell). Management imposters are told by clients that the company is “incompetent” (actual quote). Guess who’s being blamed.

Decadence, when it comes to technology at least, goes years back at Sirius.

“Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.”

–Ernest Hemingway

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