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The Sirius Open Source Shell Game
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ is trying to dodge liabilities; in the process it misleads staff and bullies staff, leading some colleagues to abrupt departures and others into mental and physical health problems

THE company that my wife and I left earlier this month no longer has an office and no longer pretends to have an office, either. About 7 weeks ago the address was changed for the second time in a month. The current address isn’t even the company’s own.

The legal status of the company is unclear or barely verifiable. People who ask about it receive evasive if not aggressive replies. The video above goes through the latest 3 posts about the company. This hopefully serves as a bit of a cautionary tale. Do not work for companies like these. Spot the signs.

Aside from the bizarre working hours, there were other factors.

Summary: Abuse and bullying by management at Sirius ‘Open Source’ caused health problems for some staff; this is no laughing matter as there can be legal ramifications

THIS series is about halfway through now. It has only been prepared for a number of weeks and more material is being added as we go along.

Speaking for myself, I never took sick leave (or time off work for illness) in my entire time in the company. The same goes for my wife. But colleagues have had different experiences. One was rushed to the hospital with COVID-19 (from which he never fully recovered) and another suffered from abuse by managers. This abuse was causing health issues, in effect harming the health of staff, as we shall show much later in this series. This is what happens when completely untrained (not merely insufficiently or improperly trained) people are assigned or entrusted to manage a company with workers who are difficult to recruit and then retain. Skilled and experienced staff is very hard to find and keep.

As a reminder, managers at Sirius aren’t there for their skills but for nepotism. They posses no relevant skills and clients can notice this. Of course it can in turn lead to contract cancellations and non-renewals.

Here’s the relevant part of the report:

In later years the nepotism (to be expanded upon in the final section) became apparent. Some people were basically implicitly shielded from criticism.

For instance, one colleague was often late to the shift and did not apologise. Her partner did the same thing — basically came online almost half an hour late without apology. This is abject disrespect for colleagues, even people who have been in the company for much longer than them. The three-way relationship involved here will be explained later.

The above examples are merely a small subset and some are based on distant but accurate recollections of a rather dark era of distress. When a conceited manager is accusing, without any actual evidence, people of “cooking” while on the job it doesn’t sound like management but just an attempt to shame staff. As an aside, it was often unclear what the management itself was doing (if anything substantial at all). There was a sentiment that some management people colluded and perpetrated schemes against individual members of staff, not limited to Roy and Rianne. This often backfired. There were also examples of retaliation attempts. One common tactic, which can be witnessed outside the realm of high-tech as well, is to psychologically manipulate or assign people nonsensical things, e.g. asking then to perform totally meaningless jobs that don’t yield anything at all and don’t improve but rather worsen the service, encumbering staff, never to be checked by anyone (as if just to waste time). This happened in Sirius too.

The hypocrisy was not just routine; it was a new standard, e.g. reprimanding people for not picking up the phone fast enough even when there were upstream technical faults (supplier) or when Reception was far slower to pick up the phone, if at all. This sort of hypocrisy or these attempts to shame staff are akin to guilt tripping. Healthy work environments would weed out such behaviour outright.

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When Babysitters Try to Manage Adults
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

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

Summary: Over 3 years ago was ‘peak bullying’ at Sirius ‘Open Source’; technical staff (what’s left of it!) was subjected to false accusations by abusive management — a tradition that would sporadically continue for years to come, as we shall show in weeks to follow

THE messages below are part of a report deposited with the company before my wife and I left for good.

Found below are the complaints from my wife, from another colleague, and also from myself. Those have not been edited; they’re the same as they were in early 2019, except redaction of stuff like people’s names and clients’ names.

This whole subject will be dealt with in much greater depth when we’re done with this report (we’ll explore this again next month).

This needs to be properly and fully documented because it involves people’s lives, individuals’ feelings, professional integrity, matters of law/compliance, and ethical breaches. Slack is mentioned in my own message (one of many on this matter), but Slack in general will be covered a lot much later in this series. A shift towards LastPass and Slack signalled the trend wherein Sirius abandons Open Source and adopts proprietary software instead — a trend that is still ongoing (more and more Open Source is still being abandoned by Sirius).

Below, lacking the full context of the communications, is a response to the Chief Bullies (“accusers”):

To quote what Rianne wrote to the accuser (with redaction):

Hi ????????,

I have read the letter. I will send you the schedule for training dates with ???????? as soon as possible.

I just want to make a separate point here. The ???????? OpenVPN certificate issue wasn’t solely my own fault. I have clearly asked (on the ticket and my handovers) for my colleagues to have a look at it as I don’t have experience dealing with VPN certificates. It was being dragged shift after shift only for us all to eventually know that there are only two people who have actual access to do this authority (that is ???????? and ????????, who was *holiday*). ???????? couldn’t take action on this because he was busy with ????????/projects and ???????? was on holiday for almost the entire month of ????????. So this is just clearly a misunderstanding. I did what I was supposed to do and could not do anything beyond that.

Regarding the ???????? issue:

1. Ticket related to ???????? – this is the reason why ???????? asked for a refund. It’s because we got stuck in handling the issue and I know the reason why. It is because, with all honesty, nobody among us knows about ???????? (no actual experience, it’s not something we can just look up online, it needs experience) and to be fair we did well on all the rest of the tickets. This is why I’m nowadays trying to learn this thing, just so that next time we will be better equipped. So again, I’m not accepting this as if it’s my fault. This is a collaborative job, not to be dealt with by a single person. And I lack ???????? experience.

[...]

Therefore, if ever the company wants to sanction me or send me to disciplinary action, the latter incident was the appropriate one, not ????????/???????? and ????????/???????? issues. For me this doesn’t make sense.

Hope I explained myself according to facts as I don’t want to offend people, more so in the company, Sirius. I have been working in Sirius for six years and I made an error affecting one of the biggest clients… only recently. My first ever mistake as far as I can remember.

Roy and Rianne were not alone. There was an orchestrated witch-hunt which impacted the remaining colleagues, one of whom issued a grievance letter:

Grievance concerning ????????

On ????????, my birthday, I was doing a ticket review and emailed ???????? again to ask her if she’d heard back from ???????? and ???????? about the firewall and cache (Ticket#????????????????????????????????) Later that day I had a very aggressive, bullying reply from ???????? who accused me of not reading her email and implying that I make lots of excuses for not doing so. I have since asked her again to respond but so far she hasn’t done so. As far as I can tell her aggressive response is just deflecting the fact that she hasn’t responded to my repeated request.

Then on the ???????? she emailed to ask if I was completing tasks and I emailed back to say I was, but she emailed again and accused me of not responding to a few of her emails and said that it was becoming a problem. I have replied and asked her for a list of her emails that I haven’t replied to but so far she hasn’t provided it. This is why I believe she is picking on me – she has just made this up and uses it to attack me.

She also accused me of not watching the monitoring – I tried to explain how it works but to no avail and said I need to learn how to do it from others. I have asked what I need to learn, but so far there is no response.

She’s sent me several emails concerning my handovers and each time I have modified them according to what she wants, however nothing is good enough and I think she is just using this as a stick to beat me with. One of the changes she wanted was to include everything from the previous handover – initially I objected as I said things would get lost but she was adamant and ???????? said to me just copy and paste, which I did. Then a few weeks later she asked me why I was copying the previous handover? This is not allowed now!

She is always putting me down: I did the majority of the work with ???????? but she sent us an email saying “If I am honest I cannot blame her decision. Our customer service with ???????? has been awful. We have taken too long to respond to tickets and even longer to solve them. This will be investigated and actions will be taken.” I sent her a report about ???????? putting the blame mostly onto ????????’s shoulders but this has never been mentioned.

This is the second time ???????? has started to pick on me. Last time she told me her and ???????? were going on a course to learn how to treat employees with depression. I have asked what she learnt and is putting into practice but to no avail. I find this very upsetting and stressful and this adds to my depression affecting my personal life as well as my work and it is entirely unnecessary. I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect to be able work in a positive encouraging environment free from bullying. I have said several times now that the way to get the best from me is to encourage me and this helps my skills to develop.

What I would like:

1) I would like her to withdraw the written warning she gave me as I think it was very unfair as I was only doing my best for the client and it was only ???????? who knew that they had refused caching and the firewall before – how was I to know if it wasn’t on the wiki?

2) I would like her to stop changing the format of the handover all the time as I believe she is just using this to beat me with and put me down

3) I would like a guarantee that she will no longer make things up about me and accuse me of things without basis

4) I would like her to start to encourage us as a team instead of picking us off one by one

5) I would like to work in a positive environment – ???????? encourages me a lot and this spurs me on in my work

Roy also expressed concerns, about both moral and technical/legal issues. For instance:

I am deeply concerned, as the employee who has worked the longest in this company (along with ????????), that what we do by outsourcing data is strictly illegal and may be in violation of clients’ terms (we can get sued by them if they find out and we probably have a legal obligation to inform them of the breach and reset all the passwords for security reasons).

My key colleagues, one of whom worked in the company even longer than I have, may have left due to this. It’s putting great strain on the company, which apparently refuses to listen to people who raise legitimate concerns, based on technical if not legal ground as well.

there’s no real intention to move to Open Source like Matrix/Riot, only assurances;

Stay tuned for more tomorrow.

Video download link | md5sum ab839950e7cf004eeab966e8edca96e4
Sinking in Debt
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: In order to better understand what’s happening at Sirius ‘Open Source’ one must properly examine publicly-available financial disclosures, which are obligatory; annual reports show a company that despite shrinking every year is rapidly falling into debt that it can never repay

THE clientele of Sirius and the ethics of the company have been getting worse. I could no longer keep my mouth shut and at the start of this year I decided that I would leave. In its usual fashion (as of late), the company resorted to bullying and intimidation (including efforts this past Monday to censor this series). If anything, this reinforces the need for transparency.

Sirius ‘Open Source’ still uses the term “Open Source” in its name, but it’s rather misleading. The company rejects Open Source for its very own use, never mind clients’. Sort of like the Linux Foundation, which actively abandons Open Source and moves to proprietary. This foundation will be the subject of our next post.

2018 and 2019:

2019 and 2020:

2020 and 2021:

Growing debt, no money left in the bank.

Summary: When the founder of Sirius ‘Open Source’ divorced his wife a new company was formed, almost cashless; there was a lot of debt, but workers could not ask about it

TRUTH be told, the state of Sirius has not been good for years, but treatment of staff worsened a lot after management had changed. Then, there was a tendency to blame staff for failures, even if and when the failures were attributed to actions at the very top. Below we present part 2 of the relevant section of the report. As shown above, as the years went by the company was running out of money and out of time (way too much debt). These figures are all in the public domain. The lesson of the story is, desperate companies may resort to bullying, and the bullying would then be directed at anyone but the management.

The company had not shared with us financial information or contract details (amounts of money) in about half a decade. Financial statements are publicly available, however, in the public domain.

Apparently there was something in the wiki when the CEO’s ex-wife was around, but it’s all gone now. Is the company heavily indebted to a bank? According to the latest statement, the company is very, very deep in debt. Notice witness in the financial documents of the bank: the office manager. Even at that point the company understated the severity of the situation as debt grew every year despite a significant cut in the number of salaried staff. Some names/signatures are rubbed off, but maybe those aren’t relevant. The CEO’s ex-wife is not listed in some of the recent documents. One is left guessing aimlessly. Transparency would be much appreciated.

The office manager refused to tell Roy why the CEO had relocated or was based in the US and was repeatedly evasive when Roy asked. Workers were not told why the company changed registration (like a new company minted; new contracts needed to be signed), so some speculated that post-divorce ownership may have been a motivation. Those were dark times for the company with many questions hanging and an absent CEO, at one point showing up in a rib shirt for a company meeting online. This felt rather inappropriate.

Those observations may not be pleasant to see or hear. But those are very important and they hopefully help explain a certain change in attitude. For instance, the company’s use of Slack probably violates privacy law associated with some of our clients, never mind our own. We are aware of several colleagues who may have left due to management being rude and unpleasant.

The harshest bit was, after key colleagues had left the bullying from management intensified, taking out frustration on the wrong people. For instance, Roy and Rianne were sent to be interrogated. The HR agency that interrogated Roy and Rianne (this lasted for nearly 3 hours!) totally sided with Roy and Rianne and asked important questions about the management; the HR people urged Roy and Rianne to keep record of everything and assumed this thing was likely politically-motivated (or similar). In other words, this backfired spectacularly on the accuser and moreover cost the company a lot of money, never mind the moral damage. No clarify or apology was consequently issued to Roy and Rianne. The accusers were not punished this this misuse of company budget and one remains on the payroll to this day. What are decent people supposed to expect from a company that treats veteran (long-time staff) like that? By that time, Roy had been in the company about 5 times longer than the principal accuser. Roy was encouraged by HR to keep documentation for self-defensive purposes, as per this document.