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Impact of Sirius Nepotism
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Today we focus on nepotism at Sirius ‘Open Source’ — a subject we’ll cover some more tomorrow; in the video above I add stories that were left out or only partly covered in the text

AS noted in Rianne’s departure message, she was bullied and falsely accused. She wasn’t part of the “clique”. The “clique” always sacrifices those outside the “clique” first. It protects the salaries of the loved ones.

As the video above explains, managers started bringing relatives and sexual partners into the company in spite of a lack of qualifications. Over time this would render the company increasingly incapable of carrying out actual work.

As it stands at the moment, we’re talking about a company that has managers who pay themselves a large salary while sliding or shelving away the debt (or growing deficit) into the shell of a company, likely to dodge its financial liabilities some time in the future. A lot of the staff was underpaid and for over a decade the salary wasn’t increased to keep up with either seniority or inflation.

The sad decline of the company ought to be explained. There are companies out there that made similar mistakes and managers claiming that they took a paycut (without ever holding themselves accountable for their mistakes) is a symptom of infantile administration. We reckon the company might file for “administration” (insolvency) some time before it turns 25. The offshore shells (US) serve no real purpose anymore. Gates Foundation never intended to salvage the CEO’s business.

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The Very Ugly Collapse of Sirius
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The Sirius ‘Open Source’ series is now dealing with the more interesting “stories from the trenches”; with over 20,000 views of the Wiki alone after less than 40 days (see above) it seems clear that people are interested in the 21 years of experience my wife and I had inside a company that claims to be “Open Source” (things changed for the worse, so we must investigate/examine why, knowing this can happen to other companies including large ones such as Red Hat)

THIS week the series entered its final phase. We shall be gathering remaining material/stories and explain them in a more generalised context, seeing that some readers (whom we heard from) experienced similar things in present or past workplaces. There are things here that people can relate to even if they worked for other companies in other countries.

Some time this month we shall cover a likely illegal contract-signing ‘ceremony’ and explain the context of Sirius ‘expanding’ to the US (because it was failing in the UK and the marriage of the CEO was collapsing). The above video explains how both my wife and I were being bullied by management just weeks or at most a month after a shell was created in the US after the Gates Foundation had secretly (under NDA) offered money to the CEO. Only a few years prior to that he told me (face to face in Alton Towers) that Microsoft had contacted him over the phone to complain about me (regarding things I wrote in Techrights). Funny how Microsoft likes to complain about you behind your back… to your boss. I only found out and wrote about it years later. It was risky to even mention this, but I did it anyway.

Therer’s a lot more information in the above video — stuff that wasn’t covered in the text earlier on. We’re far from done here and there’s still an ongoing fact-finding investigation.

“Those with long memories might suggest a parallel between Rick’s position and mine when in 1997, I was sitting on the XML Working Group and co-editing the spec, on a pro bono basis as an indie consultant. Netscape hired me to represent their interests, and when I announced this, controversy ensued. Which is a nice way of saying that Microsoft went berserk; tried unsuccessfully to get me fired as co-editor, and then launched a vicious, deeply personal extended attack in which they tried to destroy my career and took lethal action against a small struggling company because my wife worked there. It was a sideshow of a sideshow of the great campaign to bury Netscape and I’m sure the executives have forgotten; but I haven’t.”

–Tim Bray

Summary: Sleek like an eel, the so-called ‘founder’ and his pathologically-lying right-hand man have turned the company into a multi-headed hydra that offloads debt from one shell to another while refusing to cover financial liabilities

MONTHS ago it was becoming apparent that Sirius would not survive for much longer. Public filings (we’ve already included some PDFs and screenshots of them^*) made that rather clear. Even the company admitted it was having difficulties. It held online meetings with staff in order to discuss this. Well, the company is quite frankly broke and not worth suing for severance (it would likely have nothing to pay out, even after losing, according to our lawyers^**; so the short story is that layoffs or resignations would be similar).

Just to be very clear on this matter, the company does not wish to issue compensation. It said that in letters. It thinks it can dodge its obligations and has constructed a chain of shell companies, which further complicate litigation. The company wanted to make it all seem legitimate; so it meticulously issued or manufactured some false pretexts, even bogus scenarios (months in the making already). It probably reckoned it would be cheaper to start a witch-hunt than to do things properly. We still have them saying on the record (audio/video) that compensation would be considered, but that was just what HR told them to say. There was probably no intention to ever consider that. We have those bits on record (compensation mentioned several times^***).

To avoid repetition, the company has engaged in a lot of chronic lying and false promises in 2022^****. There were contradictory statements (like claims of recruitment in the US, later refuted by what the managers told me upon asking). It’s hard to even keep track of the lies. Many didn’t try to keep track; they were too busy trying to cope with a sort of ‘jet lag’ — an integral part of the job. We’re talking about technical people who are idle a lot of the time because they work overnight, devoted to complex tasks of monitoring many things and responding accordingly — all this while paid laughably little. Some cooks who work in daytime (9 to 5) get paid more. It’s worth noting that they use us for marketing in their site. They use or even exploit our credentials, even more than a month after we left. The company wouldn’t get away with it several years ago. To remind readers, there’s also programming done, but that falls under “projects” and has another pay grade. For projects, the staff needs a proper daytime job (without distractions such as alerts; they’re not sysadmins) and with decent pay.

Speculations aren’t as good as facts, but at Sirius speculating was often required due to a lack of transparency. The footnotes below contain a mixture of facts and speculations.

____
^* We’ve also shown PDFs with names and balances redacted; some demonstrate the nepotism, which we’ll revisit later this week. Sirius is basically run like a family thing. Incorporation of the current shell is dated “16 Oct 2017″ (with “Starting value 1 pound (minimum)”). We’ve long assumed this shell was meant to help dodge liability to the soon-divorced wife. The ‘founder’ has had two failed marriages with 2 daughters from each. The second wife was very much in control of the ‘founder’ (say former insiders who worked in the office and saw it firsthand). The ‘founder’ is (openly) a Donald Trump fan (there are Trump support tweets). Not a huge deal, but does help explain a thing or two at times. Jobs were advertised by him and the company’s account in Twitter a few years ago; that said the company was also US-based and said laughable things like us being American leaders in the area (we have had almost no clients and staff there!); the salary is very low for the skills level required and is shown in USD (currency) as well as GBP. The official Sirius Twitter account used to say US/UK; this is no longer the case. No idea why (possibly aborted plans), but the plausible explanation is that the company was just inconsistently presenting itself to potential/prospective clients, depending on what they wanted to hear or believe.

^** To give some more hypothetical scenarios, let’s say we found a way to sue the company (it is hiding). The lawyers told us a legal case of this nature can take 12 months to conclude and if by that point the debt collectors decide which liabilities are paid first, then the news isn’t good; a court case (legal bills and so on), even if a resounding loss for the company, would be at the bottom of the priorities, the bottom of the list (or liabilities to pay off). So it would be a pyrrhic victory for us, no financial and moral damages paid, not even our legal fees covered. This hopefully helps explain the decision to resign. The resignations gave us more freedom to speak out too (no agreement to keep silent). One notable issue is, the company can pretend to be broke in one shell while hiding some assets in another. There’s this ‘monkey business’ modus operandi which is to separate companies into profitable and non-profitable, then pick one part with no liability and throw out the rest. Maybe this is applicable here. We’ve found no compelling evidence though.

^*** We started making our own recordings because the management lied about providing recordings of particular meetings in 2019. It lied about such transparency, so I started making my own recordings of such meetings.

^**** Last year we had this meeting for “re-infrastructuring”, followed by several more meetings. They pretended things would be OK but were planning to dismantle the company and turn it into a kind of ‘consultants’ reseller, looking not to pay staff, seeking advice for back-stabbing (from external HR firm, months before spying on us).

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Sirius Stuck in Clown Computing
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Sirius does not know what it’s doing. How can Sirius advise clients on hosting when it cannot even do its own hosting right? Colleagues tried to push “AWS” to clients, but I kept standing in the way, saying it would cost a fortune and erode security/privacy (over time I was vindicated as bills constantly soared)

THE VIDEO above is relatively long but it could be far longer. I have a lot of things to say about the shortcomings with clown computing, based on firsthand experience for over a decade. The short story is, avoid clown computing any time it’s possible to shun clown computing. The clown computing pushers (marketing) are untrustworthy; they “appeal to authority” and they’ve long targeted gullible non-technical managers.

Disregard their misleading vocabulary (like “serverless”). Call it “clown computing” and don’t say “on-prem”; they’ve utilised this for upselling, exploiting a new buzzword for what was done, correctly, for decades already! A lot of that isn’t even “self-hosted” (another relatively new term); it’s like getting a subdomain in GitHub(.com), which is proprietary and controlled by just one company. There’s that same subdomain mentality of Slack, as it gives false impression (illusion) of control, like “guilds” for chat. All that centralisation is corrosive and very risky. It’s also expensive in the long run (I give the example of FeedBurner, which almost literally burned its own users). When the hosting is controlled by one company the user is at the mercy of this one company; moving from one company to another is often impossible or very expensive. This entrapment is exploited by raising prices ad infinitum — to the point where it becomes so unbearable that the providers lose more clients than they gain in additional surpluses (price hikes). In the case of GitHub, the hosting is controlled by one company; the platform and code are also controlled by that same company (Microsoft).

People need to talk about these issues in abstract and topological terms, only to be challenged by weak-minded folks who speak in buzzwords and brands (like “AWS” and “Amazon”). I’ve sadly found myself unable to communicate these issues with people who act like salesmen rather than software engineers.

Putting aside financial aspects, AWS has technical issues and occasional downtimes, as noted in passing above (in the video). Lots and lots of examples of that could be given and presented in full. Moving from one’s own servers to Amazon (et al) is as technically sanitary as giving up on toilets at home, choosing to use public toilets instead (“as a service”).

All in all, the video above tells some stories “from the trenches” that we don’t plan to write about (they’re not that scandalous anyway). It does not merely repeat what was covered in the article earlier on.

Summary: The Sirius ‘Open Source’ management was dumb enough to replace the in-house infrastructure with overpriced (and outsourced) junk that did not even work as expected

THE report we deposited over a month ago already covered the fiasco of outsourcing (gradual) where I had worked for nearly 12 years. We don’t want to repeat what was already covered. I discussed this in person with the main individual responsible for the awful decision. He said they envisioned it would save money, but based on bills that I saw it was beyond insane to suggest so! Why would any sane company throw about 10,000 pounds down the drain every year? A modest second-hand server can be purchased for just 1,000 pounds and we didn’t need to buy any. We already had servers!!! We had an ISP, too.

When the company’s “cloud” (or “clown”) bills keep blowing upwards (upward to almost a thousand pounds a month), for something that started very small (the vendor lock-in relies on this sort of illusion, before exit barriers are raised), you have to wonder about the judgment of short-sighted decision-makers like Mr Kink. Who’s going to be held accountable? Or when?

As a reminder, AWS operated at a loss for years and Azure still seems to be operating at a loss (they just call everything “Azure” now). They are enticing people to enter the trap. Microsoft loses money and so does Google. Billions in losses! I brought this up over the phone, speaking to the CEO for about an hour almost a year ago! But they don’t want to listen!

As a reminder, Microsoft is laying off staff, cancelling and shutting down datacentres, as they overprovisioned for something that never came (or resulted in massive losses). Microsoft basically misleads shareholders by rebranding many things “cloud” and/or “Azure”, so even if it’s not growing Microsoft can claim otherwise. There’s no proper definition of “cloud” or “Azure”.

On the phone about a year ago I suggested small self-hosted machines (the CEO called this “hobbyist”). It’s worth reminding ourselves that we lost staff that looked after our servers. That too was the fault of the management, for reasons we explained before.

It would be so much cheaper and safer to run our own infrastructure, as we already did for decades. And yes, we covered this in the report and earlier in this series. This is a no-brainer.

To give one example of what moving to AWS caused Sirius: OTRS, a ticketing system, needed us throwing more and more resources at it (partly because of bad design, partly due to workers sending megabytes of text in E-mails, as they top-post — the “Microsoft Way” basically — and don’t bother trimming/snipping what they respond to). Each time you add resources the bills go up by a lot! That’s the “magic” of “the clown”! It’s getting very expensive very fast!

Remember that we used to self-host all the E-mail of the company; now the company uses phony encryption as a tenant on someone else’s servers (Amazon). I challenged my colleagues about this. I argued with management. They could not even defend their decision. They saw no need to defend what they had done! We’ve had arguments over this internally in 2022. Of course it was risky for me to bring this up, but at this stage it was the moral thing to do, even a moral obligation. At Sirius, colleagues felt like their efforts and contributions were ignored/discarded by the cabal (family), so they quit caring. This is how nepotism dooms companies. Some colleagues left, some remained but without much desire to go beyond the basics. And this aspect too we’ve covered here before.

Regarding E-mail hosting in “the clown”, here’s a 2020 story. To quote an Evening Shift handover: “Spent most of my evening tracking down missing emails. I was rather perturbed by xxxxx’s handover email disappearing and I’m guessing that because the server was underpowered it started to behave strangely and misclassified legitimate emails as viruses and deleted them. Fortunately each email is given an unique id by the system which is useful for searching the logs. Managed to get a list of deleted ones and sent it to xxxxx, xxxxx, and xxxxx suggesting that they identify their clients or ones they recognise and email them with the time + 1 hour asking to resend. I found one from xxxxx and emailed and xxxxx kindly sent his email again.”

Wonderful! What a mess.

“Ironically,” Ryan Farmer notes today, “”Cloud Hosting” only makes sense if your needs are so small that it’s hardly worth setting anything up yourself.”

In some cases useful virtual machines were turned off to “save money”. Even if they took little space and CPU. If self-hosted, they would cost almost nothing to leave on.

Clown computing is a trap. To quote one new (days-old) cautionary tale (already in Daily Links): “Turns out that Revue is getting shut down. This means that I won’t be able to use it anymore (and I stopped using it because it wasn’t getting much traction vs the amount of work I put into it).”

So maybe outsourcing isn’t such a wise long-term strategy after all.

At one point by far our biggest client relied on VMware for clown hosting; of course VMware shut the whole thing down and in a hurry we needed to get all the servers out of there. Clown computing: it’s here today, but gone tomorrow. You’re not part of the decision! It does not matter if you have critical services on there and they give you a very short notice (to vacate).

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Sirius Failure to Pay Providers
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The Sirius ‘Open Source’ CEO and other ‘management’ staff are to blame for major outages/downtimes clients were experiencing; while they were busy eating or pretending to be busy it was the technical staff taking 24/7 support calls and fighting to restore services (after management failed to pay bills, even repeatedly, in spite of repeated reminders)

THE video above covers a clear (slam-dunk) case of gross incompetence/negligence by managers at Sirius. We’ll be showing more examples later this month. From the clients’ perspective, such gross incompetence by Sirius management may merit a refund (failing to meet SLAs for sure) and would typically constitute gross misconduct — albeit only in a company that actually holds managers too accountable (they won’t hold themselves accountable and step down/resign upon failure; instead they say absurd things). Mr. “Art of the Deal” is no good role model unless we ran a truly scammy operation.

One client even said it bluntly to our manager, accusing the company of “incompetence” (the examples below are only the managers’ fault)

Summary: Dishonesty and non-technical problems became a norm under the new Sirius ‘Open Source’ CEO (or under his watch); today we give one client’s story as an example or a case study, where Sirius management is failing to pay upstream providers, resulting in catastrophes

THE “finaliser” of the company may not be the only misguided manager (or saboteur). He turned out to be the barrier and the burier [sic] of the company.

Today we give as an example two separate incidents impacting twice the same client, one year apart. Cause of outage? Not faulty hardware. Not faulty software, either. It was unpaid bills. Who failed to pay? Sirius. The client trusted Sirius to take care of it. Big mistake.

Without naming the client or the nature of the client’s work, let’s just say that it is a critical client, a longtime client (longest), which relies on real-time access to data and cannot afford downtimes (not long downtimes anyway; as alluded/hinted in this meme last month, the effects would potentially be devastating).

Sirius failed to pay providers in two countries. The first such incident apparently didn’t serve as sufficient warning. No lessons learned. Or maybe no money left in the bank. Remember that it also looks like Sirius could barely pay its own staff; it’s like they failed to pay our pension on several occasions/years; thankfully the pension provider started sending us more and more letters to warn us; it was waiting to report the company, maybe even impose penalties/fines as a result.

Making fun of companies or persons who cannot pay bills is no source for amusement/mockery, but if one company fails to pay another the latter may fail to pay its bills or even its staff. So that’s not fair. We’re not talking about food bills here; it’s stuff like hosting. They kept warning, repeatedly, before taking action (e.g. an E-mail saying payment was “overdue” and lots of warnings before that, for several months in fact).

Was the client properly informed about what had happened or were those incidents brushed under the carpet, swept under some rug somewhere? This is the sort of stuff that made me unhappy about the company. The latter incident happened just months ago. I decided not to contact the client and instead hope the company would confess. That never happened though. A host wasn’t being paid for a very long time and then it issued warnings which escalated in severity. The client might also want to ask this host and see if there are overdue invoices right now (in 2023). Months ago the client had a very major outage after Sirius had racked up thousands of pounds in unpaid hosting bills (while trying to sell the client AWS ‘clown computing’, which would be vastly more expensive and I internally opposed efforts to move to it).

It’s absurd that pointing out such embarrassing realities would be deemed ‘defaming’ a company (with facts). The liars love to claim that everyone who says the truth is engaged in “defamatory” behaviour, as if defamation and truth became synonyms. The egoistic boss fails to understand that a company is not a person and facts are not defamation.

When an incident happened in 2021 the handover said: “Logged onto their portal and server is suspended due to unpaid invoice. Raised it with everyone on Slack, and xxxxx told me to tell xxxxx that we’re raising an important ticket with them. xxxxx paid the invoice and they lifted the suspension.”

The Slack messages at the time:

xxxxx: Does anyone know if xxxxx has been paid yet as xxxxx says he can’t get onto xxxxx
xxxxx: xxxxx is asking for an update. Can we pay xxxxx tonight or will we have to wait until tomorrow?
xxxxx: They have a fairly old-school process for accepting payment if I recall. It took a number of days to clear payment last time.
xxxxx: xxxxx and/or xxxxx put the payment through last time to a specific bank account.

“It took a number of days to clear payment last time,” it says. Not the first time. Lessons not learned.

This is similar to the excuses we got when our pension wasn’t paid (on two separate years), even several months after the days in question. They blame the payment processor instead of those who failed (e.g. forgot) to make the payment!

Three months ago another rather similar incident happened, but this time in another country and another hosting provider. There was no mention of what had happened after the Big Boss was shuffling lots of credit cards, struggling to make a payment to the provider. To quote: “xxxxx and xxxxx emailed to say that xxxxx was down but we didn’t get any alerts so looked into it. Then one of their customers emailed to say they couldn’t login. xxxxx asked me to restart UIs which I did and the problem was resolved. xxxxx sent some questions to ask xxxxx who said he will look into it and get back to them tomorrow. I checked the db connections and there seems to be 380 open out of a possible 1000, but I’m sure xxxxx will be able to verify this too.”

Nothing was said about the failure to pay the bills. Are we meant to think nothing actually happened? Are we meant to lie to clients about this, wasting their time as they try hard to figure our the root cause?

Don’t work for chronic liars. If your employer starts lying a lot, consider your options.