O we might have a fourth Prime Minister in less than 12 months. Things aren’t so “strong and stable”, are they, Tories?

Given the awful state of public health and the bailouts for the rich (including energy giants) it “pays off” to be prudent and proactive. I left my job last month and lately I’ve been checking the state of pension schemes, knowing some of them are akin to pyramid schemes. I was already cautioned about this more than a decade ago (after the first financial crisis and meltdown). Shown above in this figure is our rapidly growing national debt (similar trend to the US, the political sibling of the UK). This does not seem sustainable simply because it is not. And as health and long life are a sort of wealth I decided to leave the job (almost a year ago I finalised this decision), but now it’s time to worry about financing the future.

I’ve ranted already about pension providers barely responding to their customers. I documented this here.

With Aviva, it took nearly a fortnight (and persistent nagging) merely to get this not very useful reply from a generic E-mail account (and no name):

> Dear Customer,
>
> Thank you for contacting Aviva.
>
> To allow us to get your query to the relevant Administration department
> as quickly as possible, we require some additional information to help
> us find your policy with us.

It took you nearly two weeks to finally respond to me.

> Please reply with the following information ?
>
> Policy Number ?*please note we may not be able to trace your policy
> without the policy number *

As far as I know, Aviva never sent me any correspondence with any details. Myself and my employer paid Aviva, but I have no record of the actual Policy Number.

> Full name (including any previous names that may be linked to your
> policies)

Roy Schestowitz

or

Roy Samuel Schestowitz

working for Sirius Corporation

> Date of Birth

[... redacted]]

> Full address (including any previous addresses that may be linked to
> your policies)
>
> National Insurance Number

[... redacted]]

> As soon as we receive the details we need, and we are able to find your
> policy our Admin team will be in touch.

Please do. I’ve been frustrated by how long it took you to respond and even blogged about it.

Aviva hardly bothered to communicate with me, ever.

> Warm Regards,
>
> The Aviva Customer Team

There seems to be no “safe” place for one’s money these days. Commodities, cash, “crypto” (scam)…. they’re all volatile. Pension schemes don’t even assure anything; they’re just there and people assume they too are “strong and stable”.

Nothing is “strong and stable” these days. Pension providers barely want to even speak to their so-called ‘customers’. All they want is their money. Keep paying us every month, they insist, no questions asked…

There were times I literally stayed at their home because they didn’t want to spend money on suitable accommodation (e.g. hotel)

Summary: At Sirius ‘Open Source’ I was sometimes asked by management to look after personal affairs or help family friends; employers aren’t supposed to leverage their workforce like that

TECHRIGHTS deals with a variety of “Tech” issues and a broad range of “Rights”, including so-called ‘IP’ so-called ‘rights’. There is currently a constitutional crisis brewing in Germany and it relates to patents, but today we focus on labour rights pertaining to workforce outside the workplace.

As readers are aware, my wife and I resigned last month and left our job (after a combined period of 21 years in that employer). Today I’d like to highlight a likely common situation where the employer tries to get workers to do personal favours outside the business or outside the workplace. Many people don’t like to talk about it, as it might come across as “moaning” or a lack of generosity. After all, some colleagues — typically below the pay grade of their bosses — end up picking up post or picking up the kids from school. They may end up like family assistants. They try to “get ahead” by improving the relationship with the boss or, to put it more bluntly, “sucking up” to the boss. It’s unprofessional, but it is still done a lot. Some bosses exploit that, knowing it’s construed as impolite to say “no” to the people who pay the salary.

In practice, bosses should never do this. It’s not like asking for sexual favours, but it’s still bad. It’s better not to even ask or bother with such a request.

Today’s example is old but still relevant. I can finally speak about it. The CEO and his wife asked me to look into a site of a family friend from Spain, in spite of language barriers and the site having nothing whatsoever to do with my job. Like I’m a “home butler” of theirs, serving guests.

It started like this:

Hi xxxxx,

I have cced Roy into this mail as he knows a lot about wordpress so he should be able to help you sort out the problems you are having.
I will leave you to chat between yourselves.

See you in a few weeks

xxxxxx xx

The person in question spoke, but with very weak English — to the point where it’s extremely difficult to communicate at all. It was a massive language barrier. I followed up:

Hi xxxxx,

Can you please show me your site and tell me what you are hoping to
achieve, maybe with examples of sites that accomplish what you’re after?

Regards,

The communication was informal, but I was expected to give technical help to a family friend of the CEO and his wife. Here’s example of communication that I received:

Hi xxxxx!!

Thanks!!! My mum thinks that she is going to pick me up hahaha so you will See her at the AirPort

Hi Roy,

Ill have to give you acces to the blog Cuz its not aviable now, Also Ive got allready a list with the things that I would like to change if its possible of course

Do I give you access with this email?

Thanks a lot for your help

xxxxxxx
Enviado desde mi iPhone

It didn’t go very far, but the point of the matter is, the manager was asking me to provide support to someone who wasn’t a client but a personal friend.

On another occasion, more recently, the CEO was asking me to speak to a personal friend who had become the target of a patent troll, as if I was some unpaid ‘consultant’ on this matter.

“Next time I’ll phone you,” I said, “assuming you don’t keep an eye on E-mail.” I spent a long time basically advising someone because he was a friend of the CEO. Looking back (in retrospect), it was a waste of time as I was under no obligation to do so. But because I was receiving salaries (for something totally unrelated) I felt compelled to agree.

There should be very strict laws against this sort of thing. Paying someone a salary for job X does not make one a “butler” for job Y. From what my wife has told me, in some occupations and with some agencies there are official avenues for reporting this. Apparently this sort of misuse or workforce became such a big problem that confidential helplines/lifelines were thrown at workers, offering resolution without retribution/reprisal from the employers (threatening/blackmailing workers who report the practice/abuse).

Video download link | md5sum e07915de3d9b82d54ea7b3b66fd312a9
A Sirius Relationship and Couple
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: It’s hardly a scandal that a married couple was running the company from around 2010 until almost 2018; but that may have been a poor role model, as in later years one manager would bring in a spouse and two girlfriends into the company in spite of unsuitable background; the video above ends the series of articles about nepotism inside Sirius ‘Open Source’

THE company Sirius ‘Open Source’ was owned and controlled by a husband and wife when I joined almost 12 years ago. It still had plenty of geeks, including a former Debian Developer. It had a large building, it had staff specialising in different facets of operation (e.g. finance/accounting), and nepotism — if that counts at all — was limited to the CEO. In all fairness, it’s quite common for a couple to run a business. The only other example of nepotism (prior to me joining) that I’m aware of is one colleague who joined because of his boyfriend, who then became a colleague. He later left both him and the company, but again, in all fairness his (ex)boyfriend was technical and a GNU/Linux user. He looked after almost everything in the office, he was polite, and generally amicable. It was devastating to the company when he left several years ago. His certificates and his KDE desktop were still left there in the office when I last visited (even a year after he had left).

Looking back at the whole thing (21 years in combined duration for my wife and I), the CEO’s wife did a much better job than anything that came later and it seems safe to attribute the collapse of the company to the deterioration of that marriage (the CEO’s second marriage, ending around 2018 or 2019). It didn’t take long for him to sell out to Bill Gates (2019) and only weeks later the new manager was bullying both myself and my wife. They were never held accountable for it; not even an apology was offered.

The video above tells stories almost a decade old, corresponding to the text published last night.

Video download link | md5sum d0384f2c4e1fd225180787cf9d38a9fe
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.

Video download link | md5sum 0b5cee9f48792260e28e59272e7fbb14
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).

Video download link | md5sum b7092ce567dc2abaaf29741f7fd87ae2
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.