Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ compared Network Operation Centre (NOC) staff to “monkeys”; the company’s management refuses to talk to staff, resorts to pathological lying, and hopes to somehow maintain the illusion that it is still behaving “professionally”

THE series is getting longer as we go on and on. We’re continuing to accumulate and sometimes receive more explosive revelations, showing that the management of Sirius is not only lying to clients and to staff. It is a lot worse. Sirius makes stuff up. It’s also misrepresenting clients, attributing to them something they never said.

As we shall show next month, the so-called ‘CEO’ (a relatively new arrival) has the audacity to act like a Private Investigator when in fact fabricating and distorting allegations. There may be legal ramifications here, but the company started attacking the staff just two days after it had changed its official registered address to the address of the accountancy, which means it’s hard to serve legal papers to Sirius (i.e. suing the company).

Below we reproduce text from the report sent to the management 4 weeks ago (further context will be provided later as another major scandal unfolds):

Those who accuse Roy, and moreover lump his wife into it (more on that later), conveniently forget all the many positive things Roy wrote about Sirius in Techrights even years before working for the company. This is what’s shown publicly in blog posts, not some assorted chat gossip with a ton of typos.

None of this is about defamation (no falsehoods contained therein), it’s all about ego. It’s about egotistic people, whose names are never even mentioned, not knowing how to cope with constructive and factual criticism. As noted before, the company is deaf to its own staff. Technical people are treated as clueless. This is a recipe for corporate failure.

To be very clear, the company’s clients are never named in relation to the company but in relation to news (they are famous people, public figures). To claims that people with audience of millions cannot be even mentioned in Techrights is outright crazy.

In IRC, the main channel talks about technology, but the company instead cherry-picks some side channel that was deprecated back in 2010. In it, some real issues are discussed, potential misconduct by the company at many levels, even gross misconduct by the company and lies devised to cover up failure to comply with contracts (possible legal breach and actionable). But no person or company gets mentioned, except maybe by accident (very rarely). Roy insists that he did not name people or the companies; the PDFs supplied to Roy support that, as he was always careful. Roy is entitled to an opinion, especially outside work. He used reasonably polite wording.

To be very clear, the job in the overnight Support Team involves about 1 hour of practical work on actual servers (true for NOC colleagues; there’s nothing practical to do aside from response to incidents), the rest of time being devoted to tickets, monitoring, response, and discussion with colleagues. Roy did all of these things very well. Roy never posted to social media while on shift. Ever. That much is very evident.

To be very clear, the company defamed the NOC (Support Team) staff, comparing it to “monkeys” in the official wiki (before hiring those “monkeys”). Staff should not be compared to animals; it’s not fair to animals and it’s not fair to people. This is an example of unprofessional behaviour inside the company. Now the management is running after us “monkeys”. To wit, the company name-called Roy even in company E-mail (calling him “paranoid” in writing and over the telephone). This culture issue isn’t limited to staff. For instance, the company says bad things in Slack, worse than in IRC, and with identifiable names included (e.g. one manager of a client being called “an arse” by the Sirius founder). This is really bad, this is unprofessional, and this gets transmitted to a surveillance company (Salesforce) in another continent, working for clients like ICE. When one’s own chief (and founder) is name-calling the clients by their real name in a privacy-infringing tool, visible to all staff, why are high standards expected from low-paid, exploited, “milked” staff like Roy and Rianne, who already endured unwarranted abuse years prior?

It should be noted that low-quality “gossip” (two-person chat) — with quantity to make up for the low quality — don’t add up to a serious case of disciplinary action, especially against someone who never even spoke in that IRC network, never mind the channel.

Summary: The self-demolition of Sirius ‘Open Source’ is work in progress; but it’s important to understand how that came about and cautionary notes from within

THE morale inside the company was eroding rapidly and workers became dissatisfied with the transition away from “Open Source”. Some spoke out about it more loudly than others, in spite of the known dangers like incurring management’s wrath. At the moment, there are almost as many “managers” as there are non-managers! Heck, it seems 50% of what’s left in the company right now goes by the name “manager”. What sort of business is this???

The text below shows a culmination of these frustrations coming from yours truly early this year. I was already determined to just leave, but there was still a glimmer of hope things would change.

Well, things did change. But not for the better.

Sirius wasn’t always so toxic a workplace (bullying, abuse, management anger issues et cetera were specified in prior sections). It’s worth noting that what was attractive about this company approximately a decade ago was the colleagues and the company being a way to escape malicious software and instead use decent things. Sadly, that did not last. Well, of course over time (it did not happen overnight!), and especially in recent years, this was no longer the case. And it got worse this past October, as later parts of this series will explain.

The following part of the report was sent to the “company’s founder” before I realised that he probably wasn’t even the company’s founder (he fakes his credentials and [cref 167171 idolises Donald Trump]) but someone who joined it later on. The words from the internal report below hopefully shed light on the atmosphere in early 2022:

The longest-serving staff member sans the company’s founder is paid a salary of 26,500 a year for full time work and there’s a snag, which cannot be conveniently evaded. Roy believes that the company milks him; no pay rise in over a decade (Roy got paid more when he joined), even amid soaring inflation, no apologies, unwarranted bullying, with bullies not being held accountable. Roy did bring up the salary aspect, but this never gets rectified. After almost 12 years… same salary, but again this sort of misses the bigger picture. Roy feels like “low-cost tech labour”, treated poorly and unfairly at times in spite of a lot of factors previously fully conveyed in text (internally). Roy did raise concern — and only internally — more times than he can recall. Anything else is a last recourse in a two-person IRC conversation (no names mentioned). Here is Roy’s message sent to the CEO earlier this year:

Hi ????????,

Last night I tried testing softphone calls with 2 of your phone numbers that I have, I think about 5 times in total, taking timezone into account. I could not test with anyone here as they were asleep. One thing I noticed is that my browser still insists on enabling things manually each time I talk. That’s just how it works.

Yesterday before bedtime I checked my inbox and saw an E-mail with a threatening and combative tone. It was not well received because I hadn’t been approached at all before it was sent. It was sent without even asking me for my side (as if due process does not exist).

I warned in advance about relying on this product, but I received no reply at all. Those softphones typically work only or “best” with Chrome.

This is part of a broader problem and I wish to open a dialogue about a number of other issue. I want to keep this amicable and constructive. Bear with me while I explain.

I don’t think I’ve been demanding or unreasonable. I sacrificed a lot for this role. I’ve accepted a pay decrease for 11 years, even months after I had joined (it did not keep up with inflation and in 2011 when I was moved from weekend slots to weekday+weekend nighttimes — typically a time slot that means 200% the “normal” rate — my pro-rata amount was reduced, even after the increase from 25k to 26.5k). I did not complain. And this E-mail isn’t about money. That’s now what’s important to me.

As I noted in my reply last night, no training given to staff means that mistakes can be made (passing a document isn’t the same as training). Yet worse, from my managers I’m receiving no replies and it often feels like talking to the wall. I don’t know why a manager would think that this management style reinforces confidence from staff. At the start of the year he said we’d start receiving regular updates. This did not happen (no weekly updates as promised) and there has been no effort to stick to the company’s values. In fact, the message is being diluted and my E-mail messages about this remain unanswered. Remember that ???????? and I are your longest-serving (to present) employees. I’m always happy to receive even just a phonecall to touch base.

Then there’s the more ‘petty’ or less important stuff, which I will mention anyway (it’s not the reason for this mail, but I want to get it off my chest). The company was not even sending payslips for years, pension lapses added to a sense of something gone awry silently, recently there was a mistake made by ????????, leaving me working 12 hours in a row (no disciplinary action for her, I assume; that’s just for us, the “low-level” employees to face). I still haven’t forgotten what happened 3 years. There was a climate of threats, directed not only at me but also colleagues; as far as I can gather, there was no accountability for ???????? either, in effect bullying staff, as if some people are exempted from their own standards. And again no transparency; we weren’t even told when she left the company.

We need to look inward instead of resorting to selective finger-pointing at people who work at 1am for roughly minimum wage, even people with a doctoral degree.

If you want to talk about these things, I suggest phone as that would convey and add tone. With text it’s too easy to misunderstand and misinterpret well-meaning people.

The CEO never even responded to this. Did not pick up the phone, either. Roy tried many times. Same outcome.

As noted above, the salary is laughable.

Also, as noted previously, the behaviour of the company in recent years (sometimes lying, choosing unethical clients, rejecting Open Source) is already becoming public reputation damage to Roy and to his work, set aside the company’s concern for its own reputation. Roy believes he could sue particular people inside the company for bullying, but Roy doesn’t want to bother with litigation, seeing that the company is already becoming a liability to his online reputation by its choice of clients and proprietary technologies, which pose moral issues (clerical job, loan shark, military).

Video download link | md5sum 0c301ce0818bf40fea64e7c3f7de0520
A Demolition Job in Sirius
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Like we’ve seen at the European Patent Office (EPO), the people who view individuals as “resources” (to be sold) are there to undermine the interests of those “resources”; just like at the EPO, in Sirius (which I left this month) these “resources” were treated poorly and their right to free speech (or freedom of expression) was denied

THE situation — communications-wise — at Sirius ‘Open Source’ can be characterised as dishonesty, outright lying, and cover-up. Many failures are being plastered over. Those aren’t ‘white lies’ or benign spin; they misinform people to keep them onboard and mislead clients, who may otherwise choose more wisely who to trust.

The term Human Resources (HR) is offensive for all sorts of reasons. As workers of the EPO quickly find out upon arrival, Human Resources people actively work against the staff. They undermine workers’ rights.

Sirius does not have Human Resources staff; it outsources this function. In companies with a Human Resources department there’s generally an interest/incentive at HR to keep the company in tact, otherwise that department too will be out of work. No workers? Then no HR! But when it’s outsourced the logistics change a lot.

The lesson to take from this is, when companies try to behave in this way the time is right to leave. No lawyers were being consulted by the company until it was too late; the company’s management single-handedly doomed the company. It seems unlikely to survive until its next (25^th) anniversary.

Video download link | md5sum 2559ad3e58655ae8f53c6926a800bc30
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.

Video download link | md5sum 4f785d7a3b704cd8beddec4cf33cdb28
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 ed8d64d30480b43b0b9fbbe627e0a9bf
Bullies as Managers
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Sirius turned from bad to worse; as debt increased and further loans were being taken actually essential workers were leaving and earlier this winter the company registered as its accountants’ address (envelopes are sent from an unregistered address, probably someone’s apartment near London or Bristol)

THE sad story of Sirius ‘Open Source’ has been told here for a fortnight already. It started two Saturdays ago. In the video above I sum up the latest two parts in the series. We’ve covered about a third of the material so far.

The short story is, the unqualified “managers” at the company (following tragedy and ordeals in the personal life of the founder) decided to assign classic “bullshit jobs” (tasks which serve no actual purposes), falsely accuse people, steer the company away from “Open Source” (which they neither understand nor use) and it didn’t take long for the most important technical staff to leave. As a result, the company’s infrastructure could barely be maintained anymore, hence outsourcing was seen as imperative. The sad thing is, innocent people were being accused of things they had not done, and tasks previously done by people who left (could not stand the new “managers”) could not be completed. It seems like a miracle that the company even survived until the end of 2022, albeit with very heavy debt and a dodgy corporate structure. Its current registered address is actually the accountants’ address (outsourced, obviously!).

This is not the company’s address. The accountancy firm is based in this address.