Video download link | md5sum 84f018c1290b8f233c66af03884b4fbc
Worker Isolation Tactics
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Companies rarely/barely tolerate people who speak about wrongdoing, whether it is done internally (to management or among colleagues) or externally without naming anyone; at Sirius there has been a culture of gagging and isolation, hoping to prevent clients and the wider public finding out what’s truly going on, but it is time to break the silence

THE latest (and one before last) part of our report is just about the thirtieth, focusing on how management at Sirius ‘Open Source’ was trying to prevent staff talking to one another. This strategy isn’t entirely unique and there are several names for it.

The video above discusses what went on and why a witch-hunt began. Sirius ‘Open Source’ is not Open Source and it has been doing unethical as well as illegal things. It’s trying to prevent staff knowing about it and being able to discuss such matters. But at the end there’s a bit of a Streisand effect.

The saddest thing is, the company’s management also lies about itself. For instance, one new boss was introduced as a person who had created a successful company, however the public record indicates that this is either a dissolved two-person company (failed and forcibly de-registered) or a one-man ‘company’ with barely any activity in it. Extravagant claims to impress the easily-impressionable? If a one-person company is “successful” according to that one person, does that even mean anything? Look what he has done to Sirius. The company is shrinking into nothing (more ‘managers’ than technical people).

Big egos turns big companies into tiny boutiques with big debt.

Summary: Staff of Sirius ‘Open Source’ still remembers how badly managers have treated workers in the past 4 years while keeping them isolated, sometimes even gagged

IN yesterday’s video (“Sirius Open Source Uses ‘Privacy’ as a Weapon Against Truth-tellers (Can’t Speak Outside Work)”) we sought to highlight endless hypocrisy and disproportionate powers managers gave themselves. It was not about leadership but about control. Those aren’t the same thing. Leaders motivate people, but the managers Sirius attracted in recent years are power-hungry and don’t know how to manage power; they get drunk on power. Some lack actual experience in management; no, babysitting toddlers or being an assistant of an assistant doesn’t substitute training and experience at leadership. Companies would struggle to compel adults to be managed by babysitters. Programmers and sysadmins are grownups, not toddlers.

The managers at Sirius gradually become insecure, knowing they’re not just unqualified for the job but are in fact failing at their job. Then they try to stop staff from talking about the issues (failures that repeat themselves, e.g. pension contributions not being paid). Then start bullying, intimidation etc. It begets spying and dirt-digging, even habitual insults (like aimlessly accusing staff of “cooking” without any evidence whatsoever; as noted in the last part’s meme, based on a real quote). If managers start falsely accusing staff, then the principal objective is humiliation, hoping to cause guilt and render people more submissive. That never works!

Then come impediments against dialogue. Staff is divided so as to make people feel isolated. Let’s use an example. In a grievance letter posted (reproduced) here last month, a colleague explained that people who work overnight are already isolated and feeling alone. Why add insult to injury?

Then comes suppression of speech in general, like claiming the clients and colleagues deserve total privacy (in practice, it is about censorship), even outside work where they’re mentioned not by name, yet the same people who claim this are engaging in overt acts of surveillance against staff, even outside work.

This hypocritical behaviour is also used by the EPO to basically say that staff cannot speak to one another because of “privacy”, even if the conversations are about managers’ corruption. They misuse “privacy” for cover-up. Privacy is no excuse for those who are committing crimes or engaging in all sorts of wrongdoing.

The icing on the cake is, such rogue management engages in chronic lying while bullying staff and innocent people are warned not to speak to colleagues (“divide and rule”) while managers are spying on everybody. This is all about double-standards. To put it in simple terms, a boss may allege that staff is violating privacy of people and the boss builds this allegation by violating the privacy of the accused.

Sirius has quite a tradition like this. It effectively banned staff conversations in Freenode (outside work), way back in its glory days, not in 2022. It’s as if colleagues cannot have a personal life and cannot socialise outside the workplace.

As a reminder, a decade ago the company resorted to shutting down the company’s own Jabber server, very likely to prevent workers’ solidarity/empathy towards a colleague… or even the ability to find out what had happened.

Sirius created a self-defeating culture wherein people are talking to one another inside the train to avoid detection for fear of committing the “crime” of speaking to co-workers about facts (like bosses doing unethical things, including lying, cheating, engaging in extreme nepotism… like bringing 3 sexual partners to the company in spite of a lack of relevant qualifications).

Sirius is no longer unique in the sense that after COVID-19 lock-downs many people still don’t commute to work and still don’t meet colleagues in person (or seldom do). Generally speaking, when people work from home, and they’re each based in a distant town, they can’t easily meet “down the pub” and have in-person chat, so if conversations outside the spying network of the company are frowned upon, and if spyware becomes the norm, how is staff supposed to be properly informed? Trusting liars? How can a union ever be formed? As we shall show later, the company pretends to be open to the concept of a staff union, but that’s just a convenient lie.

The company goes out of its way to prevent and impede communication between workers, usually by means of blackmail/threats. How unhealthy a work atmosphere! For instance, staff is not permitted to know if someone is investigated or disciplined and similarly staff being bullies is explicitly forbidden from talking about this to anybody. This poses a threat to people’s health and safety. The company knows that, but it does not care. People are isolated and asked not to cooperate with their colleagues. It’s not limited to “bollocking” inside the company as the same goes for salaries, work status etc. Sirius is just a very secretive company that misuses the name “Open Source” and conceals the operational aspects. It’s proprietary, intransparent, and truly dishonest. It lies about its very own people when it suits the managers. As a result, colleagues are just vanishing without anyone bothering to explain why (skeletons in the closet), we have had colleagues that say they’re under de facto gag order and cannot talk about what they know, and it starts to resemble Life Is Beautiful where nobody can speak about the gas in the showers. People just vanish, no more questions…

The workplace inevitably becomes very mentally unhealthy; as we’ll show later this month, it becomes physically unhealthy too (some colleagues got diarrhoea from the stress). These tactics of isolation are being resisted, as colleagues occasionally reach out to one another, even people who are working from home. Their safety net does not come from “leaders” but from peers. The leaders are correctly perceived as dictators, who aren’t to be trusted with anything. There’s no comforting shoulder. This should not be considered standard business practice, but this is where Sirius was heading just to ensure workers were always disadvantaged, underpaid, mistreated, falsely accused. They cannot unite, they can barely even form a coalition through which to negotiate with management. Things were so out of hand in Sirius that even to have a colleague as a witness would require prior permission from management so that the management can ‘tamper’ with the person a priori (like issuing warnings or curtail freedom of expression).

The tactics employed in 2022 began to resemble authoritarian regimes and aggressive cops, more so towards the end of the year; relatives were being kept as pawns and false accusations thrown while distorting facts. Managers very well understand that scaring workers won’t make them productive; au contraire — it leads to misery.

We’ve seen these things before. At the EPO, for instance, the union (SUEPO) explained how a spouse needed to come to the Office to pick up her husband after he had suffered a mental breakdown (due to ruthless ‘investigation’). We’ll soon show that Sirius too employed a kind of Reid method/technique, which is controversial and likely illegal. This was done to Aaron Swartz.

One colleague used to joke that the company’s slogan, “stress-free technology”, took no account of how workers felt. Workers had no real voice in the company. They were barely consulted about important things.

Unfortunately, SUEPO uses the same Microsoft spyware that EPO management uses, probably because of the “installed based” (number of workers who already have that set up). But since [cref 141348 Microsoft colludes with the EPO] they can undermine communications, spy, and worse. We’ve repeatedly said that a union using the “bossware” of the boss, controlled by a truly hostile corporation, isn’t a good idea.

The reason we are writing these detailed reports is clear to those who have had similar experiences in their career. It’s important because workers would be empowered if they could identify emergent patterns of technological oppression and then respond them them, equipped with knowledge of the law in their country. Don’t let people be subjected to that; don’t be subjected to that yourself. Workers aren’t supposed to be pointed at for doing perfectly lawful things, even if their bosses aren’t happy about those things. That can lead to conflicts in one’s mind, with questions arising like, “are they telling the truth? Am I overrating or overthinking?”

Remember that sociopaths and pathological liars do this as a matter of routine; they’ve mastered all these tricks and they keep using them again and again.

The staff, they hope, may remains defenseless after all the gaslighting; when you stop receiving actual information and get fed disinformation from management, repeatedly even (and you might even start to believe it!) you may eventually lose a sense of reality.

In my personal case, working backwards to figure out where and why it started, it seems like management truly hated how I scrutinised a contract they had wanted us to sign without any legal advice, challenging the legality of it and even considering a lawyers’ consultation (advice can take weeks unless it is treated urgently).

One can assume that managers were maybe worried other people (like colleagues) would realise what’s going on and follow suit.

That’s when one manager was starting a malicious, vicious, baseless witch-hunt that backfired so badly. We’ll give more details about this later.

The portion of the report below talks about the awful, centralised, outsourced telephony system, the “timetracker” which everyone hated (except bosses who exempted themselves), and the aftermath of these misguided moves, which not only harmed the company but lowered morale. The timetracker was so counterproductive that it was quietly dropped, for the second time, a few years ago. It was more about surveillance than productivity or timekeeping.

The company ought to remove the term “Open Source” from its name; the company has presence only in proprietary platforms but none in “Open Source” ones, except maybe “legacy” systems from the “old” Sirius era. Over time it’s gravitating towards 100% proprietary, but people who run the company cannot even distinguish, so explaining the issue can be an exercise in futility. To give just recent examples, Sirius moved to a system of telephony that did not work and did so even faster as a result of it not working (example of extreme incompetence), resulting in poor service to clients that could previously make contact effortlessly. This document won’t name the systems, but it’s clear that improving the ability to answer calls or communicate was not a priority. ‘Freebies’ from Google aren’t free; they’re only temporarily available ‘free samples’.

To cite an older example, all the staff hated the timetracker and hilariously enough those who imposed it on staff refused to do the timetracker routines themselves. When challenged on this (highly hypocritical behaviour that harms morale), one of them sobbed and went away, unable to actually justify this arrogant ego trip (imposing unwanted things on people vastly more qualified). The person who sobbed later messed up the salaries (many times), then did not respond for months when question on the matter. This resulted in financial harm. The person responsible for this error was never reprimanded or punished, neither for these mistakes nor for failing to respond, which is very typical in today’s Sirius management, even the CEO lying about not receiving E-mails.

No wonder lots of workers left. Those who did not leave constantly face abuse and are being silenced. Dissent in Sirius isn’t being dealt with by grown-ups. No wonder associates were openly mocking the CEO for being non-technical and for writing face-saving cruft to clients. In fact, it seems like a lot of people either left or became cynical about the company. Those who stayed (and remains cynical) are now being maliciously targeted and it is truly sad to say that the company became a bit of a hoax, as it is neither about Open Source nor caring about the devoted staff that made many personal compromises, only pretending to care in very shallow ways like annual vouchers (worth less than one shift).

Video download link | md5sum f537fd943d49eeaf0de1f801a60f08bf
Erosion of Worker Rights in IT
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Workers’ rights are under attack; in the case of IT, more so with people who work from home, rights are under unprecedented attacks which laws have not caught up with

IN the latest meme and latest article we talked about abuse against workers or twisting of the law to basically employ people overnight for salaries far below industry standards (and basically the same as daytime salaries). There’s also the issue of ‘double shifts’ and overtime, but how about privacy?

For instance, is an employer permitted to intrude communications of staff outside work? Where is work? Home? What about spyware? Is that allowed? There are also moral aspects, especially when a company names itself “Open Source” and fails to deliver this promise.

It seems likely that the Techrights of 2023 may shift somewhat to issues of rights in the workspace, based on my personal experiences that I can finally speak openly about (even name the employer, just not clients or colleagues as it would be unfair to them).

Tomorrow we’ll cover more of the free speech aspects and “privacy” aspects.

Anyway, happy new year from Techrights!

Earl Grey for the grey little fella’, please

Maybe Sirius management wants its staff to also starve to death (the above is based on a real quote from a fake imposter boss)

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ will continue to occupy time and space in January and February of this year; we’re starting to wrap up the series that’s based around the report (sent to 3 managers before we left the company)

THE new year has begun! For some, in Sirius at least, the future is unclear. We can imagine that there are ongoing or impending disputes among managers and remaining stakeholders (e.g. “owner of Sirius”), seeing that the company is not what it claims to be. We envision a bitter end to the company, very likely in 2023. The company is basically insolvent if one chooses to judge it by its unaudited financial filings. The way it was treating its staff towards the end of the year serves to suggest it’s also broke, looking for excuses not to pay staff what the staff is fully entitled to.

We must stress that the company wasn’t always like this! The company acted a lot more professionally a decade ago, whereas the way things were handled towards the end got truly grim, with conniving, back-stabbing, and profound betrayal of long-serving staff. The goal wasn’t to end things on a positive note; the way things were done was likely in breach of British law, as noted below. We’re going to shed some more light later this month when handling some of the nitty-gritty stuff. Many of those tricks are from the same cloth or the same playbook of other failing companies. It’s worth learning and understanding them.

During lockdowns some companies asked staff to sleep inside datacentres (oh, hi, Microsoft!). Are those sleep deprivation experiments? Was this truly consensual (when one can lose the job for declining to obey; Azure was already laying off staff that year)? Can money overcome law, as well as health & safety regulations?

As a site named Techrights (since 2010, i.e. about 13 years already) we think it’s perfectly appropriate and we deem it suitable to cover these issues; many “Tech” jobs are impacted by matters of labour “rights” (a la EPO, where such fundamental rights are routinely denied without consequences for perpetrators!). There are particular rights that are treated differently when the job is performed just digitally, e.g. “remote” work, spying, access to machines, management of company “assets” and so on. What about lunch breaks? What happens when you do non-stop monitoring (and reporting of incidents, response/mitigation included)? What happens when you work from home? What if you work overnight (1AM to 9AM shifts)? The meme above exemplifies the absurdity of some existing policies, right? At times I worked 16-hour shifts, albeit that was a long time ago and only with my explicit consent. The mainstream media does not explore these pertinent issues in the context of “knowledge workers” as often as it ought to. The EFF habitually dabbles in this domain, as we’ll show later this month when we cover “bossware” [1, 2]. Sadly, the EFF has been mostly asleep at the wheel in recent years (after one co-founder had died and another was ousted).

Below is a portion of the report:

Further Discussion of the Issues

There are lots of issues that cannot be brought up without infringing the confidentiality of Sirius clients. However important they are, it’s regretful that they cannot be mentioned in this document.

What facts have shown thus far is astounding and hopefully a cautionary tale. No company should hire people and keep them on the same salary in their 40s for the same job they were hired to do in their 20s, not to mention inflation being ignored as if it’s not happening. On top of that, bullying is not acceptable, especially in light of working conditions, which may be in breach of British law for some of the aforementioned reasons.

Management figures, lacking any technical skills trying to get staff to study things like containers despite Sirius clients not using these is an unfortunate ploy. They are just hoping to fake their staff possessing some skills and then netting a contract based on it. As we saw earlier, this results in the company, Sirius, hopelessly left to support systems it is unable to support, as the skills being bragged about aren’t in fact to be found inside the company. So hopefully that will change. If Sirius does not net contracts based on an old (and long-lost) reputation for skills it does not have, then maybe staff can actually meet clients’ expectations.

Video download link | md5sum ae193a872db6e602cf1a990fcaad29ba
Gaslighting at Sirius
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ has become a company that’s run by liars, who don’t tolerate people who oppose lying (there’s also bullying and gaslighting — a subject for next month or next year)

THE video above shows the latest meme and article along with Jay Little’s new blog post about a gaslighting boss who lies a lot like it’s a bodily function.

People who wish to be true to themselves and maintain their values (a matter of personal integrity) ought to consider leaving; many people, including managers, left GitHub after Microsoft had bought the company. Then again, GitHub was proprietary all along, unlike Sirius Open Source.

Companies come and go all the time. Companies that elevate unqualified people to positions of power perish faster.

Recognise the signs, leave before things escalate

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ is trying to shut things down ‘on the cheap’; or so it would seem not just to an outsider but also to an insider, seeing the self-destructive behaviour

THE latest post was entitled “Symptoms of an Impending Bankruptcy?” because the company where I had worked for nearly 12 years was coming to an end. It’s partly the fault of one or two bitter managers. Their off-putting behaviour moreover destroyed staff morale. This is a common problem and it happens in other companies too.

Ultimately, staff leaves, clients leave, and there’s nothing left to salvage. They then refuse to pay departure fees (obligations to staff) and various bills too. They believe they can get away with this by hiding while humiliating people. We’ll say a lot more about this next month.

A lot of what we’re dealing with here isn’t entirely unique. Other companies in the sector follow similar models and it’s therefore important to recognise patterns.

The title of this post says “Successful Bankruptcy” because some business schools teach that as if the goal is bankruptcy, not saving or salvaging things, and “success” means screwing as many people/entities as possible in the process, passing costs, liabilities and deficits to them (those can be clients, suppliers, staff, lenders/banks, even relatives who were conned into becoming so-called ‘investors’ based on false promises or elusive prospects).

In the case of Sirius, the writings were on the wall for quite some time; the company meetings in recent years were dire and managers would never mention something like “Open Source”; yes, it was about money and nothing else!

Forget about software freedom, autonomy, and so on; the management doesn’t care! And this apathy is short-sighted as companies that forget what used to distinguish them simply won’t attract good workers. They cannot. I kept saying this in the meetings this year. How many people were hired this year? Zero. There wasn’t even an attempt to recruit anybody (as far as we’re aware).

We’ve meanwhile learned that other people have been having similar experiences in other companies. We heard one story last night in IRC, we received some E-mails in recent weeks, and we expect people to perhaps be inspired.

And behold, how timely, just three days ago in a FOSS blog on “the Gaslighting Weasel”: “My boss lied all of the time. Despite the fact that it was relatively easy to know they were lying, they didn’t care. If you called them out on it, they’d either ignore that, change the subject or somehow try to turn it back around on you. They didn’t just do this to me. They did it to everybody who works with them.”

This happened in Sirius too and colleagues were visibly resisting the lying. It irritated several colleagues.

How is a company supposed to be led by liars? We’re not talking about some habitual liar but a pathological one; it’s as if he has a book at the shelf behind him, with a title like “How to Lie Like a Boss!” (along with a rather smug reading list)

It’s hard to point out to pathological liars that they are liars. They’d simply not accept it. Instead, they resort to attacking the messenger/s. That’s why it is called “pathological”.

As a matter of fact, being a clever weasel, manipulating people and getting away with lies, ultimately dooms a sense of integrity in any organisation. Consider this article cited by the above post. It says: “People who engage in gaslighting are often habitual and pathological liars and frequently exhibit narcissistic tendencies. It is typical for them to blatantly lie and never back down or change their stories, even when you call them out or provide proof of their deception. [...] When you ask a someone who gaslights a question or call them out for something they did or said, they may change the subject by asking a question instead of responding to the issue at hand. This not only throws off your train of thought but causes you to question the need to press a matter when they don’t feel the need to respond. [...] A person who gaslights tends to retell stories in ways that are in their favor. For instance, if your partner shoved you against the wall and you are discussing it later, they may twist the story and say you stumbled and they tried to steady you, which is what caused you to fall into the wall.”

To be very clear, it wasn’t yours truly causing trouble. My actions were reactionary and the boss wasn’t happy. He got into this whole mess by repeatedly lying, and lying very badly. That’s why people started to call him “liar”; then he then used that to hunt down critics.

If one goes back to all the lying, it then becomes clear what the root issue is.

Here’s more from the blog above: “Meanwhile the ex-clients generally had very negative memories too. I know because I was still working with some of them on my own and we’d occasionally chat about the past. Of course now I realize that that my boss was painting themselves in a positive light. In every story they tell, they are the hero. There can be no other version of it. At least not in their deeply disturbed worldview.”

Sirius, as I said yesterday, has no chance of surviving. I know that as an insider. Expect it to fold soon. To make matters more difficult, a lot of the remaining company assets/money/resources are passed to Google and Amazon (AWS, gifts, ads) instead of where it can be more efficiently used/allocated. I pointed this out repeatedly, but that fell on deaf ears.

At Sirius what we’re now dealing with is two men who are not thinking straight, maybe due to andropause (not Andrew Boss or “Andrew, pause!”), with one of them showing up to a formal meeting in a rib shirt (not a step far from a shirtless Alex Jones). Geeks are basically being governed by a lying sociopath with a huge ego and overinflated sense of esteem, driving away our remaining clients by demolishing any remnants of trust (eventually they did find out they had been lied to).

Sirius may still seem like it’s doing OK, but it’s posturing at best. Maybe several more colleagues have left since my wife and I did; maybe the managers are not bothering to even update the site, knowing they might take it offline some time soon anyway, but the site still needs to be seen as healthy for existing (remaining) clients. As a reminder, the social control media accounts, notably Twitter, haven’t been active since this past summer (we showed evidence of this before). Maybe that’s the end of Sirius already. They just count the weeks/months.

From the report sent at the start of this month:

The current CEO’s role seems to be something along the lines of those “successful bankruptcy” they teach MBA students about, i.e. shutting a company down on the cheap (like looking for reasons to deny compensation). One might even joke that this CEO is like a “demolition man” for Sirius, spending time stalking staff instead of serving the company (Sirius lost Argo AI and other seemingly ‘fake’ clients whose systems Sirius never had access to; Argo AI is now formally and legally defunct), sawing the boat beneath him as at the end he too would be left without a job and Sirius as a company too become fiscally defunct.

It feels like Sirius is already so desperate for clients that it is willing to sign contracts at a humongous loss to Sirius. For instance, Sirius recently “miscalculated” with one client (charged 1,000 pounds for a project/client, but later realised Sirius already spent 5,000 pounds on the project, which means the losses are 4 times the revenue). In October the company changed the official company address to its accountancy’s address, i.e. the address of another firm. The day after Roy asked the CEO about it; he only got angry and it didn’t look good. We were running out of assets and maybe no postbox, either. Letters are sent to staff with no return address. Who runs the show? A private apartment?

Using Rianne for accusation by proxy seems irrational on many levels. It’s probably done just for spite and revenge against Roy. The letter sent to Rianne (by E-mail and then by post) is missing context and there are no URLs in screenshots. Without full context or at least a URL it’s almost impossible to know what one is looking at. Evidence oughtn’t be presented like this and IRC logs might not even be admissible in most contexts.

Video download link | md5sum 40e0b150595f3d35232a867e7c02391f
The Sirius Implosion
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The situation at Sirius has gotten really bad; there are well overdue invoices, dodgy address changes, and recently a major client (oldest client) suffered a very major outage after Sirius had racked up thousands of pounds in unpaid hosting bills

THE above video deals with this morning’s part as well as yesterday’s part. Some of the symptoms we’ve been seeing lately suggest that Sirius ‘Open Source’ might be heading towards bankruptcy/insolvency/administration (tomorrow’s part is entitled “Successful Bankruptcy”).

A company that fails to pay bills and is making up excuses/pretexts to deny severance is a company that does not care about its future. A recent example of this was Elon Musk at Twitter. When a company starts debt-loading or offloading liabilities to other parties (public companies, upstream suppliers, private clients, staff) it’s certainly time to demand what you’re entitled to and go away. My wife and I left this month and the video above is part of a long story we must tell, ensuring others are forewarned (not about Sirius alone; other companies behave similarly sometimes).