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

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ of the past 4 years has been somewhat of a farce at the top; people with neither skills nor experience in management (far from it!) try to hide their incapability and insecurities by mostly bullying the staff, misusing/abusing authority that was never deserved in the first place

THE recipe for disaster was right there in Sirius for nearly half a decade, i.e. around the company had turned 20 (it was founded in 1998). Managers were appointed not based on skilled but based on nepotism and blind loyalty. When challenged (regarding failure to perform the job or follow the law) the reaction would often be nasty bullying, false accusations, and anything else that can humiliate technical staff, including people who spent many years in the company and did a lot for the company. They stayed up all night, solved issues, didn’t just munch cookies all day long.

I heard similar stories about other companies (even the EPO), but I don’t know these companies firsthand, so I cannot explain how and why they collapsed. The above is my own story and some secondhand account of my wife’s story too. The lesson of the story is, never work for companies where people who aren’t qualified at anything relevant (not managerial skills, not technology, let alone Open Source) rise to positions of power. We recently learned that Elodie Bergot climbed up the ranks again, probably owing to her husband, a longtime friend and ally of Frenchman Benoît Battistelli and Frenchman António Campinos. When it ceases to be about skills and capacity to perform the job (like Mr. Kink bringing three sexual partners into the company) the jobs won’t get done, the pensions won’t get paid, and even very basic things (like holidays) won’t be handled properly. Managing a company of adults isn’t the same as babysitting toddlers; doing the latter is not suitable experience for doing the former, or [cref 167181 managing an office that does not even exist]. Ganging up against innocent people may seem ‘fun’, but these adventurous campaigns of hate mostly drove away key (technical) staff, rendering the company “dead man walking” (far too much debt, nothing left to sell). Management imposters are told by clients that the company is “incompetent” (actual quote). Guess who’s being blamed.

Decadence, when it comes to technology at least, goes years back at Sirius.

“Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.”

–Ernest Hemingway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi ????????,

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

Grievance concerning ????????

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I would like:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned for more tomorrow.

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Sinking in Debt
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

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

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

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

2018 and 2019:

2019 and 2020:

2020 and 2021:

Growing debt, no money left in the bank.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

Summary: Around 4 years ago some of the most essential staff of Sirius Open Source suddenly left the company, even at short notice (the management was trying to hide this, but abstaining from any remarks on this matter became unsustainable); it’s probable that abusive management played a considerable role in this ongoing demolition of Sirius Open Source

THIS part (one of 4 in the corresponding long section) deals with the beginning of the end of Sirius ‘Open Source’, which began to do irrational and occasionally dubious (maybe illegal) things, leading to the collapse of the company and coinciding with the collapse of the founder’s marriage. A certain “management cabal” was covertly forming, based on perceived loyalty if not kinship, publicly insulting the former manager and former wife (who even contacted clients after the divorce) while treating longtime staff like rubbish. It was about 4 years ago. This part does not deal with anyone’s personal life, but it’s impossible to understand Sirius and its unfortunate demise without grasping that issues in the personal life of the founder triggered a whole bunch of commercial issues, and management vacuum was hurriedly filled up by incompetent bullies who lie to everybody and never admit mistakes. These people don’t know how to manage, were never trained in management, and they compensated for inner insecurities by acting aggressively against sceptics.

There’s this quasi-twofold issue: as the company employs based on nepotism, in spite of a lack of any relevant qualifications and/or experience (even managers; they don’t know “Open Source”), the company ends up with nontechnical Windows users in technical roles. This means clients cannot be wooed — or existing contracts secured/renewed — for technical tasks, so the nature of contracts becomes increasingly clerical — not technical — and as Windows has back doors among many other security problems the whole security model becomes farcical. On issues pertaining to a lack of skills and nepotism, please stay tuned until next month.

In a nutshell, as this section shall hopefully demonstrate, the management of Sirius basically destroyed and dismantled the company with years-old failures and an endless string of bad decisions, lacking any consultation with those impacted, who are also proficient. And why? Well, because to the “cabal” it is a vanity project; they know everything! And at the same time they know nothing. Sadly for them, eventually they end up without a company, without an employer, without a job of their own. So well done! Own goal.

As somebody explained to me earlier today, sometimes people are blinded, and more so if they’re upset and angry. They’re too confident and the ego is becoming way too big, and hence they wear blinders and see nothing else that may make actual sense. Due to emotions and impulses they destroyed the company. It’s too late now. They recently discovered that they had destroyed the company and now they focus on how to try to not only suppress this series but also remove anything that was published so far. This isn’t a company run by grown-ups but by cartoon-obsessed and over-confident “superheroes” (in their own minds).

Here is the first part of the section in the report. It is entitled The Bullying Era because bullying is what best sums up what was happening back then. Not bullying among staff like peers and colleagues but bullying from the management (i.e. top-down), along with false allegations, accusations, and sometimes fabrications.

In this first part we present some background about the status quo around 2018. Later we’ll show some bullying examples.

The Bullying Era

This section is essential. Without it, the sentiments of Roy and Rianne or their relationship with the company cannot be fully grasped.

Several years ago there was management change. It seems to have resulted in the company becoming a lot smaller and poorly managed. Staff did communicate some of the concerns, as those concerns were shared across teams and colleagues (unionisation is difficult in very small companies). To quote one message seen: “I’m gratified to know you’re with us in all this. We’re a lot stronger as a group. I regret to see we’re all being bullied, typically with bogus allegations and our health is affected. I did face the management over this, albeit privately.”

The management likes to think it lives in a tall tower on a hill, enjoying total control over minds and hearts. But when many people get treated very unfairly and truly badly they’re likely to talk to one another.

Preliminary research helped elucidate pertinent facts about the company. There was a list of things we know and things we would only speculate about at that point. Facts:

– When Roy joined the company his per-hour rate was higher than now (almost 12 years later). Some colleagues receive different pay for the exact same role. For instance, some years ago it could be confirmed that some overnight NOC staff received a salary of 21,000 pounds per annum, whereas colleagues got paid about 25% more. They did the exact same role.

– a key colleague no longer appeared to be in the company, as confirmed (we believe) by the VPN renewal table. Roy warned or politely cautioned management not to lose technical staff and named him specifically.

– One colleague once spoke about being “shareholder” or similar with the CEO, but this was not communicated to any of the colleagues.

– The CEO was angry at a long-serving colleague when he left, one might only suppose due to the very short notice. Managing core functions at the company became almost impossible and some clients could not be served, resulting in complaints later mis-attributed (wrong people blamed rather than those who lost the principal colleague).

– The Sirius office was, at that point, virtually empty and must have cost at least a grand a month just to rent (workers were almost sure it’s rented, as the shutdown in 2020 helped confirm). This seemed like a mis-allocation of funds or priorities.

– Company meetings were canceled without any reason given — not a positive sign at all.

– No transparency about departure of workers. One had to guess or rely on gossip.

– Some colleagues, who had more inside information (because of physical office access), decided to leave the company

– Moving to AWS was about lowering costs, but those costs have (expectedly) risen to something comparable to a salary, set aside issues associated with autonomy, privacy etc. This was short-sighted.

– Moving or changing the NOC’s night cover from 4 people to 3 people was also about lowering costs, but that meant really awful and unhealthy sleeping patterns for all those involved. Despite assurances this would improve, nothing ever happened and no redemption came. People who work in daytime cannot fully understand what it involves to work overnight and change the night hours half a dozen times a month (like jet lag, maybe even worse due to short intervals).

– The new manager knew the Sirius CEO for a long time (circumstances or context not fully known but it may be professional, like the Open Source Consortium, which the CEO claimed to be the leader/founder of but apparently wasn’t; there was a mis-representation in the press; Roy met the person behind the Open Source Consortium, who wished to point out he had wanted to sue the Sirius CEO for defamation over it but said it would be too expensive and thus unworthy of pursuing).

– At some time around that point the Director of the company (in the UK) was US-based and even insinuated to staff that many NOC operations would be shifted to the US (that never actually happened).