Video download link | md5sum 93ed07dde58f9f18674c2d75a0c2a72c
Management That Dislikes Geeks
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ has devolved into a kakistocracy that lies to staff and gaslights technical workers. This is how companies perish.

TODAY’S COVERAGE of Sirius focused on how the company was treating valuable geeks, whom the company should thank and be grateful to even have. It can barely hire any more; those who come leave very quickly.

A deficit of technical knowledge has long doomed the company. A deficit of technical staff is even worse. Treating them like “crap” only makes things worse, leading to dissent, protest, and resignations. The video above covers the latest meme and article. Tomorrow we’ll talk about unions.

My wife Rianne never appreciated these insulting analogies (calling NOC staff “monkeys” and treating them accordingly)

5 Little Monkeys Swinging In The Tree

Summary: As per Rianne’s departure message about Sirius ‘Open Source’ (tuxmachines.org post), the abuse endured since 2019 did a lot of damage and false accusations were the last straw; the role was created by people who called folks who would occupy it “monkeys”; that’s how some would view the staff

THE staff will always remember what happened. The staff does not forget bullying. Witch-hunts are also impossible to forget. While Rianne strongly suspects that Matthew Garrett ‘doxxed’ her to her employer as part of his efforts to silence me, the more plausible explanation is that Sirius management was looking for excuses to quell technical dissent and moral defense. I’ve been arguing against many of the company’s decisions for a long time (internally).

I wasn’t alone though; other staff also felt unhappy and some found the courage to speak about it, not just to peers but also to management. We’ve already shown a bunch letters after videos on grievances and there might be a letter-ripping video after explaining and showing the chain of events.

Adding insult to injury, in Rianne’s case her love of animals and regular donations to animal charities were sort of weaponised, hence the image below:

The company relied on truly ‘flimsy’ ‘evidence’. The management said, without any evidence, that I had uttered something “defamatory”; it took two weeks to actually show something and what they then showed was some side IRC channel (that nobody reads) stating perfectly factual information about my experiences, without naming people or the company. It was a chat between just two people and didn’t reveal anybody’s identity. It was factual and necessary; it was moral to object to bad ideas. Blind obedience and unquestionable docility should not be seen as a merit.

Based on a two-person chat, however, the company started breaching protocols and making up processes, as we shall show at a later date. The procedures set forth were disregarded and extreme measures taken for no good reason, so we resigned. It was done with immediate effect, as per the law; and “you are unlikely, in most circumstances, to need to continue the process,” say the rules. So we’re free to speak about what happened. We shall soon talk about labour union aspects as well. It’s something I’ve spoken about with friends for almost 4 years already.

In a company where some technical workers are compared to “monkeys” and there are about as many “managers” as non-managers, something has truly gone wrong. We had a moral duty or felt an urgent need to explain what had gone wrong. We now have a wiki that maintains several sections, including: memes, videos, report, key facts in a nutshell…

We’ve published about 45 videos with good titles (explaining in short the issues at hand), cases of clients (without naming them), openwashing, clown-washing etc.

As a reminder, we talk about a company that despite opposition from its own technical staff basically outsourced almost everything (Sirius also used to host for clients, on its very own premises). It used to self-host even the VoIP and file storage, but now, with no actual office, Sirius is just some account in another company’s server.

As we’ve said before, the company stands no chance of surviving. It’s deep in debt and it doesn’t know what it’s doing. Even its own clients began accusing it of “incompetence” (direct quote). When I joined the company in 2011 the staff had extensive media contacts in the wiki (for outreach, promotion, advocacy). It deteriorated over time as management was dismissing people without informing staff what actually happened (not safe to rely on hearsay and misinformation). Then, in Freenode, there was already an outlet for staff to discuss issues. Tackling a tradition of secrecy (dishonest management, but not quiet management), the IRC channel about the company insisted that “management wasn’t always right”, hence the need for a space in which bosses could be scrutinised. Now we do this in Techrights. The “monkeys” speak out.

Further to the rants from the other day, consider the Aviva letter claiming to have ‘lost’ traces of a pension, along with my reply:

> Thank you for sending in this LOA, We have searched our files with the
> information you have provided and can?t find anything, if you have any
> other information we can search again, we will just need you to resend
> it with the LOA.
>
> The details we need to search our systems to find out customer are
> policy numbers, full name, date of birth, current address or old
> addresses that may not have been changed on our systems, national
> insurance numbers, scheme number or scheme address
>
>
> *Kind regards*
> Aviva Customer Team

Hi,

I paid into my pension scheme at Aviva from around 2011 until about 2016. I gave you my DOB and NI number and you say you cannot find my account. How is that possible? Did you lose my money?

And a more personalised one too:

This is an automated email from Aviva Customer Services – please do not reply as this mailbox is not monitored.

Dear Dr R Schestowitz

Thank you for contacting Aviva. Please find attached the information you asked for.

If we have sent you a form to complete, please ensure you print and complete the form and post it back to us. For security reasons we are unable to accept forms by email or fax.

If you need any further information and you are calling from United Kingdom then please contact us on 0800 953 1777 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday not including bank holidays.

If calling from other countries please contact us on +0044 2037 611130.

Please do not reply to this email address, it is not monitored for incoming messages and your query may not be dealt with. Please email enquiries@aviva.co.uk instead?. For security reasons please only include your policy number when you email us.

Yours sincerely

Aviva Customer Services | PO Box 520, Norwich, NR1 3WG
Telephone: 0800 953 1777 | E-mail: enquiries@aviva.co.uk

?Any details you submit will not be secure whilst being submitted

Here’s the PDF (nothing sensitive in there):

Be wary of pension providers. They’re mostly good at taking money.

Video download link | md5sum 517c825e6b2b4ff488a8c7557ed7b5ce
Management Always Right
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ has a seemingly very common problem; managers cannot be held accountable and even when shown that they failed at something, instead of apologising or taking actions against themselves they resort to accusing/blaming the reporter

TWELVE years ago the management at Sirius was a lot better. I was there. I saw it. Managers were typically technical people (like programmers and sysadmins). Things have changed though.

In recent years managers were just self-styled ‘managers’ or “professional managers” with experience in babysitting (literally).

As noted here a few hours ago, bringing a concrete example to the table, managers had made bad technical decisions and then refused to admit that. The evidence does not matter! It’s all about one’s pride. It’s about protecting brands^*.

Moreover, in that same example, it should be clear that staff wasn’t properly informed or trained; then, a falsified timeline was constructed for post hoc-type cover-up.

This example is about a year old, so in relative terms it is recent. If you work in a company that behaves in this way, consider leaving. Things won’t improve as this sort of attitude repels geeks.
_______
^* At Sirius, Google and AWS/Amazon were stubbornly defended no matter what (also Slack and Clownflare to a lesser degree). Readers of Techrights would likely be going one step ahead, correctly guessing some companies (not Sirius!) or even universities/governments (public sector, accountable to their citizens) which made a move to Microsoft would be ‘religiously’ defending bad decisions/choices (bribes often play a role, as Microsoft whistleblowers have repeatedly demonstrated in the recent past).

And whenever things fail, as always happens (Microsoft products are even defective by design), Microsoft just pushes them more Microsoft as the supposed solution. More sales! The culprits who brought Microsoft to the business/government want to “prove” it’ll work; so they pay Microsoft some more, albeit not at a personal expense. It’s a vicious cycle. Everyone loses, except Microsoft. And if only everything ran on Microsoft, they insist, things would be ‘optimal’ (until the next ransomware attack).

As an associate put it (to paraphrase), the problem is always that there wasn’t sufficient faith in Microsoft and that is always solved by buying TheNextVersion(tm) and MORE of it. For decades the cycle has been the same, namely it’d work if only they could achieve 100% Microsoft integration. Once that happens, the target goal posts move, and it would work if only they could purchase TheNextVersion, and if that happens before they run out of money, then the goals posts move again. At that point it becomes, it’d work if only they had the right Microsoft training. Then by that time, the $TheNextVersion has become $ThePreviousVersion and that part of the cycle starts again. And yet they still blame outright collapses on “Linux people” and your average worker agrees to believe that excuse. The problem is not new, it as it goes back to the 1990s. But for a recent example look at Aaron Swartz’s blog post about Conde Nast and why he had no choice but to walk out the door and not look back.

Clients chasing while managers chasing staff that works overnight, entrapping the staff for using faulty processes and faulty software (the management’s own fault)

Summary: Lately we’ve focused on nepotism and special treatment at Sirius ‘Open Source’; today we show how the “club” (or the clique, which is sometimes literally family members) avoids responsibility and liability

THIS series has inevitably become long because there’s plenty left to say and a lot to demonstrate with more practical examples (sans names of people and companies, especially clients).

We’ve already shared several examples of management passing blame to staff that did nothing wrong while failing to hold itself accountable for its own failures. A year ago there was one classic example of this when a message about a potential client resulted in disciplinary warnings; I joked that since we had received no instructions whatsoever I can at best say “hi, it’s Roy” when picking up the phone. To spare all the ‘gory’ details, here’s a message I sent back then:

I’ve just caught up with E-mail.

I remember the scenario very well. This was the first time ever that I received a call over Google Voice while connected (online).

The browser requested authorisation for microphone access and other things before I could pick up the call AND also be heard. This is inevitably what happens when there’s no thorough testing of such new protocols (Rianne did do some testing on her laptop).

It boils down to our instructions (which I have saved locally) coming late and without any training after that. Or even being able to test it “live” in my browser, which understandably limits what site site wants to do with my hardware.

I hope this clarify what happened and helps prevent future such scenario (browser settings have been changed accordingly).

Regards,

I got the following reply:

Hi Roy,

Many thanks for your reply with responses on the points raised.

I will check on the points you have noted and get back to you to see if there were any steps where there was an issue with the process and any areas that we could have improved on.

I think a key point though is that nothing should prevent us from answering any call with a professional greeting that sounds like a Service desk response. First impressions are vital for customer confidence of course. This is something that with your years of valuable experience should be well-practiced.

Thank you for resolving the browser settings though for future calls and engaging with this change.

And then me again:

Just to note (I’ve not yet read the other 5 messages), for a number of weeks we were on duty “in the blind”. We were given no instructions at all regarding:

- How to answer
- What to say
- Who might phone
- What to ask
- Where to enter information

In a sense, had we answered, it would possibly prove worse than not picking up at all.

A hypothetical call would be something like

“Oh, hello, who are you?”

“What do you want?”

“What are you? What am I? What am I even supposed to do?”

So I think that higher up (than me) someone failed to prepare us. I did not raise this concern at the time.

Regards,

Long story short, the company expected technical staff to carry out purely clerical work using defective products that many staff members had issues with (but could communicate with peers to affirm that pattern) trying to meet impossible demands like picking a call within 3 rings using defective stuff. Sometimes it would not phone or ring, sometimes it is a background process (not an actual phone!), sometimes there was insufficient memory.

At the end came a long document with a fabricated timeline of what had actually happened. Why? Because you can never assert that people above you blew it. Or that it’s their fault that faulty products are used and no instructions are available.

It’s not even clear if the above client was actually a paying client. The company was habitually announcing clients that later turned out to be ‘pre’ announcements or truly premature as nothing would ever come out of it. Giving false hopes to staff to discourage looking for other employment may seem fair, but it is still misleading. The managers were very eager to give a false impression (illusion) of getting business.

We previously shared some screenshots from the Internet Archive, demonstrating with the Wayback Machine the contents of old sites of Sirius, mentioning words like community and advertising more honestly (staff, clients etc.). Well, honesty is long gone at Sirius.

Sirius is now a minuscule company. At the moment it paints a misleading picture of who works in the company and who the company works for. We’re already in the second half of January and this still hasn’t been rectified. I happen to know that at least one client (telephony company) asked to be removed from the fake “clients” page. There were probably more, but I wasn’t a witness to that. Should Rianne and I keep asking them to remove our names from the site too? They’re not even removing our prior staff that left years ago; one of them changed jobs to work for our client.

Sirius is very fake.

Video download link | md5sum ae1efc68cafb1d4dec5a536eb6aaf511
Do Us a Favour, Stop Asking for Favours
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Employers must not ask staff to do jobs outside the remit and scope of their work contract; anything else should be strictly forbidden, based on my personal experience which I talk about today

THE video above speaks of Sirius ‘Open Source’ and the notion of coercion. Apparently this is done to volunteers in Debian as well (i.e. unpaid people). Being part of a project or a company does not constitute a master/slave relationship. Voluntary contributions outside one’s work are welcomed, but when subordinates cannot (easily) say “no” to those who pay their salaries or hired them…. that’s a potential problem.

Today I gave two personal examples where the company’s management asked me to do favours (gratis work) for their own friends. I use some analogies to exemplify the absurdity and I certainly hope other people, including employers, can learn something. There should be clearly expressed laws that forbid that. This should be illegal.

New:

Video: (until Google removes it)

Description:

Changes of ECG parameters after BNT162b2 vaccine in the senior high school students

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36602621/

Full text link

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9813456/

Data collected, December 2021

Published, January 2023

Aims

Determine the ECG parameter change

Determine efficacy of ECG screening after the second dose of BNT162b2

In cooperation with the school vaccination system of Taipei City government (Taiwan)

N = 4,928 (mostly male)

12 to 18 year old

Before and after 12 lead ECGs

Three follow up 12 lead ECGs

ECGs read by by pediatric cardiologists

Serial comparisons of ECGs and questionnaire survey

Heart rate increased significantly after the vaccine,

(mean increase of 2.6 beats per minute)

QRS duration and QT interval decreased significantly after the vaccine with increasing heart rate

763 (17.1%) had at least one cardiac symptom after the second vaccine dose.

After the first dose, 209 (5.7%) had at least one cardiac symptom

Cardiac symptoms

Chest pain

Palpitations

Dizziness or syncope

Depolarization and repolarization parameters

All 4 cardiac symptoms significantly higher after the second dose of BNT162b2 vaccine (p less than 0.001)

N = 4,928

Abnormal ECGs were obtained in 51 (1.0%)

31 students were asymptomatic

ST – T changes, 37

Premature ventricular contractions, 4

Sinus bradycardia, 2

Atrial tachycardia, 1

Incomplete right bundle branch block, 3

Abnormal QRS, 2

Prolonged QT, 2

4 judged to have significant arrhythmia

1 was diagnosed with mild myocarditis

10, suspected pericarditis

All of these symptoms improved over time

Asymptomatic at one month

No covid in Taiwan at this time.

Conclusion

Cardiac symptoms are common after the second dose of BNT162b2 vaccine

Incidences of significant arrhythmias and myocarditis are 0.1%

One in a thousand

Rotavirus vaccine Rotashield, (1999)

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/rotavirus/vac-rotashield-historical.htm

1 to 2 serious events per 10,000 vaccinees

(Intussusception)

Vaccine withdrawn

From the authors

BNT162b2 has a better safety profile than mRNA-1273 Moderna

Cardiac-related adverse effects, as peri- and myocarditis, are of particular concern because of possible serious complications

US vaccina advice

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/stay-up-to-date.html#children

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/stay-up-to-date.html

CDC recommends one updated (bivalent) booster dose:

• For everyone aged 5 years and older if it has been at least 2 months since your last dose.

• For children aged 6 months–4 years who completed the Moderna primary series and if it has been at least 2 months since their last dose.

UK vaccine advice

Who can get a COVID-19 vaccine

Everyone aged 5 (on or before 31 August 2022) and over can get a 1st and 2nd dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

People aged 16 and over, and some children aged 12 to 15, can also get a booster dose.