I was surprised by my current job. When I walked in the first thing they did was give me a badge to open doors. The second thing they did was take me to “orientation,” which mostly consisted of them handing me a laptop and giving me the password for my already configured administrative user.
My first day was sitting for 8 hours abandoned in a cubicle because my new boss forgot to put in the new hire requests for IT. No user, no email, no nothing. Only reason I had a laptop at all was because they happened to find an old one in a drawer.
I had a job where that happened, but I was fortunate enough that they called me before I left to head to them. (It was a long drive.)
Every morning they called to say “I’m sorry, we haven’t been able to get your account setup yet. Can you come in tomorrow instead?”
That lasted for a week. The last day I didn’t even bother to get ready because I figured they’d be doing the same thing and just starting me the next Monday. It was a risk but it all worked out.
It’s not always for lack of trying. I spent a year or so building the integration (from a box of scraps!) between the shiny new HR system and our IDP. This integration was supposed to be functional out of the box according to the HR system salesgoblin. It didn’t just need to be configured, it needed to be built from scratch because they didn’t actually support hybrid AD/Entra setups managed from the AD side. Which was only the unofficial standard for Windows based shops at the time.
Anyway, I wanted to make it grant employees access to shit based off a combo of Job Title and Department. On a technical level, it’s basic baby stuff. Concatenate the Dept and Title into a string, use that as the key to a hashtable with the access they need listed. Bish bash bosh, bob’s your uncle.
It would have been a cakewalk compared to all the shit I had to build for handling separations and all the data retention shit around those.
But none of the department managers could actually tell us what the fuck their workers needed access to. Like maybe 3% had any idea at all. And I didn’t have the team or time to try and do data analytics across the access of everyone at the company just to get an unreliable best guess.
So it just handles setting new hires up with the basic access everyone gets and separations. Still a savings of ~1 hour per employee.
It’s been something like 7 years since I built that integration. They’re finally going to replace it with a true access management platform. It’s cost them multiple millions so far, has an entire new department dedicated to the thing, it has been “in-progress” for two years, and it still hasn’t replaced my shit yet.
My favorite part is when they come to me months in to something they’re trying to get working, and I’m able to point them at where they made mistaken assunptions at the first step leading to the mess they’re currently in.
I provided a ton of in-depth notes on our current standards, the weird gotchas/deviations, every single stumbling block and edge case I had found, all the seemingly logical and safe assumptions that don’t actually hold. I don’t think they read any of it. I keep asking them to reach out before they start working on a new piece of functionality. They don’t.
So now I get to tell them things like “that assumption you built this piece of logic off of will bite you in the ass in this specific way”, they say they’ll take it under consideration, and I laugh knowing this whole project will probably implode under the weight of incorrect assumptions before it’s finished.
heck, i had a consultancy gig where the customer wanted me on-site for intro 400km away, and i had to spend a few days with no hardware at all, never mind access. also it was a high-security thing so i had to be escorted around at all times until they could sort out the badge thing. very productive week, that. at least got a few hotel breakfasts out of it.
I had a job like that. It was a public secret that the night shift people were there just in case someone called - we generally got 3-5 calls per shift and there were something like 7 people. I didn’t really use Reddit at the time, but they didn’t block Netflix or Hulu so I (and most of the others) just watched those. I read a lot of books, too. Some people slept through their entire shifts. I only fell asleep once, by accident; I was always too nervous I’d miss a call. One shift a co-worker and I just played Fluxx waiting for calls.
I was at that job for eighteen months. When I left, I was worried that I didn’t know how to work anymore. I was well liked, sometimes even specifically requested, at my next job, though, so perhaps the time semi-off helped me.
oh loads. my rate was 100€/h for that, plus travel, food, and accommodation. not that i got all of that money but it definitely hurt them more than it hurt me.
Like anyone in a corporate job has correct access on day 1
I was surprised by my current job. When I walked in the first thing they did was give me a badge to open doors. The second thing they did was take me to “orientation,” which mostly consisted of them handing me a laptop and giving me the password for my already configured administrative user.
My first day was sitting for 8 hours abandoned in a cubicle because my new boss forgot to put in the new hire requests for IT. No user, no email, no nothing. Only reason I had a laptop at all was because they happened to find an old one in a drawer.
I had a job where that happened, but I was fortunate enough that they called me before I left to head to them. (It was a long drive.)
Every morning they called to say “I’m sorry, we haven’t been able to get your account setup yet. Can you come in tomorrow instead?”
That lasted for a week. The last day I didn’t even bother to get ready because I figured they’d be doing the same thing and just starting me the next Monday. It was a risk but it all worked out.
This was my first month and a half one time
A Password is a thing that protects you from hackers. If you work here for long enough, you might even get your own account.
It’s not always for lack of trying. I spent a year or so building the integration (from a box of scraps!) between the shiny new HR system and our IDP. This integration was supposed to be functional out of the box according to the HR system salesgoblin. It didn’t just need to be configured, it needed to be built from scratch because they didn’t actually support hybrid AD/Entra setups managed from the AD side. Which was only the unofficial standard for Windows based shops at the time.
Anyway, I wanted to make it grant employees access to shit based off a combo of Job Title and Department. On a technical level, it’s basic baby stuff. Concatenate the Dept and Title into a string, use that as the key to a hashtable with the access they need listed. Bish bash bosh, bob’s your uncle.
It would have been a cakewalk compared to all the shit I had to build for handling separations and all the data retention shit around those.
But none of the department managers could actually tell us what the fuck their workers needed access to. Like maybe 3% had any idea at all. And I didn’t have the team or time to try and do data analytics across the access of everyone at the company just to get an unreliable best guess.
So it just handles setting new hires up with the basic access everyone gets and separations. Still a savings of ~1 hour per employee.
It’s been something like 7 years since I built that integration. They’re finally going to replace it with a true access management platform. It’s cost them multiple millions so far, has an entire new department dedicated to the thing, it has been “in-progress” for two years, and it still hasn’t replaced my shit yet.
My favorite part is when they come to me months in to something they’re trying to get working, and I’m able to point them at where they made mistaken assunptions at the first step leading to the mess they’re currently in.
I provided a ton of in-depth notes on our current standards, the weird gotchas/deviations, every single stumbling block and edge case I had found, all the seemingly logical and safe assumptions that don’t actually hold. I don’t think they read any of it. I keep asking them to reach out before they start working on a new piece of functionality. They don’t.
So now I get to tell them things like “that assumption you built this piece of logic off of will bite you in the ass in this specific way”, they say they’ll take it under consideration, and I laugh knowing this whole project will probably implode under the weight of incorrect assumptions before it’s finished.
heck, i had a consultancy gig where the customer wanted me on-site for intro 400km away, and i had to spend a few days with no hardware at all, never mind access. also it was a high-security thing so i had to be escorted around at all times until they could sort out the badge thing. very productive week, that. at least got a few hotel breakfasts out of it.
I sure hope you got paid for just milling about.
i had a job where jack fucking shit happened. I just went on reddit all day. this was worth paying me thousands to do.
I had a job like that. It was a public secret that the night shift people were there just in case someone called - we generally got 3-5 calls per shift and there were something like 7 people. I didn’t really use Reddit at the time, but they didn’t block Netflix or Hulu so I (and most of the others) just watched those. I read a lot of books, too. Some people slept through their entire shifts. I only fell asleep once, by accident; I was always too nervous I’d miss a call. One shift a co-worker and I just played Fluxx waiting for calls.
I was at that job for eighteen months. When I left, I was worried that I didn’t know how to work anymore. I was well liked, sometimes even specifically requested, at my next job, though, so perhaps the time semi-off helped me.
oh loads. my rate was 100€/h for that, plus travel, food, and accommodation. not that i got all of that money but it definitely hurt them more than it hurt me.
End of week one: “you should have your work account by this time next week… at the earliest”
They sent that as an email to the address you don’t have access to yet