3 ms·

I am living in this hell at the moment. This situation originated from compliance box ticking and trickled down to a kafkaesque nightmare where you are punished

by hughrr 5y ago

I am living in this hell at the moment. This situation originated from compliance box ticking and trickled down to a kafkaesque nightmare where you are punished for ancillary problems. This is of course while being hammered because delivery has declined to a snail’s pace because the numerous hoops that need to be jumped through and general cruddiness of the process get in the way. But someone somewhere high up in the ivory tower ticked a box. I suspect the same here happened with Amazon and an insurer somewhere. Push the hell down to the bottom of the stack. The funny thing in this case is the process holes are still so enormous that you can drive a tank on fire through it and straight into production. The net gain is zero and the outcome is overconfidence.

robbedpeter 5y ago
Taser the camera. "Dunno, hoss, didn't notice it wasn't working. "
- mikro2nd 5y ago
  Speak softly and carry a can of spray-paint. (Hairspray might work just as well and be more defensible.)
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    sure, so the AI knows you're driving and it can NEVER see your face.
sdedovic 5y ago
Reminds me of something that happened a few years ago to me. Company was primarily using Java for the backend. The Application Security team decided to start scanning all our deployable JARs and WARs with a static analysis tool. Well, immediately the tool started complaining about our libraries. For example, the official Elasticsearch library, for the version of the database we used, had multiple System.out.println calls. Well those were all flagged and the static analysis tool deemed our code unacceptable. We needed to use a logger, not stdout. So we had to go and take it up with AppSec. And explain, no thats not our code. Yes, it does run in production. No we can't use a different library. The whole thing was exactly as you put it, a kafkaesque nightmare where I'm being punished for something I don't understand by people who don't understand. An no-one can tell me why.
- version_five 5y ago
  Just want to point out that Kafka based his stories in part on his experience working in the (Hapsburg i think?) bureaucracy, in particular the idea of a faceless and impenetrable organization that can't be reasoned with an is full of catch-22s (which I haven't read). So I find it funny we call it Kafkaesque when Kafka was just referring to how bureaucracy is. We should call it bureaucratic and admit that is what all big orgs end up becoming.
- piokoch 5y ago
  Phew, this at least spot some real issue (in some cases System.out.println can make multi-threaded program to get "synchronized" on console acces). At some point I came across a tool (I think it was white source) that was going through Github page of each library used and was checking if there are no bugs reported. Obviously very often there were totally bogus tickets, support requests created as bugs, rants as bugs, duplicates of already fixed tickets, etc. so investigating all that crap was really hard. Another problem was licencing. There are a lot of libraries that have dual licence, e.g. GPL and CDDL, obviously the tool was panicking that GPL is used, not noticing that there is a second "business-friendly" license. Those static analysis tools are not bad as a concept, however ratio of false positives to real issues found is too large to make them truly useful unless one can invest a lot of resources into tuning them.

by hughrr 5y ago

robbedpeter 5y ago

Taser the camera. "Dunno, hoss, didn't notice it wasn't working. "

mikro2nd 5y ago
Speak softly and carry a can of spray-paint. (Hairspray might work just as well and be more defensible.)
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  sure, so the AI knows you're driving and it can NEVER see your face.

sdedovic 5y ago

Reminds me of something that happened a few years ago to me. Company was primarily using Java for the backend. The Application Security team decided to start scanning all our deployable JARs and WARs with a static analysis tool. Well, immediately the tool started complaining about our libraries. For example, the official Elasticsearch library, for the version of the database we used, had multiple System.out.println calls. Well those were all flagged and the static analysis tool deemed our code unacceptable. We needed to use a logger, not stdout. So we had to go and take it up with AppSec. And explain, no thats not our code. Yes, it does run in production. No we can't use a different library. The whole thing was exactly as you put it, a kafkaesque nightmare where I'm being punished for something I don't understand by people who don't understand. An no-one can tell me why.

version_five 5y ago
Just want to point out that Kafka based his stories in part on his experience working in the (Hapsburg i think?) bureaucracy, in particular the idea of a faceless and impenetrable organization that can't be reasoned with an is full of catch-22s (which I haven't read). So I find it funny we call it Kafkaesque when Kafka was just referring to how bureaucracy is. We should call it bureaucratic and admit that is what all big orgs end up becoming.
piokoch 5y ago
Phew, this at least spot some real issue (in some cases System.out.println can make multi-threaded program to get "synchronized" on console acces). At some point I came across a tool (I think it was white source) that was going through Github page of each library used and was checking if there are no bugs reported. Obviously very often there were totally bogus tickets, support requests created as bugs, rants as bugs, duplicates of already fixed tickets, etc. so investigating all that crap was really hard. Another problem was licencing. There are a lot of libraries that have dual licence, e.g. GPL and CDDL, obviously the tool was panicking that GPL is used, not noticing that there is a second "business-friendly" license. Those static analysis tools are not bad as a concept, however ratio of false positives to real issues found is too large to make them truly useful unless one can invest a lot of resources into tuning them.