10 ms·

Seems like an innocent enough mistake. Remind me of when I once helped organize a volunteer hackathon with people from different companies. We created a Slack o

• macintux 4y ago
  Ouch. I try to not mix work and personal content on the same laptop, I’ve seen too many glitches (although usually not quite that embarrassing). Slack has been my one exception (although only on my phone). Thanks for the valuable reminder.
  • Ansil849 4y ago
    > I try to not mix work and personal content on the same laptop It's kind of jaw dropping to me at how this is still not the norm and how people gratuitously mix personal and work content on the same devices, both mobile and desktop.
    • Stratoscope 4y ago
      I remember when I worked at an Alphabet company and they offered the option of using your personal phone to sign in to work stuff. (It wasn't Slack, it was one of the seventeen different chat systems they had going at the time.) There was a teensy-weensy little caveat: Google IT could wipe your personal device at any time! No thanks.
      • macintux 4y ago
        That’s a widespread problem. I worked for a dramatically smaller IT firm and it also gave employees the opportunity to register their phones with the company’s Exchange service; when I asked my boss whether we should warn them about the power that gave us, he felt it would just cause unnecessary alarm.
        • idontpost 4y ago
          Your boss was an asshole.
          • bryanrasmussen 4y ago
            well, probably, but maybe it meant that while it gave the power to do this he would never do it. However one should never say never in business, so maybe naive.
        • sofixa 4y ago
          At least on Android, adding a corporate account explicitly lists what access you're giving to the corporate administrators.
      • yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
        That's... odd. Was this a long time ago? Because these days Android has work profiles that specifically exist to let you shove work stuff in its own separate space that can be managed separately from the rest of the device, and Google itself not using the feature that they built into the OS to support that exact situation would seem really weird.
        • Stratoscope 4y ago
          Yeah, it was a while ago, and it's possible that I could be remembering some details wrong. It just struck me as "no, I would rather carry a separate work phone if I have to."
          • 4y ago
    • eurasiantiger 4y ago
      If you work from home, have a separate work laptop, but connect it to the same network with your home computers, it’s all for nothing.
      • saagarjha 4y ago
        How so? Hopping around in your home network should not be possible by default and would be a gross overreach by any IT department, even beyond “you put data on this device and therefore we will search the entire thing”.
        • lodovic 4y ago
          Indeed, my work laptop is heavily firewalled, always assumes to be on an unsafe network, and uses a vpn and zscaler. Say you are on an airport wifi - I wouldn't expect corporate IT to scan the neighboring devices. No way it's going to snoop around on my home network, that would just expose the machine.
        • eurasiantiger 4y ago
          Interesting perspective difference; I was referring to protecting the work computer from threats, not the home network from corporate. You must work at happy places… Apparently you would also be surprised by how common it is to use a home printer, a home wifi access point, etc. and have IoT devices in the network. Corporate firewalls and scanners only protect against unauthorised connections and known threats; zero-day exploits can still be much more effective from a local network.
          • saagarjha 4y ago
            I have a pretty dim view of endpoint security, seeing it mostly as a thing that works against me rather than for me. I feel that any threat model that includes "zero-day exploits" is almost always poorly formed and sensationalist, rather than grounded in a genuine evaluation of security tradeoffs.
    • dotancohen 4y ago
      Purchasing, carrying, and maintaining two devices is expensive, heavy, and tedious. Easy always beats safe. Not to mention that there may be significant overlap between work and play for some people. I code Magento (PHP) during the day and contribute to open source PHP efforts as a hobby. In which environment (work or personal) should my notes and bookmarks be? When I have a company issued laptop I use two machines. When I don't, then I use two accounts on the same machine. Most Linux distros even allow fast account switching in different virtual consoles. I use a different background and panel color for the personal and work environments. It's not a perfect solution, but neither is separate devices.
      • can16358p 4y ago
        This. My work and hobby life is completely entwined. I have one powerful machine and micromanage my time by switching between windows of work and leisure. Add the fact that I do coding as work and video editing as a hobby which both need powerful machines, and it would be very stupid, unmanageable, and inconvenient to buy two MacBooks.
        • pharmakom 4y ago
          Dual boot or at least have 2 users.
          • can16358p 4y ago
            I constantly switch between windows and micromanage time. That's just impossible.
    • can16358p 4y ago
      I work for many different software projects. I also do a lot of 4K video editing both as a hobby and occasionaly for work. I also switch between tasks a lot daily. I am mobile. Yeah it would be perfectly economic, riskless, convenient, and definitely manageable to carry two fully specced MacBook Pros in my bag. Not even jumping into the software licensing territory.
    • Aeolun 4y ago
      Carrying two machines around all the time is no fun.
    • tannhaeuser 4y ago
      Umm, I remember a time when Personal Computers were seen as universal, do-it-all devices. And there was this expectation, you know, that your FOSS-OS will put all your security and privacy choices into your hand. That was roughly before folks took the red pill and went all-in on intransparent browser apps and would program their change-the-world app for themselves, to be released when ready. Unlike today where they flaunt non-novel, insignificant, uninspired crap on github.
    • rhinoceraptor 4y ago
      Pretty much no company will pay for a work phone these days, even if you have on-call duty.
      • lodovic 4y ago
        I put a prepaid sim card in my old phone and use it exclusively for work 2fa. Now I can turn off that phone at my convenience and when this gig is over I can just switch to a new sim.
      • Delk 4y ago
        That sounds very culturally dependent. I don't know where the other people in this discussion are based, though.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      Slack makes it easy. Terrible UX. I’m hoping it improves. I have a set of different organizations in Slack, but I used to keep getting them mixed up (embarrassing). What I did, was assign a different color theme to each org (on Mac. Doesn’t work on iOS). Helps me to differentiate quickly.
  • dheera 4y ago
    That and also in case there is any legal reason to sneeze the company laptop for discovery or anything you don't want any personal stuff on there. Keep personal stuff on personal devices, and never use personal devices for work either.
    • cyberlurker 4y ago
      God bless you :) But yes, we’ve seen from a number of US politicians how bad of an idea it is to mix personal and work on one device/account. Usually email. It is annoying having two phones if work isn’t paying.
      • jen20 4y ago
        If work isn’t paying, what gives them the right to have email or chat in your personal phone?!
        • cyberlurker 4y ago
          There is no right, just a personal choice. If you have to lug around the company provided laptop if you want to check your work calendar/email/slack/whatever, you may start to consider using your personal device.
        • dheera 4y ago
          Many people are effectively sheep and will install a company app on their personal phone because "wow it's so convenient everything is all on one device". That said ... employment is at-will, so there are no real rules here. It's not that different from if you sign up to be an Uber driver you're expected to have a car and a phone that you are willing to use for work, or you can't take the job. Nobody says it has to be the same device as the one you use for your personal email, it's just that you are expected to have a device for the job. So nothing legally prevents them from requiring you to have a device with the company apps on it, in return for you accepting some hopefully big enough salary. For software engineering, if the salary is on the low end of market I expect work to buy me a work phone, if they require me to install any apps. If salary is on the high end, then I wouldn't fuss about it too much, I could just buy myself a separate personal phone for work with the pile of extra cash, but them buying me one would still be a nice, appreciated gesture.
  • likortera 4y ago
    My solution to this is to have two separate accounts on my work laptop. One for work, the other one for side projects, personal browser, courses, learning, etc. As long as you're not doing anything illegal and are running on a non Administrator account, I think it is a good compromise vs having to carry a second laptop.
    • saagarjha 4y ago
      Your company likely has full access to that account and I would generally not recommend using any devices owned by your employer for side projects unless they specifically allow you to in some sort of legal contract that says something along the lines of them not owning everything you do on that account.
      • likortera 4y ago
        > Your company likely has full access No, they don't. At my company we buy our own laptops, and we expense them. There is no VPN and no company owned software installed. And most of what we do is Open Source anyway. > specifically allow you to in some sort of legal contract that says something along the lines of them not owning everything you do on that account Not a problem, my side projects are just for learning purposes. They're open source, and most of them end up abandoned. I'm not running a side business on a company laptop, so they can own everything if they want, I'm fine with that.
        • saagarjha 4y ago
          I’m glad it works out for you, but perhaps you see the issue with offering your advice unqualified in this situation?
• JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  Mission accomplished; now delete your machines.
• cmeacham98 4y ago
  Did the slack warning not tell you the number of people it was going to ping? At least nowadays it says something like "You're going to ping X people in Y timezones".
  • faustomorales 4y ago
    Right you are, yes, it was that same message. I suppose what I meant to convey is, "despite the thoughtful safeguards built into Slack, I still managed to screw this up." :) I really appreciate Slack and it is my preferred workplace communication platform, so I hope no one reads my anecdote as criticism of the product. I can't think of any way Slack itself could have done more to prevent my mistake. As more context, I do remember thinking, "that X number seems higher than I would expect, but maybe we had a lot of folks who signed up for the event that didn't show." I worked at a small company so the size of the company was on the same order of magnitude as the number of invitees to the event (~100). I explained away the Y time zones because I knew some people traveled internationally. I was also operating on very little sleep, so that probably didn't help.
    • iuri1 4y ago
      Well I used to have a gmail lab plugin which forced me into answering arithmetic questions when it was past 23 hours in my local time and I tried to send an e-mail
  • Dylan16807 4y ago
    Discord has a fun warning like that except it lies. It looks at how many people are on the server instead of the channel you're pinging.
• blensor 4y ago
  The real problem was that so many people felt the urge to reply to that PR making it so much worse than a single ping. I can live with the random message that has nothing to do with me, but having to delete an endless stream of messages because so many people felt the need to reply already knowing that it would go out to everyone is really annoying
  • NullPrefix 4y ago
    UNSUBSCRIBE!
  • richardw 4y ago
    Happened in my wife’s company of around 40k people. Mail to all, replies to stop replying, many hours to stop the firestorm. Then next timezone 8 hours out started replying. I don’t know why they didn’t just kill permissions to the mailing list.
    • anamexis 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm
    • spockz 4y ago
      Outlook has this amazing feature to ignore email threads: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ignore-all-email-messages-in-a-conversation-5ec0c3c2-3440-484e-9aca-0588234d44e9 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ignore-all-email-...
      • monkpit 4y ago
        They also have Reply Storm Protection in Exchange now: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/reply-all-storm-protection-in-exchange-online/ba-p/1369811 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/re...
    • cycomanic 4y ago
      Similar thing happened at uni when I was doing a PhD. The graduate office had some sort of mailing list which included all PhD students (or maybe even graduate students). There was maybe one mail a year to this list. At some point someone replied to the list (don't ask why the allowed everyone to post), they want to be unsubscribe, trigger a torrent of emails of people wanting to unsubscribe, people telling people to use the link on the email, people asking why they get this email, others telling everyone to stop replying (the irony). It was a study of human psychology. The whole thing lasted a week, I think in the end somebody was competent enough to restrict who could write to the list or maybe they just nuked the list.
• qwertox 4y ago
  > Seems like an innocent enough mistake. I doubt it. If you look at the PR, it does not add any value at all, but introduces a mistake ("for our repositories"), plus the commit message is kind of strange.
  • progval 4y ago
    Looks like a typical PR from young programmers who are learning English, which is consistent with the rest of the profile.
    • silisili 4y ago
      I don't quite get the mindset here. I'm (slowly and lazily) learning a new language, and can't imagine going into some native speaker's repo and trying to correct it...
      • Pako 4y ago
        This kinda looks like an attempt to get a commit into a bigger open source repository. It'd look nice on a resume to say you "contributed to Unreal Engine on GitHub".
        • vonseel 4y ago
          I got a commit into Django a few years ago. It was just updating a documentation link, but are you saying I should put it on my resume?
        • SwiftyBug 4y ago
          But that's so weird because even if that's on the resume, any interviewer would be interested in know what the contribution was. Maybe revealing that you only "fixed typos" would do more harm than good?
          • abirch 4y ago
            Depends on your level of honesty. Given that you're fixing typos to say that you contributed to a project, you'd probably double down and quote the number of PR (remember to only do 1 typo fix per PR) and then add a real bug you may have fixed or make one up. Unfortunately the entire interview process is why I usually try to hire former co-workers.
• al_borland 4y ago
  Free Code Camp had a bug in their email notification system several years back. I suspect they weren’t incrementing the index in their loop… Since I was the first person in the email list, I got an email for every person in their list. I had to shut my phone off, as the notifications were going out of control and couldn’t keep up. Fun fact, Gmail caps threads at 100 messages. So I had a full page of 100 email long threads in gmail on my phone.
  • sureglymop 4y ago
    That's terrifying.. did the notifications make your phone unusable? DOSed by FreeCodeCamp...
    • al_borland 4y ago
      Yeah, pretty much. I forcefully shut my phone off, as I was unable to just get to the settings, and then was trying to DM the guy via Twitter to try and get it to stop. Eventually it did stop and he reached out to tell me what went wrong.
  • matsemann 4y ago
    I did that exact bug once. But I didn't just get one email for each subscriber, since the index didn't increase the loop never terminated. Took me some time to actually kill the process (PHP script running at some provider back in the day). Got over a 100k emails to my Gmail, so much that my account crashed and it took a few days before I managed to log in again (got an error saying something went wrong when opening gmail in the browser). So at least then it was very possible to ddos someone's mailbox.
• yread 4y ago
  It's difficult to strike a balance between "Are you sure?" and a message describing precisely what you're going to do and why it's unusual in these warnings. Slack could include the org in their message though
• red_admiral 4y ago
  Following up with "verify the pull request and merge asap" doesn't sound like someone who knows what they're doing, though.
• ldjb 4y ago
  This reminds me of something that happened to me a couple of years ago, near the start of the pandemic and when we had recently switched from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. I needed to set up a one-to-one Teams meeting with a colleague, so I hit the 'Schedule meeting' button, added my colleague as an attendee, filled in the meeting name, date and time. I saw that Teams was asking me to select a channel. I didn't realise this was an optional field, so I just selected the General channel in my department's Teams channel. It seemed the most appropriate. And so I sent out the meeting invite, thinking it would only go to one colleague (the only one I had selected as a participant). I realised something was wrong a few moments later when I started receiving out-of-office responses from people I didn't recognise. I checked the meeting invite in my sent folder and realised it had gone out to the entire department. Hundreds of people, including all the senior managers and even the CTO! Turns out that when you specify a channel when creating a meeting in Teams, it also sends the meeting invite to everybody who has access to that channel which, in this case, was the entire department. There was no indication that this would happen, however. Still, I learnt my lesson. Now I know not to select a channel when creating a Teams meeting.
  • ushakov 4y ago
    what a UX failure if they labeled this as “Invite members of channels” this would have been avoided
• OOPMan 4y ago
  Innocent or not I woke up this morning after the last one died down to see a new fake MR on the same repo. It's trolling and childish trolling at that.