6 ms·

I had a developer that I inherited from a previous manager some years ago. Made tons of excuses about his machine, the complexity of the problem, etc. I offer

by bbarn 3y ago

I had a developer that I inherited from a previous manager some years ago. Made tons of excuses about his machine, the complexity of the problem, etc. I offered to check his machine out and he refused because it had "private stuff" on it. He had the same machine as the rest of the team, so since he hadn't made a commit in two weeks on a relatively simple problem, refused help from anyone, etc., we ultimately let him go. When we looked at his PC to see if there was anything useful from the project, his browser had around a thousand tabs open. Probably 80% of them were duplicates of other tabs, linking to the same couple stack overflow and C# sites for really basic stuff. The other 20% were... definitely "private stuff".

JohnFen 3y ago
> he refused because it had "private stuff" on it. There's a huge red flag. "Private stuff" (embarrassing or otherwise) shouldn't be on company machines in the first place.
- dijit 3y ago
  I agree completely. However if anyone touches my computer: don't you dare f*%king touch my private key. (ditto for my browsers sessions database, google cloud credentials directory etc;) I'm paranoid about it, but not enough to buy a yubikey, apparently.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    > However if anyone touches my computer: don't you dare f*%king touch my private key. Touch the computer, sure, but please don’t touch the screen with your filthy grease fingers.
    - mdpye 3y ago
      My work laptop has a touchscreen. I've never used it, but other people use it by accident fairly often. Usually only once each though, the look of shock is sometimes even worth the fingerprint :D
    - chimprich 3y ago
      I've never understood people who do this. You can point at the screen, tap with a pen, take the mouse or keyboard and move the cursor, etc. but surely it's bad manners to splodge your finger on someone's screen.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I'm unusually strict about maintaining a separation between work and personal (for instance, I would never allow my personal smartphone to connect to my employer's WiFi), so I wouldn't use personal keys on a work machine at all. But if those keys (or passwords, etc.) are generated for work purposes, I consider them to be as much company property as the machine itself, so I'm no more protective of them than I am of any other sensitive company data.
    - dijit 3y ago
      Interesting thought. How do you feel about giving your colleague your password? My personal opinion is that I can hold someone legally culpable if their account does something like leak financial information; you have a professional responsibility to secure your account from absolutely everyone. Administrators acting on your account must of course be heavily logged and audited, which is the case.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        > How do you feel about giving your colleague your password? I usually don't, mostly just out of good security habits, but also because most employers specifically prohibit doing that. Almost always, your colleague can be given his own access to whatever the password is for anyway. If that's not possible, then I'll share the password and change it immediately after my colleague doesn't need access anymore. > you have a professional responsibility to secure your account from absolutely everyone. I agree -- that's part of treating credentials the same way as all other sensitive company data. But it's still my employer's data, not mine. If I quit the company or if my supervisor wants to see the contents of my machine, I'm fine with that. The machine and everything on it belongs to the company anyway.
        dijit 3y ago
        Ok, but your private key, session tokens and CLI access tokens (kube configs, gcloud etc;) are your password in those situations. They tie to your identity, thus you must not treat them the same as company secrets, they are professional personal secrets which should not be disclosed or allowed to fall into anyone elses hands (less they be revoked and cycled). It's not just good security posture it could affect your career quite badly or lead to legal issues.
hinkley 3y ago
I’m at the other extreme of “private stuff”. Nothing work related should live on my work machine. It should all be pushed to git or dumped in the wiki (personal pages if nothing else). On one of my largest projects the IT dept made bulk orders for hardware and doled them out to new hires. 18 months into our new project someone’s hard drive died. Everyone acted like his dog died. I said no problem let’s go through the onboarding docs. The longest step by far was that the company mandated Whole Disk Encryption but IT hadn’t put it in their old inventory yet. So that was 2/3 of setup time. We found some issues with the docs and fixed them. Every two to four weeks that summer, someone else’s drive would go. You see, we got all of these machines from the same production run. So the hard drives came from the same production run, which was apparently faulty. The process got a little faster as we went. By the end of the summer it was my turn, and people still looked at me like I needed condolences. I got a faster machine for a few hours worth of work. I’m not sad. All my stuff was in the network already. I lost a couple hours’ of work, tops.
- teachrdan 3y ago
  > Nothing work related should live on my work machine. I thought this was a typo at first. Love this as an engineering koan.
  - noSyncCloud 3y ago
    And the corollary – nothing personal should be on your work machine, either
  - canucker2016 3y ago
    "Nothing work related should live ONLY on my work machine." is the intent.
- opello 3y ago
  This is the best way to reduce bus factor and not fall behind documenting key details!
  - jbm 3y ago
sureglymop 3y ago
He was let go after two weeks? No confrontation nothing? Sounds very american. In European working culture if you don't show up for two weeks people will be worried that something happened to you and try to work it out with you. This type of all or nothing reaction is a bit sporadic imo.
- mikestew 3y ago
  Sounds very american. Yeah, it's not like that part of the story was condensed and might have left out a bunch of details that weren't important to the story. So let's give OP a hard time and make judgements about a situation for which we have not even the slightest bit of context.
  - sureglymop 3y ago
    Oh absolutely, you're right. I am saying that despite whatever may have happened, two weeks is very short. I feel like it would be at least a month here regardless.
    - Uvix 3y ago
      It's not that the person didn't show up for two weeks, though; they showed up but refused to actually do any work.
  - bbarn 3y ago
    For context, I was brought in with the knowledge he hadn't done anything meaningful since being hired some time before my arrival, and we did reach out and offer help or ask if he needed anything, which he refused, somewhat angrily.
- RandallBrown 3y ago
  He was let go after two weeks of not doing any work, despite the manager offering to help him.
- sowbug 3y ago
  You might have meant to use a word other than "sporadic." That word describes a recurring event that happens at unpredictable intervals, such as snow in a normally hot desert, or a Linux crash caused by a race condition. Other words that fit the sentence better are "unusual," "unexpected," "unjustified," "inappropriate," "surprising," "extreme," "abrupt," or "out of the blue." (For what it's worth, I'm American, and I disagree with your assessment. We don't know how long the person was given to make progress, and we don't know what was communicated. To conclude that a two-week period without a commit represents the entire period between the start of the poor performance and the termination is, well, a bit out of the blue.)

by bbarn 3y ago

JohnFen 3y ago

> he refused because it had "private stuff" on it. There's a huge red flag. "Private stuff" (embarrassing or otherwise) shouldn't be on company machines in the first place.

dijit 3y ago
I agree completely. However if anyone touches my computer: don't you dare f*%king touch my private key. (ditto for my browsers sessions database, google cloud credentials directory etc;) I'm paranoid about it, but not enough to buy a yubikey, apparently.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  > However if anyone touches my computer: don't you dare f*%king touch my private key. Touch the computer, sure, but please don’t touch the screen with your filthy grease fingers.
  - mdpye 3y ago
    My work laptop has a touchscreen. I've never used it, but other people use it by accident fairly often. Usually only once each though, the look of shock is sometimes even worth the fingerprint :D
  - chimprich 3y ago
    I've never understood people who do this. You can point at the screen, tap with a pen, take the mouse or keyboard and move the cursor, etc. but surely it's bad manners to splodge your finger on someone's screen.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I'm unusually strict about maintaining a separation between work and personal (for instance, I would never allow my personal smartphone to connect to my employer's WiFi), so I wouldn't use personal keys on a work machine at all. But if those keys (or passwords, etc.) are generated for work purposes, I consider them to be as much company property as the machine itself, so I'm no more protective of them than I am of any other sensitive company data.
  - dijit 3y ago
    Interesting thought. How do you feel about giving your colleague your password? My personal opinion is that I can hold someone legally culpable if their account does something like leak financial information; you have a professional responsibility to secure your account from absolutely everyone. Administrators acting on your account must of course be heavily logged and audited, which is the case.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > How do you feel about giving your colleague your password? I usually don't, mostly just out of good security habits, but also because most employers specifically prohibit doing that. Almost always, your colleague can be given his own access to whatever the password is for anyway. If that's not possible, then I'll share the password and change it immediately after my colleague doesn't need access anymore. > you have a professional responsibility to secure your account from absolutely everyone. I agree -- that's part of treating credentials the same way as all other sensitive company data. But it's still my employer's data, not mine. If I quit the company or if my supervisor wants to see the contents of my machine, I'm fine with that. The machine and everything on it belongs to the company anyway.
      - dijit 3y ago
        Ok, but your private key, session tokens and CLI access tokens (kube configs, gcloud etc;) are your password in those situations. They tie to your identity, thus you must not treat them the same as company secrets, they are professional personal secrets which should not be disclosed or allowed to fall into anyone elses hands (less they be revoked and cycled). It's not just good security posture it could affect your career quite badly or lead to legal issues.

hinkley 3y ago

I’m at the other extreme of “private stuff”. Nothing work related should live on my work machine. It should all be pushed to git or dumped in the wiki (personal pages if nothing else). On one of my largest projects the IT dept made bulk orders for hardware and doled them out to new hires. 18 months into our new project someone’s hard drive died. Everyone acted like his dog died. I said no problem let’s go through the onboarding docs. The longest step by far was that the company mandated Whole Disk Encryption but IT hadn’t put it in their old inventory yet. So that was 2/3 of setup time. We found some issues with the docs and fixed them. Every two to four weeks that summer, someone else’s drive would go. You see, we got all of these machines from the same production run. So the hard drives came from the same production run, which was apparently faulty. The process got a little faster as we went. By the end of the summer it was my turn, and people still looked at me like I needed condolences. I got a faster machine for a few hours worth of work. I’m not sad. All my stuff was in the network already. I lost a couple hours’ of work, tops.

teachrdan 3y ago
> Nothing work related should live on my work machine. I thought this was a typo at first. Love this as an engineering koan.
- noSyncCloud 3y ago
  And the corollary – nothing personal should be on your work machine, either
- canucker2016 3y ago
  "Nothing work related should live ONLY on my work machine." is the intent.
opello 3y ago
This is the best way to reduce bus factor and not fall behind documenting key details!
- jbm 3y ago

sureglymop 3y ago

He was let go after two weeks? No confrontation nothing? Sounds very american. In European working culture if you don't show up for two weeks people will be worried that something happened to you and try to work it out with you. This type of all or nothing reaction is a bit sporadic imo.

mikestew 3y ago
Sounds very american. Yeah, it's not like that part of the story was condensed and might have left out a bunch of details that weren't important to the story. So let's give OP a hard time and make judgements about a situation for which we have not even the slightest bit of context.
- sureglymop 3y ago
  Oh absolutely, you're right. I am saying that despite whatever may have happened, two weeks is very short. I feel like it would be at least a month here regardless.
  - Uvix 3y ago
    It's not that the person didn't show up for two weeks, though; they showed up but refused to actually do any work.
- bbarn 3y ago
  For context, I was brought in with the knowledge he hadn't done anything meaningful since being hired some time before my arrival, and we did reach out and offer help or ask if he needed anything, which he refused, somewhat angrily.
RandallBrown 3y ago
He was let go after two weeks of not doing any work, despite the manager offering to help him.
sowbug 3y ago
You might have meant to use a word other than "sporadic." That word describes a recurring event that happens at unpredictable intervals, such as snow in a normally hot desert, or a Linux crash caused by a race condition. Other words that fit the sentence better are "unusual," "unexpected," "unjustified," "inappropriate," "surprising," "extreme," "abrupt," or "out of the blue." (For what it's worth, I'm American, and I disagree with your assessment. We don't know how long the person was given to make progress, and we don't know what was communicated. To conclude that a two-week period without a commit represents the entire period between the start of the poor performance and the termination is, well, a bit out of the blue.)