How To Demoralize Employees: A DIY Guide for Terrible Companies
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There's no GPS data in the picture, as far as I can see with the Tools I have.
Probably because I blocked access to location data for apps in my phone.
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https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/exif-viewer/nafpfdcmppffipmhcpkbplhkoiekndck?hl=en
mighty poor reviews that one has.....
i wonder if the others do any better
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That's the one I use because it was literally the first in the results on Google.
A lot of the reviews are basically "EXIF NOT FOUND" and that's probably because, well, it's not found more often than it is.
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Anyone else check for GPS data in the EXIF on this, after the previous Discoincident on this topic, or was it just me?
No GPS data, but it was taken with a Galaxy SIII. ;)
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Anyone else check for GPS data in the EXIF on this, after the previous Discoincident on this topic, or was it just me?
It appears to have been scrubbed.
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mighty poor reviews that one has.....
i wonder if the others do any better
I use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/exif-viewer/mmbhfeiddhndihdjeganjggkmjapkffm/related?hl=en-US&utm_source=chrome-ntp-launcher. If GPS data is available, it will even map it for you.
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Huh? Dicksourse seems to be destroying your link
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i don't have easy click and see exif data controls.
I wouldn't have any clue how to look at EXIF data. I was tempted, but not enough to look up how to look at it.
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Hmmm
Serial numbers instead of usernames
Check
Desktop background locked to company logo
This isn't standard practice? Huh.
However, at my current place I'll see your company logo and raise you 'motivational' company promotional material, occasionally changed, on desktop and screensaver.
OTOH the desktop is always some variant of blue and the promotional stuff is just a bit of text and a couple of logos so not too intrusive. I don't [i]get[/i] this love of changing your desktop to crazy pictures: if it isn't blue-ish and relatively blank it screws with my head.Tiny cubicles
I'll happily swap my desk for Blakey's tiny cube. I have no objection to small spaces - if anything the contrary, and I don't have a lot of stuff. I do, however, have social anxiety issues verging on paranoia and a complete inability to act if someone's watching me. In fairness this particular open plan office is pleasant as these things go, but what I want is some privacy. And some degree of insulation from sights and sounds. Also the air-con is way too high, except in the hottest week of summer when it broke.
No free coffee
Check. Though there is a hot-and-cold water dispenser. Not sure if electric coffee machines are allowed: most people either bring jars of instant coffee or cafetiere-type coffee machines.
And a few other things:
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Have a just-adequate network. Adopt shiny new cloud based systems for everything, that put vastly higher strain on said network, without improving the infrastructure. Dismiss any and all complaints and tickets about the near-constant network issues. Be sure the shiny new system will be a buggy and ill-thought-out pile of crap.
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Don't actually employ people! Hire contractors instead. The amount of permanent IT staff is way below the basic minimum level of staff needed to keep the operation going, and most of these people will be retained on an ongoing basis for as long as they're willing to stay, but don't contract any of them for more than six months at a time so that they can actually have some security and stability in their lives. Make sure you have a backbone of actual employees who'll cheerfully discuss their bonuses and other perks in front of everyone else.
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Have an office in the capital and other large offices elsewhere in the country (and the world). Be sure that the 'main' office has far better perks and facilities. Ensure the employees there have minimal awareness that most people are based in other places - I once got an invitation to an in-person meeting in ten minutes' time at the other end of the country. They should e.g. send notices specific to that location to all the company, including opportunities, offers, etc that no-one else is eligible for, and much discussion of their perks and facilities.
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(For the contracting company,) make sure you insist on your employees being flexible to work anywhere in the country. Allow the decision about contract renewals to have little notice. If their contract isn't renewed then make them come in every day 9:00-5:30 to one of your centres until they find another placement, even if they're not based anywhere near one. Don't guarantee any notice whatsoever after they're placed again for making arrangements to move etc..
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Pay a low-ish salary. Send most of your employees to the capital where living costs are hellishly high and typical practice is to pay an increased weighting on what you would elsewhere. Pay no such weighting. (I got lucky and was sent up North - practically a third world country - but most of my fellows are in the capital.)
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Embrace the indentured servitude model of employee retention. Take graduates with no experience, sometimes minimal relevant knowledge or skills, and give them a crash course before you hire them out. Charge astronomical fees (I'm technically in as much debt from my four month training course as from my entire four year university degree). Agree to write the debt off after they work for you for two years so that in practice the fee is a fine for quitting. By the end of two years you should have made your profit off them and don't care if they don't stay, so don't invest money or effort in making them want to.
I've got plenty more, but this is way too long already.
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I don't miss working for those guys at all
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By the end of two years you should have made your profit off them and don't care if they don't stay, so don't invest money or effort in making them want to.
I know a surprising amount of people who stayed on after the two years, despite their rate working out to less than the going rate for someone with two years' experience in the field. Don't know about up country, but in London it was mostly investment banks, which will pay a lot of you negotiate properly
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I don't really have much idea about the going rate, to be honest. I know the people I trained with who went to London had a hard enough time finding places they could afford to live on the first-year salary but for Newcastle it's pretty ample.
The reason I won't stay long after the two years is because I just want to stop limiting my life to commitments that only last six months or can be dispensed with on short notice, and possessions that will fit in my car if/when I have to move on.
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Huh? Dicksourse seems to be destroying your link
WTF. Middle-click it instead of left-clicking. Or just...here:
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I wouldn't have any clue how to look at EXIF data.
Right-click in Windows Explorer, choose Properties from the popup menu, look at Details tab.
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(Foreword: blame the cyborg ninja cat for this)
Ensure employees have no usernames, as that might unnecessarily make them feel like human beings instead of replaceable automatons. Instead, their Active Directory accounts should be serial numbered. Similarly, make sure their location in the building is referred to as their "grid location". In general, follow prison/concentration camp naming practices at every opportunity.
Cryptic usernames here -- blame the mainframe. We also have a grid system in most of the main buildings, because otherwise you'd likely get terribly lost (sometimes, you still do).
2. Create a long, involved and unnecessarily complex QA process that takes literally 5+ hours of employee time to go through, even if no bugs are found. Require testing the code in three different environments before it is pushed to prod. Just in case the employee begins to feel that this process is actually useful and necessary, reveal to them that the prod servers are configured entirely differently, and not one of the testing servers matches it.
Well...our external vendor likes to overcomplicate QA -- but we need a long and involved QA process here, considering the price of bugs in our system ;)Speaking of QA, don't bother going through the checklists for third-party code, even though that third-party code hosts/manipulates far more critical business data than first-party code. While employees are wasting time checking off the 30-point code quality review, happily deploy third-party code which does critical data manipulations in triggers without wrapping them in transactions or correctly using UPDLOCK hints. Remember: the goal of QA isn't quality software, the goal is to assign blame in case something blows up.
No, but only because our vendor reinvents the wheel at every opportunity :PPlace your employees in a colorless, featureless cubefarm. Mesh chairs? Hah! Have a second group that does virtually identical work, but their employees get standing desks, tons of space, and windows to a beautiful view. Make sure the cubefarm employees have to visit the standing desk employees frequently. Don't provide any creature comforts-- not even free coffee! If an employee brings in their own coffeemaker, explain that this is "against the rules". This can not be restated enough, even if an employee brings in donuts and coffee for an early morning meeting, under no circumstances should they be allowed to expense it!
Decor's available on order from Building Services here, AIUI -- also, there is no rule against pushpins, so most cubes usually get at least a little bit of decoration around here. Also, we probably have 4x the cube space -- the original cube that prompted this thread isn't a cubicle, it's a cubelet. ;) Also, coffee is plentiful around here.Under no circumstances should developers be allowed to speak to DBAs or change management as if they were actual human beings. All communication should be through tickets. If a ticket is formatted incorrectly, under no circumstances should the DBA or change management employee just fix it themselves, or contact the ticket's creator to resolve-- they should simply delete the ticket so the developer has to start over from scratch. It also doesn't matter if this blows a schedule. Nothing is more important than getting the ticket correct.
We do use tickets, but talking with the DBA is A-OK as well. Also, I haven't seen a delete button for tickets over here...so bad tickets mean that you have to contact the ticket's creator to fix it.Speaking of which, use CA Service Desk Manager as your ticketing system. It doesn't matter that it's unusable, cluttered, and plain broken in many fundamental ways. If an employee expects to simply send a URL to link another employee to a ticket, they are foolish and should be punished. Similarly, use PlanView for timecards and generally pick the absolutely worst possible software for all purposes at all times. Also lock the IE version to 8, naturally.
We have a handful of ticket systems roaming around for different things: the one that most devs deal with, though, actually has some attention paid to it. Also, we're rolling out IE11, and both Chrome and FF are available through the internal desktop software delivery system.Employee computers should be locked-down in the stuffiest and dumbest ways possible. Group policy should ensure that valuable productivity features like browser history, or Office Communicator's conversation history are always turned-off.
Nope and nope.The desktop background should be locked to the company's logo for literally no good reason.
We have lots of corporate desktop backgrounds! (And PowerPoint title slides, for that matter...)Group Policy should dictate Windows Update settings so that, even if an employee installs software they know for sure is insecure (like a copy of Visual Studio from the original DVD image), they are unable to patch their own computer. Also, turn off UAC by policy-- even if employees want the added protection of UAC on their computers, they're not allowed to turn it back on.
Dunno about UAC since we're not local admins anyway -- haven't tried patching VS, either, for that matter -- I'm not sure if the auto-updater will even work when run as a *gasp* limited user :OHave a just-adequate network. Adopt shiny new cloud based systems for everything, that put vastly higher strain on said network, without improving the infrastructure. Dismiss any and all complaints and tickets about the near-constant network issues. Be sure the shiny new system will be a buggy and ill-thought-out pile of crap.
We have an entire telecom department and a WAN sprawled over two-thirds of the USA...although getting Ma Bell to give us a fatter pipe can be a challenge, even when we have some leverage over her! (We actually lease ROW and fiber to telecoms.)Don't actually employ people! Hire contractors instead. The amount of permanent IT staff is way below the basic minimum level of staff needed to keep the operation going, and most of these people will be retained on an ongoing basis for as long as they're willing to stay, but don't contract any of them for more than six months at a time so that they can actually have some security and stability in their lives. Make sure you have a backbone of actual employees who'll cheerfully discuss their bonuses and other perks in front of everyone else.
Thankfully, we haven't succumbed to IT-contractor-mania here -- it probably helps that we have to deal with contractors in other departments as well, and even be a contractor on occasion!Have an office in the capital and other large offices elsewhere in the country (and the world). Be sure that the 'main' office has far better perks and facilities. Ensure the employees there have minimal awareness that most people are based in other places - I once got an invitation to an in-person meeting in ten minutes' time at the other end of the country. They should e.g. send notices specific to that location to all the company, including opportunities, offers, etc that no-one else is eligible for, and much discussion of their perks and facilities.
Lots of offices -- but we pretty darn well know that our backbone lives out in the field. Reminds me that I need to talk to a manager I know about a field visit sometime... ;PPay a low-ish salary. Send most of your employees to the capital where living costs are hellishly high and typical practice is to pay an increased weighting on what you would elsewhere. Pay no such weighting. (I got lucky and was sent up North - practically a third world country - but most of my fellows are in the capital.)
We have the graciousness of being HQ'ed in a city with a relatively low cost of living, close to where the company was founded.Embrace the indentured servitude model of employee retention. Take graduates with no experience, sometimes minimal relevant knowledge or skills, and give them a crash course before you hire them out. Charge astronomical fees (I'm technically in as much debt from my four month training course as from my entire four year university degree). Agree to write the debt off after they work for you for two years so that in practice the fee is a fine for quitting. By the end of two years you should have made your profit off them and don't care if they don't stay, so don't invest money or effort in making them want to.
Hell no! (We have plenty of training courses -- but we also have plenty of OJT roaming around the company as well.)
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I know the people I trained with who went to London had a hard enough time finding places they could afford to live on the first-year salary
Oh, so you guys have that welfare problem, too?
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Right-click in Windows Explorer
Doesn't seem to be installed.
EDIT: but dolphin seems to show all that stuff. Thanks.
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They should e.g. send notices specific to that location to all the company, including opportunities, offers, etc that no-one else is eligible for, and much discussion of their perks and facilities.
When I did contract game testing at Microsoft, they did that all the time.
To: All Users
Did you know if you work on the Microsoft Xbox Team you can download any Xbox 360 game for free? Go to this intranet site: blah for free codes to every Xbox 360 game.(Inevitably 5 minutes later)
To: All Users
Free game perk for full-time employees only.The worst thing is they had a mailing list for full-time employees that didn't blast out to contractors. They just didn't use it.
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If their contract isn't renewed then make them come in every day 9:00-5:30 to one of your centres until they find another placement, even if they're not based anywhere near one.
I don't get this. If you're not contracted to them, why do you have to come in? I mean they can ask you do, but I can't see how they could enforce this in any manner.
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This company employs you directly, then farms you out to other companies as a contractor. If the other company drops you, you're obliged to go in to the parent company and do next to nothing, for a reduced salary
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This company employs you directly, then farms you out to other companies as a contractor. If the other company drops you, you're obliged to go in to the parent company and do next to nothing, for a reduced salary
That's crazysauce. Why don't they just drop you and not pay you anything at all if they have no contracts for you?
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Well they do have contracts. It just takes an indeterminate length of time to match people up with them.
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Ok even so, why do you have to physically be there? Like, why don't they save the air conditioning cost and just make sure you have a phone on you?
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That was my original point.
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I guess but I mean it more like, what would happen if instead of coming in, you just called them in the morning and made sure they had your cell number? Then play Xbox.
It's a WTF from two angles here: 1) the company telling people to do it and 2) people actually doing it.
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If you're not contracted to them, why do you have to come in?
I wondered this too. Maybe she meant she had to come in to the employment agency's offices. I've heard of that.
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In theory, you're there for extra training. In practice, all I did while between contracts was flirt with the attractive Irish girl who was doing project management.
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We're supposed to be looking through their lists for contracts that would be suitable (in addition to their placement people doing the same) and improving skills etc, or preparing for interviews. But there's nothing we couldn't do at home.
We're [i]forbidden[/i] to not come in, it's in our employment contract and training agreement. And for anyone still under the two years agreement, if we break anything in that we can in theory be sacked and they'll call in the debt.
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Why don't they just drop you and not pay you anything at all if they have no contracts for you?
If you're not so bad they want to fire you, it's easier to put you on a bench so you're there when they're ready for you again.
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That's crazy. If I were them, I'd set up a ball pit or something. Then at least you could play in a ball pit.
(The above ball pit idea is not crazy, if you were wondering.)
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I would pass this suggestion to them, but that would mean revealing that I was bitching about them and I don't like to upset the people with tens of thousands of pounds of leverage over me.
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we can in theory be sacked and they'll call in the debt
They actually terminated my contract about 6 months early, by mutual agreement, and gave mea a month's garden leave rather than expecting me to come in for the final four weeks and do even less of anything
bitching about them
My termination terms included that I wasn't allowed to say anything bad about them
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My termination terms included that I wasn't allowed to say anything bad about them
I'm sure UK law like US law says that if you sign a contract with a blatantly illegal clause, that clause has no legal force behind it.
But even attempting to put that language there puts them in Bond villain territory.
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all I did while between contracts was flirt with the attractive Irish girl who was doing project management.
Did someone say "Irish girl"?
http://5.media.bustedtees.cvcdn.com/d/-/bustedtees.004806ed-ce2b-4080-a759-b5d28137.jpg
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Luckily, even if it was legal (which I'm pretty sure it wasn't for exactly the reason you said) there was an easy workaround:
my contract says I'm not allowed to say anything bad about them, so I'm saying nothing
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terms included that I wasn't allowed to say anything bad about them
It's more frustrating that I won't be allowed to mention the company I spent my entire placement so far, and probably will the rest, working for, on my CV. I expect I won't be able to get references from them either, unless it can be arranged through the mothership, anonymised, because of the client confidentiality bit.
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Sod that. I put the bank I was working for in my CV.
I don't remember anything forbidding that, but it might be a new piece of WTF they've added since I left (3 years ago now, the scars have nearly healed)
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I would have to check the wording but it definitely specified that the fact that the client [i]was[/i] a client of theirs fell under the heading of confidential information about the client that must not be mentioned ever, so I couldn't say I was placed with them while working for the parent company, and I'm pretty sure I couldn't get away with omitting the parent company and just saying I was contracted by the client?
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I don't remember anything like that, and I read the contract pretty carefully since I wasn't convinced they were entirely above board. Probably since my time.
Do they still give you a free hour of legal advice? Could be fun to use ut for poking holes in their contract
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(For the contracting company,) make sure you insist on your employees being flexible to work anywhere in the country. Allow the decision about contract renewals to have little notice. If their contract isn't renewed then make them come in every day 9:00-5:30 to one of your centres until they find another placement, even if they're not based anywhere near one. Don't guarantee any notice whatsoever after they're placed again for making arrangements to move etc..
Pay a low-ish salary. Send most of your employees to the capital where living costs are hellishly high and typical practice is to pay an increased weighting on what you would elsewhere. Pay no such weighting. (I got lucky and was sent up North - practically a third world country - but most of my fellows are in the capital.)
Embrace the indentured servitude model of employee retention. Take graduates with no experience, sometimes minimal relevant knowledge or skills, and give them a crash course before you hire them out. Charge astronomical fees (I'm technically in as much debt from my four month training course as from my entire four year university degree). Agree to write the debt off after they work for you for two years so that in practice the fee is a fine for quitting. By the end of two years you should have made your profit off them and don't care if they don't stay, so don't invest money or effort in making them want to.I've got plenty more, but this is way too long already.
Oh, snap. I reckon I know who this is.
Terrible company if they are.
We have graduates provided by them - the graduates are superb but the company themselves are terrible.
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The above ball pit idea is not crazy, if you were wondering.
From the guy who freaks out that he gets sick from people not washing their hands enough?
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Oh, snap. I reckon I know who this is.Terrible company if they are.We have graduates provided by them - the graduates are superb but the company themselves are terrible.
Can someone name names? We here in the colonies are left entirely in the dark on this one...
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So they require their employees to go through a training program, that puts you indebted to them for a number of years?
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I'm pretty sure I couldn't get away with omitting the parent company and just saying I was contracted by the client?
Since I've been outed as an SE fan, you might try poking about on Workplace. I asked about the general case here:
How to list contracting on resume
How do I list contracting on my resume? Specifically, I'm paid by company B (a staffing agency) to do work for company A. Company A is much more impressive than company B -- everyone locally will ...
They don't do legal advice for obvious liability reasons, but country-specific norms are okay.
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The way they phrase it is that the training costs however many thousand, but you have two payment options: pay upfront (which nobody does) or have the fee waived in return for signing a contract saying you'll work as a contractor for them for two years. You get around £20k (possibly more now, I did the training in 2010), and their clients reportedly pay inn the region of £300 a day to the parennt company
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Fuck it, I'm not scared of their wrath any more
You may not be... We've made it pretty obvious between us that we're talking about the same company. Oh well you said it not me.
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You get around £20k
Around $32K/year in USD? That seems tragically low, even for a new recruit. $16/hour roughly. Ouch.
clients reportedly pay inn the region of £300 a day to the parennt company
But, that also seems pretty freaking low TBH. That would be $480/day in USD, which is about half the market rate where I am. 1/3 the market rate if my employees are out of town.
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