Good luck finding a lawyer. Most of them won't take cases they have no reasonable chance to win.
The circumstances around hiring are obscure enough that any marginally talented corporate shyster can talk rings around any argument your lawyer might make. And no recruiter will admit to that sort of thing out loud.
I wasn't making any moral judgements. What I expect engineers to see is 1) There are rules about emissions, with clear specifications, 2) Their product is currently not meeting those specifications, and 3) They must modify the product so it produces emissions that meet or exceed the requirements.
Now the way to get to 3) is to fix your shit. I expect engineers to know that as well. I also expect them to know that cheating the test like this is against specifications, which state (if not explicitly, then implicitly) that the design must work within the regulations described. Cheating like this is outside the regulations, so I expect an engineer to see the problem and try to fix it. Where this went off the rails is that some idiot in a suit told the engineer to not change it, and if they made a fuss, they can expect to be out of a job.
I agree that there needs to be someone who is technical, but the truth on the ground is that most C-level execs regard IT as little more than overpaid janitors who break things all the time and make them change their passwords once in a while. The C-levels that I've worked with (multiple Fortune 500 companies) don't even know that there's anything to know about IT, past 1) IT costs money, 2) IT doesn't do anything that they understand, therefore it's not important, and 3) whenever anything in the building that runs on electricity breaks, you can take out your frustration on the IT guy that comes up to fix it and not have to worry about any consequences.
Then that engineer is what is technically known as "a shitty engineer". Engineers take specs and data and turn them into things. Efficient engineers build precisely to spec, no more, no less. Smart engineers have made the likely mistakes they'll make along the way already and will incorporate what they learned from them into the new design.
If this cheat wasn't in some spec somewhere, and the engineer added it on his/her own initiative, that engineer needs to lose his/her job and/or their freedom.
Engineering *had* to know this was going to get discovered at some point. That's what really amazes me here. Why on earth would you be so stupid as to proceed down a path you knew full well was going to exploded in your face? Someone ignored that warning.
There's a fine line between "not being stupid" and "losing your job". You can be correct, provably, technically correct, but it doesn't matter if the people who are in charge (and who sign your paycheck) find your correctness annoying. Someone in Engineering had to have had a conscience about this, and I find it highly likely that that someone no longer works for VW, and is bound by an NDA from disclosing what he knew.
That, and there's a virulent belief that IT can simply be outsourced.
That's not so much a belief as a truth. You can outsource your IT, firms exist to do that. You will probably save money doing that, and that's all that matters to the suits. Nevermind that now it takes three weeks to get a problem fixed instead of same-day, and your workers get so fed up with the lousy service the outsourced IT provides that they just let problems continue without asking for them to be fixed. This hurts your business in lost productivity.
But, productivity is hard to measure. Dollars are not, and the outsourcing saves dollars. This makes it a perfect solution for the folks that can't turn on their computers without a cheat sheet.
1) You're comparing a group composed of humans to your CNC machine, as if they're both something to be bought and sold. Dehumanizing people rarely improves a situation.
2) Can you do your job without that CNC machine? No? There isn't a company in an industrialized nation in the world that can do its job without IT workers. They might try to, they might even last for a while, but eventually other less-stupid companies will eat their lunch while they're trying to figure out the fax machine.
when the suits don't listen to the nerds, I'll bet. I'm sure at some point someone in engineering said that this was wrong, that they shouldn't cheat like this. I'm sure he/she was quickly told to drop it or start looking for a new job.
"I was directed by my immediate manager to take that action. Here is the email (that I forwarded to my own outside email account) in which I objected to the action, and here's his response directing me to do it anyway. As my job duties require me to follow his instructions or face disciplinary action up to and including termination, I followed the instructions."
Pedanticism would be splitting the hair between "webmaster" and "devops" or whatever. "Webmaster" works for the "Product Owner". The webmaster does as he/she is directed by the product owner. Are you familiar with Scrum?
Given that the typical slashdotter believes that Apple users are clueless hipster sheeples who know nothing except that they worship any Apple product, and the guy pulls his app because it instantly became the number 1 download, there is something askew with your hypothesis.
Guess I'm not the typical Slashdotter then. Assumptions can make you look pretty silly. I've used Apple products on and off since the IIe. I haven't installed iOS 9 but probably will this evening.
Either the so called "clueless Apple worshippers" are not as stupid as we're told they are - which is the likely truth, or your idea that everyone will gleefully accept whatever your haircut guy wants to shove up their ass idea is wrong.
I don't know if we're talking about the same thing. In any event, what I'm saying is that it doesn't matter if the MBA is right or wrong, or if the dev is right or wrong. The MBA gets listened to, the dev does as he's told or he gets fired. It might be a colossally bad idea, even illegal, but they don't care. Those computer guys don't know anything about business. Eventually the MBA's bad decisions catch up with them, but at that point they've either moved on to their next set of suckers with a big raise, or utilized their "make sure you can blame someone else for your own mistakes" skill set. We have a product owner here who, I swear, has a core skill set of "avoiding responsibility" and "not doing his job and making a sour face when he gets caught not doing it."
Dude, I'm on your side here. The trouble is that haircut guy has no incentive or motivation to change his behavior. The shitty ads make the company money, and for a for-profit company, that outweighs any other concerns.
You can stand behind your principles all you want. Just be prepared for the possibility that you will be fired for it.
And people do, I've done it. It's just that either I present it in an un-compelling way (or at least a way that's easily ignored), or I get spoken to about being "negative". We can't always win every little moral battle, not if we want to keep a roof over our heads. It's a choice; do I want to lose my job because I think an ad is too annoying? I know what I'd choose.
Now in terms of actual malfeasance, like messing with customer data in an illegal way, yes, I'd lose my job over that. If it came down to it, I'd say "I am not doing that. You can fire me, but either way I'm not doing it." I'd expect to get fired, to the point where I'd have another job offer in my pocket before I put my foot down over it.
There's a line somewhere, and "annoying ads" don't go past it. We don't live in a black-and-white world. Sometimes you have to do things you'd rather not do, and frequently that's called "doing a job".
Uncontested. Unfortunately, in the real world, it's not the way things work. Developers are seen as interchangeable cogs and cost centers, while MBAs have "vision" for the company and actually bring in revenue. I mean think about it, who's going to win here:
MBA: "Blah blah this much money per month blah blah" Dev: "But it'll annoy our users".
See my comment above. Very frequently it's not the webmaster that has control over the content, if he/she wants to keep his/her job. When the person that signs your paychecks tells you to put some atrocity on the web page, you do it or you get fired. If the choice is between putting some shit on a website that I don't own and losing my paycheck and my health insurance, that shit goes on that website, and my resume gets dusted off.
your sleazy idiot MBA walking haircut product owner decides what code runs on your systems, my sleazy idiot MBA walking haircut product owner decides what runs on mine.
FTFY.
The webmaster/developer on any site of significant size or complexity most likely is not making those decisions. Frequently it's "OK here are these external requirements, you nerds go off and do whatever it is you do, I'm going to go have a latte." The problem is, that without that bullshit that the MBA has found, the site has no revenue, and the webmaster has no job. Not everyone is a cowboy or a one-man-shop; some of us have to deal with poor decisions made by people who are not merely non-technical, but shouldn't be let within 20 feet of anything with more than three buttons.
Slashdot Mirror
Good luck finding a lawyer. Most of them won't take cases they have no reasonable chance to win.
The circumstances around hiring are obscure enough that any marginally talented corporate shyster can talk rings around any argument your lawyer might make. And no recruiter will admit to that sort of thing out loud.
Boss says do thing. You say thing is wrong. Boss says do thing or you're fired. You have to feed and house 4 people.
You do the thing and document the hell out of it. You start looking for a new job.
I wasn't making any moral judgements. What I expect engineers to see is 1) There are rules about emissions, with clear specifications, 2) Their product is currently not meeting those specifications, and 3) They must modify the product so it produces emissions that meet or exceed the requirements.
Now the way to get to 3) is to fix your shit. I expect engineers to know that as well. I also expect them to know that cheating the test like this is against specifications, which state (if not explicitly, then implicitly) that the design must work within the regulations described. Cheating like this is outside the regulations, so I expect an engineer to see the problem and try to fix it. Where this went off the rails is that some idiot in a suit told the engineer to not change it, and if they made a fuss, they can expect to be out of a job.
I agree that there needs to be someone who is technical, but the truth on the ground is that most C-level execs regard IT as little more than overpaid janitors who break things all the time and make them change their passwords once in a while. The C-levels that I've worked with (multiple Fortune 500 companies) don't even know that there's anything to know about IT, past 1) IT costs money, 2) IT doesn't do anything that they understand, therefore it's not important, and 3) whenever anything in the building that runs on electricity breaks, you can take out your frustration on the IT guy that comes up to fix it and not have to worry about any consequences.
Then that engineer is what is technically known as "a shitty engineer". Engineers take specs and data and turn them into things. Efficient engineers build precisely to spec, no more, no less. Smart engineers have made the likely mistakes they'll make along the way already and will incorporate what they learned from them into the new design.
If this cheat wasn't in some spec somewhere, and the engineer added it on his/her own initiative, that engineer needs to lose his/her job and/or their freedom.
There's a fine line between "not being stupid" and "losing your job". You can be correct, provably, technically correct, but it doesn't matter if the people who are in charge (and who sign your paycheck) find your correctness annoying. Someone in Engineering had to have had a conscience about this, and I find it highly likely that that someone no longer works for VW, and is bound by an NDA from disclosing what he knew.
That's not so much a belief as a truth. You can outsource your IT, firms exist to do that. You will probably save money doing that, and that's all that matters to the suits. Nevermind that now it takes three weeks to get a problem fixed instead of same-day, and your workers get so fed up with the lousy service the outsourced IT provides that they just let problems continue without asking for them to be fixed. This hurts your business in lost productivity.
But, productivity is hard to measure. Dollars are not, and the outsourcing saves dollars. This makes it a perfect solution for the folks that can't turn on their computers without a cheat sheet.
Two things:
1) You're comparing a group composed of humans to your CNC machine, as if they're both something to be bought and sold. Dehumanizing people rarely improves a situation.
2) Can you do your job without that CNC machine? No? There isn't a company in an industrialized nation in the world that can do its job without IT workers. They might try to, they might even last for a while, but eventually other less-stupid companies will eat their lunch while they're trying to figure out the fax machine.
*blink*
when the suits don't listen to the nerds, I'll bet. I'm sure at some point someone in engineering said that this was wrong, that they shouldn't cheat like this. I'm sure he/she was quickly told to drop it or start looking for a new job.
Fuck you.
Right now it is. People are going to find uses for it we can't think of today.
Your point also could have been made without insulting people.
Yes. That isn't it. I was asking because I really didn't know if you knew about it or not, because it gives some context.
Perhaps. I don't think it's likely, these slimebags are very good at getting away with all kinds of shit.
"I was directed by my immediate manager to take that action. Here is the email (that I forwarded to my own outside email account) in which I objected to the action, and here's his response directing me to do it anyway. As my job duties require me to follow his instructions or face disciplinary action up to and including termination, I followed the instructions."
Pedanticism would be splitting the hair between "webmaster" and "devops" or whatever. "Webmaster" works for the "Product Owner". The webmaster does as he/she is directed by the product owner. Are you familiar with Scrum?
Guess I'm not the typical Slashdotter then. Assumptions can make you look pretty silly. I've used Apple products on and off since the IIe. I haven't installed iOS 9 but probably will this evening.
I don't know if we're talking about the same thing. In any event, what I'm saying is that it doesn't matter if the MBA is right or wrong, or if the dev is right or wrong. The MBA gets listened to, the dev does as he's told or he gets fired. It might be a colossally bad idea, even illegal, but they don't care. Those computer guys don't know anything about business. Eventually the MBA's bad decisions catch up with them, but at that point they've either moved on to their next set of suckers with a big raise, or utilized their "make sure you can blame someone else for your own mistakes" skill set. We have a product owner here who, I swear, has a core skill set of "avoiding responsibility" and "not doing his job and making a sour face when he gets caught not doing it."
Dude, I'm on your side here. The trouble is that haircut guy has no incentive or motivation to change his behavior. The shitty ads make the company money, and for a for-profit company, that outweighs any other concerns.
You can stand behind your principles all you want. Just be prepared for the possibility that you will be fired for it.
That's the product owner, not the webmaster. The webmaster does as he's told or he finds another job.
And people do, I've done it. It's just that either I present it in an un-compelling way (or at least a way that's easily ignored), or I get spoken to about being "negative". We can't always win every little moral battle, not if we want to keep a roof over our heads. It's a choice; do I want to lose my job because I think an ad is too annoying? I know what I'd choose.
Now in terms of actual malfeasance, like messing with customer data in an illegal way, yes, I'd lose my job over that. If it came down to it, I'd say "I am not doing that. You can fire me, but either way I'm not doing it." I'd expect to get fired, to the point where I'd have another job offer in my pocket before I put my foot down over it.
There's a line somewhere, and "annoying ads" don't go past it. We don't live in a black-and-white world. Sometimes you have to do things you'd rather not do, and frequently that's called "doing a job".
Uncontested. Unfortunately, in the real world, it's not the way things work. Developers are seen as interchangeable cogs and cost centers, while MBAs have "vision" for the company and actually bring in revenue. I mean think about it, who's going to win here:
MBA: "Blah blah this much money per month blah blah"
Dev: "But it'll annoy our users".
The MBA wins that argument.
Who's complaining? Given the choice, I'd rather not put them up. But it isn't always my choice, not if I want to keep that job.
Oh please. We're not herding people into ovens here.
See my comment above. Very frequently it's not the webmaster that has control over the content, if he/she wants to keep his/her job. When the person that signs your paychecks tells you to put some atrocity on the web page, you do it or you get fired. If the choice is between putting some shit on a website that I don't own and losing my paycheck and my health insurance, that shit goes on that website, and my resume gets dusted off.
FTFY.
The webmaster/developer on any site of significant size or complexity most likely is not making those decisions. Frequently it's "OK here are these external requirements, you nerds go off and do whatever it is you do, I'm going to go have a latte." The problem is, that without that bullshit that the MBA has found, the site has no revenue, and the webmaster has no job. Not everyone is a cowboy or a one-man-shop; some of us have to deal with poor decisions made by people who are not merely non-technical, but shouldn't be let within 20 feet of anything with more than three buttons.