BOFH: Guys? Guys? We need blockchain... can you install blockchain? BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "I've got two words for you," the Boss says excitedly. "Block Chain!" "That's one word," the PFY shoots back. "Unless you're talking about old fashioned lifting apparatus," I say. "And it's usually said as 'Chain block'. Was that what you were talking about?" "No, I mean the new …
Surely all this needed was some fake status reports on request when the boss wanted updates? By the time he's wondering why nothing has actually been delivered, the next shiny will have appeared on the horizon to take his attention and you can "shut down" the Blockchain project....
"I was expecting the BOfH to simply set every server in the datacentre to Bitcoin mining, perhaps after judiciously adding £10,000 of graphics cards to the budget, and then wait until people noticed and complained. Then of course blame the boss's blockchain project."
Oh, I think he did that a long time ago. Only he didn't blame the project, he blamed the boss in person. Meet the new boss.
I've not worked for many employers, so I'm sure others will have vastly more saddening stories of a similar ilk.
I'll never forget one particular CIO (because we loved TLAs at that company) who upon joining had to "make his mark". Amongst various bad ideas, I'll never forget as the "most senior IT person" being pulled into a conference call he was on with a large vendor of fantastic hosting support (*ahem*) who's architect was saying words like "multi-master-replication" and "nfs-clustering" etc.
The CIO, nodding excitedly, kept saying "Yes! It sounds like we need some of that multi-master-replication with nfs-clustering!"
I'd feel unnecessarily unfair in continuing the story beyond that, except to say it all fairly rapidly disappeared after he left. A small website with perhaps 4-5 concurrent users at peak. Definitely a case of buzzword bingo over technical understanding.
I once tried to get a co-worker's job title changed to Application Support Specialist. I might have snuck it past the boss, who was actually a very good boss, but I got greedy and tried to add "Head of Licensing Enforcement". That made the acronym a little too easy to spot, apparently.
A CIO at a past company was good at the talk, not the walk. And as the technical and HR issues mounted up, this became increasingly clear to higher management, causing said CIO to come up with increasingly deranged ideas to show that he was on top of things.
Lots of people leaving due to low morale after too many months of too much crunch? Let's introduce a minimum three-month notice period "to make people feel safer". It's just a coincidence that this makes it harder to find a new job, right?
Evidence of existing/legacy platforms that need uplifting/replacing? Ignore them in favour of the latest new-shiny.
Later, when confronted with performance issues as a result of this policy, he insisted that the DBAs go through the database and delete records that are more than X months old. Utterly ineffective as a performance tweak thanks to the fact that the DBAs were generally on top of tuning queries and indexing tables, but it did give him some nice big numbers he could show to higher management...
"Let's introduce a minimum three-month notice period "to make people feel safer". It's just a coincidence that this makes it harder to find a new job, right?"
So true. At one company I worked for the top management were about to bring this in. There was general dissatisfaction about the company at local management level, and when tipped off by HR four of us handed in our notice in one week to ensure we didn't get trapped. Including HR, so no heads rolled.
I did wonder afterwards how the local general manager explained it. "To lose one senior manager is unfortunate...to lose 4 in one week looks like carelessness." But they kept him on. I guess, like Theresa May and Rudd, they really at that point had no alternative.
Bosses at the end of the 1990s would announce that we would be doing everything in future "with XML" and hire a twat on £1200 per day to ponce about analysing the business. Two months later, they would vanish leaving behind a half-written DTD and an irrelevant project statement. The boss would then tell you to finish it off without training or assistance, the budget having been used up.
The boss would then tell you to finish it off without training or assistance
But if harassed sufficiently, he would eventually agree to shell out £40 for a couple of textbooks (while muttering 'I don't know why someone like you can't find all you need to know on the Internet' under his breath).
I know this, because I came across those books when I moved office earlier this year. Left the fuckers in the recycling waste.
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