BOFH: You know something's up when the suits want to spend money
- Reference: 1763118012
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/11/14/bofh_2025_episode_21/
- Source link:
"Server replacements?" the PFY asks.
"Yeah, replacing our core systems. Surely we're going to replace the servers?"
[1]
"Most of our 'servers' are in the cloud."
[2]
[3]
"Oh. What about our network equipment? We must need to replace some of that?"
"No, no, it's all good."
[4]
"Well, perhaps we should kick off a project to plan for next year's replacements?"
"I... guess we could look into it," the PFY says, as the Boss wanders off to the next destination on his list.
...
[5]
"That was... unusual," I comment, once the Boss is gone.
"Yeah, it was like he was trying to spend money," the PFY observes.
Our conversation is interrupted by the arrival of the Director.
"How are our online systems going?" he asks. "No issues? Are we being serviced alright? Should we be looking at other providers?"
"Uh... They're all... OK?" the PFY replies.
"Well, perhaps we need a price comparison? Maybe there's a better provider?"
"I could... take a look?" the PFY says.
"Good. Do that, will you?"
...
"Something's going on," I say, once he's gone, and the PFY immediately agrees.
Ten minutes of tapping at his keyboard, he has an answer.
"There's a Christmas bonus!" he says.
"A CHRISTMAS BONUS!!!" I gasp.
"Sort of," the PFY nods. "A survey of a couple of inboxes reveals a 'top secret, not to be mentioned to anyone' discussion at board level to implement a one-off 'Special Achievement Award' for any staff member who proposes a project that would save the company from significant costs or risk."
"Ah, the mist is parting. What projects are we talking about?"
"It's hard to say – because the project is 'top secret.'"
"So... everyone knows about it?" I ask.
"Yep. Everyone's been BCC'd by someone."
"Everyone but us, it would seem. So it's a feeding frenzy?"
"Uh-huh. The building people want to recarpet the entire building to eliminate trip hazards."
"An early play of the Health and Safety wildcard."
"The Head Beancounter wants to implement a two-factor purchase approval system to reduce potential loss."
"Everyone loves a trier," I observe.
"The colored pencil office want to migrate to a browser-based design tool and create an online digital library of all our prior artwork – including a side mission of digitizing all historic design material."
"History card, nice. What about HR?"
"The Head of HR has proposed a one-stop cell phone-based portal for leave booking, health reporting, personal improvement, and employment prospect management."
"Of course. And our team? What have we put forward?"
"Our TEAM? Nothing. Though as of... 20 seconds ago, the Boss wants to replace 150K of server and network equipment and the Director has suggested creating a project team to evaluate and migrate our online systems to a single cost-effective best-fit provider."
"So they're cutting us out?"
"Undoubtedly."
"Thinking caps on?" I suggest.
...
"I... see you... submitted a couple of projects for the... Special Achievement Award," the Boss says casually, after he and the Director wander (again, "casually") into Mission Control.
"Oh, those?" the PFY says, equally casually. "They're just a couple of thoughts we had."
"What thoughts?" the Director asks.
"Well, the obvious one is the Y2K38 problem."
"The Y2K38 problem?"
"Yes, similar to the Y2K problem, only this one's about older systems 'clocking over.'"
"Is that even a thing?" the Boss asks. "Would it even be that bad?"
"We may not be talking human sacrifice and cats and dogs living together, but it could be bad," the PFY replies.
"And financially catastrophic," I add.
"Then there's our second project – the Y10K problem."
"The Y10K problem?"
"Yes, when we get to year 10,000. NONE of our systems are prepared for a five-digit year."
"But that's... seven thousand... uuhhhhm..."
[6]BOFH : Saving the planet, one falsified metric at a time
[7]BOFH : Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch
[8]BOFH : HR discovers the limits of vertical mobility
[9]BOFH : These office thefts really take the biscuit
"Nine hundred and seventy-five years from now. Yes, but it pays to be prepared."
"You can't seriously be proposing that?"
"Of course I am. Using the Company's risk assessment criteria, anything with a severity of 'catastrophic' – however unlikely – has a risk assessment of HIGH, and risk is one of the criteria for the Special Achievement Award."
"By that rationale, I could propose UFOs crashing into the building," the Boss snaps.
"Write that down," I mumble to the PFY, much to the Boss's consternation.
"Clock rollovers are a real issue that the Company needs to treat seriously. I mean, the BMS system is still flaky after the change from BC to AD."
Nothing.
"Never mind," the PFY chips in, "we're also putting together proposal for a 'Management Abstraction Layer' to replace a chunk of intermediary positions with a web page that just says 'Hang on a minute, I'll just ask' in response to any question submitted to it."
"And which 'intermediary positions' are you talking about?" the Director asks.
"What's the combined salaries of our top five staff?" I ask the Boss.
"Hang on a minute, I'll just ask," the Boss says.
"There we go."
...
But not everything goes according to plan. APPARENTLY some senior IT people questioned the credibility of our proposals, and they were discounted.
Luckily, my last-minute proposal – that the award should be shared equally between the selection committee and the award winners so as to encourage better quality solutions on an ongoing basis – turned out to be the winner on the day.
Who could have guessed?
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Re: a 'Management Abstraction† Layer'
You will need an exceptional intelligent AI to produce
'Hang on a minute, I'll just ask' responses. Perfect opportunity to add that to the list as well, wouldn't it?
Re: a 'Management Abstraction† Layer'
I remember the T-shirts from the late 1990s that said "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script".
Seems that a MAL is not that new an idea...
Re: a 'Management Abstraction† Layer'
" very small shell script "
AFAIK The smallest syntactically correct (Bourne) shell script is:
:
Older Unix system would invoke csh it the first character was a # which might replace a bad tempered manglement type.
Arguably even a single character is over-implementation.
Re: a 'Management Abstraction† Layer'
The smallest shell script is
:(){ :|:& };:
try it !
"Seems that a MAL is not that new an idea..."
But if you put it on a T-shirt, won't you be introducing MAL-wear to the system?
Re: a 'Management Abstraction† Layer'
Hang on a minute, I'll just ask.
Can I have a raise?
Too much money to spend
One place I worked, my job description could be called "anti-sales".
When new equipment was needed, and with an IT budget of over £100 million a year, that was all the time, I was tasked with working out what specifications were actually required. That was to counter the suppliers sales teams who considered the company an easy target, since the people signing off on new kit knew didily-squat about MIPs, gigabytes or bandwidth. The closest they got to technical knowledge was "oooh, shiny".
After one carefully prepared, numerically sound, counter-proposal the question of software licensing came up. I told the PHB how many were needed now and what the future would require. However, the wily salesperson had slipped in a bunch of extra licenses. Much like a dishonest waiter will "accidentally" add another round of drinks to the bill.
It turned out that bossy-kins had assumed both numbers were the same and put the order in, with the inflated license numbers. When someone questioned the extra cost, manager-person replied "oh well, it's only £60k" and the audit department was satisfied with that.
Re: Too much money to spend
We had a junior employee whose role included doing the research and proposing suitable equipment for one-off projects.
I was given approval to purchase myself a new laptop when my position was officially changed to a developer role, as at the time I had an old MacBook that was struggling with some of the more demanding stuff.
Above mentioned employee was twiddling his thumbs that day, so I suggested he could help do some googling for a nice professional looking i7, 32GB RAM sort of spec laptop that would look good when I visit clients as someone with the word senior in my new job title.
That was how I ended up with an i9 with 64GB RAM, 2TB NVMe drive, and 4k touch screen.
Shortly after this, I was tasked with seeing what spare parts we had laying around the office. After checking the specs of a system sitting on the shelf collecting dust, which had been purchased for a one-off event playing a single 512x512pixel video stream, I went and gave our main proxmox server a significant hardware upgrade for zero cost... And his purchase proposals started getting more scrutiny!
Re: Too much money to spend
To be fair to the employee he was obviously trying to ensure machines that had plenty of "headroom" in case initial demands were an underestimate of what would be required.
A distinct improvement on low spec purchases (glares at his work machine with barely enough disk space for one decent sized database once all necessary software is installed and where CPU & memory usage rarely dip below about 90% of max & the fan never seems to get a rest )
"shared equally between the selection committee and the award winners"
Bribery. Old but golden even more so when the readies were more or less "(mis)appropriated" from the party being bribed.
Looking at the risk assessment of Simon's proposal:
Hazard: Award going to another group.
Severity: Catastrophic.
Risk: none.
Re: "shared equally between the selection committee and the award winners"
Another bottle of claret, Morris.
"An early play of the Health and Safety wildcard."
"An early play of the Health and Safety wildcard."
Never a truer word spoken , that and "Data Protection" are the "catch all" jokers in the pack that can be used as a reason to do anything , or to not do something .
Re: "An early play of the Health and Safety wildcard."
Indeed. I had a support zombie from MS cite GDPR as to why he couldn't just message me on Teams instead of endless emails.
Management Abstraction Layer
replace a chunk of intermediary positions with a web page that just says 'Hang on a minute, I'll just ask' in response to any question submitted to it."
Genious.
We have an "Information Governance" team who's jobs could probably be replaced by a couple of wall posters, or at the max a powerpoint training slideshow
Re: Management Abstraction Layer
"Genious."
Agreed (well, almost). But it's a line worthy of the late great Douglas Adams.
"colored pencil office"
"colored" pencil office????
Re: "colored crayon office"
Marketing/Strategy/etc.
1. They use the crayons to draw all the pretty pictures - usually someone else will actually then convert the drawings to PowerPoint for them to drone in front of
2. Cannot be trusted with anything sharper than a crayon
3. Crayons also used to cross out on the menu of "blue sky" terms they use in every missive - pivot, leverage, etc.
Re: "colored crayon office"
Methinks "u" have missed the point the previous commenter was trying to make there...
Re: "colored pencil office"
"colored" pencil office????
Obviously a typo.
The "colo-red pencil office" is the co-location office for the single colour red pencil team who are in charge of putting that one red line in the email signature which means every email gets printed out in, and charged for, colour
They are in a colo-located office so that nobody can find them and stop them
"Hang on a minute, I'll just ask."
That's a massive improvement on the old middle-management way of doing things: pull an answer out of their arseholes and then blame their subordinates for not working hard enough to make that answer correct.
The old line from "Ghostbusters" is never lost on me
"We may not be talking human sacrifice and cats and dogs living together, but it could be bad," the PFY replies.
A Friday toast ---> to Simon for alluding to Pre-Web "Deep" Geek Culture.
(You want my vote for anything? Quote "Ghostbusters", "Spaceballs", or Monty Python in my general direction.)
One small step for a man, one giant quantum communications leap for iMankind
That BOFH post has me pondering and wondering whether El Reg are up for global international and universatile internetional leadership with the simple publishing of novel complex news of emerging situations.
One surely has to admit the present conventional historical and hysterical incumbents have definitely lost the plot and are proving themselves daily totally unfit for future greater intelligence purpose. And one can only ignore and claim not to see the bleeding fcuking obvious for so long before every other man and his dog realise the madness before them and resolve to fix it and revolt ....... with the creation of havoc and mayhem against failed and oppressive systems managers and administrators/prime ministers and collectively responsible colleagues, a premium initial attack weapon of virtually autonomous choice. Let them enjoy the taste of their own medicine and the fruits of their labours so that they can better understand and experience the folly of the past and present ways.
Is that not what you clearly see has led to such as is a current inevitable existential calamity?
a 'Management Abstraction† Layer'
through an open third storey window would be favourite.
† sense #6. the act of withdrawing or removing.