Sectorgame

This is the sort of email I've been getting recently;
"HI

I am able to create VNC session with a specific port number.After successful creation,iam not able to connect the vnc with the port number given during the creation of vnc session.


My machine details:

REMOVED

Please do the needful?

"

In case you're not familiar with VNC (or rlogin, etc) into a Solaris/Unix box, it's simply a question of remote connection. In this gentlemans case, he could have had a look himself and tried ssh, telnet or rlogin before emailing the help list, to see whether the ports were open. Y'know, basic investigation that takes a few minutes of google, and a little lateral thinking.

Of course, he didn't, and just ran for help at the first sign of trouble. A bit like the guy who couldn't get clearcase or ssh to work (because 'someone else' had deleted it from the /opt directory I'd spent my day off installing it into, the week before).

It's enormously frustrating.

But to put it all into a bit of context. In case you didn't know, I work at Cisco, in a Scottish development centre - we (until recently) worked on something called ISC, which is a big software tool that provides a myriad of diagnostic features for networks. In particular our office developed MPLS Diagnostics before the whole ISC tool was moved to our remit.

I've been here just over 3 years now, and virtually no-one here (and I mean in the UK) has had any sort of raise (i.e. cost-of-living) because the money allocated for that is sent to India, China (these 2 to bring up to scratch with other competitors - although an Indian developer for example is still half the annual wage of a UK employee) and the US (who get money regardless of relative income vs other employers). I think it's maybe the top 10% who get raises, which amounts to less than 10 people locally (less now, but we'll get to that).

ISC - and thus my office - is part of the group (NMTG) of Cisco dedicated to software (the main money comes from hardware, i.e. routers and lately servers). The problem is that software is mostly given away or included as part of overall hardware packages, so the income goes unrecognised (if it even exists). Thus every few years there's a grand panic as they cull jobs or 'reorganize' (cull lots of jobs) to try and make themselves look more financially valuable. On top of this, ISC is entering a maintenance (end-life) phase, and the proposed replacement (built on the Eclipse IDE by an Israeli team which was bought over as they made a competing diagnostics platform) was a shambolic mess of bugs and incomplete documentation (to the extent that it was technically impossible for us to port a new next generation flexible diagnostics engine, which was really quite an impressive piece of work).

Hence most of the top management have left, voluntarily or otherwise. And the new directors first video presentation to the group was a shocking excercise in weasel wording and obfuscation, especially when asked about job security.

Hopefully that gives a picture of how much of a mess this company and division is, even before the recession....

(TBC)

....

Anyway, at this point it's worth mentioning the team here, in Glasgow, is actually very strong. I'm very lucky in that everyone I know here is a) extremely smart and b) genuinely nice. Seriously, it's a fantastic place to work (people-wise).

As I mentioned before, ISC is moving to 'maintenance'. This is despite a massive multi-hundred million dollar contract with (IIRC) At&T for Cisco to redesign and build their network. Part of that contract involves provision of support and diagnostics through ISC, which is a large part of my work (or it was, anyways). I moved onto this work, IIRC, about May last year.

(NOTE: dates are really fuzzy, so might be a month or two out here. But the time-periods are more or less correct)

It was around June that we got news of large-scale redundancies (one of the boss guys came in from the States, delivered the news, then more or less ran out the conference room to leave behind the somewhat weasely UK HR guy) - the ISC program was being moved to a subcontractor (Tech Mahindra) in India. Bear in mind said program was still an integral part of the huge deal with AT&T, and this meant that a bunch of effective novices would be responsible for maintaining ISC. I can't imagine a company, having bought a truly massive state-of-the-art network, would be happy at the prospect of the people handling the diagnostics software not really knowing what they were doing. On top of this, we had to train the people who would (literally) be taking our jobs, whilst the company paid for them to fly and stay here for several months.

As well as us, teams in US, and Israel were affected. Unlike people in the Us, we at least had some statutory protection and a long consultation period to discuss how many redundancies and the compensation. It'd actually take around 6-8 months before we found out exactly how many were being made redundant and what our status was (bear in mind that anyone taking out a mortage etc would have to say they were at risk of redundancy). At the end I think 90% of the test team were laid off, 4-5 developers, and several dev managers (leaving the remaining programmers with virtually no line management) - about half the total workforce.

On top of this, we had to extend the training for the TM (Indian outsourcers) 'tiger' team because they struggled with basic networking. I was told they were about the level of a fresh graduate; technically competent but lacking in domain knowledge. Given how much I've had to learn, I can imagine this being a big problem in the next few years - it's taken me 3 years (+) to get up to speed with what is a very complex area, and my education is more based on problem solving and analysis than Indian university (which I've been told - by one of the now-departed big boss guys - is more based on supporting their maintenance outsourcing industry).

So, in summary - we were placed in 6+ month limbo over our jobs, given a reduced set of compensation from the previous redundancies, and handed over our work to people who - as the top of the first post indicates - are lacking in the skills to maintain it.

(bear in mind this started before the recession)

And that's not the worst of it...

Phew, last bit. Sorry for the length.

The company itself has been using the recession as an excuse to strip peripheral benefits, meaning we're all on less (effectively) than last year, even if we were receiving cost of living benefits. Over the last few months;
- free cans of juice / bottled water and fruit have been removed
- removed various options (anything requiring milk) from the coffee machine and cut down on the quality of the beans (tastes like fermented cats piss)
- plants are being removed from the office (to save on watering them)
- mid year bonus has been cancelled (so if you get a redundancy notice, no bonus even though you'd be working past the usual bonus time)
- no more share options as a bonus except to a lucky few (also, previous options are at anywhere from $5-$15 below the current share price and thus effectively worthless)
- no more free internet for US employee (not confirmed if this happens in the UK)
- forced Christmas vacation in the US (it's not legal in the EU AFAIK; basically they're making people use holiday days over that period to shut down offices and save on power)

On top of that, the situation is intolerable now. We have no work given to us, because the whole NMTG group is a shambolic mess and seems to have no direction. I sit at my day doing precisely f###-all, and I'm not alone. We also have pretty much no test-team, which will really screw up future development (testing seems to be an optional resource for the company).

Oh, and I'm being made redundant in November. Fortunately there's a large retention bonus for staying an extra 6 months (it's a 6 month extension from the earlier redundancies), and I've got sponsorship (from another company, to be clear) going back to uni to do a PhD. So I'm ok, although I will miss the people I work with (and the Tuesday football).

But the people who'll still be here have been treated shambolically. It's a disgrace.

Ouch! Sorry to hear it. Good luck with the studying, it's always good to keep the mind active.