Craptastic
Nov. 13th, 2006 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swehSo there's a rumour going around at work. The line of business I've been working for for the past 3 years is being disbanded.
Basically it went like this. We were building an super-duper-all-singing-all-dancing centralised control system for managing accounts and access and privilege escalation and so on. We designed something far superior to the commercial alternatives, and it would be something that met our requirements, rather than being full of kludges and didn't need a horrendous amount of infrastructure that the existing solution uses.
People liked this and funded it. We had a plan for what was to be done this year.
And then Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) came along. Oh crap. So our management team said "hey, can you modify this so that we can get all the reports needed to pass our audit?" We said "Errr... that's not the aim of this product; when we have the management code in place then these reports will just fall out of it." The response... "But we need this now". Countered with "But then we will not be able to do what we'd planned for the year!" and trumped with "Doesn't matter; we need this or we will be fined megabucks." So... we spent 5 months writing code to do their reports. Added functionality so that we can track changes to systems, allow changes to be reviewed and signed off, to do lots of clever stuff. And it was, it was clever (and quite hard to do, in places!). But it wasn't part of our plan.
Come the SOX review and our line of business was able to show 98% compliance; the average for the rest of the bank was below 80%. Our high score brought the overall result to above 80% and so we avoided megamegabucks of fines. Our management was happy. We proved our flexibility and ability to meet the businesses changing requirements. Yay!
Seems the yay was premature. Upper management is now reviewing projects for next year. And... we failed to meet our plans! Our work is so far behind schedule and we are so we are considered a failure. Upper management is disbanding our team, sacking contractors, possibly also sacking the management level responsible for the "fiasco". At the very least reassigning them.
The other lead engineer on the Unix side has heard a rumour that he'll be reassigned to an SA team. The lead engineer on the DBMS side was a contractor and is now struggling to find a job and is putting together a proposal which he wants to sell to upper management (where he becomes an employee and leads a DBMS engineering team; good luck on that!).
And me? I've not heard anything officially. Just rumours. And so I'm out in the cold. I have no fucking idea what is going on or what I'm going to be doing. I just hope I'll have a job at the end of it!
Basically it went like this. We were building an super-duper-all-singing-all-dancing centralised control system for managing accounts and access and privilege escalation and so on. We designed something far superior to the commercial alternatives, and it would be something that met our requirements, rather than being full of kludges and didn't need a horrendous amount of infrastructure that the existing solution uses.
People liked this and funded it. We had a plan for what was to be done this year.
And then Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) came along. Oh crap. So our management team said "hey, can you modify this so that we can get all the reports needed to pass our audit?" We said "Errr... that's not the aim of this product; when we have the management code in place then these reports will just fall out of it." The response... "But we need this now". Countered with "But then we will not be able to do what we'd planned for the year!" and trumped with "Doesn't matter; we need this or we will be fined megabucks." So... we spent 5 months writing code to do their reports. Added functionality so that we can track changes to systems, allow changes to be reviewed and signed off, to do lots of clever stuff. And it was, it was clever (and quite hard to do, in places!). But it wasn't part of our plan.
Come the SOX review and our line of business was able to show 98% compliance; the average for the rest of the bank was below 80%. Our high score brought the overall result to above 80% and so we avoided megamegabucks of fines. Our management was happy. We proved our flexibility and ability to meet the businesses changing requirements. Yay!
Seems the yay was premature. Upper management is now reviewing projects for next year. And... we failed to meet our plans! Our work is so far behind schedule and we are so we are considered a failure. Upper management is disbanding our team, sacking contractors, possibly also sacking the management level responsible for the "fiasco". At the very least reassigning them.
The other lead engineer on the Unix side has heard a rumour that he'll be reassigned to an SA team. The lead engineer on the DBMS side was a contractor and is now struggling to find a job and is putting together a proposal which he wants to sell to upper management (where he becomes an employee and leads a DBMS engineering team; good luck on that!).
And me? I've not heard anything officially. Just rumours. And so I'm out in the cold. I have no fucking idea what is going on or what I'm going to be doing. I just hope I'll have a job at the end of it!
