CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by Shirley »

Looks like the retired life is almost over for me. I just accepted a job with Tanium. I start in a couple of Mondays. I'm not a big fish in a small pond anymore, but the Tanium pond is growing like crazy.
Totally Kafkaesque
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by mister d »

Congrats.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by Nonlinear FC »

Nice.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by wlu_lax6 »

Shirley wrote: Wed May 29, 2019 12:32 pm Looks like the retired life is almost over for me. I just accepted a job with Tanium. I start in a couple of Mondays. I'm not a big fish in a small pond anymore, but the Tanium pond is growing like crazy.
Nice...if you get an excuse to hit the McLean office, I will buy the beer.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by Steve of phpBB »

That's great news, Dave. Where will you be?
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by Shirley »

Tanium has a pretty big office here in the Triangle (Morrisville). There are more devs here than in HQ in Emeryville, CA. I'll be a PM, not a dev, but I'll work closely with devs, so this is pretty convenient.
Totally Kafkaesque
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by phxgators »

Congrats Shirley!
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by A_B »

I'll confess I looked the company up because I'd never heard of it and didn't know what they did. Now that I've researched it, I can confirm that I have heard of them and have no idea what they do.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by Pruitt »

A_B wrote: Thu May 30, 2019 8:55 am I'll confess I looked the company up because I'd never heard of it and didn't know what they did. Now that I've researched it, I can confirm that I have heard of them and have no idea what they do.
I'll second that emotion.

And congrats on the new gig! Whatever it is that you do.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by Shirley »

Tanium makes software to monitor and manage a company's many computers. For example, it can easily find out how many of a company's thousands of computers have a particular patch installed. And it can be used to install that patch, or see if someone's been trying to hack in, etc.

What's amazing is that they launched the product in 2012 and have been profitable every year since. And last raised money last fall at a $6.7B valuation. It's a successful company.
Totally Kafkaesque
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by A_B »

These endpoints aren't gonna mange themselves!
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by The Sybian »

Shirley wrote: Thu May 30, 2019 9:53 am Tanium makes software to monitor and manage a company's many computers. For example, it can easily find out how many of a company's thousands of computers have a particular patch installed. And it can be used to install that patch, or see if someone's been trying to hack in, etc.

What's amazing is that they launched the product in 2012 and have been profitable every year since. And last raised money last fall at a $6.7B valuation. It's a successful company.
Oh, so it's basically Bright Car for your business' computers.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by Shirley »

The Sybian wrote: Thu May 30, 2019 12:16 pm
Shirley wrote: Thu May 30, 2019 9:53 am Tanium makes software to monitor and manage a company's many computers. For example, it can easily find out how many of a company's thousands of computers have a particular patch installed. And it can be used to install that patch, or see if someone's been trying to hack in, etc.

What's amazing is that they launched the product in 2012 and have been profitable every year since. And last raised money last fall at a $6.7B valuation. It's a successful company.
Oh, so it's basically Bright Car for your business' computers.
Exactly
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by Sabo »

Me: We need to shut down two of your servers. They're old and you no longer use them.

Editor: OK, but give me a couple of weeks so everyone can get the data they need off the server.

Me: OK, that's fine.

*two weeks pass*

Editor: You can shut down the server now.

Me: *shuts down both servers*

Editor: Can you turn them back on? One of our editors still needs stuff off the server.

Me: *pounds head on desk*
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by The Sybian »

Sabo wrote: Tue Jul 02, 2019 11:20 am Me: We need to shut down two of your servers. They're old and you no longer use them.

Editor: OK, but give me a couple of weeks so everyone can get the data they need off the server.

Me: OK, that's fine.

*two weeks pass*

Editor: You can shut down the server now.

Me: *shuts down both servers*

Editor: Can you turn them back on? One of our editors still needs stuff off the server.

Me: *pounds head on desk*
Surely turning a server back on is as simple as hitting the power button...
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by Sabo »

Not when it's almost 500 miles away!
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by duff »

Sabo wrote: Tue Jul 02, 2019 1:23 pm Not when it's almost 500 miles away!
Virtualize that shit, Sabo.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by brian »

I receive so few work calls that I just realized my softphone app has not been running for a week and I had no voice mails (if the app isn't running it goes directly to voice mail.)

ETA: Most of our intra-office communication is via Slack. Most of my customers contact me via email.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by brian »

This may or may not surprise most of you, but I have a bit of a reputation as the office crank. I choose to think of myself as more like the office "realist", but maybe that's a distinction without a difference in the business world.

Anyway, about three years ago we agreed to take on a huge development project for a business we'll call Company E. This would require us to basically eliminate most other development on the rest of our products for about six to nine months to undertake a huge deal that would result in us completely re-doing our email product for Company E. Of course, the deal was worth quite a bit of money to get the business and the rest of our customers would reap benefits from the new email product, but the tradeoff was that rest of the products (which were/still are vastly more profitable to the company's bottom line) would stagnate for awhile until we could free up the resources to get back to them.

I told whomever would listen that I thought it was a bad idea*, that the business with Company E would be great but not at the expense of the rest of the platform and potentially alienating the rest of our customer base if they're not able to see regular progress/updates to the existing products yadda yadda yadda. I said my piece, almost everyone dismissed me and everyone moved on.

Fast forward to this morning and Company E cancelled with us and is switching to another vendor.

I'm not petty enough to say "I told you so", but I'm still curious if anyone whose opinion matters (namely the two company owner/founders) is going to remember my constant opposition to the project at the time. The curse of being right about that stuff is that everyone is so pissed/bummed about losing the business even if they remember that you were opposed to it, there's a tendency to take out their frustration on you for being right, so might have that to look forward to.

Just felt like venting. Guess I better get back to work and make sure I can ensure I still have a job in a few months.

* - For however much it sounds like complaining, the company culture is such that you really do have a voice on these projects/decisions. It's not that the company is a "democracy" - it's not -- but the culture is that anyone can air their opinions and we have regular sessions to discuss things that impact everyone at the company, even when it comes to things as inconsequential as if it's OK for people to bring their dogs into work one day a week.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by mister d »

How did it affect the rest of the customer base?
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

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mister d wrote: Tue Jul 23, 2019 12:39 pm How did it affect the rest of the customer base?
Negatively, as expected, but we weathered it. Had to eat a lot of shit for awhile in my department (customer experience) especially. I explained even at the time though that my opposition wasn't based in self-interest (i.e. not wanting to deal with more pissed off customers), but on personal experience from my previous company where I worked for 10 years that allowed the sales department and the race for huge business opportunities to drive the development roadmap at the expense of the existing customer base.

That never went well for them and in my experience almost never goes well for software companies in general. Every situation is different, but if you control most of an entire market, the primary focus needs to be on retention of that market. Any additional resources you have to work on growth, new products, new business is great at that point, but not at the expense of the existing market.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by GoodKarma »

I have been in similar positions in the past. Based on my experience (although I obviously don't know the people involved) they probably won't remember your objection and if they do I doubt they will give it much thought.

Running a company is a bit like being a QB in football...you have to forget about the INT you just threw and move on to the next series (or opportunity).
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by wlu_lax6 »

My company just replaced the toilet paper hardware in our bathrooms. Goodbye metal holders with built in ashtrays. Hello plastic Scott branded dispenser.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

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Couldn't access our payroll company's website to get my paystubs to send for a mortgage re-finance. Went to contact our crazy HR rep, only to discover she had been fired about 30 minutes previous (for what broke the camel's back I can only guess), so then had to send an email to the company owner asking for help since he's essentially the HR backup.

Good times.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

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My office is moving buildings this week, so I came in today to pack up my shit for the move. Actually, to take it all home because yesterday I received notice that I don't have a desk in the new office. My boss insisted I have a desk and was promised by her boss that I would, but since I come in maybe 3 times a year, I'm not even going to say anything, I don't come in enough to care.

Anyways, I had all of my stuff in a cardboard box with my name on it, in my cube. We have until 4:00 tomorrow to pack everything in plastic shipping bins. Get to my cube, nothing here. Office manager, a nice guy maybe 25 yo, isn't sure what he did with it. Then thinks he dumped it all in the locked shredding garbage cans, and he doesn't have the code. Long story short, we just went through both bins, and he says they picked up on Tuesday, all my shit is gone. 6 years worth of notes and files for investigations that are all ripe for lawsuits, and all those notes must be kept for discovery. It's amazing I haven't been subpoenaed for my notes or deposed yet, and it's just a matter of time. The look on his face when I explained this and told him to be prepared to testify that he threw away my notes makes it hard to be mad at him.

What I am pissed about losing is my crystal Dept of Homeland Security paperweight I got as a gift when I left CBP. That was a special item for me, and I can't imagine just tossing it in the garbage and not remembering it. Also miss my law school International Law Journal metal mug. Had that with me at every job I've had. All I got was an, "oh, I should have reached out before throwing all your stuff away." I mean, it was in a box, with my name on it, in my cube.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by Nonlinear FC »

That dude doesn't get any kind of reprimand?? Like, that's insane.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

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Nonlinear FC wrote: Thu Aug 08, 2019 12:12 pm That dude doesn't get any kind of reprimand?? Like, that's insane.
It just happened. I have no idea who he reports to. I'm sure if I reported this, he would get in a ton of trouble, because we don't fuck around when it comes to securing documents. I mean, an HR outsourcing company that is publicly traded, data security is everything. We could get fired for holding a door open for someone, even if it's your boss. No joke, at least at HQ. The CEO is meticulous as fuck with stuff like that.

Just had my weekly call with my boss, and she is debating whether we have to report this to Legal. Fortunately, I type summaries of all my handwritten notes from investigation interviews, so I have cleaned up electronic versions, and won't have to decipher my scrawled shorthand notes, which often don't make sense to me a year later.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by sancarlos »

The Sybian wrote: Thu Aug 08, 2019 11:23 am My office is moving buildings this week, so I came in today to pack up my shit for the move. Actually, to take it all home because yesterday I received notice that I don't have a desk in the new office. My boss insisted I have a desk and was promised by her boss that I would, but since I come in maybe 3 times a year, I'm not even going to say anything, I don't come in enough to care.

Anyways, I had all of my stuff in a cardboard box with my name on it, in my cube. We have until 4:00 tomorrow to pack everything in plastic shipping bins. Get to my cube, nothing here. Office manager, a nice guy maybe 25 yo, isn't sure what he did with it. Then thinks he dumped it all in the locked shredding garbage cans, and he doesn't have the code. Long story short, we just went through both bins, and he says they picked up on Tuesday, all my shit is gone. 6 years worth of notes and files for investigations that are all ripe for lawsuits, and all those notes must be kept for discovery. It's amazing I haven't been subpoenaed for my notes or deposed yet, and it's just a matter of time. The look on his face when I explained this and told him to be prepared to testify that he threw away my notes makes it hard to be mad at him.

What I am pissed about losing is my crystal Dept of Homeland Security paperweight I got as a gift when I left CBP. That was a special item for me, and I can't imagine just tossing it in the garbage and not remembering it. Also miss my law school International Law Journal metal mug. Had that with me at every job I've had. All I got was an, "oh, I should have reached out before throwing all your stuff away." I mean, it was in a box, with my name on it, in my cube.
That really sucks, Sybian!

Reminds me a bit of a time, a long long time ago in our office. I was just a young guy without a lot of important stuff, so that part is different from your situation. But, we had just moved offices and my office desktop wasn't loading properly when I booted up in the morning. This was on a Friday. So, I told the IT guy and he said he'd look at it over the weekend. I came in on Monday and it wouldn't even boot. I asked the guy about it, and he said, "Oh yeah. Something went wrong, and I somehow wiped your hard drive. You had everything backed up, right?" I could have punched him.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by Giff »

So one of my employees quit in June and I forgot to lock her account to the website we support. Come to find out during an audit that she had logged-in to the account 5 weeks after her last day. So, it's awesome that she left us high and dry (after I bent over backwards to allow her to work remotely so her husband could take a job in Virginia) then decided to do this. Even more awesome is literally 2 minutes after this was brought to my attention, I had a message from someone from the DoD saying she has applied for a job there and they'd like to speak with me as part of the vetting process. Wonder if they'd find it interesting she logged-in to a site she knew she shouldn't have been 5 weeks after she quit.

Side note, I didn't call the agent back and he showed up in the lobby of our building today asking for me. I was in a meeting and not sure what I could really say without consulting HR first, so they told him to go away. Is that weird?
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by EnochRoot »

Giff wrote: Thu Sep 12, 2019 3:48 pm So one of my employees quit in June and I forgot to lock her account to the website we support. Come to find out during an audit that she had logged-in to the account 5 weeks after her last day. So, it's awesome that she left us high and dry (after I bent over backwards to allow her to work remotely so her husband could take a job in Virginia) then decided to do this. Even more awesome is literally 2 minutes after this was brought to my attention, I had a message from someone from the DoD saying she has applied for a job there and they'd like to speak with me as part of the vetting process. Wonder if they'd find it interesting she logged-in to a site she knew she shouldn't have been 5 weeks after she quit.

Side note, I didn't call the agent back and he showed up in the lobby of our building today asking for me. I was in a meeting and not sure what I could really say without consulting HR first, so they told him to go away. Is that weird?
Nope. HR guys for defense / govt contracts are insane like that.

So, a monthly audit turned up activity she created in early-mid August? What did her account do? Besides the username/password the hacker used to gain unauthorized access, how else do you know it was her? 2FA?
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by EnochRoot »

What was her position with your company? Sounds pen-test-y.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by mister d »

I still visit RiverAveBlues like five months since it shut down so if she's anything like me it was just muscle memory.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by rass »

Yesterday morning someone brought in a glorious, dog-sized loaf of challah bread. I had a slice and it was delicious.

As of first thing this morning, there was one slice left. My guess is that one slice has been cut in half no less than 3 times today, and there is still one sad, likely stale, chunk of bread sitting on a plate in the kitchen.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

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rass wrote: Fri Mar 18, 2016 11:37 am Bringing together a couple of former subjects, the older male receptionist who can't keep names straight and sometimes wears a manatee-print belt was observed this morning leaving a bathroom stall, exiting the bathroom without washing his hands, then entering the office and making a beeline for a communal bowl of M&Ms.
So far I've caught him twice this week leaving a stall and then exiting the bathroom without washing his hands. The first time he left for the day. Today he wandering downstairs, I assume to get the mail because a couple of minutes later he came into my office, double-checked with me that the other desk indeed belongs to my office mate (we've been in here for this dude's entire tenure here), and then dropped a magazine on his keyboard.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by A_B »

Just cleaned up my work inbox. This will horrify some of you, but I had 5400+ unread.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by rass »

rass wrote: Thu Oct 03, 2019 11:23 am
rass wrote: Fri Mar 18, 2016 11:37 am Bringing together a couple of former subjects, the older male receptionist who can't keep names straight and sometimes wears a manatee-print belt was observed this morning leaving a bathroom stall, exiting the bathroom without washing his hands, then entering the office and making a beeline for a communal bowl of M&Ms.
So far I've caught him twice this week leaving a stall and then exiting the bathroom without washing his hands. The first time he left for the day. Today he wandering downstairs, I assume to get the mail because a couple of minutes later he came into my office, double-checked with me that the other desk indeed belongs to my office mate (we've been in here for this dude's entire tenure here), and then dropped a magazine on his keyboard.
Since we're here...

Last week, he wandered in a dropped off a package with my office mate, then puttered out of our office muttering to himself "where is <<rass>>..." I was in my office, at my desk. He came back 30 seconds later, announced my name and handed me my package.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by brian »

A_B wrote: Thu Dec 19, 2019 12:15 pm Just cleaned up my work inbox. This will horrify some of you, but I had 5400+ unread.
So how does that work exactly? This is a serious question. I can't have any unread emails or else I go crazy, but I don't get that many emails a day (probably about 150. Five to ten are directly from people (my boss, a customer, etc.) that I have to deal with ASAP, 20 to 30 are automated alerts for tasks I have to do ASAP and the rest are automated updates from our various account management software (Trello, Hubspot, etc.)

Now, those I seldom actually read in any detail unless it's something critical so I mostly just mark those as read without reading. So is what you're doing not just marking them as read and leaving them in your inbox?

You're not the only person who does this, so I'm legit curious. How do you know if an unread email wasn't something you really needed to deal with?
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by A_B »

I would say that 5000 of them were from news lists or google alerts or amazon/best buy. I've had this e-mail address since about 1999, and for a while it was the e-mail I used at those sites and I have just never changed it. So I sort by from and unread and I can delete large swaths of those at once. And the news alerts ones almost always have the whole message in the subject so I don't need to open them and I just don't delete them when I get them.

Also a fair amount of them were stock price alerts that also say the entire message in the subject line.

And since I'm sorted by From, I can catch any missed messages that actually need attention, but the vast marjoity of the legit emails are things I looked at on my phone and for whatever reason didn't sync as read. There were only about 10-15 that had legit things to follow up on, and all of those were from within the past week or so. SO I do a decent job of reading the stuff I need to I guess.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by brian »

OK, I guess I've always been fascinated when I see people with 10,000 or more unread messages. I do keep my work and personal email separate so that only work stuff goes to that address, so that helps keep the amount of emails down. My personal account I probably get about 150-200 messages a day as well, but will delete about 90 percent of that without reading.
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Re: CUBE LIFE! Office Etiquette

Post by Brontoburglar »

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