Just saw this news article about SETI at Home and remembered that a lot of Dopers are part of this. Hope you’ve all asked permission!
Ouch.
Regardless of the fact that the man was clearly wrong, if this is the kind of the thing his department director says to a newspaper, I can only see that being relieved of his job has to be a good thing. Isn’t that just about borderline defamation of character there? Slander, libel, something?
So basically this guy is getting fired for breathing otherwise unused air after regular business hours?
Sure if your company has a policy against breathing company air after normal business hours then you can be fired. Sure.
But it’s still silly.
That’s about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. The department director might as well have put on a shirt saying “I’m a dumbshit.”
I think it’s completely unreasonable to fire him over this and the remarks made by the department director are unecessary but I do understand that a lot of workplaces have rules against installing unauthorised software. It really is their own business if they choose to enforce that rule even where there’s no apparent harm done.
Oh yeah? I guess you wouldn’t mind if your valet took your car out for a joyride while you were eating in the restaurant then, eh?
Well, if my car had to sit there idling all night anyway, and I had to pay for the gas regardless, I’d almost rather a driver in my employ took it for spin.
I wouldn’t want my driver to use my car to make money delivering pizza, but the seti@home guy wasn’t exactly running a for profit porn site.
Ok, I’m not saying the guy wasn’t basically wrong, but he wasn’t doing something worth firing him over.
Some of these unused processor time distributed computing projects could help predict the weather or help find a cure for a disease, besides finding ET.
Bah. The only way this is morally, as opposed to legally, wrong is if the machines would have otherwise been turned off completely, and he was wasting electrical power. From what I read in the article, those machines would have been burning power either way, and he was simply salvaging clock cycles that otherwise would have been wasted.
I hope he has enough socked away to simply retire at this point, or that he quickly finds intelligent life in the pool of people looking to hire him.
Completely wrong analogy.
Taking my car out for a joyride could damage me or the car in the following ways:
- car could be damaged via a crash
- crash could also hurt valet. I don’t want to be responsible for that.
- crash could also hurt other people. I really don’t want to be responsible for that.
- ANY driving causes wear and tear on my car.
- I’m out the cash I paid for the gas that the valet uses
- Car could be used for illegal activities, ie, drug deals or getaway car for theft. Nope, don’t want to go near that.
SETI@home has NO risks involved, given that most computers are on overnight anyway. You have a small point if the computer is normally turned off. But there’s really no risk in running SETI@home - it doesn’t cause wear and tear on the machine, it’s not going to hurt anyone, and there’s no additional risk of virus or anything else getting onto the machine by using SETI@home.
If anything, I see this in the same light I see in-office recycling. Organizations spend WAY more time and money on recycling paper and soda cans than they ever would by supporting SETI@home or other p2p applications, and nobody’s been fired over that.
You know, one of the joys of owning property is the ability to keep others from doing things with it, just because. I like this. I don’t care if it is not hurting me to have another family live in my house while I’m gone for a weekend (they’ll do all the dishes, pay for electricity, won’t do any damage, etc., they will just live between my four walls); it’s my damn house and I’ll use it as I please, even if it means not using it.
The same applies to a company’s computer systems; if you want to use SETI, go ahead, but do it on something you own, or get the owner’s permission.
“But it wasn’t being used,” is not a defense to do what you want with someone else’s toy.
I disagree that just because SETI might not cause any damage to the company in any way, that it’s not a problem that the guy was running it. The computers belong to the company, and it is their right to control what is done to them, or with them. I know that I would be pretty pissed off and found out a friend of mine had decided to install SETI on my computer, to run only when I was asleep, and didn’t tell me he had done it. It’s my computer, and he has no right to do anything to it beyond what I give him permission to do. Who knows, maybe they’d have agreed to it if he’d just asked.
I think the big picture is, he was using the company hardware to do things that he wasn’t authorized to do. The fact that it was SETI makes no difference.
I see that this thread has deterioriated into a rift between people that understand the utter and complete harmlessness of running SETI@Home on an idle computer, versus clueless and argumentative nitwits that have broomsticks shoved up their asses.
Aside from normal wear and tear on the equipment. This isn’t some eMachines desktop, this was a pretty major server.
I fail to see how you can possibly think it’s okay to use something that isn’t yours for anything you want. I take it you’d be fine with me stepping into your house to, oh, use your toaster? Maybe microwave up some hotdogs, then kick back and watch some TV? Oh, don’t worry, I’ll do it while you’re at work… you won’t even know I was there!
It’s pretty well agreed that SETI poses little to no risk. However, that’s irrelevant. Every single day I see people lose productivity because they installed something on their computer in violation of corporate policies, which ends up trashing files/other programs/Windows/their entire machine. Sometimes this happens multiple times a day. The head IT tech that sits outside my office hears this same refrain each day: “Yeah, um, Dave, I installed this program from a, um, website and now XP won’t, um, boot, and I need to finish a presentation…now. Can you help me?” Then a reformat and re-image and a day later, they get back to where they were.
I’ve seen how unstable XP is in a very large corporate environment. It’s absolutely horrifying how many XP machines need to be reformatted every day because even the approved software screws them up. Why introduce more variables and more potential problems with non-essential and non work-related software?
And for Pete’s sake, surely there’s been some note taken of the tens of millions of virused and trojaned and zombied machines over the last few years or so? How do you think a lot of that gets started? For every person loading SETI on a machine and doing no harm, there is a person loading a program their “friend” mailed them that trashes a database. Who pays for that, exactly? Who writes the check for the lost time? You know, this is even pretty selfish too, as a person that could disrupt a major server could, potentially, be threatening the jobs and livlihoods of their co-workers should it impact operations enough. I’ve personally seen it happen.
Sometimes, believe it or not, it’s really not up to the employees to over-rule corporate IT security measures. So don’t whinge about the Man putting his jackboot on your neck because you can’t play games or do non-work related stuff at work. SETI may be harmless, as may numerous other collaborative computing efforts, but who’s to decide that? A company is not in the business of deciding and picking and choosing which programs employees can download from the net and run, and which they can’t. Should they spend time and resources and effort in this economy deciding “OK, ‘Radar Rat Race’ version 1.0 through 2.1b is safe, but ‘Sonar Mouse Race’ version 3.1.2 has a Java bug that locks the machine up…and ‘Laser Wombat Race’ version 2.7 has spyware in it that installs Bonzi Buddy” Does that sound like a productive business case?
And it’s certainly possible that a version of SETI could come out with a bug - say one that floods the bandwidth on the network, or deletes the wrong file, or grabs a socket from a database server. In fact, IIRC, there was at least one buggy version of SETI, but I could be wrong. Who’s going to pay for that? Is Berkeley going to? And the IT time spent finding out why a major credit card server no longer processes transactions? Who pays for that? Are you going to whip out your checkbook and write a check out to your company? Somehow I doubt it; in fact, I’ll bet a person that would install a buggy SETI that crashed a server would be indignant and offended that they were asked to actually take responsibility, and would probabaly start a pit thread about how the Evil Plutocrat “Pubbies” that ran their company were so heartless and cold and committing a Hate Crime against “Science”…yeesh. Then the usual cast of clowns would come in to say “SEE? SEE? SEE the violence inherent under the Bush Junta? Kerry would let you install anything you want, and download porn all day long! And put your boss in jail if she even looked at you funny!”
This argument is between people that understand that computer security and computer stability policies and procedures help make work easier and less of a burden for themselves and their co-workers, and help to keep their jobs more secure - and people that want to play games and fuck around at work and whine about how oppressed they are. You want to help SETI? Run it at home, or ask permission of your employer first. I know that’s a novel concept, but I know that some employers do allow, and even encourage collaborative distributed computing efforts. It might just be possible that someone could do it with permission, even do a “corporate challenge” type of thing.
I agree. All the guy had to say was that the employee was using company resources without permission and that would have been it. What he said was unprofessional.
I saw nothing in the OP about the employee going against company policy and installing non-approved software. If that was the case, then I agree the company had more of a claim to be upset. Even so, IMO being fired for installing unapproved software - assuming it’s a first offense - is drastic. Una, does your company fire people who install non-approved software? Do you think they should?
And as far as people saying “it’s the company’s computer” that’s crap IMO. Yes, it is the company’s computer, but in every company I’ve worked in, you do have a bit of leeway to use the company property assigned to you in ways you want. Sure, if you want to be a hardass, all employees should do NOTHING on company time other than work-related activities. As someone who was once reprimanded for reading a newspaper while copying disks and told that it was within the companies right’s to make me stare at a wall for 2 hours while I fed disks into a disk drive, I can say that I, for one, will never work at a place with such small-minded assholes running it. Keeping employees happy results in a more efficient, high morale workplace. Coming up with idiotic rules that do nothing but lower employee morale and make people feel like their bosses are stupid isn’t a good business strategy.
C’mon people - IF the company had a policy about installing unapproved software, and IF the guy insisted on installing it even after he’d been reminded of the policy and IF the boss quoted in the article hadn’t been so slanderous, then maybe this place had a point when they fired him. As it stands, all I see is some small-minded mid-level manager asserting his power and firing an employee over something that should be, at best, a gentle reprimand.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. If there was no policy in place, then the company was overbearing for firing the guy. I have no problem admitting that. Where I have a problem is when it swings over to a complete lack of understanding of property rights that some people seem to be showing in this thread. The fundamental understanding for most human beings is that you do not use someone else’s property without asking; the “everyone who disagrees has a stick up their ass” posters notwithstanding.
I’m a human being. I take comfort in knowing what is happening with the things I have worked for and own. Helps to stabalize my small little mental world. Doesn’t matter if I’m not using it. I’ll probably let you use it if you ask. You need to ask. If you don’t like that, I imagine there are some communes you can go live on where you won’t need to ask. Enjoy.
I agree casual users who don’t really know what they’re doing should be reprimanded for installing something w/out approval, and fired for maliciously installing something destructive. But this was a programmer. I don’t know exactly what that means in this case, but it sounds like the network & its servers could have been his responsibility and he’d know better than anyone what would be safe and harmless to install & run.
I think IT types do stuff all the time w/out bothering to explain it to their pointy haired bosses, because it’s just not worth explaining to someone who is kinda stupid, intimidated by what you do, and inclined to automatically say “no” to everything because they don’t understand it.
I think that’s one Dilbert stereotype that is dead wrong: if anything, the pointy haired boss doesn’t get what the IT type is doing and just tends to greenlight it. My experience is that IT types typically tend to get away with too much because their bosses don’t have the knowledge base to call bullshit on what the are doing.
“Yeah, we really need 24 licenses of this new piece of software to manage the server; the software is really great because it’s on its second version and therefore incredibly stable. It halves the packet response time versus our old software, and functions as a sort of “valve” to block unwanted outside intrusion. It’s called ‘Half-Life 2’; and as makes sense, is made by a company called ‘Valve Software’.”