What does the company you work for do to completely remove any confidence you may have had in their product?
I work for a company which manufactures heating products. I currently sell boilers.
I have spent the last 2-3/4 years freezing my ass off. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s about 65 in my office. What kind of heating manufacterer doesn’t use it’s own products? Even when the AC isn’t running on high, it’s still cold in here. At the moment, the AC has been running nonstop for about 4 weeks. There is a 10° temperature difference between my office and the hall. The thermostat doesn’t work so we can only turn the AC up, not off.
I make about 4 trips to the bathroom every day just to run hot water on my hands. It’s hard to type with frozen hands.
So, what does your company do that goes against everything they’re trying to promote?
Last company I worked for did HVAC consulting. Sort of thing where we show up and tell the customer how to save money by turning off the lights, adjusting the thermostat, etc. Funny thing is, the temperature differential between the two sides of our office was > 10 degrees F. Our landlord refused to hire us to fix the problem. It was always funniest when a client came to visit and we couldn’t use the conference room because the sun was shining.
I’m a programmer. Specifically, I design and develop database applications. Sometimes I do shrink-wrap software. I have worked for several companies that sold my work for > $50,000 per license, yet refused to use that same software in-house, for the purpose for which it was designed.
For the longest time, Oracle did not use their own applications in-house because, frankly, they sucked. When Larry announced that, from now on, Oracle would use their own applications, it made front-page news in the IT press.
About once every six months, I read an article on Slashdot where someone has discovered a Microsoft website making use of Java or Oracle or some other non-MS product.
Spent a year working at a company that produced network management software and just could not get its email server working. We could send out emails just fine, but incoming email would arrive at the server and then vanish forever. After a few weeks of ineffectual futzing around, management decided to have one guy (the one who was too useless to have any other responsibilities) log directly to the email server, and he would individually forward each message to its proper recipient. If he was out of the office that day, well, we just didn’t receive any email.
I work for a major home improvement retail chain. Our store has a leaky roof. The roof has leaked for years. Despite numerous attempts to fix it, new leaks appear for every old one that’s discovered and patched. I find it endlessly embarassing that we have buckets set up to catch the dripping water whenever we get a heavy rainfall, or when snow starts melting on the roof during winter thaws.