[ryancnelson]

i love this. A startup I was at during early COVID times got acquired into Hewlett Packard Enterprise, so we all became HPE employees with HPE addresses. There was a similar form there to request "ryancnelson"@hpe, etc...

One of my co-workers got cute and asked for "[e-mail]" .... And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.

[jrockway]

They must have learned from your experience. When we were acquired by HPE they did not let us choose and our director of engineering got an email address that misspelled his name... fixing it involved him being locked out of all systems while the people trying to fix it emailed someone else with a similar name about it. His advice for other team members in the same spot was "if you don't like your email address, do not attempt to fix it."

HPE was truly a trip. I paid $2000 to be able to disparage them online and it was worth every penny.

[litenboll]

Same story for me at a game studio bought by Microsoft. It was simply not worth the hassle. As an employee I still had to sit through the same customer support as anyone else, talking to some person at an Indian call center with a bad line. After some failed attempts I just gave up and lived with my misspelled address.

[TheNewsIsHere]

My spouse is principal architect for a platform made by a large cloud vendor.

It takes an Act of Congress, a Papal Conclave who produces white smoke on the first vote, Divine Intervention, and Interdiction by a Vice President, all offered in triplicate upon the altar of subpar IT support organizations, to get a ticket closed -with- a resolution in less than a year. If it’s not something they already have a script for it’s almost certainly impossible as far as IT support is concerned.

The company makes billions of dollars a year, employs tens of thousands of people, and they still can’t craft a competent and empowered IT support organization. Even if just for their own developers and technical experts.

[jrockway]

Yeah, this has always bothered me. I don't really know what the issue is. One possibility is that IT is a "cost center" and so by making it cost as little as possible, you are doing a good job of running the company.

I look at it more like a "productivity multiplier", where spending money wisely can make other departments more cost efficient beyond the cost you put into IT. I guess they don't teach that in business school, or everyone is already as productive as they can possibly be. Somehow I doubt it, though.

[TheNewsIsHere]

I was once issued %%my full first name and last name%%@company.

It was insane to type that, and no one could really work with it. And we had several alias domains.

An IT director actually came to me and said “we can shorten that if you’d like”.

Sure. I ended up with lastname@company. That created a lot of chaos for a few days because my initial username had already been fully propagated. These were the days before niceties like SCIM, so everything was in-house glue, manual work, or obscure third party solutions.

[flutetornado]

I’d do that every time I get a chance! Ex-HPE black label on my resume from a startup I used to work in that they bought. That company is a complete horror show.

[jrockway]

It was weird. It makes me sad because the startup I worked at was really gelling despite the HPE interference. Then they just laid everyone off one day (multiple senior leadership changes later) for no apparent reason.

All the code is Apache 2 so I guess if I really cared I could just revive it... and as it turns out, I don't care that much. Other stuff to do.

[flutetornado]

Everyone in my entire team - best of engineering as well as every manager left. Underpaying and over subscribing people has become a hallmark over there - it's just a body shop now. Engineers are just numbers on a sheet, to be exploited, chewed and cast aside when they eventually burnout. Upper management has no vision and everyone's constantly firefighting and struggling to catch up with competitors who had long term vision to invest in engineering teams, tooling and infrastructure to scale up the products and people. They want to do in 2 years what took Google and Amazon a couple of decades. Result post-HPE: poor quality, unscalable, cobbled together, barely functional codebase. Before, the startup I worked for had a well balanced rare combination of high performance, modular and well architected codebase. Later the constant push to ship as fast as possible to catch up with competition, completely destroyed the whole thing - teams, codebase and infrastructure. All because they only know how to react and have no idea how to stay ahead of the curve. Buying startups has become their only means of survival as talent stays away from their brand and the only way to justify value to shareholders is to jump from one rock to another, hoping the new one will rocket them away from the black hole they are spiraling into - all they manage to do is stick to the new rock and pull it with them as fast as they were going into the hole they will eventually vaporize in.

[UltraSane]

"Engineers are just numbers on a sheet, to be exploited, chewed and cast aside when they eventually burnout."

This is exactly how Epic the Electronic Medical Record company operates, but on new college grads instead of Engineers.

[sheepscreek]

Most of the industry and most series C/D startups are like that. It’s a sad state boys and girls. Once you’ve been here long enough, disillusionment sets in. Corporate greed, (em)powered by shareholder greed, takes top priority.

[jrockway]

I'm always a little embarrassed when I go to the doctor and tell them I'm a software engineer. I know your EMR system is terrible but if I had done it it would have been better. Sorry :(

(My primary care doctor's office was venture-funded at one point and they actually have a great system. But all my specialists are on MyChart and everything there is always a disaster. Doesn't even have a "preferred name" field, so it has to be noted on my records on a case by case basis and it's ... inconsistent.)

[franush]

Wow

[nar001]

What was it? Since the source code is open source, you probably wouldn't mind telling?

[Lio]

That’s so Brazilian, in the sense of the film[1] not the country.

There’s something of Bob Hoskins’ heating engineer in what you’ve described.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

[whstl]

I have a Brazilian (the country) email story.

This company had a rule where the mail was first name + last name initial. So, [e-mail] if you're Tim Cook. Naturally they ended up hiring a customer success person called "Ana Lopes".

She of course noticed on the first day and complained, but IT dragged their feet until some high-profile customer saw "reply to ANAL" in the automated ZenDesk email and send an angry email to the CEO.

[cyberpunk]

I still raise a glass occasionally to good old William Anker.

[knotimpressed]

What were the details of paying $2000?

[jkingsman]

Not the commenter, but I would assume forgoing an exit bonus/severance payment that was contingent upon signing a non-disparagement agreement.

[jrockway]

Yup exactly. I got my retention bonus and 2 months pay and all that stuff without agreeing to anything, and they offered a little bit more to agree not to disparage them. I'm pretty chatty so decided it wasn't worth it ;)

[thaumasiotes]

When NCC Group fired me, they characterized the payment for a nondisparagement agreement as "severance", and didn't offer anything else.†

So now I'm free to tell people that they fired me with zero days' notice and zero severance. That's just the way they roll.

I find it funny that their nondisparagement policy specifically causes disparagement that otherwise couldn't have occurred.

† They also gave me an explicit reassurance that I shouldn't worry about my health benefits, because those would remain good until the end of the month. I didn't find this particularly reassuring, since it was Halloween.

[swyx]

2000 is a pretty low amount. presumably theyd have to spend way more than that to enforce it, so they would NOT spend it, in which case its free money that you shouldnt have turned down because it was way too small for a gag order

[jimmydddd]

I friend of mine was an MD advisor to a bio-tech startup. They wanted her to sign off on things that she didn't feel comfortable signing. I guess she wasn't too happy with them as she gave up a $30K severance so she could disparage them. :-)

[Thorrez]

>you shouldnt have turned down because it was way too small for a gag order

You're saying that if someone offers me a small amount of money I should accept it, but if someone offers me a large amount of money I should maybe reject it?

That sounds backwards to me.

[fragmede]

Question is, how many zeros would it take to convince you otherwise.

[jrockway]

Some number, absolutely. I don't have that much integrity ;)

[DonHopkins]

As long as the first digit wasn't also a zero.

[simonask]

As a European, it is absolutely WILD to me that this is legal.

[mytailorisrich]

Non-disparagement clauses are generally legal in Europe, too. In addition, defamation laws may apply to what is said/written about a company, so one should be careful in any case.

[rapnie]

> bonus/severance

bribe?

[bigfatkitten]

In the late 90s I worked for a now defunct Australian electronics retailer, who were also a well-known AS/400 shop. Our stock reports etc would come via email from qsecofr@<domain>.com.au.

The QSECOFR (Security Officer) user is effectively root on OS/400.

I would've thought they would run these jobs as some other user, but apparently not.

[jamesfinlayson]

Dick Smith?

[jll29]

Reminds me of that public speaker announcement asking (in American English) a Mr. Peter File to please report to the service desk.

(Not from "Brazil" the film, but Monty Python-originating regardless.)

[FabHK]

The IT Crowd, S02E04.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8n9xraFoNI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSJ8XPnJK1o

[bryanrasmussen]

this reminds me when I was at a course from a big software company in the late 90s, and we had problems setting up the system at first because some executive in Germany had named his machine localhost.

[MortyWaves]

How was that mess ever fixed?

[bryanrasmussen]

I guess they contacted the executive and had them change the name?

on edit: I do remember we had to come back to the course the next day, so it took a day to get it fixed.

[atulatul]

Was the co-worker called Newman?

I read the last sentence 'And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.' in Newman's voice:

From the Seinfeld episode The Diplomat's Club:

"I took over his route. And boy, were there a lot of dogs on that route."

[stfods]

Ah, I remember this feature, somewhere within Directory services setup. I have successfully obtained [e-mail] and a few more similar weird email addresses. Sometimes back is 2006 or 2007

[williamdclt]

I’m confused why cron jobs would be sending emails to [e-mail]?

[tuyiown]

(not an unix sysadmin, just guessing what happened from my shaky knowledge)

cron jobs reports activity by email to the user (UID) they are running, historically UNIX boxes have the ability to handle mail locally (people would leave messages to each other by connecting to the same server via terminal), so that the root cron activity would land into the root (/root) account mbox file.

When email got interconnected more across servers, generally the service that would dispatch mail to the users account on their home folder on the server started to be able to forward to to others servers, if a domain name was provided. Add to it the ability to fallback to a _default_ domain name for sending email into the organization, and voilà, the root email account for the default domain name receives the entirety of the cron jobs running under root of all the servers running with the default configuration and domain fallback.

[layer8]

If you ever come across a ~/dead.letter file, that's one way it can be misconfigured. ;)

[sph]

IIRC cron writes stdout to the local mail spool (<user>@localhost). If the server is configured correctly, with an SMTP service for the domain, these emails are basically forwarded to <user>@<domain>

In practice, I have never seen a Linux server with an actual SMTP server configured correctly in 20 years, so the worst that usually happens is that cronjobs never actually leave the machine. You used to get a mail notification when you logged in if cron had written something, but that doesn’t happen anymore on recent distros.

[axpvms]

Lots of domains have a locahost record set up. I used to think it was funny to use them for email forms when entering an email was required and the email validation would accept them. eg: to set the email to [e-mail] for example.

[lgeorget]

It's usually configured correctly at some point in time and then the configuration "rots": it becomes inconsistent, some emails are forwarded, other are lost, nobody cares, etc.

In my case, I configured Postfix to redirect all mails looking like (root|admin|postmaster)@server to myemailaddress+(root|admin|postmaster)_server@domain and Postfix ignores what comes after the + in the user part. So I get all the emails but I still know where they come from. It has worked well for quite some years now but I'm not deluding myself, I know that at some time, that will rot too.

[ecnahc515]

Cronjobs often run as root. If the host has is configured to send emails when a cronjob is completed it will default to sending it to user@domain where the user is the user the cronjob runs as, and the domain is what was configured in the cron configuration.

[dijit]

Minor nitpicky correction: cron only sends an email if there's any stdout of the job.

This is an important distinction because if you have configured mail forwarding, your cron jobs should be configured to output only on error.. then any emails are actionable.

[threePointFive]

Moreutils has a great command `chronic` which is a wrapper command like `time` or `sudo`, ie. you just run `chronic <command>`. It'll supress stdout and stderr until the command exits at which point it will print only if the exit code was non-zero.

[stevekemp]

I copied the same idea in my static collection of sysadmin utilities:

https://github.com/skx/sysbox/

[onei]

If you want emails from some random internal machine, you can use one of the HPE SMTP servers. There was one for internal email, another for external iirc although I'm not sure there was a difference in practice. Those SMTP servers would do a DNS lookup before accepting the email.

When I set this sort of thing up, I'd get myself a hostname on an internal subdomain. But that was a truly miserable experience. It was a multi-stage form submission on a server I imagine to be the closest possible relation to an actual potato. It was soul-destroyingly slow. Alternatively, you could just pretend your machine was hpe.com - the hostname was valid, even if the IP was totally wrong, and the SMTP server would accept it.

My guess is that there was a bunch of stuff that pre-dated the HP/HPE split and they took the quick and dirty option whenever the old internal domain name got yanked during the changeover. And if your process runs as root, you get [e-mail] and hope there's something in the subject/body to identify the specific machine.

[ferguess_k]

Or something like "[e-mail]", where ab is whatever a mage system.