memes

Edit: also being bad at your job makes you an insider threat. So I guess you just have to be entirely mediocre, not too good, not too bad. Do just enough to get by, but don’t do too much. Or too little. Any outlier is an insider threat. Conform. Don’t be different.

This immediately reminded me of "Snow Crash":

Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo...

Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.

It doesn’t seem as fun as fucking a Chinese spy though.

Well... no. You'd be fucking Jensen Huang in this scenario

They do by default, but if they bitch they get exceptions. Because they are in charge.

Everyone inside your company is an insider threat. Just like everyone outside of it is an outside threat. The point is to ID/flag people who are are disproportionately more risky than the baseline standard of risk. The FedEx guy making regular deliveries isn't a flag, but if if he shows up at 2am and hangs out for an hour, yeah that's weird and you should investigate that.

I presented a 45-minute security training presentation to my company of 35 people. Boring, right? I practiced for almost a year, though I'm not afraid to speak in front of a group, I wanted it right.

Management brought in good food and had everyone attend. We all but shut down for this. Did I mention I'm not afraid? I was scared shitless.

I left 15-minutes for questions and we ran into 30. Everyone was engaged! One of the wildest things I've pulled off in my IT career.

Maybe I should update and make a living offering my little class. Hmmm...

I worked for a tech giant that is a homonym of Sysco. The mandatory security training videos were I shit you not animated cartoon animals. I would be deeply concerned about security flaws in their products, except that I never encountered anyone there that had anything whatsoever to do with their actual products, nor did I encounter anyone who themselves had ever encountered anyone that had anything whatsoever to do with their actual products. This abstraction from the product line was actually a common topic of conversation there among the employees.

"Do as I say, not as I've done."

The training is not for you. The training is to protect the company.

If anything ever happens that results in some kind of legal action, the company can say they gave the employee the training and the employee successfully completed the training, therefore we did all we could to prevent this and we are not liable. So then it all falls on you.

I took a very similar presentation from the shadiest company I was ever employed by, specifically that "gifts and other favors" are generally guidelines to be followed by local customs. I.e. bribe away as long as you aren't in the United States. Weird as fuck for a company that solely does commerce in the United States to have murky guidance on this very clear issue.

My role here was very brief, they hired me for a licensed role and then paid me as a customer service rep, so I quit immediately after my first paycheck was about $3,000 short.

If the leaders don’t take accountability or ethics seriously, why should the employees?

Have you heard of ethics?