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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

TFA explains that this was self imposed a hard cutoff:

> For anyone wondering why we don’t just lift the compliance restrictions, we don’t specify it. Their Compliance department does

after a year-long grace period:

> The machines came to end of life about 12 months ago, and the company being a multi-billion dollar operation managed to eke out another year of manufacturer support. Mostly symbolic as they’re not exactly going to release custom firmware for a handful of devices. They then put a set-in-stone tombstone date on support. 12pm today.

This was imposed internally by the company's compliance and legal departments, TFAA is the executioner but the execution would be contractually mandated:

> They require, and have specified, a zero-tolerance for device non-compliance.

This means an unapproved batched and drawn-out phaseout would be a breach of contract.

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> This means an unapproved batched and drawn-out phaseout would be a breach of contract.

You could brownout or kill a few a few days before the real issue, though, potentially.

Which might breach an SLA or itself be deliberate malfeasance. If I were in this position, I would want to be absolutely squeaky clean.

What one could try is to call the CEO directly. Or maybe try the legal backdoor: contact the general counsel, tell them that the contract says such-and-such, that you think the contract is well written and you intend to do what it says, but that the organization should be aware that it may cause a problem. If legal doesn’t know how to get the CEO’s attention, then something is very wrong.

The very first post of TFA lays out that they've been sending emergency-level alerts for a while (aside from that being a year-long issue):

> 4 meetings, 124 emails, and two phone calls a day for the last 14 days have warned them of this.

There's only so much you can do.

> If legal doesn’t know how to get the CEO’s attention, then something is very wrong.

From the thread legal (and / or compliance) is the setter of the issue, and was well aware that it would cause issues (for a minority), but they were not in charge of resolution. And from downthread posts, they likely extensively documented their warnings:

> oh I’m absolutely backing the horse with the 3 miles of email threads proving this

And methinks legal and compliance had very much planned for the issue coming to a head, because they were getting fed up with being blow off, and having to shoulder the legal or regulatory risk.

I think this is exactly it.

A year to make fixes and nothing was done?

Legal is like, "We warned you every way we possibly could have."

"two phone calls a day for 14 days" is far from insufficient notice, to say nothing of the rest.

I disagree. In conservative companies, it would be common to meet in person and give a firm handshake, before taking out the required documents from a briefcase. It's sad to see this tradition evaporate.

I'm not sorry to see it go. Half the time the people in the meeting forget what was decided on because it's one of a thousand other things they had a meeting about and no one we wrote anything down.

There's value in face to face, but not when it's a wide reaching announcement like this.

Various people seem to think I'm blaming the person doing the work - nope, I didn't. Blame isn't the point and won't fix anything. But strategically the best option is to work with stakeholders towards incremental force, squeezing the trash compactor slowly. If stakeholders insist on backing everyone into the worst possible corner, then so be it; next time they'll probably listen.

But you keep implying that the onus is on the poster, who is a third-party service provider, to resolve this, or at least get everyone around the table. It's not -- the issue is between the company's compliance department and operations. All the stakeholders for this issue are inside the company, and the poster is not.

How about just saying it'll take 6 hours between the lockouts and the wipes.

> This means an unapproved batched and drawn-out phaseout would be a breach of contract.

You can always start early.

This is the right answer

People here blaming management but discussing how to do things at the last day. You don't

You give them a new device before locking out their old one

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