Comment by apexalpha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apexalpha | Hacker News Reader

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I work at a (government and extreme bureaucratic) organisation that builds apps used by field engineers.

I found out SSO was broken. They had to login to every app using the same account. Twice per day because the token live was 4 hours "for security".

I found out it was because they published these apps as PWAs, making them more isolated than normal apps.

I asked the product manager and he says the issue is "with Apple and Google", not his department. When asked why he chose PWAs for the apps he said this was easier to deploy, saves them developer accounts and such.

Since I can't force him to change I found a workaround: SSO works in PWAs if you use Edge on a recent Android version on a Samsung tablet. Lucky me we had bought Samsung tablets (this was not a requirement when purchasing I looked it up, just luck).

I asked the Intune manager about this and they said the field engineers should just set Edge as default in stead of Chrome.

When trying this on a company tablet it said: "Edge disabled by X group policy". That guys' department set the policy...

After they removed this I asked why it wasn't the default browser and he said this wasn't possible. I challenged him on this by Googling the Intune manual to set the default browser.

Later they said they had raised a support ticket with Microsoft for this.

On the internal Wiki I found a document describing the problem. It was dated 11 months before I joined.

The short of it is: no one gives a shit about anything but their own paycheck and getting off of work at 5pm.

It's the human condition (and also in part the companies' own fault since they stopped investing in employees)

The people who give a shit and are passionate eventually join the other 99.9%, because it's absolutely exhausting pulling the cart with 10 freeloaders on it who don't care.

I envy the people who can give a shit for longer than 2-3 years at any given job. I suppose being your own boss is one of the few ways to stay passionate and care about something for a long enough period of time.

I do!

I border collied these people into a room and the issue is now fixed.

The system still sucks but 2000 field engineers got 10 min of their days back.

A few weeks later the Scrum Master of the PWA team gave an inspiring talk about it at a conference.

Personally you couldn't torture out of me that my app was so bad for so long, but yeah.

Interesting...I happen to have a border collie and their ability to get things done their way simply by looking at humans is...uncanny.

I will have to think of things like this where can save 5-10 min on something program-wide.

It gets worse. In my company the least competent people care the most.

> I suppose being your own boss is one of the few ways to stay passionate and care about something for a long enough period of time.

I run a business and the passion is still hard to maintain. On Friday one of my customers cussed me out for 20 mins because I took a few hours to respond. That was a tough way to start the weekend.

Believe it or not, there exist places where 50% or more give a shit.

I'm sure at Apple under Jobs, the % would've been very high. It will have dropped significantly by now.

You're absolutely right on a country-scale though.

It’s a problem of motivation. Now, if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime. So where's the motivation? And here's another thing, Bob. I have eight different bosses right now!

You can take it up with your manager that you saved 10 minutes of time per day for 2000 workers, equivalent to 8333 work hours per year, equivalent to $2M USD per year, and argue that this value you bring should be reflected in your salary. You can also add it to your CV, to make you more attractive to other employers. Ultimately, you will have to make an effort to convince others of your value if you want a higher salary.

> The people who give a shit and are passionate eventually join the other 99.9%, because it's absolutely exhausting pulling the cart with 10 freeloaders on it who don't care.

It's not that for me. It's learning that the company is a bunch of hot air, all the mission statements and corporate values are total bullshit and only the bottom line matters. The rest is just pr for morale. The leadership doesn't care about anything and will kick us to the kerb whenever it's convenient for them.

Once you look through that bullshit all passion disappears and you just do as little as possible like all the others.

Well, some of us might get promoted if they are a good little drone but I'm not management material so I'm just finding a quiet corner where I can collect my salary with the least amount of work. And just fake all the enthusiasm. Just get AI to post some emoji loaded excited comments when there's an all hands teams meeting.

Anyway that's what turned me off giving a fuck. I did use to care too. Sometimes I still do but it's because I have some project I actually find interesting on a personal/technical level. But most of the work is cutting through bullshit red tape that other teams have made up for us. I'm just caring about my personal development now.

I once worked in a government agency where 4 employees used a app that on ran on IE6. So the rest of the 2000 strong organization had to use chrome by remote desktop into a server.

Decision tree: Does any department still use IE6? Yes -> lets setup a Remote Desktop cluster so the rest can use Chrome

This is like a perfect case study in how problems don't get solved, they just get… routed

Liars gonna lie.

> I challenged him on this by Googling the Intune manual to set the default browser.

I've found that LLMs really democratize debate when issues like this arise!

Can't guarantee you'll win, but when someone bets you're not willing to RTFM to call their bluff-- Oh boy!

This is an odd level of aggression. Life is too short.

What do you propose instead?

edit: Nevermind. You shared your thoughts in a later comment above, dismissing the HN forum as vindictive.

life is too short to spend it drowning in misinformation. Calling someone out on a technical failure is 100% legit. How is it "aggressive" if they're clearly wrong?

Life is too short for liars.

It's funny that you're replying with a recommendation to use LLMs when the parent comment is about how a search engine worked just fine.

If I google a question like that these days I'm likely to get an LLM response as the first result. The line is definitely blurred

The irony isn't lost on me, either.

Googling does result with a Gemini/AI response at the top.

that's why you set &udm=14 in the search URL config...

I’m so tired of the “nothing ever happens” crowd. Y’all are absolutely exhausting and add nothing positive to the conversation. Assuming everyone on the internet is lying makes as little sense as assuming nobody on the internet is lying.

Edit: I guess I misunderstood the parent (look in the replies). I hate the phenomenon I’m describing so I’ll leave the comment but I don’t want to besmirch caminante’s good name!

Are you replying to the intended comment?

The parent said they were getting stonewalled by a colleague over a T/F. Maybe you're assuming I called the parent a liar...?

Yeah. I think your comment is being misunderstood.

I blame me ;-). Though, one haywire reply can taint everyone's interpretation!

Thanks for the heads up! I’ve edited my comment to absolve you of any crime. :-P

Not offended. Try to have a 'better' day.

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