WallowingB_36

GitHub repos full of markdown. A Jenkins job rebuilds using a static site generator (mostly Jekyll, a couple use Pelican). Each team has a subdomain on our internal network, so like accounting.company.internal type thing. Most have a TOC type landing page with popular links. Commit markdown -> site rebuilds itself.

GitHub desktop is easy to use and we're generally staffing under 35's, who are pretty computer savvy. They may not get the in's and out's of Git, but Customer Service people are rebasing (their internal knowledge base is built the same way).

Upsides for users: Using whatever editor you favor. Anyone can help support your teams efforts (copywriters are committing tweaks all the time to every teams repo, use dem writing skills). We avoid fragmenting and putting multiple UX's in people's faces.

Design folks even made some CSS that's easily injected to match company branding. Optional to use of course.

This is for the things teams can/want to share. HR obviously doesn't people's salary info in there.

We needed GitHub anyway. So we found a way to avoid spinning up some kludgy wiki framework with a shitty WYSIWYG editor no one wants to maintain or paying money for some janky thing like Jive or Yammer.

In my case, the employer had a great "take what you need" policy when it came to sick leave. Vacation hours were earned, up to 6 weeks worth of hours a year, but you could bank up to 8 weeks of hours. The only catch was "be responsible".

As a father with two little kids who are always getting sick, this was great. It was useable for their visits for shots and times when my wife could not change her schedule easily (she does by appointment, in-home yoga/physical therapy, can be tricky to bail on a person that needs your help on short notice). I still had the ability to stay home if I got sick at some point (which happens way more with kids).

This was the way for years. Until this year. Now it's a hard 5 weeks of combined sick and vacation time.

With plans already set up for the year, plane tickets booked, for weddings, vacation, etc. I'd burned it all up by June. So here I am with 3 days of vacation/sick leave left. If I get sick now I'm going to work.

That, coupled with losing a non-trivial amount of vacation hours has caused people to leave here in droves (with other mgmt issues coming in after the sick/vacay policy change and doubling the insurance premium). I don't really know what they were thinking as every other high tech company around us has a much better sick/vacation policy, better insurance. They can afford it, according to HR/accounting folks I talked to at happy hours. They're just making the numbers look better for their own benefit.

So TL;DR (and having read this article, far too frequently) the real answer management screws us out of it.

While an official statement would be nice, I suspect at least one reason is right in the article:

"Security researcher Mustafa Al-Bassam reported on Twitter that he "almost had a heart attack" when he walked into a McDonald's and was prompted on his phone to download the fast food restaurant's app."

Google makes most of its money selling your attention to marketers. This could easily be used to tailor ads.

Within 100 yards of Barnes and Noble? "Ding! Get 10% off your purchase when you present this QR code!"