01.15.23

Distortion of Timelines and Chronic Cover-up at Sirius ‘Open Source’

Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software at 7:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Clients chasing while managers chasing staff that works overnight, entrapping the staff for using faulty processes and faulty software (the management’s own fault)

Summary: Lately we’ve focused on nepotism and special treatment at Sirius ‘Open Source’; today we show how the “club” (or the clique, which is sometimes literally family members) avoids responsibility and liability

THIS series has inevitably become long because there’s plenty left to say and a lot to demonstrate with more practical examples (sans names of people and companies, especially clients).

We’ve already shared several examples of management passing blame to staff that did nothing wrong while failing to hold itself accountable for its own failures. A year ago there was one classic example of this when a message about a potential client resulted in disciplinary warnings; I joked that since we had received no instructions whatsoever I can at best say “hi, it’s Roy” when picking up the phone. To spare all the ‘gory’ details, here’s a message I sent back then:

I’ve just caught up with E-mail.

I remember the scenario very well. This was the first time ever that I received a call over Google Voice while connected (online).

The browser requested authorisation for microphone access and other things before I could pick up the call AND also be heard. This is inevitably what happens when there’s no thorough testing of such new protocols (Rianne did do some testing on her laptop).

It boils down to our instructions (which I have saved locally) coming late and without any training after that. Or even being able to test it “live” in my browser, which understandably limits what site site wants to do with my hardware.

I hope this clarify what happened and helps prevent future such scenario (browser settings have been changed accordingly).

Regards,

I got the following reply:

Hi Roy,

Many thanks for your reply with responses on the points raised.

I will check on the points you have noted and get back to you to see if there were any steps where there was an issue with the process and any areas that we could have improved on.

I think a key point though is that nothing should prevent us from answering any call with a professional greeting that sounds like a Service desk response. First impressions are vital for customer confidence of course. This is something that with your years of valuable experience should be well-practiced.

Thank you for resolving the browser settings though for future calls and engaging with this change.

And then me again:

Just to note (I’ve not yet read the other 5 messages), for a number of weeks we were on duty “in the blind”. We were given no instructions at all regarding:

- How to answer
- What to say
- Who might phone
- What to ask
- Where to enter information

In a sense, had we answered, it would possibly prove worse than not picking up at all.

A hypothetical call would be something like

“Oh, hello, who are you?”

“What do you want?”

“What are you? What am I? What am I even supposed to do?”

So I think that higher up (than me) someone failed to prepare us. I did not raise this concern at the time.

Regards,

Long story short, the company expected technical staff to carry out purely clerical work using defective products that many staff members had issues with (but could communicate with peers to affirm that pattern) trying to meet impossible demands like picking a call within 3 rings using defective stuff. Sometimes it would not phone or ring, sometimes it is a background process (not an actual phone!), sometimes there was insufficient memory.

At the end came a long document with a fabricated timeline of what had actually happened. Why? Because you can never assert that people above you blew it. Or that it’s their fault that faulty products are used and no instructions are available.

It’s not even clear if the above client was actually a paying client. The company was habitually announcing clients that later turned out to be ‘pre’ announcements or truly premature as nothing would ever come out of it. Giving false hopes to staff to discourage looking for other employment may seem fair, but it is still misleading. The managers were very eager to give a false impression (illusion) of getting business.

We previously shared some screenshots from the Internet Archive, demonstrating with the Wayback Machine the contents of old sites of Sirius, mentioning words like community and advertising more honestly (staff, clients etc.). Well, honesty is long gone at Sirius.

Sirius is now a minuscule company. At the moment it paints a misleading picture of who works in the company and who the company works for. We’re already in the second half of January and this still hasn’t been rectified. I happen to know that at least one client (telephony company) asked to be removed from the fake “clients” page. There were probably more, but I wasn’t a witness to that. Should Rianne and I keep asking them to remove our names from the site too? They’re not even removing our prior staff that left years ago; one of them changed jobs to work for our client.

Sirius is very fake. █

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