All jobs I have ever worked have collectively wasted more man hours through incompetence and the usual corporate BS than I could ever hope to with any conceivable April fools joke.
The deal is they pay you a fair amount of money to put up with that. Whereas people such as the gentlemen in the article are causing people stress for no reason and with no compensation - and barely even an acknowledgement of misbehaviour.
There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad.
> There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad
Bollocks, and bollocks to the parent hot take. Any moral framework that forbids fun, whether it's because it offends God or "causes people (a tiny bit of) stress", is repugnant to me
There is an irony that you're adjudicating away other people's stress while holding up your own opinions and feelings of repugnance as evidence of a problem.
The reality of professional standards is we can't control what people feel or happens to them but we sure can put a good faith effort in to try and make the experience as neutral as possible. This April fools prank breached that standard in an unpleasant way. I hope there wasn't a student tired and on edge trying to meet a deadline. It'd feel awful to think the print system was out, spend a morning running around and then learn that some IT bloke was abusing his power out of a misplaced sense fun. It isn't a serious offence but it is bad behaviour.
> The reality of professional standards is we can't control what people feel or happens to them but we sure can put a good faith effort in to try and make the experience as neutral as possible.
You should use some Microsoft or Google products. They "sure can put a good faith effort in to try and make the experience as" crappy and masochistic as possible, while siphoning all your data.
And yes, avoid people without humor, especially the serious types.
Ah, but do you get to have fun at the cost of others?
That is the question.
It's not the offense, it's the wasted time and money. Think of one of those meeting timers that counts in dollars instead of minutes. Now apply that to all the time spent by random people calling the main office, and by the main office fielding all those calls. It's one thing to cost your employer thousands of dollars because you made a mistake (I'm sure we've all been there), and quite another to cost your employer thousands of dollars with a prank.
You can't even make the (quite bad) defense that people should have known better and it's their own fault for falling for it. The message was 100% plausible.
> timers that counts in dollars instead of minutes
Not the best way to measure time imo.
The whole point is to measure what really matters to the business, instead of measuring time.
Not every second of working time has the same level of productivity/value. Having a clock that measures time in dollars makes no sense because it assumes some linear relationship between them.
No, it assumes some linear relationship between pay and time. Which is a little iffy for salaried workers, but only a little.
My employer gets about 40 hours/week of "work" from me, whatever that might consist of. I cost them $X every two weeks in pay and benefits. It's pretty reasonable to say my attendance in a one-hour meeting has a $X/80 cost to my employer.
You don't need to overcomplicate this. The employment relationship is pretty simple at its foundation: the employer buys the time of its employees.
There is a very linear relationship between time and money for the one who pays the employees though.
Nobody says “you know boss, that two hour meeting today was a total waste of time, please deduct two hours worth of my salary from my paycheck”. So the company quite literally pays for everyone’s time who was at the meeting. And that is a function of who is present and how long the meeting goes. It is very much not a function of productivity/value.
And the point of having a, more often rethorical than real, taximeter showing the cost of the meeting puts this into perspective. The more people you invite the more the meeting costs. The longer it goes the more it costs. The goal is not to abolish all meetings, but to make people think if the bang to buck ratio of the meeting is right. To instill a culture where people prepare for meetings, they have concrete questions or decision outcomes they are looking for, and to criticaly think about the length of the meeting and right-size the invite list.
> The whole point is to measure what really matters to the business, instead of measuring time.
We tried to speak with management about it. They wouldn't listen.
> It's not the offense, it's the wasted time and money. Think of one of those meeting timers that counts in dollars instead of minutes.
Yes, think about it. Captcha, (Windows) updates, crappy UIs updated every couple of months, new features instead of bug fixing. _That_ is wasted time and money.
That doesn't mean you go and deliberately make it worse for a laugh.
It's just disingenuous to pretend it's about corporate efficiency when it's more about personal feelings/vibes.
“Corporate efficiency” is vague and largely meaningless. “Don’t waste a bunch of your coworkers’ time” is a lot more concrete. Especially don’t set up the people who answer the phones to get angry calls due to your prank.