Toronto Transit - "The Better Way"

[LotC]

Originally posted by Asher
I've been in the US investment bank world the past couple years and I've seen TONS of people being laid off. Some of them are contractors with basically the same situation (they signed 1 or 2 year contracts, they got terminated early) and others were full time employees. This kind of **** is happening all around me and happens all the time, but when it happens to unionized people they start *****ing and moaning and crying and stomping and asking for the government to bail them out. What *****es, honestly.

Note: I also say this with relatives who work at the auto plants in Ontario, though none at GM. The stories I hear about the **** they get away with.

Personally I wouldn't mind if, instead of getting laid off, these investment bankers were thrown into a pool of lava. The world would be a better place without them.

[Asher]

Originally posted by LotC
Personally I wouldn't mind if, instead of getting laid off, these investment bankers were thrown into a pool of lava. The world would be a better place without them.

I'm not exactly talking about investment bankers. About 50% of the employees of an investment bank are in IT of some kind.

But generally I agree with you. The bankers themselves are the biggest ***** on the planet. I rub a lot of them the wrong way 'cause I've got a spine. They're very pushy people and are genuinely surprised when anyone pushes back. It's the best way to survive at the banks, really. All of the nameless, faceless people get laid off and the people who stick around are the ones who stick up for themselves.

[Kuciwalker]

Speaking of investment firms:

Originally posted on The Daily WTF
It was the calm before the storm. Brokers were sitting at their desks in silence, watching the clock. The market was going to open in minutes, and huge volume orders would start pouring in. The developers working for the firm – a mid-size proprietary trading outfit on Wall Street – were already busy; an order from the previous day should’ve expired automatically, but didn’t. It was manually fixed moments after it was discovered.

“Huh,� Daniil shrugged, “I wonder if this has anything to do with the latest release.� They’d just rolled out a minor update to their proprietary trading system. Daniil had overheard his boss barking at a junior developer that they needed the feature in two days – testing, review, standard processes be damned. “Done� had a higher priority than “working.� Any objections raised by the developers were met with the same reaction you’d get from a dog after explaining the Pythagorean Theorem – blank, drooling faces.

DING DING DING DING – the market was open. All eyes turned to the board that’d soon populate with dozens of orders. Brokers glanced at the clock and then quickly back to the board. Any second now the avalanche would begin. Any second now…

Nothing happened. Brokers’ heads started poking up above cubicle walls like gophers, each one looking more panicked and confused than the last. The panic was contagious – developers were in a panic trying to figure out why there weren’t any orders. Developers clicked, typed, and swore like crazy to locate the source of the issue, and it only took a few minutes. It was a bug from the latest release.

They couldn’t roll back since the market had already opened. The only option was to fast-track some changes, putting the system at even more risk. Brokers egged them on – “there’s no time to test! Just get it working,� they urged.

The attitude among the devs was a strange sort of frenzied optimism. “We might even have this fixed before any clients even notic-“ The phone started ringing. It was the CEO.

“What the hell is happening up there? Our orders are getting rejected. Why?�

Daniil did all he could to reassure him that it was being addressed, cut short by the CEO being screamed at in the background, then yelling a hurried “I’ll call you back.� Daniil feared that a bunch of angry brokers had gone vigilante and killed the CEO.

The panicked optimism gave way to plain old panic. Daniil looked up orders caught by the web service but not processed – in the span of two minutes, seven orders had been placed, each around $15,000. In 120 seconds they’d lost over $100,000 of the orders. Other developers shouted that they were discovering errors on other systems.

What’s worse, sell orders were failing as well. One dev, using language that would make a sailor cry, told Daniil that he’d discovered a failed sell order that was now worth $5,000 less than it would have been just a few minutes ago.

Meanwhile, another dev had found and fixed the problem – a stored procedure had changed, and error conditions were never checked. The updated procedure was called by about a dozen other procedures in the system, and since there was no error checking, it’d cancel the call and continue right along as though nothing had happened. The error message would be displayed only after the order was already recorded, but not completed.

After running some numbers, Daniil discovered that the amount of lost commissions, sales, and trades outweighed the cost of testing and fixing the change over ten-fold. Mentioning this to his boss, it was promptly ignored. “Is the fix in production yet? What are you waiting for?! Deploy! DEPLOY!�

[LotC]

Originally posted by Asher

I'm not exactly talking about investment bankers. About 50% of the employees of an investment bank are in IT of some kind.

But generally I agree with you. The bankers themselves are the biggest ***** on the planet. I rub a lot of them the wrong way 'cause I've got a spine. They're very pushy people and are genuinely surprised when anyone pushes back. It's the best way to survive at the banks, really. All of the nameless, faceless people get laid off and the people who stick around are the ones who stick up for themselves.

I'm glad we can agree on something, now let's start organizing that exclusive tour to Mauna Kea.

[Asher]

$5,000 is nothing.

There was a bug in our system a month back that cost the investment firm $5M. From a simple bug. Heads rolled, kind of, and the CIO herself ordered a brash change to the system which adds more accountability at the cost of pissing off everyone by creating mountains of work.

We also regularly have trades in the billions of dollars flowing through the system. It's kind of mind-blowing when you actually think about what it's doing, and how poorly it's implemented.

Have I mentioned there's no test or QA cycles? Cowboy coding. And it's not just this bank, it's all of them from what I've heard. You'll get a harebrained spec from a business analyst who needs a feature implemented within two weeks into production. You hack the codebase up to **** because you lack the time to properly design and test, then you put through a couple test trades in a UAT environment and launch it into the world of production for a global release. 9 times out of 10 bugs immediately appear in production and you rush out fixes for the most common. The more obscure bugs never get fixed.

And inbetween fixing the bugs and implementing new features, you're manually creating XML and manipulating the DBs to fix the bugs "manually" so the data is valid and can be transmitted to DTCC and the other banks.

[Kuciwalker]

$5,000 is nothing.

$5000 was just one of the orders.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker

$5,000 is nothing.

$5000 was just one of the orders.

Yes, it is nothing.

This must've been some consumer-facing investment software because the big banks are at the VERY least six figure deals, most are tens of millions, some billions (as the notionals).

Don't think I've ever seen a trade at work under $100K.

[Wezil]

Originally posted by Asher

So what?

A couple of my friends signed 2 year job contracts and were laid off last month, about 4 months into them.

This **** happens, get over it.

You still are (purposely) avoiding the point Asher. This wasn't a simple layoff.

The GM workers gave up wage increases for 3 years, COLA for 15 months, agreed to increased co-pay on meds, and agreed to work sharing. In exchange they were promised the plant would stay open.

If I give 'x' in a written contract in exchange for 'y' I damn well better get what I sacrificed for.

You simply cannot convince me that the industry experienced such a fundamental change in the last two weeks that what GM agreed to suddenly became impossible. They intentionally bargained in bad faith.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Wezil
You still are (purposely) avoiding the point Asher. This wasn't a simple layoff.

The GM workers gave up wage increases for 3 years, COLA for 15 months, agreed to increased co-pay on meds, and agreed to work sharing. In exchange they were promised the plant would stay open.

If I give 'x' in a written contract in exchange for 'y' I damn well better get what I sacrificed for.

Just what exactly do these employment contracts do if not that?

These guys, who have families that depend on them, signed 2-year contracts for X amount of money, paid bimonthly. Then a few months into the contract, it was suddenly canceled (and they did get some money out of it as a result, but nowhere near the full value of the contract).

This is not at all uncommon, and if anything it is actually worse than what the union put up with here. These guys didn't have over a year of warning before they had to find new work.

And I'm genuinely amused that you think it's relevant that they gave up pay increases, given the dire situation of GM and the fact that GM can't even afford to sustain them at current rates for a year. They already get paid WAY too much for what they do. Do you really think the ~2%/yr they gave up would've matter for the 1 year the plant was open after the contract was signed? Especially in light of the "punitive amount" that the CAW will now get as a result of the early termination?

Sorry, their sob stories are ****. Welcome to the world of business. If you're part of a **** company making **** products in a **** economy, you can't seriously expect anyone can guarantee you employment. That should be just common sense. And to put that in a contract is just monumental stupidity on behalf of GM and the union.

GM could either run the company further into the ground by operating a plant making products no one is buying, or they could close the plants making such products to try to save the company. Maybe if the unions weren't so *****y and lacking in foresight, they could see value in keeping GM around rather than making contracts that would put them in the fast track to bankruptcy.

You simply cannot convince me that the industry experienced such a fundamental change in the last two weeks that what GM agreed to suddenly became impossible. They intentionally bargained in bad faith.

I've no doubt GM is tremendously incompetent.

But I also have no doubt that the people they send to negotiate with the likes of unions are not privy to very high level strategy at GM, which includes pending closures (which I'm sure were kept hush-hush til finalized).

I am also unaware of a single instance where the CAW has bargained in good faith. Their MO is essentially extortion.

[Wezil]

What were your IT guys concessions Asher? Does "bad faith bargaining" mean anything to you?

[Wezil]

Nm, I can see you are blinded by union hatred. I've had enough.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Wezil
What were your IT guys concessions Asher? Does "bad faith bargaining" mean anything to you?

Concessions don't mean anything at all. What matters is what was signed at the end.

And terminating a contract early is not rare. And just because the union gave up tiny pay raises for guaranteed employment -- in an economy where that cannot be realistically guaranteed -- doesn't mean anything except the union management is dumber than anyone could've thought.

I am even MORE enraged by the government trying to get involved here and the union asking for the government to step in.

WHY THE HELL should my taxpayer money be spent to sustain jobs making **** products for companies that can't manage themselves?

****, cut them loose. If you want to spend my taxpayer money, move the CAW workers and their families to Alberta. They still need lots of people there!

[Asher]

And now the CAW is talking about a wildcat strike.

Yeah, that'll show GM they made a bad call.

Christ on a stick, these are the stupidest people on the face of the earth.

[Asher]

More union stupidity, this time the TTC again.

http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/437354

Drug tests for TTC staff?
SUPPLIED PHOTO
Maintenance worker Antonio Almeida, pictured in 2005, was killed in an accident in a TTC subway tunnel in April 2007.

Commission considers controversial practice following worker's death but transit union calls it a human rights violation

Jun 05, 2008 04:30 AM
Tess Kalinowski
Transportation Reporter

The Toronto Transit Commission is considering a highly controversial move to require drug and alcohol testing of employees, following the death of a subway worker in April 2007.

The idea, slated to be considered by the commission during a June 18 safety discussion, is likely to be fiercely opposed by the TTC unions.

"That's an infringement on my human rights," union head Bob Kinnear responded yesterday, adding that TTC workers would undergo drug tests "as soon as Prime Minister Stephen Harper or Premier Dalton McGuinty do it."

The proposal came to light a day after a TTC bus operator was charged with impaired driving.

But it was last year's fatal accident that killed maintenance worker Antonio Almeida, 38, that has prompted the transit commission to consider drug testing, the Star has learned.

The married father of two had drugs in his system when he died in the accident, which also seriously injured two others in the 11-member asbestos removal crew, said sources close to the investigation.

Almeida was crushed while driving a work car at the end of his night shift. The accident occurred when a piece of equipment snagged on a tunnel wall.

The Ontario Coroner's Office is to decide by end of the month whether there will be an inquest.

There's no evidence Almeida was responsible for the tragedy, according to the sources. He was, however, one of three TTC employees caught together using cannabis during working hours in the year before he died, a source said. The drug use took place in a car off TTC property.

All three employees were initially fired following the incident, but the company reinstated Almeida and another worker, said a source.

Almeida's widow, however, denied her husband was fired for the incident in the car. He was suspended for two weeks while the company investigated, said Sonya Almeida last night.

"If he had smoked he would have been fired," she said, adding that it was within a couple of months of that incident that the TTC gave her husband an award of excellence.

She said her husband was not smoking drugs the day before his final shift. "I know for a fact he didn't smoke on the Sunday," she said.

The issue of drug and alcohol testing is being raised within a broader discussion of public and employee safety and how to determine whether employees are fit for duty, said TTC chair Adam Giambrone, who would not confirm the reported drug use.

"You expect people to be able to come to work and do their job safely. The question will come up – `Will that include drug and alcohol testing?' We're evaluating that. How do you deal with fatigue, which is a very serious situation when it comes to driving? We have to figure that out," he said. "The drug testing, if you were going to do that, isn't necessarily the be-all and end-all."

Last month, the TTC was fined $200,000 after it pleaded guilty to failing to take every reasonable precaution to protect Almeida and other workers. It also was ordered to pay $50,000 to a fund for victims of crime. Although drug testing by transit authorities is common in the U.S., Giambrone said he's aware of only one in Canada that does it: Windsor. Buses there cross into Detroit and the testing is mandatory to comply with U.S. regulations.

There is no drug test that would prevent the kind of "isolated incident" that occurred on a TTC bus this week, Kinnear argued.

On Tuesday, passengers on a TTC bus in the west end of the city called police to report they suspected their driver was drunk.

Satvinder Bisla, 48, was charged with one count of driving over the legal limit.

"His employment will be terminated," TTC spokesperson Brad Ross said yesterday. "We can't have our operators driving our vehicles intoxicated. It goes against everything we're about with respect to public safety. It's a pretty basic standard of expectation that we have and that the public has."

Kinnear said that his union deals with about half a dozen cases a year of alcohol or drugs on the job among its 9,000 members.

But checks are built into the system: Operators must check in with supervisors and clerks to collect fare boxes before their shifts. If there's a suspicion they're impaired, they are not allowed behind the wheel, Giambrone said.

"Nothing is absolute," he said. "In all these situations you need to assure yourself you've got a good system in place that deals with almost all circumstances. Even under drug and alcohol testing there's mistakes." With thousands of employees, "you just couldn't test everyone every day even if you wanted to."

The safety of the 1.5 million people who ride the TTC every day is paramount, he said. But measures to ensure safety must also be balanced with legal considerations, privacy issues and respect for employees.

Drug testing generally is considered discriminatory under the Canadian Human Rights Commission guidelines for employers, said Karen Izzard, a senior policy adviser.

"A positive drug test doesn't tell you when drugs were taken, how much was taken. It can't be linked necessarily to impairment on the job."

Human rights case law does support testing in "safety-critical" occupations such as trucking, particularly where it involves crossing the border, or transit, she said.

But the practice, criticized for its potential to violate personal privacy, is widely rejected by workers.

First of all, how the **** can TTC employees keep their jobs when caught smoking marijuana ON THE JOB?

Second of all, it's not an infringement of your human rights to undergo drug testing when you are voluntarily employed by an organization. Professional athletes have to do this too, as do other professionals. If you don't like it, ****ing quit.

[Kuciwalker]

Jesus, Wezil, it's this simple: if the contract has a clause that allows GM to get out early, and GM gets out early per that clause, then GM didn't do anything wrong.