In evaluating their activities, companies primarily focus on financial indicators business success. But there is another important factor that directly affects the company's profit, but which is often forgotten. Ukrainian top managers are not serious about the personnel engagement index. As a result, they lose investments and do not receive the maximum possible income. We forget that in addition to technology, advanced business models and tangible assets, business is done by people.

And in many ways, not top managers, but hired personnel - specialists who come to the office “to work” every day.

An unengaged employee performs poorly and is ineffective for the company - this is a proven fact. Moreover, he feels offended. He will take the opportunity to harm the employer, no matter how well we think of people - perhaps even unconsciously. For example, he will transfer confidential information of the company to a competitor or simply tell the “wrong people” about internal processes.

Basically, the wage fund is 70-90% of the total costs of the company. We invest in employees in the hope that they will justify these costs. The deepest delusion - if people are sitting in the office, then they are working. As practice shows, low-engagement personnel do not even pay off the funds invested in them.

The world has changed a long time ago. The majority, playing by the old rules in the new conditions, is doomed to failure. It has been scientifically proven that the carrot and stick method no longer works. A person gets used to the salary after three months, and financial incentives lose their significance.

Now we are talking about an adequate basic remuneration (the figure is individual for each person) - this is the amount that allows a person not to worry about meeting their basic needs for housing, food, and the usual level of comfort. “The secret of high performance and performance lies not in our biological needs and not in rewards and punishments, but in our deep desire to manage our lives, develop and expand our abilities and lead a life that has a purpose (purpose) and meaning,” wrote D.Pink.

There is a motivator stronger than money. To get the most out of your staff, it is enough to add a few rules to the management system that do not require additional financial costs.

personal interest

It is doubly interesting to work when you achieve your personal goals by performing a daily work routine. No need to complicate and write individual development plans for each employee. As practice shows, this is costly and will not be properly appreciated by the employee.

Most people know where they will spend their holidays next summer, but do not understand how much they will be earning by then. And the task of the manager is to gradually paint the path to the desired earnings of the employee

There is one goal that brings people to work - the possibility of earning. The task of the manager is to explain to the subordinate the importance and significance of the work performed for the growth and development of the company as a whole, and how this activity will affect the salary and career growth of the latter. Most people know where they will spend their holidays next summer, but do not understand how much they will be earning by then. And the task of the manager is to gradually paint the path to the desired earnings of the employee.

Feedback

Most often, an employee is not involved, not because he is bad or out of place, but because he works in submission to a lazy manager who, watching the imitation of violent activity, believes that everything is already good. He does not pay enough attention to the staff, and people, at best, feel like "cogs in a large corporate machine." At worst, they treat work as a place where you just have to endure and work "from call to call", no matter how and for what.

So the first working rule is the attention of the immediate supervisor. And the task of the HR department is to convey to every manager the importance of emotional intelligence, constant feedback with the team.

Understanding business goals

The system works well when there is feedback between the constituent elements. The staff must be aware of where the company is moving, regularly receive information about changes in products or services.

key role in internal communications plays the first person of the company. One of its main tasks is to convey confidence in the success of the company, make the staff fall in love with the product or service, instill faith in the company and the belief that each employee is an important and integral element of the system. Everything seems to be banal, but it works.

The task of the HR department is to convey to each manager the importance of emotional intelligence, constant feedback from the team

It is very important not only to inform subordinates, but also to listen to what, in their opinion, works well, and what can be changed for the better. When people see a company change, create products based on their opinions and comments, they get excited.

To measure engagement, our company has been using the Gallup questionnaire for several years. From personal experience, in 95% of cases this technique gives valid results, but it is worth double-checking in any case. A lot depends on the state in which a person answers questions.

More than a dozen times experiments were carried out in different business sectors and among different categories personnel. The results consistently show that engaged employees complain less, work more efficiently, come to work earlier, stay late after work more often, get sick less often and take time off.

I'll start with a sketch from Saturday. Two Pakistanis are standing near the Universitet metro station in Moscow, they have huge packages stuffed with some small leaflets, from afar you can’t see what is written on these cardboard boxes. I come closer and see that they are handing out SIM cards, each passerby is simply handed such a card in his hands. Things are moving quickly, in the five minutes that I watched this scene, about a hundred cards were handed out. Approximately so much is placed in the hands of two people, then they scooped up a new handful in bags and began to distribute it further. I asked how many SIM cards there are in total, they did not answer, as if they had become deaf and dumb. But even if you imagine how many fit into these two packages, then you can easily find about 10,000 SIM cards that can be distributed in a couple of hours.

The attraction of collecting subscribers this time from Beeline, and all operators indulge in this, but Beeline somehow often began to happen in Moscow. In the evening, when I was returning past the metro, I noticed that a lot of SIM cards were lying around the trash cans, people grabbed them and then threw them away as unnecessary. Here is such an advertising campaign with an unclear outcome and without any passport data, which turned out to be of no use to anyone here. The moral of this story is simple - as long as operators pay for this holiday of life, it will be easy and simple to get a SIM card at any corner and without documents. But once SIM rewards are gone or vetted, there will simply be no such attraction.

In this issue of Spillikins, we will talk a lot about failures in companies, including discussing what happened at MegaFon a week ago, and dwell on the failure of the British Airways computer system.

How the largest company destroys itself from the inside - debriefing

The title is an exact copy of the title of the article that appeared about MegaFon. A link to this material was sent to me by about a hundred people, as a rule, they asked how true it was, and immediately added “looks very realistic.” The text is a classic of the genre, and therefore it would be a big omission to ignore it. I will try to make out most of what was said and focus on some points. At the same time, let's dive into some details of the life of corporations and operators.

The original text can be found.

Let's start with the obvious. Every major technology failure in any company in the world is controversial, as the public wants to know and, if possible, understand its causes. Yes, this is just interesting, since massive failures do not occur every day. Therefore, when a text appeared about a failure in MegaFon with a lack of communication in the Volga region, Moscow and the region, as well as the Central region, this did not look unusual. The article received maximum coverage, was widely discussed by everyone who is somehow related to the subject of communication. But what surprises me is that no one has asked the obvious question who is the author of this imperishable creation. An anonymous author calls himself an engineer, and at the same time an IT specialist (engineer / IT specialist - this is how he writes about himself), indicates that he worked for MegaFon for many years, apparently, he left the company in 2016, according to what is written. Unfortunately, he is anonymous, which instantly devalues ​​all his words and statements, since it is impossible to take them on faith. However, he did not give away any secrets that would not be known to the public, which again brings the issue of anonymity to the fore. What is the author afraid of? Harassed by a former employer? Violations of a non-disclosure agreement that expired for him in 2016 at the latest? Yes, and nothing was said that went beyond the personal point of view, not a single secret of the company was disclosed, which again leads to the main question - why is the author hiding? However, he partially tries to answer this question:

Everything written below is purely my IMHO, it can be completely subjective, I can omit something, but since I stewed in all this mess for a very long time, memories and feelings are still fresh. This is my first and last post, you have the right to copy the text, distribute, quote and do whatever you want with it. I won’t go into this account anymore, because I don’t believe in decency and freedom of speech. There is only one goal, to raise at least a little hype.

For me, this passage was the first call, since the text is composed correctly in terms of questions and answers, it is written professionally. Usually, when someone creates a text with a given set of thoughts, after a draft it is re-read, they ask questions that the public may have, and try to answer them in order to avoid depreciating the very information that is embedded.

In principle, MegaFon can be replaced by any Russian operator in this text, and the picture will not change in any way, since the realities of the Russian market are described. For example, let's read this passage:

I worked at MegaFon for many years. With enthusiasm, a lot of revisions, let's say with faith that I am doing something significant, that the future is ours... And the company really grew, its coverage grew, becoming the best. The professionalism of the team grew, the team grew stronger, the salary grew.

Until 2012, everything was exactly like this in Russia, operators increased staff, salaries and bonuses grew, promotion changed career ladder In a word, everything was more or less good. But with the transition to the service model, when engineers began to be taken out of the staff of operators, to manufacturers of infrastructure equipment, it turned out that their new employers did not want to pay as much as the operators paid. They wanted to save on engineers, because they did not consider this work difficult. This did not apply to all engineers and specialists, as a rule, transfer to external structures was offered to those who were not of great importance to the operator, were not a high-level specialist. The choice was offered either to go to work for the vendor, or to quit with a severance pay, which, depending on the operator and the year of dismissal, could vary. They didn’t throw anyone out on the street, they parted amicably.

From the point of view of the labor market, the profession of telecom engineers and IT specialists has moved from the stage of a growing market to a market saturated with supply, there are more engineers than there was a need for them. By 2014, mass construction of new networks was actually completed, free resources appeared that turned out to be unclaimed, that is, a lot of people suddenly faced a lack of work. Conventionally, this can be described as follows: out of a hundred engineers for operators who worked in 2010, by 2015, about 50 engineers remained on the market, who now worked both for operators and for vendors or service companies. And it's not only Russian trend, and global - many processes are automated, networks are not being built at the same pace, since there is no practical need for this. This can and should be illustrated with figures. Thus, the period of rapid construction of networks fell on 2007-2012, the growth in the number of base stations of all standards was almost tenfold (both new stations and the replacement of old ones). For example, according to Roskomnadzor, from the end of 2013 to the end of 2014, the number of new LTE stations in Russia increased from 12,364 to 42,047 for all operators (data can be found). That is, the growth was 3.4 times. At the same time, the growth in the number of base stations in 2G/3G was noticeably less, the market has moved to the slowdown stage.

But let's look at the big picture, for example, find out how many base stations were put into operation in 2016. Here is an excerpt from a press release from Roskomnadzor: In 2016, the number of RES PRTS increased by 16.5% compared to 2015 and amounted to 543,388 by the end of the year.

It is easy to decipher the PRTS abbreviation, these are mobile radio electronic communication stations, that is, those same BSs. But behind the figures for the growth of base stations, there is a slowdown or complete cessation of the growth of radio relay stations, look at the graphs from Roskomnadzor for 2016.

It turns out that every year in Russia there is a growing number of engineers who once worked for operators, but are now forced to look for work in other areas. And if before 2009 we had a shortage of such personnel, now the situation is exactly the opposite. We also need to remember the exit from the market of a number of players who built their networks (the same Antares).

The laws of the market in Russia have not been repealed, and therefore the salary of engineers not only does not grow, it is reduced. Under these conditions, operators in Russia have made the right bet, they are trying to automate their processes as much as possible, leaving the most knowledgeable and professional people at work who can control vendors, who service service contracts and perform rough work. And for those who remain wage at least it has not fallen, but often increased, as well as the scope of their responsibility, as well as the workload. This is what is happening in the operator market, and this is one of the arguments of the article under discussion, which is incorrect and deliberately turns the situation topsy-turvy.

And now the quote again:

The first suspicions, my colleagues and I began to arise in 2012-13. When we suddenly found out that we are working on an outdated model. In those years, Mr. Tavrin was just forming a team, but he already promised big changes. Federalization, optimization, cost reduction and other pleasant words for an MBA graduate. It is now possible to end the story on this, but then it was not so frightening. It would seem, who in their right mind would shake the infrastructure, working, debugged over the years? After all, they usually don’t save on engineers / IT specialists ... But this is exactly what our top did in the first place.

Plans were announced to optimize costs, and tadams, it was our technical staff that turned out to be the most unoptimized. The plans were grandiose, the federalization of all monitoring systems, the unification of operation in highly qualified centers in St. Petersburg and Samara, the introduction of AI, and unified systems accounting / processing of accidents and tasks for the whole country. But as always there was a small but, it was necessary to cut it in half technical staff from old commands. And for the second, allocate a quota with a demotion. Guess who left?

I applaud, only a person who understands the subject, who answered all the questions that may arise, and immediately gave counter-arguments, can mix the truth with a lie. The fact that all over the world manufacturers of infrastructure equipment automate it as much as possible and get rid of after-sales service, here it is presented as a minus, although it is not. Strategic objective Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, and indeed any other infrastructure company, to make their equipment not only fault-tolerant, but to reduce the number of engineers that service it. For them, it is a matter of survival in the short term, as they have taken over the service contracts of operators around the world. And the initial discount for equipment maintenance is such that in the current realities they work at a loss. But given the duration of the contracts and the fact that each new generation of equipment requires less attention from engineers, it turns out that they reach the break-even point, and then they start making money. It's their strategy that works.

A lot has been done to reduce the OPEX or operating costs of base stations over the past decade, these are new power supply systems, automatic control of parameters, remote updating of systems and subsystems, including remote backup of information, and much, much more. For example, at one of the meetings in China, Huawei representatives proudly showed a graph that showed a 6-fold drop in OPEX in ten years, directly related to the lack of the need to frequently visit base stations. All work that can be given to programs will be given to programs and automated complexes. And this is bad news for engineers, every year the competition among them will increase in the market, and an overabundance of labor will persist. I take out of brackets those who can be called piece goods, who can set up everything and everything with their hands, squeeze out almost everything that is possible from the equipment - such people will be needed at all times, and their income will be out of the market, they are very expensive.

Therefore, the moaning of an anonymous person that everything is gone and now fewer engineers work in MegaFon than before, unfortunately, are designed for ordinary people who have no idea how modern operators work. The trend is simple and clear, the reduction in the staff of engineers has begun, and it is in full swing for all operators in the world, except for those who are under active construction (for example, Tele2 in Russia does not reduce engineers, as it aggressively builds new base stations and infrastructure).

I will skip the next passage from the original article, since I already answered it, but I will focus on this important point:

And to improve statistics, and beautiful performance reports, the accident criteria have been revised. What used to be a fucking star suddenly became a minor incident. In some categories, the allowable degradations were generally increased by more than four times. What can I say, many types of errors on the equipment were no longer processed at all, since they allegedly became insignificant.

Truth! The true truth, but with one small caveat that changes everything again. Each operator allocates for itself priority network parameters, for example, in MegaFon these are 3G / 4G networks, while the quality of the EDGE operator now worries little. I am sure that there will be a number of M2M devices throughout the country that work via EDGE. Also, for sure, someone has EDGE in their phones and only he. Of course, you can leave the old criteria for network load, to ensure that EDGE is always available to everyone at a comfortable speed. Truth? Are you sure this is needed? Each operator allocates resources to those subscribers who are the most on the network, and monitors mass services more closely than others. I am sure that in 2007 problems with EDGE were the star, in 2017 this does not bother anyone, including the users of this service themselves. The network of any operator is a living organism, and the criteria for errors and degradation of services are constantly changing, as the network itself is changing and evolving.

And again, let me quote, which is important:

After reading all of the above, you probably already have your hair on end, but no, this is just small part problems. The following should be added to the already written wall of text. The accident happened because:

Firstly, the broken equipment was lobbied by the director of development (technical development of the network, who is now the director of infrastructure sick!), with the formation of a marketer ... Someone asked the techies why they want a telecom vendor, and not HP? No.

Secondly, how many people have been trained to operate this equipment? A handful. And then they cut it, which I wrote about. And until 2017, in general, everyone except Moscow and the ECUS went with any beard training.

Thirdly, federalization touched everything. So three branches were closed by 2 nodes. It looks especially fresh and innovative against the backdrop of past years, when we reserved everything we could and more than once. By distributing equipment geographically to each region of the branch, up to several data centers per city.

It's great when there is a person who can be responsible for all the mistakes, a kind of switchman. The choice of the same HP as a vendor for telecom is not at all obvious. They are only trying to enter this market and, as a result, they probably offer much more interesting conditions, which resulted in their purchase. After the MegaFon crash, I'm not sure that HP will remain this vendor, however, a one-sided view that this is someone's personal lobbying shows complete ignorance of MegaFon's procurement structure. Someone alone cannot lobby for such a decision, it is basically impossible. Even if lobbying CEO, then it still won't easy task. As well as other operators, plus or minus a built-in procurement system, within which “lobbying” is extremely difficult.

Now about the "handful of trained people" who were "fired". My imagination vividly paints a picture of a data center in which a security guard sits (because cheap work force), as well as occasionally vendor engineers go there, no one else is there. There are no trained engineers, there is no one to work. The problem is that I often visit the data centers of various companies, there are always engineers there, they are not empty. Given the model that operators work on, hardware maintenance is almost always on the vendor's side, that is, everything depends on the quality of the engineers on their side. And here HP definitely has a problem that was broadcast on MegaFon. Yes, it is a management mistake that a supplier was chosen that does not have successful story in telecom. Without this failure, things could have been different - HP would have become another supplier for telecom companies, along with other manufacturers. Do you really think that stories like this didn't happen in the past when new, unknown vendors came on the market and operators didn't try them? Yes, such stories are a wagon and a small cart, this is a normal practice for any market. Companies are always looking for additional efficiency, but not at the expense of quality. Here this search has played a detriment, but it also happens.

And the last remark about the enlargement of control centers is a given for any operator. In Sweden, operators often do not just build such a center for themselves, but divide such centers into two operators, direct competitors build such centers, as they understand their advantages. It's just that everyone has access to their part of the data, this is an attempt to save on the construction of expensive facilities. It is good that Russia has a large market and, as a result, Russian operators are able to build such facilities on their own.

Another passage:

And the other day, Mr. Soldatenkov (Director of MegaFon), made an appeal to the employees, hinting how bad they were that they allowed this. Former colleagues sent me, and I was bombed. So everyone already doesn't give a shit, don't give a shit about the network, don't give a shit about communication, don't give a shit about corporate values. The predecessor of the current gender ruined most of what worked great, and made everything with what was left to work as difficult as possible. The current one has deprived people and financial motivation so don't be surprised by what happens. WannaCry, both HLR cases are mostly the result of a breakdown in what is happening in the most important part of the company.

It seems that we have seen different addresses of the CEO of MegaFon, since there is nothing like that in what I observed. There are speculations about the reasons, but no hints or anything like that. It is possible that a classic cap fire occurred here. And again we see an excellent twisting of facts, let me remind you that Sergei Vladimirovich was before Tavrin and came after Tavrin. This is a man who in many ways led MegaFon to the success that the company has today. It turns out that Soldatenkov has changed during this time and, moreover, deprived people of “financial motivation”. I have never heard more nonsense.

Well screwed into the text of WannaCry, which struck subsidiary MegaFon, retail network. To fully understand why this is funny and funny, I will say that MegaFon-Retail has its own CEO, its own IT system and engineers, it is a separate company, both in fact and legally. Apparently, the hand of effective top managers has also reached there, who are laying off engineers in batches, while they themselves are fattening on the freed up resources.

You can parse this text in even more detail, but the fact remains that it was written professionally and touches the strings in the souls of those very engineers who are now looking for work in a market where this work is becoming less and less. And it seems to them that everything is lost and nothing will happen without them, and companies will have hard times. Moreover, I am sure that such people will often break systems themselves in order to prove that they are vital for companies, statistics show that 90% of failures are tied to the human factor and people’s resentment. Failures will occur for all operators and companies, without them, nowhere, this is the norm. The question is how quickly they will be corrected, how massive they will be. The fact that MegaFon will reorganize many processes is obvious. The fact that the management responsible for the equipment will change is also obvious. But the text that made such a sensation will not become more truthful or true because it discards the trends that occur in the market of operators, and gives only emotion in the form of Yaroslavna's crying, which does not explain absolutely anything. Oh no, she explains that there are effective managers who are to blame for everything. Funny? Not good. The problem is that this is harmful text that does not answer key questions and masks the real problems that exist in the industry. And this text is quite applicable to any Russian or Western company, since all operators in the world same conditions in this aspect, there is nothing else anywhere.

I tried to show how the conditions in the market of operators have changed and what this has led to. Not to give some kind of emotion in the style of "the fool himself", but to explain the processes, causes and effects. Any thinking person can start from my text and unearth a lot of information that will confirm these trends and show in detail how the market for operators and operator equipment is changing.

MegaFon compensation for network failure - three options

MegaFon offered its subscribers compensation for a network failure. Those who directly contacted the support service received 50 rubles to their account on the first day. With an average bill of 300 rubles, this is quite noticeable money, which in the package tariff is enough for more than one day. For everyone else, they offered the following compensation to choose from:

• additional package 1 GB of traffic and 50 minutes of calls;
• an additional package of 2 GB of traffic;
• downloading the film "Attraction" by Fyodor Bondarchuk.

The third option is punishment enough in itself, it will be interesting to see how many people choose this option. For most people, the choice of additional options is interesting, especially for those who sit on small packages, for the rest, this is not a very attractive offer. For example, within my tariff plan everything is so good that any compensation of this kind seems unnecessary. Based on this, "heavy" subscribers cannot be satisfied with such compensation, on the other hand, it is not particularly needed. In many ways, compensation affects precisely the most massive segment of users, those to whom it is pleasant and good.

Highly important point lies in the fact that you do not need to run somewhere, write statements. All conditionally victims received an SMS containing a code for receiving compensation automatically. I received such an SMS, despite the fact that at the time of the failure I was in St. Petersburg and everything worked for me! However, since my phone was registered in Moscow and was included in the list of those that suffered, I was also given compensation.

Corporate clients received compensation on an individual basis, there was no uniform approach. Here it is exactly the same as at the initial conclusion of contracts, each client has its own unique conditions, there is no complete coincidence of conditions for different legal entities.

It will be very interesting to see the number of those who applied for compensation, not in absolute numbers, but at least as a percentage, I hope that MegaFon will provide such information after June 6, when the distribution of compensation will stop. While we can say that people are applying, the receipt of compensation was especially active on the first day, when SMS only began to be sent out.

Another touch to the failure in the MegaFon network, over this and subsequent days, the number of transitions via MNP in the networks of other operators did not increase, it remained exactly at the same level. That is, the daily transfer balances have not changed in any way, which indicates a simple thing - MegaFon subscribers did not run en masse to other operators while keeping the number. Loyalty? For sure.

Do you think the proposed compensation looks sufficient? If not, what would you like to receive from the operator? I remind you that average cost services on the MegaFon network per month is 300 rubles, respectively, per day it will be 10 rubles for an ordinary subscriber. Dance away from these numbers in how you present compensations and their size. Our discussion will be useful not only for MegaFon, but for all operators, in order to assess the expectations of people in cases of such failures.

Computer glitch at British Airways and cancellation of all London flights

Definitely before the world was much simpler, you had a paper ticket, and if your plane was fueled, you could take off on schedule. AT modern world the ability to travel is directly dependent on computer systems, as airlines have proven many times over. I was lucky, as a mass denial of service during flights all the time passed nearby, but by. For example, on Saturday, May 27, British Airways computer systems failed in Britain, the cause of the problem is the lack of electricity, the failure of the backup power system in the data center. No catastrophes, malicious attacks, the usual banal failure from within the system. Result? Cancellation of all flights from London, and from two airports at once.

The cancellation affected not only those who did not have time to board the flight, but also those who had already checked in their luggage and went to clean zone, as well as those who were sitting in their seats on the planes and preparing for takeoff, the liners were returned back and unloaded. About 600 BA aircraft take off and arrive at Heathrow daily, a day of downtime is a collapse in traffic. British Airways' local websites went down almost instantly, information boards and local Internet resources failed at Heathrow Terminal 5, queues of passengers lined up both outside and inside the airport. There was simply no information about what was happening and what to do, for the first five or six hours people remained in an information vacuum, and BA employees could not really say anything.

Later, the company issued a bulletin in which it asked to keep receipts for food, expenses at the airport, as well as hotels, it intends to compensate these expenses to its customers, but for this you will need to contact the company separately when the whole system is already working. On Sunday, May 28, part of the flights were sent, and the disruptions in the schedule continued, they will resolve for a long time. Interestingly, Monday is a day off, and on Saturday many Britons went on short holidays, plus children's holidays, for many the rest was ruined. It is also sad that those who checked in their luggage will be able to receive it with home delivery, but when is unknown.

The size of the disaster for BA cannot be overestimated, a major airline was unable to serve tens of thousands of people, which caused a strain on all services of both the company and airports. And all this is a consequence of a failure in the computer system. A local failure that was not caused by external, serious reasons. For some reason, this news makes me uncomfortable. It turns out that our world is very fragile and every year will become even more fragile. I hope that you do not become a victim of such failures and that your holidays go well.

My friend, who got into this mess, said the following:

We passed the control, sat in the noodle shop, ate. Flights began to be canceled, but they didn’t tell us anything, everything was fine at the gate. A girl from BA came up, asked those who were flying in business class to leave and took us to the lounge, it was already crowded inside, people weren’t sitting on their heads. An hour later, there were even more of them, the lounge was periodically closed, someone was kicked out to other lounges, but it was no better there. Zero information! Zero without a wand! Cellular worked intermittently, voice calls did not always go through, but you could call via the Internet, local Wi-Fi quickly died. After a couple of hours, we decided to get out of this hell and got into a queue of those who wanted to go outside, that was another puzzle. There were not so many people outside the airport, but many were sitting and waiting with suitcases. Our suitcases were not returned, there was a crowd at the BA counter, they did not even try. Some cunning comrade advised us to write a letter to BA with the flight number and indicate where to bring the suitcases, we did not receive any answer to the letter, it is not known where the luggage is. I noticed that chargers and external batteries were dismantled in stores. Many have handed over the chargers in luggage. At the sockets on the floor, people settled down for the night, were going to wait for the flight. At the moment it is not known when we will fly away, we returned to the hotel and have already spent 800 pounds due to all these delays, I hope that this money will somehow compensate.

A sad story that once again demonstrates that our computer world far from ideal.

How to make the old scanner work in the new OS

In the last issue, Spillikin complained that the Canoscan LiDE 25 scanner did not have drivers for modern operating systems and therefore it was impossible to use it.

In the comments, they talked about ways to solve this problem, for example, they offered to buy an old netbook with the same version of the OS in order to connect the scanner to it. In my opinion, multiplying different devices is somehow wrong, especially since this solution is crooked. I have one working computer, and I want everything to work from it.

The second solution is better: install a virtual machine and run under it operating system from which to operate the scanner. This is a guaranteed working option to solve the problem, but you also need to fiddle with the settings, the OS takes up space on the SSD, in a word, there is no finesse.

The third option that I liked the most and have already tried is the VueScan program. It turns out that on the mistakes of manufacturers, you can quite successfully do your business, the creators of this program write their own drivers for old equipment, which is no longer supported. The cost of a regular license is $ 20 (a little expensive, but well worth it). No dancing with a tambourine is necessary, the scanner is recognized instantly and starts working.

As for me, this is the most elegant solution to the problem. At the same time, I caught myself thinking that I began to use CamScanner often, as the application turned out to be very convenient and saves documents in the cloud. The free version is enough for the eyes, it’s a pity it doesn’t have Russian language recognition, but since Samsung has it as a standard, I don’t worry too much. The paid version has a lot of unnecessary things, so I won’t advise it, it’s too twisted for the average user. A sort of modern version of the scanner, which will suit many.

Launch of Android Pay in Russia - marginal notes

After the first days of Android Pay in Russia, we can talk about several moments that accompanied the launch of this payment system. I will not talk about how to set it up, use it, and the like, this is done in a separate article.

I was wondering how fast the audience for this service would grow, as the potential reach of Android Pay is greater than Apple Pay and Samsung Pay combined. In Russia, at the time of the launch of the Android Pay service, the total number of Android smartphones running Android 4.4 and higher with an NFC chip was about 15 million. This number does not include models. Chinese manufacturers, where NFC is formally present, but not used for anything, for example, these are almost all devices from Meizu.

Already on the first day, in terms of the number of connections and the number of transactions, Android Pay showed an absolute record in numbers (I can’t disclose the exact data, but in relative values it was more than Apple Pay, three times in the first day of work). Larger audience coverage has affected, but if you look at the percentage of those who took advantage of this offer, the picture will change dramatically - both for Android Pay and Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, the number of those who decided to try the service is approximately the same in Russia, it is about 15% of the potential audience of each service. In fact, apart from the effect of a larger base at the start, Android Pay has no differences in how the service launched in Russia.

Google does not allow you to use the service on devices that are rooted or considered not secure enough. Although, from the point of view of common sense, stealing money from an account is just as difficult as when linking a card to Google Play, but these devices usually have a second one. For those who want to bypass these restrictions, we have written a separate article.

The most popular payment on the first day was that in the subway, you were charged 40 rubles per trip. Initially, the metro was going to arrange advertising campaign(at their own expense and without the consent of Google), announced that the trips would cost one ruble. Then this information was removed and they said that they would return 50% of the cost of the trip within ten minutes, this also did not happen. The Metro clearly missed something and failed to run this story. All the bumps immediately fell on Google, as if the company promised something to someone, although this was not.

If we leave aside the scandal with the metro (a typical trip on the "single" costs about 26 rubles, so the savings are not God knows what happens), then the launch of Android Pay in Russia was successful. But it is no different from what we saw on other systems, everything is very similar. Without separate promotional campaigns, interest in such payments will fade, people must receive or additional service or some kind of discount. In the absence of such an offer, the audience will not grow very quickly, because it is just another payment method, and not always convenient (for some, the phone asks to unlock itself before it allows you to pay). The interest in Android Pay and increased attention is due to the fact that it is available on fairly budget models, which was not the case with Samsung Pay, and even more so with Apple Pay. It is interesting how often such an audience will pay, but this is already a matter of the near future and consideration of this year's statistics.

In this aspect, I like what Kirill Gorynya is doing and the Wallet project. In one application on iOS/Android you get most of your discount, bonus and bank cards. It is also just a handy application that allows you to get rid of many cards in your pockets (not all, but quite a few). The audience of the application is growing, and for the Android platform, Wallet was a simple and good way to pay for anything even before Android Pay appeared in Russia.

If we compare the "Wallet" head-on and what Google offers in Android Pay, it turns out that the capabilities of the applications vary greatly. It's about like a cool car with all the bells and whistles and thoughtful little things and an ordinary car made at the factory without much love. Surprising to some, but not to some, but Wallet is cool and much better than the same Android Pay. Not only money, but also love was invested in it, which cannot be said about Android Pay. However, try it yourself and evaluate, maybe you will like it.

And as a finishing touch about payment systems, a letter from our reader Kirill Pirozhenko from Novosibirsk:

"Eldar, hello! I have been reading your articles for a long time, I would like to tell you something about Apple Pay. I don’t know if it will be interesting or not, but it might be suitable for some material.

I live in Novosibirsk, in our metro not so long ago (about a year ago) they introduced the ability to pay for travel with contactless cards. With the advent of Apple Pay and other payment systems, the metro does not officially support them, but of course there is an opportunity to pay, because. reads like a normal contactless card. So, due to the fact that the system is running in, payments fail, but a person is allowed through the turnstile, the card flies to the stop list and it can only be unlocked through the metro website. Unblocking occurs by paying the debt on the card. Apple Pay, in turn, creates a so-called device number, from which only the last 4 digits are visible and, accordingly, it is simply impossible to pay off the debt. By removing the card from the wallet and adding it again, a new device number is assigned, and so on again until the next failure. In such a simple way, the subway budget in our city can lose quite good amounts.

It turned out to be a life hack for getting into the Novosibirsk metro for free. I think it's time for the metro to start fixing bugs in the IT system so that everything works correctly.

As many already know, last Friday, May 19, MegaFon had 3 branches without communication. Volga region, Central branch and Moscow region. The accident is unprecedented for the company, and the consequences of its MF will be dealt with for a long time. Further my view is former employee(engineer / IT specialist), why this could happen. Or, more simply, how my favorite company was brought down.

This is a copy-paste from YP, the author's explanation: Everything written below is purely my IMHO, it can be completely subjective, I can omit something, but since I have been boiling in all this mess for a very long time, memories and feelings are still fresh. This is my first and last post, you have the right to copy the text, distribute, quote and do whatever you want with it. I won’t go into this account anymore, because I don’t believe in decency and freedom of speech. There is only one goal, to raise at least a little hype

I worked at MegaFon for many years. With enthusiasm, a lot of revisions, let's say with faith that I am doing something significant, that the future is ours ... And the company really grew, its coverage grew, becoming the best. The professionalism of the team grew, the team grew stronger, the salary grew. The first suspicions, I and my colleagues began to arise in 2012-13. When we suddenly found out that we are working on an outdated model. In those years, Mr. Tavrin was just forming a team, but he already promised big changes. Federalization, optimization, cost reduction and other pleasant words for an MBA graduate. It is now possible to end the story on this, but then it was not so frightening. It would seem, who in their right mind would shake the infrastructure, working, debugged over the years? After all, they usually don’t save on engineers / IT specialists ... But this is exactly what our top did in the first place. Plans to optimize costs were announced, and tadams, it was our technical staff that turned out to be the most unoptimized. The plans were grandiose, the federalization of all monitoring systems, the unification of operation in highly qualified centers in St. Petersburg and Samara, the introduction of AI, and unified systems for recording / processing accidents and tasks for the whole country. But as always there was a small but, it was necessary to cut half of the technical staff from the old teams. And for the second, allocate a quota with a demotion. Guess who left? Almost everyone who stood at the origins of the infrastructure in the branches left, exploitation in the regions was especially hard, few agreed to the downgrade. There were young people without work experience and those who managed to keep their positions. This was planned to be compensated by the Unified Network Control Centers (UCCC), in which they wanted to gather professionals. And turn their work into streaming with more narrow specialization. The idea was that a group of professionals serves several branches of the company at once. That is, if earlier the entire Volga region was exploited for 200 hours (conditionally), now they should have 20 (conditionally), in Saint Petersburg. And those 20 (conditionally) unfortunates who remained in the branch were supposed to help them. New monitoring was supposed to help in this, but it was turned from powerful departments that had previously held the network (I believe that it was the most stable in the Russian Federation), into a department of doodles that were not responsible for anything at all. And the most important function of the old monitoring - the coordination of the work of other departments ... was simply removed. If before it was a group of young guys that zadolbyvali everyone around until even the most minor problems are eliminated. That new feature monitoring has become sick! the transfer of the emergency to those 20 unfortunates from the branch and 20 from the ECUS, who are now responsible for the entire part. And then only the most critical ones, the rest of the staff had to search for it themselves, using the web platform created for this. Is it necessary to say that all this turned into an endless series of mistakes, accidents and mutual hatred? And to this day it works through one place. And to improve statistics, and beautiful performance reports, the accident criteria have been revised. What used to be a fucking star suddenly became a minor incident. In some categories, the allowable degradations were generally increased by more than four times. What can I say, many types of errors on the equipment were no longer processed at all, as they became supposedly of little significance. Then I really began to feel the pressure of the fact that everyone knows where you work. Complaints, remarks from friends, jokes about “the megaphone does not catch” rained down. And the company happily reported on the portal about how everything works wonderfully and smoothly. It would seem that you can live? But that was just the beginning. Since 2014, so many different bureaucratic systems have been introduced… Endless forms, applications, web services, accounting systems. I was still tolerable, but guess who suffered the most? Engineers, Technicians, IT people. Those who were responsible in principle for the most important, our leadership systematically turned into typical officials. Nothing should happen without filling out the appropriate forms and reports, such has become the slogan. Which one then The best way do turn it into a bureaucrat? Put him in the swamp of bureaucracy and pay less money. The ECSCs could not cope with the work and demanded new quotas for the staff, our management, in turn, added more infrastructure personnel control systems to analyze the possibility of further reductions in the branches. From close-knit teams, the infrastructure in the regions turned into heroes of the series Lost, who were just trying to survive. From well-coordinated teamwork, everything turned into some kind of dragging the blanket over oneself. In response, the ECSCs began to close the work on themselves, and in the end they stopped informing the rest of what they were doing altogether. Salaries stopped growing from the word at all, and remained at the level of 2013. Career growth, in principle, disappeared as a species. Professional development and training is dead.
As a result, by the time I left at the end of 2016, the infrastructure in the regions had become extremely deplorable. My work (and my colleagues too) has turned into some kind of endless struggle with the system. ECUS who do not have in order to perform their work qualitatively, but only speed. Colleagues from other departments who are trembling for their seats, and simply hiding behind a wall of bureaucracy erected by the company. Linear and senior management who are afraid to tell the truth, and only silently perform. All this under the sauce of complete mismatch, mutual distrust, and simply resentment towards the leadership and what is happening. It got to the point that scoring on everything except direct orders became the most popular way of working in the company. Simply because business processes began to be built that way. Everything turned into such a swamp that even on the corporate application system there was an application for help in finding the right application form ... And all this against the backdrop of a growing number of complaints about communication and a complete lack of understanding (and indeed a desire to know) among the tops what is happening down below. And most importantly, everyone understood that sooner or later this would lead to collapse. It is important to note that MegaFon is a very large company, and all the consequences in it do not occur immediately, but by inertia after a rather long period of time. Therefore, the collapse of infrastructure did not really affect immediately. And so it happened that the consequences covered the company only now. After reading all of the above, you probably already have your hair on end, but no, this is only a small part of the problems. The following should be added to the already written wall of text. The accident arose because: Firstly, the broken equipment was lobbied by the director of development (technical development of the network, who is now the director of infrastructure sick!), with the formation of a marketer ... Someone asked the techies why they want a telecom vendor, and not HP? No. Secondly, how many people have been trained to operate this equipment? A handful. And then they cut it, which I wrote about. And until 2017, in general, everyone except Moscow and the ECUS went with any beard training. Thirdly, federalization affected everything. So three branches were closed by 2 nodes. It looks especially fresh and innovative against the backdrop of past years, when we reserved everything we could and more than once. By distributing equipment geographically to each region of the branch, up to several data centers per city. Finally, fourthly, this is the complete burnout of those personnel. It's a terrible pressure on those who are left when people feel that nothing good awaits them ahead. Needless to say, my most optimistic colleagues have even begun to admit that the company is falling apart. What can I say, this year, due to the fact that MegaFon did not fulfill its profit plan, it was decided to give engineers / IT employees an annual bonus equal to half the salary. Those people who conscientiously fulfilled their goals all year, got up at night to eliminate accidents, and labored on weekends. Simply because the company did not receive any profit. Can someone say that they say they didn’t receive it because the accidents were poorly executed? By the standards of the past, yes, but by the current standards, it's excellent. With what enthusiasm and responsibility does the average engineer now relate to his work? But I don’t even raise the issue of one of the lowest salaries in telecom. And the other day, Mr. Soldatenkov (Director of MegaFon), addressed the employees, hinting how bad they were that they allowed this. Former colleagues sent me, and I was bombed. So everyone already doesn't give a shit, don't give a shit about the network, don't give a shit about communication, don't give a shit about corporate values. The predecessor of the current gender ruined most of what worked great, and made everything with what was left to work as difficult as possible. The current one has deprived people of financial motivation, so do not be surprised by what is happening. WannaCry, both cases with HLR are mostly the result of the collapse of what is happening in the most important part of the company. There is a lot more to write, but what's the point? I left, now I work for a much smaller company. Is it better than the current MF? Much. I no longer need to convince my subordinates to cut into shit-kukuevo on the weekend for just one thank you from me. Or to convince a colleague that we simply cannot raise salaries without changing positions ... And for those pennies that he receives, he must also try. What about the rest? I think they will leave sooner or later, the young people who were recruited in 2014 for lower positions have already gained enough experience and will now go to new companies. What about MegaFon? MegaFon will still be in agony for a long time, if suddenly someone from above does not take away the boobs of consulting agencies ... and at least not for a long time will see clearly. Probably not only in MegaFon, but I don’t know about others. And there will be many more accidents, and with even greater consequences. Because a runner who saves on his legs ... a runner is not for long.

As many already know, last Friday, May 19, MegaFon had 3 branches without communication. Volga region, Central branch and Moscow region. The accident is unprecedented for the company, and the consequences of its MF will be dealt with for a long time. Further, my view as a former employee (engineer / IT specialist) on why this could happen. Or, more simply, how my favorite company was brought down.
Everything written below is purely my IMHO, it can be completely subjective, I can omit something, but since I stewed in all this mess for a very long time, memories and feelings are still fresh. This is my first and last post, you have the right to copy the text, distribute, quote and do whatever you want with it. I won’t go into this account anymore, because I don’t believe in decency and freedom of speech. There is only one goal, to raise at least a little hype.

I worked at MegaFon for many years. With enthusiasm, a lot of revisions, let's say with faith that I am doing something significant, that the future is ours... And the company really grew, its coverage grew, becoming the best. The professionalism of the team grew, the team grew stronger, the salary grew.

When the direction of ventilation was still not dead for me, they contracted for one of the Ural cellular operators to service air conditioners at base stations, or whatever they call them, which are in attics, roofs, and generally anywhere, including outside the city.

Before us, serious money was paid for this service for many years in a row.

What we faced - the condos were not serviced at all, only on paper. The apogee was the situation when, having arrived at the next high-rise building, they could not open the door, it was concreted from below, tightly, for many years. And there were just so many such cases, as a result, after the next stage, the contract was simply abandoned.

Optimization and cost reduction - no words, excellent business. But when they start to go too far with this, everything ends as it is written in the post above.

I worked at MegaFon for many years. With enthusiasm, a lot of revisions, let's say with faith that I am doing something significant, that the future is ours... And the company really grew, its coverage grew, becoming the best. The professionalism of the team grew, the team grew stronger, the salary grew.

The first suspicions, my colleagues and I began to arise in 2012-13. When we suddenly found out that we are working on an outdated model. In those years, Mr. Tavrin was just forming a team, but he already promised big changes. Federalization, optimization, cost reduction and other pleasant words for an MBA graduate. It is now possible to end the story on this, but then it was not so frightening. It would seem, who in their right mind would shake the infrastructure, working, debugged over the years? After all, they usually don’t save on engineers / IT specialists ... But this is exactly what our top did in the first place.

Plans were announced to optimize costs, and tadams, it was our technical staff that turned out to be the most unoptimized. The plans were grandiose, the federalization of all monitoring systems, the unification of operation in highly qualified centers in St. Petersburg and Samara, the introduction of AI, and unified systems for recording / processing accidents and tasks for the whole country. But as always there was a small but, it was necessary to cut half of the technical staff from the old teams. And for the second, allocate a quota with a demotion. Guess who left?

Almost everyone who stood at the origins of the infrastructure in the branches left, exploitation in the regions was especially hard, few agreed to the downgrade. There were young people without work experience and those who managed to keep their positions. This was planned to be compensated by the Unified Network Control Centers (UCCC), in which they wanted to gather professionals. And turn their work into streaming with a narrower specialization. The idea was that a group of professionals serves several branches of the company at once. That is, if earlier the entire Volga region was exploited for 200 hours (conditionally), now they should have been 20 (conditionally), in St. Petersburg. And those 20 (conditionally) unfortunates who remained in the branch were supposed to help them. New monitoring was supposed to help in this, but it was turned from powerful departments that had previously held the network (I believe that it was the most stable in the Russian Federation), into a department of doodles that were not responsible for anything at all. And the most important function of the old monitoring - the coordination of the work of other departments ... was simply removed. If before it was a group of young guys that zadolbyval all around until even the most minor problems are eliminated. Then the new monitoring function became sick! the transfer of the emergency to those 20 unfortunates from the branch and 20 from the ECUS, who are now responsible for the entire part. And then only the most critical ones, the rest of the staff had to search for it themselves, using the web platform created for this. Is it necessary to say that all this turned into an endless series of mistakes, accidents and mutual hatred? And to this day it works through one place. And to improve statistics, and beautiful performance reports, the accident criteria have been revised. What used to be a fucking star suddenly became a minor incident. In some categories, the allowable degradations were generally increased by more than four times. What can I say, many types of errors on the equipment were no longer processed at all, since they allegedly became insignificant.

That's when I really started to feel the pressure of everyone knowing where you work. Complaints poured in, comments from friends, jokes about "the megaphone does not catch." And the company happily reported on the portal about how everything works wonderfully and smoothly. It would seem that you can live? But that was only the beginning.

Since 2014, so many different bureaucratic systems have been introduced... Endless forms, applications, web services, accounting systems. I was still tolerable, but guess who suffered the most? Engineers, Technicians, IT people. Those who were responsible in principle for the most important, our leadership systematically turned into typical officials. Nothing should happen without filling out the appropriate forms and reports, such has become the slogan. And what's the best way to make him turn into a bureaucrat? Put him in the swamp of bureaucracy and pay less money. The ECSCs could not cope with the work and demanded new quotas for the staff, our management, in turn, added more infrastructure personnel control systems to analyze the possibility of further reductions in the branches. From close-knit teams, the infrastructure in the regions turned into heroes of the series Lost, who were just trying to survive. From well-coordinated teamwork, everything turned into some kind of dragging the blanket over oneself. In response, the ECSCs began to close the work on themselves, and in the end they stopped informing the rest of what they were doing altogether. Salaries stopped growing from the word at all, and remained at the level of 2013. Career growth, in principle, disappeared as a species. Professional development and training is dead.

As a result, by the time I left at the end of 2016, the infrastructure in the regions had become extremely deplorable. My work (and my colleagues too) has turned into some kind of endless struggle with the system. ECUS who do not have in order to perform their work qualitatively, but only speed. Colleagues from other departments who are trembling for their seats, and simply hiding behind a wall of bureaucracy erected by the company. Linear and senior management who are afraid to tell the truth, and only silently perform. All this under the sauce of complete mismatch, mutual distrust, and simply resentment towards the leadership and what is happening. It got to the point that scoring on everything except direct orders became the most popular way of working in the company. Simply because business processes began to be built that way. Everything turned into such a swamp that even on the corporate application system there was an application for help in finding the right application form ... And all this against the backdrop of a growing number of complaints about communication and a complete lack of understanding (and indeed a desire to know) among the tops what is happening down below. And most importantly, everyone understood that sooner or later it would lead to collapse.

It is important to note that MegaFon is a very large company, and all the consequences in it do not occur immediately, but by inertia after a rather long period of time. Therefore, the collapse of infrastructure did not really affect immediately. It so happened that the consequences covered the company just now.

After reading all of the above, you probably already have your hair on end, but no, this is only a small part of the problems. The following should be added to the already written wall of text. The accident happened because:

Firstly, the broken equipment was lobbied by the director of development (technical development of the network, who is now the director of infrastructure sick!), with the formation of a marketer ... Someone asked the techies why they want a telecom vendor, and not HP? No.

Secondly, how many people have been trained to operate this equipment? A handful. And then they cut it, which I wrote about. And until 2017, in general, everyone except Moscow and the ECUS went with any beard training.

Thirdly, federalization touched everything. So three branches were closed by 2 nodes. It looks especially fresh and innovative against the backdrop of past years, when we reserved everything we could and more than once. By distributing equipment geographically to each region of the branch, up to several data centers per city.

Finally, fourthly, this is the complete burnout of those personnel. It's a terrible pressure on those who are left when people feel that nothing good awaits them ahead. Needless to say, my most optimistic colleagues have even begun to admit that the company is falling apart. What can I say, this year, due to the fact that MegaFon did not fulfill its profit plan, it was decided to give engineers / IT employees an annual bonus equal to half the salary. Those people who conscientiously fulfilled their goals all year, got up at night to eliminate accidents, and labored on weekends. Simply because the company did not receive any profit. Can someone say that they say they didn’t receive it because the accidents were poorly executed? By the standards of the past, yes, but by the current standards, it's excellent. With what enthusiasm and responsibility does the average engineer now relate to his work? But I'm not even raising the issue of one of the lowest salaries in telecom.

And the other day, Mr. Soldatenkov (Director of MegaFon), made an appeal to the employees, hinting how bad they were that they allowed this. Former colleagues sent me, and I was bombed. So everyone already doesn't give a shit, don't give a shit about the network, don't give a shit about communication, don't give a shit about corporate values. The predecessor of the current gender ruined most of what worked great, and made everything with what was left to work as difficult as possible. The current one has deprived people of financial motivation, so do not be surprised by what is happening. WannaCry, both HLR cases are mostly the result of a breakdown in what is happening in the most important part of the company.

There is so much more to write, but what's the point? I left, now I work for a much smaller company. Is it better than the current MF? Much. I no longer need to convince my subordinates to cut into shit-kukuevo on the weekend for just one thank you from me. Or to convince a colleague that we simply cannot raise salaries without changing positions ... And for those pennies that he receives, he must also try. What about the rest? I think they will leave sooner or later, the young people who were recruited in 2014 for lower positions have already gained enough experience and will now go to new companies. What about MegaFon? MegaFon will still be in agony for a long time, if suddenly someone from above does not take away the boobs of consulting agencies ... and at least not for a long time begins to see the light.

Probably so not only in MegaFon, but I don’t know about others. And there will be many more accidents, and with even greater consequences. Because a runner who saves on his legs ... a runner is not for long.