I have been working for a company for 6 months and have come across numerous errors in bad judgment and just plain utter incompetence!
I need to know what to do. I feel like they are fleecing the companies they are working for. There are 7 employees in the company. 4 are family, who all go to the same church and another person is a life long buddy of the owner who goes to the same church as well. The 7th 6th person is a 1099 (so not really an employee) and I’m the 7th. The 1099 person is kept out in the dark but it seems that I was brought in to do the “heavy lifting”
Here’s the situation. I have no direct ties to either company and don’t owe them anything. I just don’t like seeing a company pay 5x what they should and get crappy service at that!
Here are three examples of the incompetence of these guys.
1: Hourly MS SQL server 2005 DB backups (15+ GB). They ave been running FULL backups on an hourly basis since they took over. They are only running 10/100 network, some with half duplex on non-managed switches! I can’t believe they never even looked at differential backups! This has slowed the network down immensely over the last half decade! The amount of data backed up now hourly is ~30-50mb.
2. Installing home made routers/firewalls which are the bottle neck on the network. We have many customers who have well over 15Mbps d/l rates, some reaching up to 40Mbps. Well, my company sells computers that run Linux with IP tables as a business solution firewall and or proxy. These computers are crappy old P3 425Mhz’s with one internal NIC and a USB 1.1 connection with a maximum throughput of 11Mbps. Now, we are constantly getting calls about their downloads being slow since they switched. I told my boss and co-workers about this bottleneck at least 10 times (and have suggested work arounds) but they refuse to do nothing. They say that they really can’t be noticing a difference and that it shouldn’t be noticeable. I’m told not to mention anything to them about the bottleneck.
3. they record confidential passwords for all their service contracts. We use a Linux/MS network and they grab the hashed p/w’s somewhere and run them through a rainbow table and use them to log in as the user at times.
These three really bother me, but there are many more issues. I could just walk away and forget this, but I feel a moral obligation to the customer who is paying me (paying my boss who is paying me).
They are milking one company for all it is worth. They are charging 175 hours per week to the company and are supporting all their other companies while being on-site at this main company. The just do the work remotely via VPN. I’d say they might put in 60 hours of work between the 3 employees that are working that 135 hours (45 hours apiece)
I’m capable of starting my own business but I’m not sure if I have the desire at this point. I’m not all about $$. I’d rather be happy that wealthy. That being said, I also need security and decent pay. I’ve thought about approaching some of these companies and taking them on myself, but I don’t want it to look “hostel”.
What are your suggestions and how would you handle it?
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I thought I’d post a few more examples so you might get a better picture and so I would have proof that I’m trying to find the right thing to do..
Major AV Problem
I noticed that the enterprise AV scanner was not enabled. I logged on the AV server and the policies are not accessible with the administrator password. I asked the domain/network/server admin and he didn’t know why it was like that. I asked again every month for 4 months and he never knew or did anything about it.
I looked for logs of scans and I couldn’t find any. I looked at the computer that I used, rarely at times, and found that th AV was always disabled on the system. This is not good because everyone who logs onto that PC is ALWAYS logged in as an admin. I did a command line scan on that machine and found 46 different viruses and trojans.
I decided to look at another co-workers computer and did a scan only, and found 37 Trojans! This is on an ADMIN’s computer! The worst part is, that I notified both the computers ?owners? that they had viruses. They looked at the log and said that ?it wasn’t their fault b/c the viruses were in the AllUsers/Data file?… I cleaned the one computer I used on a rare basis and the computer I didn’t was left alone. 45 days later, the Trojans are still there!
A hard drive was determined to have ?crashed? or lost data some way. It was sent out to a data recovery center and the data was recovered for over $5,000 and was paid for by insurance. I later found out that my company had installed a known defective drive rather than order new hardware. The issue the drive suffered was the same as it experienced previously, so this should have been avoidable.
I would think this would be criminal in a few ways, not to mention insurance fraud.
Creating a system prone to failure due to lack of hard drive space (filling it with log files).The Linux box had it’s root partition filled with logging that was set to 10 (highest level possible). There were 3 bytes free on the system.. Many hundreds of dollars are charged for every instance of this, and it occurs fairly often. It has been noted and the owner (who sets the logging level) has been made aware of this every time this happens ( roughly twice a month).
I have always told the owner that I will not go out on calls when I find out that there is a questionable ethics issue. I’m just wondering if I am required to report it to the customer.
