When +10-15% of work force is laid off it’s not due to boss key, but idiot bosses who don’t think ahead.
But on the other side Boss key do happen due to demoralized workers realize they are working for idiot bosses making bad decisions or being shitty leaders.
This is a cool project! Reminds me of `hollywood`[1], but specifically geared towards programming. It'll be a useful tool in my arsenal of "things to run to impress non-terminal-users".
Back in the early '90s, I wrote an MS-DOS TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) "boss key" program. It would bring up a fake TurboC compilation screen whenever I pressed a key - just in case my boss walked in while I was playing a game. (The tricky part was restoring the graphics state back to normal, but that's another story.)
My boss wasn’t stupid. After a few close calls, he started asking why my compilation was taking so long without producing any results. That motivated me to improve my "boss key" app - I ended up adding line numbers that incremented on the screen, making it look like the fake compilation was actually progressing.
The classic "fun" TSR use-case was to make an app that installs an interrupt vector to decode mouse hardware "events" directly from the RS232 port before exiting via 0x21h, so that DOS screen would display a pointless "native" mouse cursor that doesn't do anything :)
When I say mouse cursor, I mean an ASCII block character with the blink bit on.
Some mouse drivers used an upper ascii range (less used) and rendered 4 “arrow” cursor parts into it over 4 chars over which the cursor ought to be. And then replaced those 4 chars on screen temporarily. As a result you had a fully pixel-perfect cursor in text mode.
You're right, TUIs had mouse support. This is a TSR, and exits to shell after running, so there's a mouse cursor visible without any app running. Like, there's nothing to "click" :)
I think I first encountered the boss key concept in Spectrum Holobyte's Tetris where hitting the ESC key would bring up an officious looking spreadsheet.
Or build ports/ruby, it usually takes longer than the whole system. I remember one popular but non-DE-requiring package that required perl, ruby and(?) python among others. Building it could take a half a day mostly spent in ./configure scripts. I wondered why didn’t ports or autotools guys just pre-configure everything once for a specific machine and skip this annoying step. My strdup(3) won’t go away right after they finish yet another iteration of it.
Amazing! Finally, the design of Rust is being used not only for interviews but also for bureaucratic reports, which is what it was designed for. Now, the bureaucracy within the team has improved and the bosses will be very pleased. A very useful tool.
I had an experience where a team of Rust juniors did whatever they wanted in a separate chat and the CTO, PM and I (Lead) had no idea what was going on. This tool would have helped. Now, I’ll focus on the code review to see how Rust's safety helped solve this issue. I think this will be a topic for a great new article about the power of Rust.
My rule has always been very simple: If you are goofing off, don't hide it. The worst thing you can do if you work for me is think I am stupid and pretend you are working. I'd rather someone say "My head just isn't in it right now", which is honest and something that happens to all of us.
I understand the need to unplug every so often as much as anyone. There are days when my brain just isn't in sync with what I have to do. Pretending you are doing work is insulting.
BTW, I didn't come up with this idea. This rule was given to me by a former boss when he hired me. The idea stayed with me as I launched and ran my own businesses.
Not bullet proof. I have coworkers that are very specialized in looking busy, like sending mails at late hours, always in meetings, micromanaging and bike shedding other people work, and so on. They get lauded by the bosses for working so much.
Nothing is, of course. For me it is a simple statement of what should be obvious consequences for an action.
I usually present it like this: If you are going to goof off, goof off. Don't pretend you are working. We all need mental breaks. Don't think people are stupid. If you choose to insult them by pretending to be working, you are going to lose you will be fired.
I had to institute this when I realized a salesperson was spending time on eBay and dating sites rather than, well, selling. He would do the thing where he'd click over to Excel or whatever when I approached. Again, how stupid do they think people are?
He would wait for sales to come in by phone or through the website, rather than actively networking and prospecting. The lack of engagement was obvious from the numbers he was (or, more accurately, was not) producing. So, I installed software to remotely monitor his company-provided computer (and record it for evidence). While I was doing this I thought "How stupid are you that you think you can fuck with an engineer?".
It didn't take long to amass a week's worth of data showing he was spending over 50% of his time (Even up to 75% on some days) during work hours on eBay, dating sites and more. The following week he was gone.
What sucks is that we spent time and money training this idiot and bringing him up to speed with products, technology, etc. What a waste of time and human potential.
I love the line from Phantom Menace: Your focus determines your reality.
Isn’t it just smarter to clear your actual build folder and then rebuild it with a script? Bonus points if you limit resources to it so it takes ages? That way if they ever actually look closely, they’ll see it’s the REAL work you’re supposed to be doing that’s building, and you’ll never get in trouble
If you were a boss and you were staring at my screen all day, I’d find another job ;).
In all seriousness though, we’re assuming in this case that you’re taking a break, and a stakeholder happens to walk past - hopefully not a constant occurrence.
It already exists as a scam on the web. A web page that pretends to be your locked desktop, and goes into fullscreen automatically. On top of it you have a scary warning telling you to call a phone number to fix that.
Old people fall for it easily, and don't know that you can hit F12 or something to go into window mode and close it. I had to "fix" that virus a few times recently.
A friend of mine who was in charge of finance said to his boss “the bank keeps sending me emails to confirm transactions and change my passwords and even after I click the links and re-enter my password they keep on asking, it’s very annoying.”.
I haven't read the code, and I wonder if there's excessive focus on performance, safety, and modern programming paradigms for a fake productivity app such as this.
Back in the days, I figured that Nethack would be too obvious so I went for MUDs (online multiplayer text adventure) instead. Except you need to connect somewhere in order to play. Hopefully, I had a device on which I could randomize the MAC address and IP, so if someone was monitoring outgoing connections they could have a harder time to figure out who it was.
I didn't do that long enough to really put it to the test, though. Eventually I switched to working on side projects instead, which look similar to what I was normally doing. And worst case scenario, I could argue that it is for training or something, which wouldn't entirely be a lie.
150 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadBut on the other side Boss key do happen due to demoralized workers realize they are working for idiot bosses making bad decisions or being shitty leaders.
[1] https://a.hollywood.computer/
https://hackertyper.com
Back in the early '90s, I wrote an MS-DOS TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) "boss key" program. It would bring up a fake TurboC compilation screen whenever I pressed a key - just in case my boss walked in while I was playing a game. (The tricky part was restoring the graphics state back to normal, but that's another story.)
My boss wasn’t stupid. After a few close calls, he started asking why my compilation was taking so long without producing any results. That motivated me to improve my "boss key" app - I ended up adding line numbers that incremented on the screen, making it look like the fake compilation was actually progressing.
But yeah I remember a lot of games had boss-keys that would let you pretend to be working.
The classic "fun" TSR use-case was to make an app that installs an interrupt vector to decode mouse hardware "events" directly from the RS232 port before exiting via 0x21h, so that DOS screen would display a pointless "native" mouse cursor that doesn't do anything :)
When I say mouse cursor, I mean an ASCII block character with the blink bit on.
I implemented a password protected access to A:
I first discovered this in a sierra quest game and as a kid didn't know what it meant. I found out only years later.
I had an experience where a team of Rust juniors did whatever they wanted in a separate chat and the CTO, PM and I (Lead) had no idea what was going on. This tool would have helped. Now, I’ll focus on the code review to see how Rust's safety helped solve this issue. I think this will be a topic for a great new article about the power of Rust.
:D
I understand the need to unplug every so often as much as anyone. There are days when my brain just isn't in sync with what I have to do. Pretending you are doing work is insulting.
BTW, I didn't come up with this idea. This rule was given to me by a former boss when he hired me. The idea stayed with me as I launched and ran my own businesses.
Nothing is, of course. For me it is a simple statement of what should be obvious consequences for an action.
I usually present it like this: If you are going to goof off, goof off. Don't pretend you are working. We all need mental breaks. Don't think people are stupid. If you choose to insult them by pretending to be working, you are going to lose you will be fired.
I had to institute this when I realized a salesperson was spending time on eBay and dating sites rather than, well, selling. He would do the thing where he'd click over to Excel or whatever when I approached. Again, how stupid do they think people are?
He would wait for sales to come in by phone or through the website, rather than actively networking and prospecting. The lack of engagement was obvious from the numbers he was (or, more accurately, was not) producing. So, I installed software to remotely monitor his company-provided computer (and record it for evidence). While I was doing this I thought "How stupid are you that you think you can fuck with an engineer?".
It didn't take long to amass a week's worth of data showing he was spending over 50% of his time (Even up to 75% on some days) during work hours on eBay, dating sites and more. The following week he was gone.
What sucks is that we spent time and money training this idiot and bringing him up to speed with products, technology, etc. What a waste of time and human potential.
I love the line from Phantom Menace: Your focus determines your reality.
Based on Google Scholar the best match is this article by researchers from Imperial College, London:
Tensor Networks for Multi-Modal Non-Euclidean Data:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14998
Looks like a very legit game changing and ground breaking work.
In all seriousness though, we’re assuming in this case that you’re taking a break, and a stakeholder happens to walk past - hopefully not a constant occurrence.
career|saved stakeholders|impressed
Old people fall for it easily, and don't know that you can hit F12 or something to go into window mode and close it. I had to "fix" that virus a few times recently.
I haven't read the code, and I wonder if there's excessive focus on performance, safety, and modern programming paradigms for a fake productivity app such as this.
Check it out if you like this kind of thing.
He was not happy.
I didn't do that long enough to really put it to the test, though. Eventually I switched to working on side projects instead, which look similar to what I was normally doing. And worst case scenario, I could argue that it is for training or something, which wouldn't entirely be a lie.