That is a very good idea! But as a person who travels using the Stockholm public transport every day I must add that the problem is far bigger than just "planka.nu". It is effectively free to use the public transport in Stockholm. I see at least five different ways people avoid paying. 1. Planka.nu who simply says that they are not going to pay and know that the lonely conductor (on the trams) is not going to do anything. 2. Middle eastern immigrants in groups that just says fuck off! 3. Swedes that comes with strange excuses like "oh, i forgot but I am just going one station". 4. Nervous Swedes that jumps in and out of the tram depending on where the conductor is. 5. Immigrants who just shake their head when the ticket checker arrives.

I have traveled with the tram to and from work in Stockholm for almost three years now and I have so far yet to see the first fine handed out. The problem with this is that people like me who pay properly are such fucking losers. I assume that the economic reality will catch up with this sooner or later.

Sweden is full of idiots like this. The worst organization is not "planka.nu" but "allt åt alla" (everything to everyone). They think that all the tax money collected should be handed out to anyone who needs money. It is obvious that they aim to receive money and have no ambition to contribute. Basically a modern version of a cargo cult

The great Swedish welfare state is dead. We do not have a working military anymore which makes even the Estonian president to complain. The healthcare is the same. It exists but not for everyone no matter how much tax you pay. Sweden has the fewest hospital beds per 1000 people in Europe. A 27 year old Swede can look forward to 40% of the salary as a pension. A Greek 120%. The School is falling in the PISA statistics. All can be found in different OECD reports.

I am soon emigrating. I am not paying anymore.

The quick answer is quit as soon as possible. This would make the system not work especially well. The problem is that this approach is not taken by everyone so the real answer is to assess what is happening and maybe stay if there is a future for you. If there are good motivations for the bad review and a reward and recognition if you improve plus a fair and honest system then it might work.

If you realize that the reviews are based on other things than your performance and you are screwed no matter what you do then the only thing you can do is leave and leave early. This is because in a system like at Microsoft there is a big value in a person who accepts a bad review and still stays.

I used to work for Microsoft and my biggest regret is that I did not quit much much earlier.

My main question to you Google people is: does Google force managers to create 20%, 70% and 10% buckets like at Microsoft? Are the managers forced to single out "worst performers" even if everyone is performing well?

So how do these "superstars just about anywhere else" feel and react when they are given on paper that they are the worst performers at the place they are at? Most people do not like it and I am pretty certain that the people at Google feel the same.

Engineers at Microsoft also participate in perf reviews through the feedback system. This is largely ignored by managers and I assume that it is exactly the same at Google. Mainly because I know that Google is infested with former Microsoft employees which have taken Microsoft practices with them.

Stack ranking is probably even more destructive at Google where you have four reviews per year. Google has a very tough interview process to get employed and I have gone through it. If a person passes that process and then gets it on paper that he sucks then you are doing damage to that very good employee. What is the purpose of that?

I think your parable is very apt. I worked for Microsoft for five years and for three of those I was put in the 10% bucket. The worst was not to be singled out as the poorest employee. The worst was not that it was totally unfair, fundamentally wrong and without any proper motivation. The worst was the bullying that ensued. The managers had nothing that they could motivate it with, since there was nothing wrong with my performance, so they reached for every straw that they could find to try to motivate why I was the bottom performer. Besides pinning other peoples mistakes on me the most popular blame was to give me a really hard time when I did my job really well. Since I worked as a tester (SDET) this was really easy. Every time I found a really good bug (you know, the ones that companies like Google now give out cash rewards for) I got blamed for finding it too late and that it fundamentally was my fault that the bug was there in the first place.

The absolutely biggest regret I have is hanging in there for so long. It is so utterly destructive on your motivation, confidence, happiness and competence to twice per year getting it on paper that you suck and being bullied in between. You can ignore it for a while but in the end it gets you deeper than you could imagine.

One thing that is a bit surprising is that Google evaluate its employees four times per year compared to Microsoft's two. I wonder what consequences that will have...

Good to see at least one tester being promoted to senior. The first one for me and I worked there for 5 years.

One thing I notice is bullet 2 regarding impact. Sure, giving feedback regarding the design and features is part of a testers job but what I found most bizarre was that this was what counted most at review time. If you design a feature or actually code parts of the product (which I ended up doing) then you are doing what a developer or PM should do and that is highly valued. If you for example do a lot of performance testing and find and fix a lot of performance issues then it is not really counted as impacting the product. It is really a bizarre epiphany to realise that if you want to boost your career as a tester then you need to do the job of a PM or dev.

I am sad to see that my bullet 3 (testers do not have careers at Microsoft) still is at least partly valid. Microsoft should really do something about that. James Whittaker (I do not know if he "invented" exploratory testing or just advocated it) still have his blog left on MSDN and he says something regarding poor promotion prospects for testers at Microsoft in it. It will be a nice day for all testers at Microsoft when that blog entry is not true anymore.

Are you sure you put your answer in the right thread because I cannot really match your answers to my bullets.

In any way, most of my list is just a collection of my day to day experiences as a tester at Microsoft. There is really nothing to agree or disagree with. If you have much better experience working as a tester at a place where you got steady promotions, endless respect, a lot of appreciation, etc. then please share.

I have been working in the testing field for almost 20 years but after a 5 year stint at Microsoft I found it to be such a horrible experience that I will never work with testing ever again. There are numerous problems and here is a selection.

1. As a tester at Microsoft your main use is as a scape goat. If you find a big bug then it is all your fault. No matter when you found it, you should have found it earlier. It is a pretty wierd experience when you do your job properly and well and you still can be blamed for doing a bad job.

2. As a tester at Microsoft you really are a second class citizen. You are considered less competent and more stupid. You are also far less important than anyone else since what you do does not explicitly impact the product.

3. As a tester at Microsoft you do not have a career. It is pretty easy for a newbie to reach SDET2 but very few reach senior level. Where I used to work there was a 1:1 ratio between testers and devs but it was a 1:7 ratio between senior testers and senior devs.

4. When you point out the problem with testers not having careers it only results in you having to listen to the director of test lying to you for an hour or two regaring how they are aware of the problem and how more testers now are going to be promoted. The result that year was that 12 devs reached senior level but not a single tester reached senior level.

5. If you are good at your job people are going to hate you. Your job (among many other things) is to find bugs in the product and people really love having someone pointing out all the mistakes they make.

6. If you have bad luck (like me) then you might end up in an automation swamp where the devs repeatedly break your tests and you spend an enormous amount of time fixing all the breaks. This really murders your competence.

7. If you have really bad luck (like me) then you might find yourself with a test manager that has nothing but contempt for testers and their competence plus thinks it is really important for testers to do a lot of mundane manual testing.

8. Also, having tester in your CV is bad if you want to pursue a career in software development. It will make it harder for you to get a job as software developer.

Since it is just passwords to mail accounts I guess he has sniffed the unencrypted POP3 traffic. This is a script kiddy hack. He probably just played with some ARP poisioning tool in the right place and got lucky.