Bearly a fire
People Resources clarifies that being eaten by a bear without prior notice is a violation of unlimited PTO policies
“Dan was eaten by a bear this weekend,” said Tab Johnson. His team of software engineers stood in a circle for their daily standup meeting.
“A bear? How did that happen?” asked Colin, distressed.
Tab looked down and shook his head. “Dan was camping out in the woods. We don’t know what happened precisely, but we do know the result. Dan’s laptop, full of invaluable contributions to our company, was smacked out of his hand by a bear. I looked at his GitHub history, and it doesn’t look like he was able to push his latest changes before the bear mauled him to death.” Tab paused. “I know this is difficult to hear.”
“This is awful news,” Laura said, tears welling up in her eyes.
“Yeah, tell me about it. Dan had all the context on the authentication system project. Without his institutional knowledge or his latest changes, we might not meet our Q1 OKRs,” Tab said.
Laura’s jaw dropped. “That’s horrible. That’s not what —”
“It is horrible,” Tab interrupted, “but don’t worry, we’ll have a full debrief at our retro meeting later today.”
Colin’s eyes widened. “This is much bigger than a retro action item, Tab.”
Tab pointed two finger-snapping pistols in Colin’s direction. “The senior perspective. Just what we need.” He rubbed his chin. “You’re right, this is a fire. We’re going to declare a fire.”
“A fire is for incidents that threaten the revenue of the company,” Colin said.
“Precisely. I’m sending out the alert.”
The fire squad
Five minutes later, the fire paging system sent out an alert to a rotating squad of on-call engineers. They all assembled in a meeting room, the first step in the engineering fire standard operating procedure (SOP).
Scooter, the designated fire commander, had the honor of pairing his flannel shirt with a fireman’s hat and reading aloud the fire report: “A bear ate Dan before he could push valuable updates and context on the authentication project.”
“Oh my god, a bear?” said Ziggy, one of the on-call engineers. Ziggy’s eyes darted left and right, his breathing quickening. “Why is this happening to me?”
The next step in a fire was to return the system to the last stable state as quickly as possible and mitigate data loss.
“The system is already in a stable state, but there was some institutional data loss. We’ll need to pummel this fire into submission,” Jennifer said while flexing her arms, which were jutting out of her sleeveless UFC shirt. “Actually, the data might be recoverable from either the Dan grey matter or laptop hard drives. We’ll pummel the data out of those drives!” She started to shadowbox.
Scooter shook his head, nearly toppling the fireman’s hat on his head. “The grey matter hard drive! What in tarnation? Now you’re talking science fiction. We need to base this conversation on reality. "
“No, it’s not science fiction. ForeverAI has a prototype. I can reach out to their CEO, Evan Dusk,” said Jennifer. “He’s a good sport even though I schooled him the last time we rolled.”
“Alright, folks. We need to split up. Someone needs to get the laptop and grey matter hard drives, and someone else needs to get hold of this prototype. With the two hard drives, we should be able to let’er buck and recover the company data,” said Scooter. “Ziggy, can you fetch the hard drives?”
Ziggy buried his hands in his face, shaking. “Why me?”
The retro
The time for retro came around a few hours later. They all looked at a spreadsheet with columns labeled “went well”, “to improve”, and “wondering about”. Tab had written “Bear-related data loss” in the “to improve” column.
After waiting a few minutes for everyone on the team to contribute their thoughts, Tab started the discussion. “I wrote this item down. We need a bear-resistant data retention strategy so we don’t fail our SOC2 audit this year. The C-Suite is very concerned. Failing that audit would imperil many pending deals.”
“This is a challenging problem to solve, Tab. I can think of a few different strategies. For starters, we could not allow engineers to work outdoors in bear country,” Colin said.
“I think that’s the smartest,” Laura piped in.
“That’s a non-starter, Colin. Every American has a god-given right to work in bear country. We can’t take that freedom away,” Tab said
“Okay. So we can’t get to zero risk. Perhaps we can harden our data retention systems to decrease the residual risk to an acceptable tolerance. We’d probably need a meeting with Cybersecurity to get their buy-in on this.”
Tab sighed. “What else?”
“We prioritize a spike ticket this sprint to investigate data loss reduction in the aftermath of bear encounters. We could look into documentation, perhaps a backup system that regularly syncs the latest from an engineer’s laptop to the cloud. We could also hold a training on bear defense.”
“A training would need sign-off from People Resources.”
“Alright, Tab. After this meeting, I’ll create a spike ticket, schedule a meeting with People Resources, and schedule another meeting with Cybersecurity,” said Colin.
“I understand all this is important, but can we talk about the loss of our teammate, Dan, for a moment?” Laura asked.
“We are talking about his loss. And the impact on this company. Right now. Where have you been?” Tab rolled his eyes.
Cybersecurity
Colin found himself face-to-face with Jed, the company’s cybersecurity expert. Jed was a bearded, bespectacled man wearing a metallic silver fedora in a cavernous office. Unusually shaped panels adorned the walls.
“Hey, Jed, you might have heard about Dan. We’re trying to tighten our data retention security to withstand bear attacks in forested areas.”
“Hey man, good to see you. Good call coming to me. There are all sorts of strategies we can implement to mitigate this risk.“
“Alright, let’s hear them,” said Colin.
“For starters, we can decrease the surface area of the vulnerability. I’d recommend against coding where bears live. If that’s a non-starter, rate-limiting the quantity of engineers in the woods at a given time should decrease packet loss. Engineers should also pay attention to their surroundings. They shouldn’t be in a flow state.”
Colin furrowed his brow. “We could try. But it is their god-given right to code in the woods, and coding requires maximum flow state. Throttling flow state could threaten revenue.”
“I thought that might be a tough sell.” Jed adjusted his silver fedora. “I have some other ideas in mind. We can implement defense in depth. I recommend encircling the encampment with rope. Every 5 yards or so, attach a bell or other noisy object. Perhaps lay out a bear trap or two. Then, put a sniper high in a tree nearby, monitoring and logging concerning events. The sniper could raise alerts or forcefully shut down unwanted bear processes.”
“A sniper lodged high in a tree…” Colin said.
“Yes. A well-trained one if you can afford it,” added Jed.
“Well, what else you got?”
“Alright. This is a good one. So, if a software engineer dies in a bear attack, but his head is intact, that represents a security risk. That data could be picked up by a malicious third party and stolen. Classic man-in-the-middle attack. I’d recommend that software engineers coat their hair in honey to reduce the risk of partial failures. That will effectively serve as a one-way hash function on their biological hardware, so the data is irretrievable.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Horrible, but important if we want to protect company IP.”
People Resources
A few minutes later, Colin found himself with the People Resources assistant, Gabby. They were in a clean white meeting room, filled with green shrubbery and ferns.
“I’m so glad you came to visit me today, Colin,” Gabby said. “What can I help you with?”
“Well, I’m looking into the aftermath of the Dan incident last weekend. I’m thinking of launching a bear training so folks know what to do if they’re in the woods.”
Gabby laughed. “Well, that’s certainly creative.” She then got very serious. “My first concern is that a training might be a legal admission that we have a bear problem at this company. I’m going to have to involve Legal on this.”
“I never would have guessed.” Colin paused for a moment. “What about if we keep it theoretical? Not an admission that there is a problem, but a hypothetical safety exercise in case it happens. Like an OSHA safety training.”
Gabby bit her lip. “I’m still a little uncomfortable with this idea. Even if we state it is just a possibility, acknowledging that there is a possibility still opens us up to legal risk.”
Exasperated, Colin said, “What if we frame this as a training to protect people from bear hugs? There are these gangs of bears hugging people in the woods.”
“That might actually be worse. What you’re describing is unwelcome physical conduct of a sexual nature. A hostile work environment. And what would be the defense in that case — hug back? That could be construed as a quid pro quo, where the engineer would continue to live in exchange for the bear hug.”
“But they aren’t employees. The bears are third parties.”
“The company still has a duty of care if we knowingly allow software engineers to go out into the woods where they might receive unwanted physical touch.”
“I think we’re going off track here…” Colin trailed off.
“No, I think we’re right on track. If an 800-pound bear hugs a 150-pound engineer—”
“180 pounds, actually, in my case,” Colin interjected.
She looked at Colin. “If you say so. In any case, that would be professionally inappropriate.”
“Yes, I agree with you.”
“And what are these bears wearing? Are they wearing professional attire?” asked Gabby.
“No. No, they aren’t. They’re bears. They’re not wearing anything.”
“Exactly. Unprofessional. I see lawsuits all over this. I don’t think we can move forward with this training.”
Dan’s hard drives
While Colin was navigating the People Resources labyrinth, the fire squad made some reasonable headway on collecting the two data storage systems, biological and physical. The bear had swiped at both Dan’s head and his laptop, so both hard drives were damaged.
When Ziggy arrived at the morgue, he asked the mortician for Dan’s hard drives.
The mortician, a disheveled blonde man seemingly lost on his way to the beach, hesitated. “Whoa. That is dark. Don’t think I can hand over this bro’s dome to you. That is illegal AF.”
Of course, the company had Dan sign away the rights to his grey matter drive when he accepted employment, so all Ziggy had to do was shove the onboarding document in the mortician’s face with his shaking hand. “T-t-that grey matter drive is company property. You are r-r-required to furnish that property to me.”
The mortician read the document and sighed. “Oh, standard boilerplate IP clause. Bummer for Dan. Give me a few minutes. I’ll be right back.” He grabbed a saw hanging on the wall and headed to the back room.
Ziggy returned to the office in a daze, with a vacant look in his eyes and two bags, one for Dan’s mangled, decapitated head, and the other for the damaged laptop.
When Jennifer reached out to Evan Dusk, he was excited by the prospect of a real-life scenario, so he sent some ForeverAI devices to the company after everyone signed an NDA and a noncompete in blood.
After a few hours in the lab, the fire squad recovered data from both hard drives. The grey matter hard drive had terabytes of repeating data logs containing self-doubt, anxiety, and existential despair. The team couldn’t determine if this was a bug in the ForeverAI product, a security incident, or the real contents of Dan’s brain.
They debated until Jennifer piped in, “Occam’s razor dictates that the simplest answer is the correct answer. He was a senior engineer, after all.” It was also the least troubling of the given options. “Well, I’ll be damned. From Dan’s head it is,” Scooter said, before spitting to his right.
They marked the ongoing fire as resolved and went about their days as usual.
The bear SOP trial run
Two weeks later, the bear fire was a distant memory. The company was rolling out a new product and decided to throw a celebration. They brought in a slip 'n slide, margarita machines, and a DJ.
By 5 pm, everyone was wasted and still partying hard.
Johnny, a young new hire wearing a 90s Nirvana shirt, went back to the main meeting room to fetch some red Solo cups. When he opened the door, he saw a large bear sniffing around the pizza boxes. He promptly closed the door.
He knew it was important to follow procedure, so he searched through his phone for the office bear encounter SOP. He found it, nestled at the bottom of a very lengthy document describing the procedure for bear encounters in the woods.
Johnny sighed in relief when he saw that step 1 instructed him to close the door to the room occupied by the bear. His instinct did not represent a breach of protocol. He read on to step 2.
Step 2: Open the door and enter. Gather necessary context on the scope of the problem and possible impact on revenue. For bears, this includes quantity, size, location, and sex. Enter this data into the office bear encounter web form.
Johnny opened the door. The bear was still in the corner, grazing on the pile of pizza boxes. He quickly started typing out the answers into the web form. The first few questions were a breeze. There was one bear, the bear was huge, and the bear was located in the main meeting room. He looked up. The bear crawled towards him, sniffing and grunting.
Johnny’s hand shook as he started googling “how to determine the sex of a bear”. His phone chimed with a notification. Someone had left a comment on his pull request. The bear huffed, snapped its jaws, and charged him. Johnny dropped his phone and screamed as the bear mauled him to death.
His phone displayed the next step in the SOP:
Step 3: Exit the room and close the door.
Ten minutes later, Colin, the creator of the bear incident web form, and three margaritas deep into the staff party, received a notification. The 10-minute SLA for the bear incident web form completion was violated. Automations were already fast at work, messaging relevant stakeholders and summoning the on-call fire squad. Colin heard something drop and looked up. The bear was huffing over a stack of fallen cups next to the margarita machine.