Inode, so we've gone from "maximally transparent" to "works in progress and subject to change." You walk into an entity with a task no one has ever attempted before, with hundreds of disparate systems, people who are not entirely cooperative, total relics of IT (hardware/software that wasn't even used when I was in university in early 70s -- as importantly, software tools that are archaic by any standard), and you can be "maximally transparent" yet subject to change. This is not an audit. This is having to figure it out on the fly, where normal audit procedures are out-the-window, and most importantly, there is no internal accounting control. So, you can't rely on ordinary measures as protection against fraud or defalcation. Or just system malfunction.
These guys came in without knowing a damned thing about what they were looking at. They were having to learn it on the fly. There ARE NO PEOPLE who understood these systems fully. They're dead or at best retired.
So, yes, procedures and processes naturally evolved on-the-fly. It doesn't matter; there are still ways of doing things, but you have to figure it out as you go.
I don't know your age but if you're not late 60s you have not seen too many "databases" comprised of flat files where everything is a sequential operation and the files originated before there was such a thing as "normal forms" for database systems. These files were designed to run on systems where memory cores were hand-strung, and 512K or 1024K of core were astoundingly huge.
The point is, systems tech sucked back then, and these systems were developed to run in that environment.
Probably no on these teams had ever worked on such systems.
How about you give them a fucking break. No one else I can think of could have led such an investigation in record time as Musk has, and every person he brought with him is a fucking hero IMO. |
