Chan's Personal Blog

Today at work we celebrated Hacking Day! This is a day where we pause development, and put on the white hats*, and attempt to break into our own system and exploit vulnerabilities. I helped implement Hacking Day a few years ago when I stumbled upon some code that had a security hole in it. After examining the code, I found more.

Why would we hack our own system you ask? Two reasons, firstly by attempting to break in, we can find vulnerabilities and patch it up before someone with malicious intent does so. Secondly, we can learn from these weaknesses in the system and try to avoid them.

All of our developers try to break into the system which yields interesting results because everyone has a different plan of attack. Having different people try to break your code can reveal things you never expected people to do and didn't account for.

In either case, it was quite an enjoyable day and I scored 13 points today. A point means finding a vulnerability in the system.

Now you probably think that our system is buggy and insecure. It's not, it's pretty good. However, due to the complexity of software though, you can never have a system that is 100% secure; however, you can try your best to be proactive and try to defend the system.

(*White hat is a reference to a white hat hacker. The term white hat hacker is often used to describe those who attempt to break into systems or networks in order to help the owners of the system by making them aware of security flaws.)

Today, my boss and I were chatting about the meeting she had today with her superiors. The meeting was about various improvements that our development team will under take in the short-term. Some of these improvements are based on suggestions that our users give us. One category of improvements was efficiency. These are things that we can do as programmers to streamline a certain process in our system.

A lot of the efficiency improvements made a lot of sense, but my boss said we probably weren't going to implement them. I asked why, and she said that the union feels threatened whenever you increase the efficiency of software, or automate certain processes. The union is worried that people would be laid off because there'd be less work available.

I found this very wierd because we always have staff saying, "the system would be great if we it could do task A, task B for us." Yet the union is kind of saying, "how dare you take this tedious work away from us!"

The fear of being laid off (at my organization) is fairly unfounded I think. More than three years ago, the department completely replaced their information system with a better one. There were fears that this new system would eliminate jobs and people would be laid off. There has been no layoffs because of the system. Instead new jobs were created because of this.

In my opinion, having a more efficient and automated system can improve people's job satisfaction, as people don't have to do boring repetitive tasks. A prime example is contact management in our information system. Some staff members are in charge of maintaining relationships with various employers and such. They had to track how active these employers were, and had to manually maintain these records. They also had to track when these employers posted jobs, was last talked to, etc, etc. I was involved in writing software to automate this contact management stuff, and this has freed up staff's time to do more with contacts. Staff now have more time to do what humans are good at like calling up contacts, or meeting with them for lunch... things that machines are terrible at.

I could be all wrong about this though. I've never been laid off, and the weight of the world hasn't crushed my hopes yet. I've also never been replaced by a machine before, so I probably don't understand these fears yet. Am I too optimistic and out of touch from reality?

Thoughts? Comments?