thisisnotgoingwell @ thisisnotgoingwell @programming.dev

Posts

4

Comments

258

Joined

2 yr. ago

Look, I can't advise you to do one thing or another, but I'll give you some career advice that has worked well for me: don't ask permission. Most of the time, the documentation is out there on how to get what you want and you can do it yourself. I won't have my work be wasted by someone else's laziness. And if your direct report doesn't like the idea, tell him you want to discuss it with his boss. Make your case to someone who cares. You have every right to make use of whatever tools will help you do a better job.

What does making your case look like? It looks like making PowerPoint presentations, detailing a cost(man hours, oversight responsibilities, etc), detailing desired results, showing what impact this will have on the team, showing how long it will take to train your average joe on using these scripts, showing how much time can be saved.

Your boss might be chilling because he's waiting out the clock on his career. You're not. Stand by your ideas, people will stand by you. But you will have to fight for your ideas, and you need to be comfortable doing that. I'm not saying it's not hard, it is soul crushing to get your ideas shot down. But you can push through.

Sounds like something you could fix with a repository. Teach your coworkers how to use git

I work in networking, a job that traditionally has been managed by a terminal and vendor-specific syntax. I used to hate the thought of automation when I was younger, why would something as important as networking be automated? I've made my career on being the clutch guy, troubleshooting complex problems, I love the art of understanding every cog in the machine and being able to visualize it. Then I started learning Python, and learning it was extremely difficult for me. It felt like an eternity between the time I poured myself into learning Python until the time I could actually make things people would want to use.

I was a supervisor working in a NOC. A NOC that had many beaurocratic requirements which got in the way of break/fix operational support, such as having to manually write an email to every customer that had an alarm, and calling every point of contact for that customer, as well as notifying the field techs of outages in their areas, and managing real operational issues. So many times I had to let real work slip through my hands because there were so many calls, so many cases, so many things to do.

Like most NOCs, we viewed alarms from SNMP. When something failed to ping, it would generate a loss of comms alarm. I had this idea to automatically notify the field tech for the specified area when a customer site was downed for more than 30 minutes, and that was a very complex thing to do, it required that I clean a lot of data... I spent days converting things like date strings into proper formatting. Once I presented it, I was told that we couldn't do this, because some political agreement made it to where the NOC was required to provide "positive contact" to other groups. I wrote it, tested it as proof of concept, specd out costs(MRC for the API I was using to send text messages was extremely cheap, it would cost the company about 6 dollars per month). Just like that, it was dead.

My director then wanted me to do something similar for our phone systems. Since our queue depended on user agent availability(your presence status), my boss wanted me to write a program to notify him if someone was unavailable for too long and the reason why. Yes, he wanted to know if someone took more than a few minutes to take a shit or get coffee.

That's when I learned, boomers only care about micro management, not efficiency.

This meme is kind of wrong though, because it's mixing the OSI model with the TCP/IP model, which are different representations of the same thing, but in either model the "link layer", ie layer 2 switching would never hand over to the "internet" layer without going through network first. So if you're confused, it's because it's wrong.

Application, transport, session, transport, network, data, physical (OSI) Application, transport, internet, network (TCP/IP)

Minimum wage is $2.13/hour for a server in the US... You're being disingenuous by implying they make federal minimum wage which is $7.25/hour.

This is almost guaranteed to have trickled down. If the banks go down due to being overleveraged, everyone suffers. Isn't it strange all the major companies are doing this, even when it doesn't make sense? Literally no one else from my team works in my office, they're all in another state. Then again, I work for a bank, so... Yeah. This is the "if I go down, we all go down" part of the plot

That's built into the model. Stars carry the weight because they've shouldered the responsibility. Others will step up... The work will be subpar, but when companies do risk analysis on stuff like this, they know how much gas they can burn before needing to be competitive again. Just another reason why we need unions in the US.

Is this a school owned device? Goofy 4 line script that uses tons of resources, so that script that unnecessarily and intentionally taxes the laptops hardware, purely innocent right? Any chance why they might not want you to do that?

That's pretty standard across any respectable industry. You're given suitable alternatives, if everyone could use whatever applications they wanted then it would be a nightmare.

Made my first fork, push and pull request today. Been learning Python and a bit of rust for 3 years now(self taught, job is network engineer) and I can't wait until it gets merged 😄 just corrected some errors in a yaml file

Something tells me your intentions aren't innocent(you want to be able to act maliciously at school or on the school network), or you have an overinflated sense of ego, the head of IT likely didn't give two shits about explaining anything to some brat. You're going to have to face some harsh realities pretty soon. Expecting digital privacy on a school issued device on the school network is asinine thinking.

I owned one, had horrible freezing issues and screens going unavailable randomly, making folded use a horrible game of flipping the phone to get the other screen, but now it switched to the other screen. Sent it for repairs under warranty for one screen having flickering issues, they sent me a new one. The new one was still bad, but at least both screens worked.

Battery life was pretty bad. Had like a 2500mah battery which with two screens drains very quickly. I used it for a few months as a primary phone and put it in a drawer. It was several versions of android behind. Took it out one year later, it worked fine, used it for a while... But these phones are made of glass, and there wasn't a proper case for it because of the hinge, so Microsoft sends you these rubber bumpers you glue onto the phone which come off easily over time, official replacement "case" which was just rubber cost like $40 bucks, which made me buy double sided adhesive to keep using the original.

Anyways some people like to have multiple phones and it's good as a second phone if you spend all day near a charger. For anything else it's impractical.

Reading on it was great, though. Haven't tried a folding or hinge phone since

Automation 😄

I'm guessing he's saying companies are still using the same human written code, but since AI is sexy right now and is being used to describe even simple programming logic, everything is "powered by AI"

Respect, my wife waits as well

What do you do now, if you don't mind my asking?

I'll say this, as an engineer who's worked closely with the brass tacks, a lot of the time when new directors or c level people are brought in, they want to own a space. There was a solution existing prior to them, because the company already existed before they joined. But no one wants to be the guy who supports the previous ideas (maintenance on an engine isn't as sexy as designing it) because the idea doesn't have their branding. They want to be seen as bold/innovative, etc. So they make some calls and they find a solution that promises everything they have and more. If the new solution is a success, their position is cemented, they are now a stakeholder in the company. Sales guy is going to sell his ass off, maybe the workforce has to be repurposed (need more expertise in new fields), etc. All this creates unnecessary work for people with real jobs just because a boss wants it. In the end, the new director/c level can say, "wow, this was great, look at how our metrics have improved, all thanks to me!" Despite the fact that they weren't given all the features they were promised, or they didn't hire/train specialized engineers to truly own the new solution. Or maybe the solution isn't very effective. A lot of the time it's mostly politics. People are trying to get headlines just like politicians so they can keep climbing the ladder.

The way you're describing "bullshit" jobs doesn't exist, there are no jobs that are inherently, always bullshit. There's just bullshit work, and a lot of people who's job it is to do bullshit work

I know you're mostly joking, but Google does sell your data/browsing habits for advertising, being able to show car dealership ads to someone who's browsing history indicates they're in the market is extremely valuable. It's not just about things "about you" like demographics/location, but an active, rolling profile about where you're most likely to spend your money.

It's hard to accept someone disagrees with you when you have main character syndrome. I looked at both of y'all's accounts, he's mostly involved in technical questions and having discussions, your comment history is all politically charged topics where you are presenting your opinions as fact. Seems like you're a combative person.

Well I only work on new stuff/deployments for data centers. Once it's deployed it goes to ops for support. I don't know if you have a lot of experience in large networks but there is a lot of break/fix work with failing hardware components and physical issues ..but that's not the side of the house you want to be in because operational stuff like NOCs are always high turnover fast-paced jobs where everything is your fault. If you're going to work networking you gotta transition to the "money-making" side of the house for better quality of life. Right now the "sexy" stuff is devops/automation and that's where a lot of gripe comes from with the old school CLI guys because they don't want to learn anything new.

Job before this was at a university with a small team of infrastructure engineers and you would think their job was to stifle progress. Their whole team and millions of dollars in expensive networking equipment could get replaced by a private cell tower.

Cyber security field is a bit different, companies know now they have to spend money on it now so the faucet is open. Most of the real preventative methods for security happen at the network. Security guys that are paid deep into six figures know networking, Linux, programming and other things.

Being an SME and earning the big bucks, in my opinion, is about knowing quite a bit about many things