I just donated $10 to the creator and maintainer of TabMix Plus for his continuing fight against the inanity of Mozilla and the authoritarian loser Firefox devs.
May he ever resist their doofy clownishness and make a good, useful extension. (That now requires all sorts of hoops to jump through to get it working.)
Everywhere in my field wants you to be a developer now.
It’s sad to see. And pointless. They’re different disciplines. A lot of roles these days expect you to be an expert developer, an experienced manager and a great sysadmin, while doing 10-20 other things as well.
This is just not possible. And I have absolutely no interest in being a developer, which is about all that seems to be valued anymore for whatever reason.
It’s a terrible time in tech.
Most dreaded question: how many years of Microsoft experience do you have.
Pretty much all of them. I first used MS-DOS sometime in 1981, shortly after it was released. That’s 42 years of experience.
If professional office experience, then 31 years; the time, it do fly.
I assume this question means “Microsoft Office” or something as it’s too broad to really answer well, but I’ve used just about every major application MS has ever made and a whole lot of their minor ones too. Alas.
Why is everything so convoluted these days?
In the tech world, everything has become difficult and convoluted because all is now becoming aimed at experienced developers instead of any users or sysadmins.
And it’s just become more complex in general. When I started you could do the job with a 110 IQ. Now you need 130 at least — more like 140+ to do it well. At some point we’ll reach an upper limit to being able to find humans to do the work as those with 140 IQ and above are only 0.48% of the population.
Will AI help with this? Maybe. But the base knowledge has to be generated by humans first. In tech and in many other areas, we’ve created a civilization too complex for most of the people who live and work in it to begin to understand.
There is exactly one generation that can rotate a pdf and there will never be another. The knowledge dies with us. https://t.co/UxZ043C2Kz
— Egg Price Sufferer (@agraybee) March 26, 2025
Only Gen X and older Millennials know how to use a computer to get anything done. The rest are utterly incompetent. It’s sad because smartphones and tablets are only 1/1000 as powerful as even the worst computer.
Most of you won’t care about this, but Microsoft Graph is aimed at developers.
And that makes it nearly useless for sysadmin types like me. As are many other tech companies, Microsoft took away anything that made administration easy and is transitioning everything into a shitty development role. So now you have to write a thousand lines of code for what used to be a single-line command (not exaggerating; it really is that bad).
There’s no motherfucking way I’m going to start writing C# code just so I can add a few users to Active Directory. Fuck Microsoft and any clown who had anything to do with Graph.
It’s another example of making everything easy for developers but far more difficult for anyone who actually needs to be productive rather than sitting in front of the little code box and typing your little codes.
There are very few things that unify most Americans anymore.
But if some IT person at 23andMe, as he or she is packing up to move out of the office, were to "accidentally" push the "OMGOSH DON'T PUSH THIS OR IT WILL DELETE EVERYTHING" button, America will have a new folk hero.— Yer buddy Don (@prayerborne) March 24, 2025
If they are at all a competent company, they have immutable backups that can’t be deleted. Where I work our safest backups I cannot even delete. In fact, no one can; they are object locked and literally cannot be deleted. No ransomware, admin, or user can nuke them. (In other words, even a takeover of my highest-level admin account would not be enough to delete these backups. The attacker would actually have to hack AWS itself, a vastly more difficult proposition.)
To delete our backups, as mentioned above someone would have to hack into AWS itself (very, very difficult), and then hack the object lock mechanism (nearly impossible) and then manually delete the data from all 20-30 datacenters it’s replicated across. This is something even a state-level actor with millions in funding would find just about impossible.
Any business that does not do something like the above is operating at clown level as it’s so cheap and easy.
Recruiter accidently emailed me her secret internal selection guidelines.
It’s sad to see tech starting to become like doctor/lawyer type careers. The professionalization of the field means less innovation, and that I never could’ve entered it as I did back in the day.
That working your way up path is closed now. Unless you attended a top 10 school if you’re just getting started, forget a decent job. Requiring a CS degree for fucking around with CSS is like requiring a Master’s Degree for being a receptionist — but that’s the way the world is moving.
Soon, there will be the rich and the connected. And then all the rest.
It’s not just websites; search does not work anywhere. Not in email. Not for the local filesystem. Not in calendars or notes. And search is not all that hard, contrary to what you have been told. One developer alone writes a search tool that’s better than any other one I’ve used and works absolutely flawlessly. So it can be done.
For some reason, these companies just do not want to have working search. In most cases, I can’t even imagine why.
How are you dealing with your company using the IT Department as a catch-all?
This is always going to happen because the IT department has the largest single population of people who can think through a problem and follow tasks step by step. In IT, that’s maybe 40% of the people present. Nowhere near the majority, to be clear.
But outside of IT, that is maybe 1-2% of people in the average department.
Because of this, IT becomes the dumping ground anything that is more complex than folding a piece of paper in half. I’ve seen it over and over again.
I don’t foresee this ever not occurring. So IT will be assembling barbecue grills and doing training until the sun goes red giant.
Where has the left’s technological audacity gone?
They have gone clownishly degrowther even though tech is the only way out of our current predicament and is the only path to any sort of livable future or the non-extinction of humanity. Also, eventually, the species will have to become multiplanetary and that is going to take tech we can barely even dream about yet.
No, it’s not impossible (no matter what you might read that is now a nearly-ubiquitous opinion). Yes, it is very very hard. But who gives a fuck? Metallurgy is hard. Harder than we give it credit for. Reading and writing is hard. Building an airplane is hard. And despite all that, we have cars, widespread literacy and A320s — all things that would have been claimed to be something “impossible” in various time periods.
It does not matter even a little bit about what current dipshit mooks think about what the future will be like. They’ll have (over the long time span) no say in building it. Their opinions are irrelevant chaff. Building is what matters, and we should do that.
We still aren’t taking the effect of phones and social media seriously.
We should be focusing on it the way we focused on cigarettes in the 80s or lead in gasoline before that. https://t.co/6X6mCkVxbG
— Saikat Chakrabarti (@saikatc) March 14, 2025
Smartphones and social media are enormous cognitohazards that are now actually destroying intelligence too. Not surprising, but more than alarming.
Phone addicts, cry harder.
I’ve had to explain many times that in fact virtual machines do need hardware. Sometimes, it was to technical people who absolutely should’ve known better. Hell, I worked at a hosting company where we had people who believed that once we had the base hardware we could spin up and use unlimited VMs on said hardware.
It’s insane the kind of stuff you encounter in the wild. Where did people leave their brains?
Containers are all the rage now and have their uses. But because they are made to be (only) dev-friendly, they are still at the level of usability and administration capability that virtualization was in the late 1990s or early 2000s.
Developers are fine with something being a bunch of unreadable JSON or YAML. But that doesn’t work for the rest of the world and makes changes vastly harder than they should be.
A lot of the tech world has gone from attempting to make thing easy for users, admins and managers to now only working to make them easy for developers. I think this might be just a numbers thing — there are now many more developers than there are of the other types. And it didn’t used to be that way.
So now in an inversion of how things should be, the primary optimization is to make development easy while everything else is getting more difficult.