I hate that my career field has been made into another shitty development job, except that to be competent I have to know 10x as much as the average developer.

I mean, that’s easy for me. But it still sucks.

I worked helpdesk and near-helpdesk jobs for a number of years. And one thing I found is that about 2% of the users are responsible for 95% of helpdesk work, calls and tickets. It’s an extremely uneven distribution.

At one place I worked where we tracked tickets and non-ticket contacts, one woman alone was responsible for more work and tickets than the entire rest of the company combined. She had constant “problems” with her machine, with her network, with remembering how to do anything more complicated than clicking on an icon and innumerable other nearly all self-caused issues.

At one point all three of the techs I had working directly for me were involved in various of her tickets (as in actively troubleshooting) — and thus were unavailable to help any other users.

The first time I brought it up to management they said, “We’re here to help all users, even the less competent.”

And then when those other users started complaining my techs were not available for them, I let management know why, showed them evidence and let them decide what to do. That week, the woman was banned from using the helpdesk at all without going through two layers of management first. We rarely heard from her again¹.

Admittedly, she was an outlier (though not that unusual). But the truth is a relatively-small contingent of the utterly incompetent will monopolize the average helpdesk, especially at a smaller company.

1. Which made me wonder how much of what she was doing was to get out of working? A lot of tickets are put in for precisely that reason too at most helpdesks.

Laptops have worse specs now than they did 4-5 years ago.

I was talking with a colleague about why that was and we speculated it’s an attempt to force people into using cloud services. Less storage, less processing power, less of everything means you’re more likely to be forced by “convenience” to cloud crap.

This decrease in laptop specs has become a real problem for our development team. Laptops with memory and storage options that we used to be able to get in 2-3 days years ago now take 6-8 weeks to be shipped. For instance, machines with 64GB of memory. Our devs still all do development locally so they need that much mem; Visual Studio alone eats up tons.

So much in the world just seems to be getting worse now, even apart from Trump and Musk.

hot take: the word 'spyware' has virtually disappeared from internet lingo not because it went away, but because it became applicable to nearly every major website and widely used software.

— gabsmashh (@gabsmashh) March 4, 2025

That’s true. We made hell and decided to pretend it was a fun place and the way things should be.

One of my biggest millennial complaints is that there are now "apps" in Windows.

Who is this for? People who are too intimidated by "application" or ".exe?" Why are we phone-ify-ing everything? Can the zoomers read?

— Alan Cole (@AlanMCole) February 4, 2025

I always think they’re talking about “appetizers.”

And no, largely, Gen Z cannot read and has very poor social skills. It’s like they got the worst of both worlds in a corporate hellscape. Bad deal, man.