Tech

Devit

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Tech

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.

No Del

Chill Tech

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.

Tech Path

Chill Tech

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.

Searchers

Chill Annoying, Tech

One of the most confusing things about modern life. Practically every search function on a large website returns seemingly random results now.

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.

BBQ Grill

Chill Annoying, Tech

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.

Tick Tech

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Tech

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.

Early Onset Alzheimer’s

Chill Evil, Tech

Smartphones and social media are enormous cognitohazards that are now actually destroying intelligence too. Not surprising, but more than alarming.

Phone addicts, cry harder.

Resourceful

Chill Clowns, Tech

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?

Virt Revert

Chill Tech

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.

Easy For

Chill Tech

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.

Gawd Help Me

Chill Annoying, Tech

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.

Spec In

Chill Annoying, Tech

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.