If you have never seen an eagle nest before, this is one in St. Paul Minnesota, along the Mississippi river.
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SysAdmin1138
@sysadmin1138@ngmx.com
mastodon 4.6.9Genderqueer, ⚧, lefty (both political and handedness), ops side of tech. Prison industrial complex abolitionist. Trying to de-cynic after years of being a sysadmin. I spent 27 years in tech, now out of it.
457 Followers
135 Following
33 Posts
Joined July 13, 2024
Replying to
I'm pretty much a bit of everything on this list, which makes me a very attractive looking employee. However, I'm not actually a Software Engineer. I'm a mechanic who keeps systems running and can patch software.
Which is a problem these days, because every employer looks to see if you're a Software Engineer before they assess literally anything else. Contracting labor markets are hard on us all.
#WritersCoffeeClub 6: Talk about something you've written which you expected would (or expect will) divide readers.
Mwahahaha. Software Telemetry, my technical book. I deliberately wrote it with most of the example scenarios involving organizations running their own infrastructure. Most technical books assume cloud and kubernetes. Mine didn't. This was a love-letter to the orgs who rock it old-school, whose internal politics don't let them go cloud, or business model is incompatible with cloud, or is doing scientific computing.
The reviews were indeed split on that issue.
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@wyatt_h_knott @cstross Ex-job, who was just starting to build out their GPU stuff when I became ex, had a 7 year replacement cycle for old-school general compute hardware. Where the hyperscalers replace whole datacenters, the mid-tier do it rack-rows at a time.
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@jalefkowit@vmst.io Threading the delicate line between everyone knows you, and if you're on the phone it's obvious fraud.
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@inthehands Having worked with a non-tech convention with the same schedule logic, I have *absolutely* seen the case of a ton of session proposals on a given topic and weak response to the topic due to dilution. That con did panels, so attendees also voted on whether to *be on* the panel, which was a third signal for interest.
The same nine people talking all weekend on the same topic burns those nine out pretty fast, so the next year when there are so many proposals again but no one wants to be on the panels, the sessions go away. Boom and bust.
Today's economic boycott is not the one thing that'll save us, but it is the kind of exercise we all need to work our way to the actions that WILL save us. Do your part, learn to be uncomfortable, and later we can have a general strike as a treat.
#PennedPossibilities 960 — Describe the longest romantic relationship your MC has ever had. (If they’ve had one.)
The 4-book thing has the cool answer. 141 years because the MC kept their partner alive until the partner died in an industrial accident involving an explosion in a hydrogen cryo-fuel farm.
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@purplewolfboy@rubber.social These people are REALLY SUFFERING and are the ones most likely to peace out during the day (with their manager's blessing) to focus-code in the evenings.
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@gem@made.asterism.gay I didn't have the characters left to counterbalance this with the negatives, like employers want a very specific shape of engineer that only sort of exists. A better environment would be if performance engineering the workforce focused on the *team* not the *individual* there would be way more tolerance for neurodiv folk. But no, it's all focused on consistent performance by individuals.
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@sterophonick@wetdry.world A little bit of everything works best these days. Big-Corporate wants engineers who can sit on an on-call rotation getting interrupted all day, can attend two meetings a day, can code while having focus blocks of 2-3 hours, can code patches while holding two slack conversations, and networks. And switch between all of these based on day of week.
No one is EVERYTHING, but a little bit of each is needed.
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@Routhinator@tenforward.social I honestly don't have a good answer here. I also avoided all AI tools. I got laid off last October and every place that got me past the resume-review stage was all in on proving my AI chops.
All of them.
Of which I had zero experience, and minimal willingness to skill up. Some of this is because I came up through Operations so am not actually a Software Engineer — I write code, but employers want people who think halting state problems are cool and have firey opinions on type-safety. Not actually being a SWE meant I had zero luck getting past the very first interview.
So I retired.
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@ferricoxide @dangillmor I ALSO applied there in late 2013, before I knew anything about them.
During the interview process, they said they'd like me to work in their SCIF. That's when I had my WTF moment. Secure Compartmentalized Information Facilities are where you keep the Cthulhonic horrors. I don't want to work with Cthulhonic horrors, thank you. I bounced.
I may be retired, but I have not been saved from having a browser-tab bar full of blue icons hard to tell apart. I blame volunteer work.
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@fluffy@plush.city 2+3 is the most frequent combo in the replies. All four are needed to be a healthy team!
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@Routhinator@tenforward.social What I learned is that if you want to stay employed in the tech industry, you need to find what your AI tolerance is. It's hard to avoid in some coding toolchains, since those are mandated by employers. Maybe look to how companies are using it in their shipped products.
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@JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange Yah! OldJob had a system like that, and it occasionally caught stuff the master SLA alarm didn't notice.
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@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @rootwyrm@weird.autos @MedeaVanamonde@beige.party @pndc@social.treehouse.systems @cstross@wandering.shop Solemnly looking forward to my international stocks making up a majority of my retirement portfolio because everything else devalued so much.
Yesterday, my wife showed me a news article where some Kuwaiti guy was lamenting that Trump didn't stay bribed, and WTF man?
Makes me wonder if the flow of free goodies from the Middle East is going to slow. Guy doesn't know how to play.
Adobe and the US government have reached a settlement in the ongoing business practices suit relating to high termination feeds for subscriptions, and making it very hard to actually cancel. DOJ gets $75M, and Adobe will somehow provide $75M of free services to people. No statement of wrongdoing.
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@celesteh My CompSci ALSO had a lone PHIL class in the major. The poor prof didn't know that, so was confused why all these hard (hah) science majors were in there who didn't actually have the background for humanities social-system thought. Your class seemed much better than the one I went through.
I loved that class, but I think I was the only one in CompSci who did.
Replying to
@lynnemthomas@wandering.shop We had three tornado warnings this afternoon. Here's hoping your evening is less exciting.