beh9540

I worked for a company once where IT Desktop Support had to install all software, even for teams who worked in Technology. I was tasked with starting a whole new program and needed a bunch of new tools installed, and needed to supply them with a list of all these applications we'd ever need.

Out of curiosity, after they didn't provide the right software a few times, I asked the guy how he was validating they were securely sourced, etc. His reply was "Oh I just googled it and grabbed the first one." After that, I at least sent him the links of where to download it from, but I couldn't convince any of the IT executives that this policy is pretty useless if they're just grabbing and installing.

I interviewed with Wikipedia a year or so ago, and right from the start the recruiter said “since we’re a donation based organization, we have to pay below market” and it was definitely below market. I politely turned them down, because I couldn’t take the pay cut.

So they’re asking their employees to donate as well, when they don’t need to.

One of my favorite resources on 1:1s, I was just sharing this in a management class I had to take.

I highly recommend his book “Managing Humans” to anyone who’s looking to be in Engineering Management.

This and the glee of executives over systems that increase the potential for overdrafts or charge backs is why I’m glad to not be in banking anymore.

One of my most memorable conversations was with a rep from one of the core processors about how she makes it her mission to make sure everyone in her family opts out of overdraft protection.

Banks spend so much time on the wording to make it sound like they’re doing you a favor, I’ve had to convince my wife not we didn’t want it.

I noticed the same thing - Nissan and Infiniti models that are basically the same chassis but with fancier features going for the same price. Infiniti was lower than MSRP but Nissan was above.

I always dreaded talking to support - AKS would routinely break in weird and ways, and it was always super frustrating waiting for support to fix things that shouldn’t have happened.

We once had an error with Azure MySQL and AKS, where it would just stop dropping packets with basic instance types. Support could never fix it, we ended up just upgrading to standard because that worked.

I will say this - the manager of the team at Azure did comp our upgrade, because they couldn’t figure out why it was happening. I tried very hard to get our project off Azure, but because it was negotiated as part the Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft, it was “free” so the CTO wouldn’t budge. I assume this is how many people end up needing to deal with Azure.

What I don’t understand about this is they were most likely an at-will employee. So the company could have just said “new policy, sign it”.

I had an employer do this - I was working there a few years, owner came in and said “we’re doing background checks, fill this out and sign it”. I asked what happened if something came back on it, and he said that I’d be fired.

My biggest mistake was not accounting for the ethics of what the company was doing.

I was young, and super excited to have a job in software while still in school, building things. Only much later did I realize that multi-level marketing (pyramid schemes), pay day loans and companies selling bath salts to smoke, all hurt people.

I was removed enough from the problem that I didn’t see it at the time, and it all seemed so exciting, but I certainly have lots of regrets from that time.

This reminds me a lot of work I used to do in the controls world. We had a large amount of equipment all with proprietary networking to embedded systems that were basically Intel 386 systems running DOS. The big issue we had was they had spinning hard drives in them, which would fail, and replacing them meant we needed to replace all the nodes on the network, often hundreds of pieces of equipment. To make matters worse, the company was long out of business.

My boss came up with the idea of replacing the drives with industrial flash drives, so as the drives failed we replaced them. We had some issues getting drives that were small enough, as there was an issue with the BIOS and drives that were too big, but we were able to keep the systems running so we could eventually replace the whole networks while equipment was getting upgraded.

We had an even older system that was an entirely custom mainframe computer with 10" hard drives and modem banks that we all stayed far away from. It wasn't as critical, so it was even slower on replacement.

This is pretty much exactly how I got my first job programming. The only student job I could get at college was working for the HVAC department: organizing filters in warehouses around campus, taking out the trash, etc. I got a very similar "go hide somewhere" from one of my bosses at the time, and so I started reading about the control system(s) HVAC used.

Eventually word got out to the controls department that some student worker knew a ton about the controls system, and I got moved there. They had an issue that they wanted to know the forecasted weather, so we could get the central plant going before demand started kicking in, and the vendor kept telling them custom development was coming in a couple of years. I ended up writing a server for BacNET/C that did it for them, and it ran under the desk for years.

I think the big reason for this is most dealers know there's little maintenance cost on EVs, which is where they make their money. With our Nissan Leaf, it's a struggle finding a dealer that even has an EV mechanic, and the ones that don't won't touch it if they don't have one.

With that said though, I've found that sales not knowing anything about the cars they sell to be the trend of late. Even with ICE cars I've bought lately, the sales people have known virtually nothing about the car that I couldn't read on the sticker.

Keep the Apidistra Flying is one of my favorite books. I first read it in High School and I remember distinctly relating with the scene when he's counting how much money he has left in his pocket during the date.

We tried this on a b2b SaaS product I worked on where we had a lot of "third party" users (volunteers for a customer) who were only going to use the application once a year at most. One of the biggest hurdles we had was explaining it to enterprise customers - when they were doing their due diligence, it didn't "check the box" and we had to change it pretty early on in order to accommodate this.

When I bought my router table, I remember reading a lot of articles about lifts not being worth it due to lack of repeatability / slop in most of the DIY and cheap mechanisms unless you bought the $500> lifts. I'd be curious if this had a similar issue. I went with the Bosch table without a lift for $169 US, and it's nice that I can put it under my bench when I'm not using it. I use it with the fixed base on my DW612, which means I can move just the powerhead to the plunge base when I don't need the router table, so I've only had to buy one router. Works pretty well, and the Bosch comes with a whole bunch of options for jointing and workholding as well.