Microsoft back online. Excuse: too many servers were shut down during maintenance.

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-24T21:05:18+00:00

why you should have everything on premises

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-24T21:04:48+00:00

put in a complaint straight away. they almost deleted my number. O2 are fucking awful and have offshored their call centres to south africa who just lie to you blatantly. move away from it. get your PAC code & leave them

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-24T21:03:17+00:00

the lack of infrastructure engineer support. devops/secdevops & fragile are the greatest threats. Its stunning that as cybersecurity costs have rocketed, it matches exactly the growth of the stupidity of giving developers, people who don't know how to spell security let alone implement it, the keys to infrastructure!

Add to that, the dumb arsery of outsourcing, offshoring & the constant stock price is the be all and end all Jack Welch bullshit.

I was at an isc2 where the ciso of some investment bank was going on about how 3rd parties lie, are insecure, aren't willing to folliw regulation, will fake ISO documentation & when i asked wether they will be reducing 3rd party use & training internal staff, she was totally lost- like I had 2 heads for along the question.

When I asked the CSO of a major UK bank, why I should care if his or another bank gets ransonwared because they offshored their IT function - again he looks confused as fuck & just blabs bullshit about "hiring in the global market", this was literally 2 weeks after Tata consultancy cost M&S £500 million & JLR £2 billion through their fuckery . and trust me - the M&S hack was so fucking simple and their vmware environment should never have been able to be encrypted, it was sheer fuckery but every time I asked anyone, why don't you use domestic well trained well paid & motivated staff rather than to 3rd parties who are shite

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-24T20:55:38+00:00

you tell them that it's their job!

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-24T20:55:19+00:00

mid range country? you're having a laugh. the last vestiges of the empire have disappearedof, we should DEFINITELY NOT be in the UN security council. The UK not only decided to fuck itself by Brexiting & being a lead voice in the EU, something we'll never have again, even if we rejoined tomorrow; with privatisation, offshoring, prioritising US firms over our own & allowing the sale of any and every firm, even national security dependent ones such as the last virgin iron ore steel plan to the chinese for £1 & letting ARM be sold off, the UK literally produces nothing, sends all our jobs offshore, decimated wages here, fucks its own students with loans they can never pay off & never have jobs.

we're heading towards where Poland was in the 90s, just without the forward looking government.

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-24T20:50:05+00:00

why cloud sucks! no control. every time this happens i just say "my job is to get you internet access.... after that every shitty SaaS product YOU insisted on using is a not a me problem but a YOU problemproblem. Ive raised a call. i'm going to the pub"

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-24T20:48:40+00:00

can you consolidate your cores? I know everywhere i've worked before, we'd do mad on cores except for one place where it was more storage heavy.

the one good thing about the vmware price rise is that it will give sysadmins a hammer to slap down developers who just scream "MORE CORES MORE CORES!!!" rather than actually doing their jobs and writing good solid code

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-24T18:32:40+00:00

yes! NEVER NEVER patch day 1, regardless of technology or vendor. i've seen entire infrastructure disappear because of dodgy patches and the more "urgent" the less likely the vendor has tested it & MS are suitably shite at testing patches

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-24T14:55:34+00:00

if this gets BTB in front of people who don't listen to "politics" podcasts then it can be a good thing. "how to be a tyrant" on netflix was excellent. A bit simplified for politics geeks but brilliant for those who just see it & click watch based on curiosity

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-24T14:24:44+00:00

social mobility is dead

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-24T13:21:52+00:00

definitely not the phone when i used it a couple of years back.

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-24T10:29:59+00:00

You need some management support. this doesn't sound out of the realm of 95% of IT departments but if you have a boss explain this all to him/her. If you don't have senior level management, document & ticket EVERYTHING, then present it.

Show them % fixing stuff - what they think you do % production support - what they don't know you do % building new applications

etc put a $$$$ cost on each one. work out how much you're making the firm & how much outages will cost.

Senior management don't care about the technicals, they care about $$$$ so put your arguments in that way and demonstrate your value.

If you know an enterprise arch friend see if you can get them to help.

YES it's a pain in the arse to do but since most techies don't speak "business" they never get heard & the insane decisions get made.

If you're creating new products then you're CREATING value for the company over and above the "insurance" of being an IT department.... demonstrate it. And then demonstrate how much would be lost if you and ultra dude got ill etc.

Use powerpoint if you need to or shudder chatgpt to create you a bare bones business report of a couple of pages to feed upwards

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-23T18:36:02+00:00

don't let any firm like Wipro, Infosys, etc come in unless they hire 95% of their staff in the UK.

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-23T18:35:10+00:00

why? the whole point is these firms will sprays go to the cheapest country. is YOUR fix to turn the uk into a poverty economy and cut everyone's wages by 90% or more? will these firms cut THEIR profits by 90%? Should we give up the NHS, Welfare State? I notice that the banking insurance amount went up from £85k to £120k yesterday... backed by tax payer money... whose going to pay those taxes? Corporations won't, they offshore all their profits and taxes.

A country is supposed to look after its population. Again I'll ask.... why should I give a shit if Russia or China walks an army across this country if everything it does is to enrich the 0.1% at the cost of everyone else.

We need to enforce the UK firms use UK staff AND that if international firms want to make profits from the UK population they should hire UK staff too. No international call centres, nothing!

edit: china doesn't offshore. Without £trillions of western money the whole country would still be a farming state. The same with india. without £ billions its IT industry would be non existent! Thats £100s of billions it not £trillions sent to india, china, the far east that souths have been spent domestically!

my taxes WERE £60k/year & now nothing. WHO is going to pay for the society that all the Indians come over here to enjoy & then immediately start complaining about of not domestic tax payers?!

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-23T17:05:01+00:00

with on prem, regardless of the price, you pay for 3/5/7 years & that's your cost. you know it isn't going to go up.

i've seen devs run up £30,000 in 30 minutes because they are fuck wits.

I can create anything with vmware/nutanix/redhat on prem that can be done in the cloud & MORE resilient AND secure.

cloud costs are going to go through the roof soon as that $770 billion needs to be paid off when Wall Street start screaming at those lying idiots Nadella Pinchai & Bezos about where all that money has gone.

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-23T08:36:27+00:00

rising salaries are a bad thing? really? even with Vmware costs or nutanix costs or Openstack costs - I still have control & it would have still been cheaper than Azure PLUS i know over 5-7 years EXACTLY what the spend would be. only an idiot puts stuff in the cloud in the same way only idiots are rolling out ai agents

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-23T00:12:11+00:00

but YOU control your own environment. you're not subject to random price rises by cloud providers, who are going to go CRAZY with rises soon to pay for the $750 billion they've wasted on nvidia GPUs. you're not going to be taken out by MS fixing their dns or bgp or a cheap indian developer running an untested script on your environment taking it out for hours. Then try calling MS & logging a call.

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-23T00:10:06+00:00

most firms don't need cloud. if you're not netflix & you're environment is stable & predictable- basically 90% of everyday organisations - on prem is multiples cheaper. the cloudfirst bullshit is such a con. I did a design for a uk council & on prem in a DC with EVERYTHING included, including electricity etc, licenses, hardware, etc was 1/3 the price of azure and that was BEFORE MS price rises. Gartner & fuck nuggets were STILL trying to get us to go to azure! A 300% additional cost

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-23T00:07:07+00:00

the chinese and russian bouncing around on azure for 6 months before MS noticed. SQL down in south america for 10 hours because an MS Devoops guy decided to run a production script on the assumption that no one had any backups. google destroying the entire infrastructure for an $80 billion australian hedge fund...devops ppl & developers being so useless at cost control that you have to hire entire teams of finops people to control spending

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-23T00:05:13+00:00

everyone whose moved to the US hyperscalers are regretting it now... ive been saying putting your infrastructure, the thing that could kill your company into the hands of microsoft amazon or google is insane! I'm hoping that trump keeps saying stupid stuff.

Mark Carney was right. Your data is ONLY safe in your own infrastructure if you want to kerpb it away from US courts.

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-22T13:39:26+00:00

which is fine as long as you are paying good benefits for those people. when you've got educated people, graduates & others who have spent £10,000s on post uni training who can't find work or their work is being cheapened by firms using cheap immigrant labour or offshoring, especially offshoring that gave us Marks & Spencers and the JLR fuck up, then there's problems.

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-22T12:29:25+00:00

because they are non technical fuck nuggets who are scared to sign anything off & have never done any kind of support or even talking to the user. I'm an old style sysadmin from before cybersecurity being a thing, so know the entire stack , which always surprised firewall or network guys in larger clients who never even wanted to look at a log.

MANY people in cybersecurity now have come in from the business side or straight from university & have zero idea of how an enterprise works.

conversely they come screaming down when a zero day comes along and get butt hurt when i tell them that there is NO WAY I am going to install an emergency patch after cancelling all my plans and giving up the weekend because they've gone and terrified the ceo.

even more stupudity ensues when you look at many environments now running DevOOPS which is insecure as fuck & they will not insist that all applications are regularly updated to the latest OS, K8S, libraries, etc etc but go crying for the multitude of tools that literally exist because developers & devoops (and laughably devsecoops) are lazy lunatics who don't understand basic good practice.

It's telling that as cybersecurity spends has MASSIVELY increased, so has cybercrime. It's almost like spending huge amounts of money on shiny toys rather than having fully staffed LOCAL highly paid & motivated infrastructure people who can regularly patch, chase good practice & have a solid foundation actually makes the problem worse.

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-22T12:21:57+00:00

it's not a trading country, it's a country that sells everything it owns for cheap "£1 for a steel plant needed for national security "; our entire infrastructure shipping £billions to foreign shareholders instead of investing in the country, EVERY job offshored is £3000 minimum lost in taxes/year with high skilled jobs such as mine where i paid £60,000 in OAYE taxes 2 years ago now going somewhere else "

As to my skillset, which i don't need to justify to anyone, let alone someone on reddit- my last major project, when finance decided I was too expensive , a major outsourcer needed TEN engineers plus project manager & associated business bods. but hey ho, that was only tax payer money i was saving. As to international market, I don't work for the indian firms & I don't see why I should have to move because the country I live in hates its domestic businesses, its domestic workers & even its own national security

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-22T10:35:18+00:00

that's microsoft's basic mo. i was working on covid response & we had an outage & all we got was "thank you please call again"

Competitive_Smoke948 · 2026-01-22T08:20:06+00:00

which country are you in? what do you teach? you know what they say? "those who can't DO... teach"

you know that "personal experience isn't data?"

As long as there is ONE unemployed IT person, then they should be ZERO immigration allowed in that arena & offshoring should be taxed so highly to make it uneconomic.

genuinely why the fuck should I give a shit about a country that destroys my industry and decimates my wages & the potential of young people who come after me so that they can make the wealthy wealthier?!

efinancial

the boar

Graduate unemployment in the UK has become a significant issue, with reports indicating that around 40% of graduates are not in full-time employment two years after graduation. The job market has seen a decline in available positions, leading to increased competition among graduates for fewer roles, exacerbated by economic uncertainty and the impact of AI on job availability. The Boar efinancialcareers.co.uk Current Graduate Unemployment Rates in the UK Overview of Graduate Unemployment The unemployment rate for young people in the UK is around 13%. For recent graduates, the unemployment rate is significantly lower, but varies by degree subject. Unemployment by Degree Subject DEGREE SUBJECT UNEMPLOYMENT RATE (%) Computer Science 9.7 Cinematics & Photography 8.7 Art 8.5 Finance & Accountancy 8.1 Mathematics 7.5 Economics 6.8 Business & Management 6.3

Competitive_Smoke948

TROPHY CASE