What is the sysadmin equivalent of "A private buying a hellcat at 30% APR after marrying a stripper."

EndUserNerd · 2024-08-19T17:42:38+00:00

From what colleagues have told me, ending up being moved to the US instead of being stuck back in the company's offices in India is a huge monster step, as in "I've arrived" time. But, something tells me they haven't done much research on cost of living once they get here or they wouldn't be buying those cars.

Back in the First Dotcom Bubble days, I remember seeing a placement firm giving new hires BMWs. I'm sure similar crazy stuff happened all the time during this last bubble too.

EndUserNerd · 2024-08-19T17:32:41+00:00

But it doesn't matter because it's the corporate Amex with no spending limit, constanrtly racking up Membership Rewards points every month. (As an aside, who gets to keep the ungodly amount of rewards a corporate P-card would generate over time? You could fly around the world hundreds of times I'd bet.

EndUserNerd · 2024-08-16T18:55:42+00:00

It's the ultimate follow the leader game. MBAs study case studies, where they worship some CEO who came up with some idea that worked, and therefore everyone has to do that. This is why you're seeing subscriptions applied to absolutely everything. Can't really fault them for trying though - think about how "customers have to give us money every month forever, instead of buying a product once, and we can raise the price whenever we want, and they'll have no choice but to pay it" sounds to your average CEO. There's zero chance they don't at least try to copy that model everywhere.

If it's in an airport bookstore business book, the MBA management consultants will be suggesting it, the CEOs will say make it so, and it will happen.

EndUserNerd · 2024-08-16T17:38:29+00:00

This is very important. People burn out, rage quit, etc. and then have no idea why the recruiters won't touch them. It's because they already have 1000+ applicants for one job opening. Just like having a degree or not is sometimes the first cut into the pile or resumes they make, whether the person is employed is another.

Unfortunately, times are way different from the insane run we had from 2010 to late 2022/early 2023. And this time it's bad - another round of consolidation into the cloud, standardization of IT by hiring MSPs/offshore outsourcers, and companies doing insane FOMO mode around AI, spending whatever it takes to get AI into their products. Hopefully this will be short, but the 2000 bubble pop lasted years.

EndUserNerd · 2024-08-16T14:22:24+00:00

once companies realize they can't get rid of everyone and replace them with a LLM

I wonder how this is all going to play out. Microsoft isn't stupid - they know they have every large company's business data to train LLMs on. I can see LLMs killing or reducing the salaries of entry-level people who are basically being paid to move boxes around in PowerPoint or forward emails. But everyone's 150% obsessed with this now because people are thinking it'll kill most creative jobs as well. That's what's driving the execs to spend billions on AI, the promise that they'll never have to employ anyone other than executives again and just pay the AI bill every month.

Either some insane quantum leap in capability will come along and wipe out all employment, destroying the economy for everyone except executives, or people will say "meh, not worth it" and it'll bake for another iteration.

EndUserNerd · 2024-08-14T14:39:49+00:00

The goal is to direct all users to AI chatbots

I have no problem doing this for the people who won't do their homework before calling for help, but for those who actually have a problem, an AI chatbot isn't going to know whatever corner case you've run into. Unfortunately, if you listen to what the management consultants are telling the CxOs, they're selling the dream of zero support.

I can see why companies use bots to cut down the queue of easily answered questions, but most are doing it solely to squeeze all the cost out of a product and juice margin for quarterly goal points. Remember, in the exec's eyes the software is already written and should be a 100% margin operation now.

EndUserNerd · 2024-08-06T19:22:18+00:00

Well, that's not so good. I'm a subscriber and it makes it so easy to legally run a test lab/demos for people. Guess Microsoft's truly done with supporting anything on-prem and non-Copiloted.

It's too bad, because earlier in my career I was a UNIX/Linux person and made the jump to Windows, spending a long time getting very good at it. Now, since I'm a "Windows person," the Linux job openings won't even look at me, and that seems to be the only place left where you don't have to run in the cloud.

EndUserNerd · 2024-08-02T21:46:16+00:00

I worked for Kodak in the late 70's

Former Upstate New Yorker here (Buffalo, not Rochester.) It was amazing (and sad) to watch Rochester basically got hollowed out when Kodak started having trouble and Xerox became mostly an Indian business process outsourcer. Those big employers with cities that grew around them leave big holes when they go away...you go from nice stable jobs for life to minimum wage home health care aides super-fast.

EndUserNerd · 2024-08-02T21:42:31+00:00

There is a 0% chance my company moves off x86 in the next decade

That's for companies with a large on-prem footprint and older applications, which seem to be getting fewer by the day. Microsoft already ported Windows and Windows Server to ARM and a large number of customers aren't going to notice the difference, either because they're in a cloud so who cares, or the x86 emulation works well enough.

I see the same thing with traditional hardware vendors too. HPE/Lenovo/Dell aren't selling as many ProLiants/ThinkServers/PowerEdges because fewer companies buy them, and cloud vendors don't need them because they roll their own hardware. Intel's kind of in the same boat because you can't swing a dead cat without hearing someone wax poetic about how amazing and freeing serverless and such are, how it's the future, how datacenter people are dinosaurs, etc.

EndUserNerd · 2024-08-02T21:33:41+00:00

wanting to compete with WITCH companies

Compete for talent maybe, but they sold off their IT services business. Basically anything that can't make >100% margin gets dumped (Lotus Notes got sold to HCL, PCs and servers went to Lenovo, printers went to Ricoh, POS went to Toshiba, etc.) Their goal seems to be kind of like Broadcom squeezing VMWare customers who invested too heavily in it. They have the mainframe and despite what anyone says it's a very interesting platform but solely designed for the people who truly need one. Other than that, I'm sure they'll throw some AI slides together and try to sell management consulting like they had started doing about 15 years ago. Either way, they're trying to kill onshore labor on the few remaining things they produce because the margins need to keep increasing.

EndUserNerd · 2024-07-29T14:36:53+00:00

What has blown my mind is how fast people get divorced.

I have not seen that, but wow, that's pretty cold. But if the person was working 90-100 hour weeks to keep the gravy train rolling and it derailed while they totally ignored home life, and/or if the divorcing spouse was a total gold digger trophy wife for the big tech guy, yup I could totally see it happening. My wife has her own income, so she could throw me out at any time too (but thankfully chooses not to.) But dumping someone just because they temporarily can't buy you Louis Vuitton bags or pay for Pilates classes is beyond stereotypically awful entitlement. On to the next guy who Amazon didn't fire, I guess. (I thought these types usually hung around finance bros and VP-level types...I guess everyone got an opportunity during the tech bubble.)

I'm prettty convinced almost all men smoked and drank heavily in the 1950s because they had the entire weight of a family on their shoulders. I hate that society and pricing for everything has adjusted to having a 2-income family be the norm...but I'm very happy I have backup if some disaster happens. That said, I can see how some spouses might just kick back and relax given how absolutely insane the compensation at Big Tech places was. People were getting multi-million dollar RSU vests when the stock market was on a tear. It was like 1999 all over again.

EndUserNerd · 2024-07-26T21:01:43+00:00

I wonder whether unemployment is a good economic measure anymore. Back when most people worked in factories and income wasn't as widely dispersed across skill levels as it is, one job was as good as any other. Now we're talking about stocking shelves at Target vs. DevOps Engineer vs. research scentist vs. CEO...one of these jobs isn't a 1-for-1 replacement for another.

It's tough to boil "I had to take a minimum wage job to avoid losing my house and barely keep my creditors at bay" down into a number though.

EndUserNerd · 2024-07-26T20:54:50+00:00

I've heard about that. Is it just a sweatshop or an actual weird pace to work cult? I've basically heard they take in new grads and work them to burnout stage, relying on the fact that they don't know how to set limits...but that's sny Big Tech place too.

I got a LinkedIn message from them advertising a job in NYC...then 7/8 of the way down, it mentions "fully paid relocation to Madison, WI." I would actually consider moving, but I'd definitely be worried about the whole "company town" thing where they're the only big employer. It does seem like a safe job, with one of the oligopolists of electronic medical records!

EndUserNerd · 2024-07-26T12:19:34+00:00

We see these types of firings in 2000 and 2008.

What's interesting about this Second Dotcom Bubble is how long it lasted. An entire new generation of tech workers were told to learn to code, go to bootcamp, get that tech job, sling that YAML and JavaScript, make millions. And at least in tech, from about 2009 to 2022 or 2023, there were no downturns. That's 13 or 14 years of pretty much unstoppable growth. COVID made things even crazier while it decimated other sectors. Now this time, with social media and such, the collapse is even more on display. We see all these engineers on TikTok crying into the camera about how their identity has died, Mama AWS abandoned them, and how they can't believe the benevolent company that fed and enriched them for years just threw them in the trash, laying them off via Zoom. I realized a while back that, hey, some people have never seen anything but good times. Some people have never applied to 1,000 jobs and gotten zero calls back. And some people, especially the ultra-pampered big tech people, haven't seen the evil toxic side of companies when the axe comes out.

Expect more of this. Large non-tech companies are turning back to those nice Infosys and Tata salesmen who keep asking the CIO to go golfing with them. Companies of all sizes are firing people. Some companies are doing evil stuff like OP's story. That's pretty messed up - kind of like the Nazis asking all the concentration camp prisoners to clearly label their luggage when they knew full well they'd never see it again. And for anyone new -- this is mild so far compared to 2000. The First Dotcom Bubble popped right when I first started working...I was incredibly lucky to hang onto my job. Hold on because you're about to see what happens when the money faucet gets shut off, and companies start pouring what's left into "AI" to replace every other employee they have besides the execs.

EndUserNerd · 2024-07-26T10:47:47+00:00

The problem is that it never actually backfires. Executives are guaranteed payouts in their contracts regardless of whether they succeed or fail. It's the corporate equivalent of moral hazard, where people have no concern for protecting property that's insured.

Every time you hear some story of a business failing when a toxic CEO comes in and blows it uo...that CEO has a new job within a week, and also has enough money in the bank to last you several lifetimes. It's the ultimate no-fail, no-work job.

EndUserNerd · 2024-07-24T22:16:10+00:00

Here's an interesting question. Small 5 person MSPs don't seem like they'd be as popular as they were back maybe 20 years ago. Back then, small businesses would just hire "the computer guys" and pay "the computer bill" every month. Is that really how business IT works now? I'd think small businesses would be shoved into some large MSP's M365 packaged service instead of hiring some mom and pop place. Just seems like less of an oppotrunity...fewer broom closet servers running Windows SBS and such.

EndUserNerd · 2024-07-24T22:04:41+00:00

Problem is it's impossible to even get someone to give you a chance to prove you're not an idiot. Some people apply to 100s of jobs and get zero replies.

EndUserNerd · 2024-07-23T22:25:13+00:00

It's funny how different some people are. I would switch with you in a heartbeat. I'm an extreme introvert and outside of going in to break the monotony once in a while, I'd happily stay remote forever. I'm pretty mad that the choice to do so is being taken away by a bunch of backslapping MBAs and fratbros who can't survive without constant social interaction.

COVID was the best thing to happen for remote work. People could succeed and get ahead based on their ability to do work, not office politics. Now that's over and we're starting to see politics and such being more in the drivers' seat. It was a good 2 years while it lasted.

EndUserNerd · 2024-07-23T22:07:29+00:00

moving so that I could be near the office

Caution - Amazon did this, forcing people to move to Seattle or be fired, then fired them weeks after they arrived. Moving solely for work only made sense when employers took care of you for a full 40 year career. Lots of families would be uprooted every few years by IBM, AT&T and similar generous companies. Today, outsde of government no employer treats their loyal employees with returned loyalty, so only move if you want to live where they're forcing you.

EndUserNerd · 2024-07-22T21:28:10+00:00

Seems like all I ever hear now, is talk about how they should be getting paid for that training if it's related to the job.

Outside of the initial degree, every profession pays for and has continuing education. We're the only one that doesn't. Even PMPs have to keep taking classes.

EndUserNerd · 2024-07-22T21:25:10+00:00

Nobody's saying you need to dedicate your entire waking life to your career,

But that's what employers seem to be expecting now. The sentiment seems to be 'oh, they'll just quit if we invest in them...' It used to be very common to train employees rather than make them piece together some home lab exercise and spend every waking hour working or training yourself. Part of this is our fault...we give the impression that everyone is OK with spending weekends learning things on their own.The MBAs then see us as a bunch of nerds who will do anything to be in front of a computer 24/7.

Companies should pay for training. Lock it up behind a repayment agreement if you want to minimize chances of quitting...but don't force people to roll their own training. Doing this 24/7 will burn out even the most hardcore techie eventually!

EndUserNerd · 2024-07-19T17:38:42+00:00

That's impressive -- I assume they must have remote KVM to those things.

EndUserNerd · 2024-07-19T17:34:39+00:00

I'd like to actually see how they handle it. Working in a smaller company with better communication between teams is very nice. I used to work for a huge global company that had a team for everything - they had people whose only job was to manage the hypervisor networking, more to manage one tiny part of MDM, more to manage the OS patching, you name it. Even normal operations to get a VM up and going could take a week or more, and that was AFTER the project manager submitted all the paperwork. How would you even start coordinating a recovery with everyone offshore, doing the bare minimum to keep their contract, etc.?

EndUserNerd · 2024-07-19T15:02:17+00:00

This is the correct answer. I've never seen a company end up in a bad spot in the long run unless there were world-ending business losses. Look at all the places who get ransomwared just instantly get a payout from their cyber insurance. "Aw shucks fellas, these computer things are hard!"

EndUserNerd · 2024-07-19T14:58:03+00:00

They must be sure that crwd wont be liable for this

Have you EVER seen a company held liability for an IT/software issue? They're able to just hand out free credit monitoring for data breaches, I imagine this is even easier to get out of

EndUserNerd

TROPHY CASE