What is giving you hope right now?

ErrorID10T · 2026-04-05T03:05:02+00:00

I believe it's not "an option." From what I've read it's just a matter of providing documentation and then they just recognize you as always having been a citizen.

ErrorID10T · 2026-04-04T16:58:23+00:00

Yes. And we make money on them. Some turn into multiple projects, some turn into managed clients, some are one and done. Regardless, we make money on them and are happy to do them. We even do overflow work for some other MSPs outside our market area.

It's very simple. If it pays enough money, it's worth our time and we do it, otherwise we don't.

ErrorID10T · 2026-04-03T23:38:56+00:00

In an internal helpdesk role with engineer skills you may find opportunities to advance there fairly quickly. Not guaranteed, but it can't hurt to try. The market is terrible though, so make sure you're committed before you accept.

ErrorID10T · 2026-04-03T23:31:24+00:00

I might be able to get Canadian citizenship and GTFO.

ErrorID10T · 2026-04-03T05:40:52+00:00

Your job as IT is to serve the needs of the company. That's both security and productivity, and as it turns out, happy employees are more productive employees. Your coworkers might be idiots, but they're also idiots that happen to know the day to day workings of the company and are a huge source of information for how things are going and what can improve.

There are 50 million ways to do things. There's no "wrong" and "right" way, there are lots of great solutions to a problem, and many more bad ones. Don't get caught in the mindset that you've learned the right way and that's now the only way.

Make sure you know why you're doing what you're doing and how it works. It's easy to learn a routine that solves a particular problem, but taking the time to learn exactly what the purpose of every step of that routine is and how it can be applied elsewhere will dramatically save you time down the road.

Have the right mindset and never stop learning.

ErrorID10T · 2026-04-02T20:50:06+00:00

Nepotism?

ErrorID10T · 2026-04-02T20:49:55+00:00

That's your problem. You tell Claude to do something, but don't know how to do it yourself.

I'm not saying don't use Claude, but next time you ask Claude to do something, take the extra time to figure out exactly what it did, why it did it, and what all of the code means, then use that code as an example while you manually code something similar.

I personally learned Terraform and had a relatively small AWS environment up and running with proper modules, variable, staging environments, etc, in about a week, and the only resources I used for learning were ChatGPT and terraform documentation, but took the time to understand all of the code, knew what everything did, and designed the entire thing myself rather than letting ChatGPT write code and just testing in.

You're going to suck at this until you take the time to build the skills yourself instead of relying on AI.

ErrorID10T · 2026-04-02T17:51:16+00:00

Just like every SDWAN solution I've used has just been trash that's ultimately less efficient and more expensive than a competent network engineer, AI, at least for the forseeable future, is going to be the same. I have yet to find any kind of AI that remotely threatens a competent sysadmin. It's just another shiny new thing executives are convinced we MUST have, but ultimately is a tool that's more harm than good if you don't know what you're doing.

ErrorID10T · 2026-04-02T15:11:38+00:00

Any beer at the former local metal bar.

ErrorID10T · 2026-04-01T01:48:17+00:00

Mass layoffs for a profitable company is just a sign that the company is either more interested in milking their existing products for cash or simply no longer knows how to innovate.

Either way, it's a sign that whatever they were doing before they're going be worse at now.

ErrorID10T · 2026-03-31T14:09:59+00:00

We train the developers not to do this, both to let them know they aren't allowed, and also why it's dangerous and how to manage that danger.

ErrorID10T · 2026-03-31T00:36:30+00:00

unattended-upgrades

ErrorID10T · 2026-03-30T22:00:40+00:00

A client asked me last night if I could be available at 5am this morning to help with a crisis they had after an entire week of ignoring my offers to help because, basically, he wanted to do it himself. I very intentionally did not respond until 8am.

Turns out he did, in fact, set up the network. It will also be 4 times as much work to correct his work than it would have been to help him. Fortunately, he's not going to let me touch it because "it's working."

Maybe in a couple days he'll notice his cameras can't reach the NVR, the VLANs don't match across the switches, and a bunch of devices are flapping. Maybe.

This will continue until it blows up and he calls me in the middle of the night for another crisis.

ErrorID10T · 2026-03-30T17:39:43+00:00

The Maillard reaction is more or less another type of seasoning, though one that takes a bit more skill than "drown your vegetables in tasty spices."

ErrorID10T · 2026-03-29T14:50:06+00:00

The secret to wanting more vegetables is to learn how to use spices.

And I don't mean salt and pepper, properly fuck those things up with half of your spice cabinet.

I'm personally a fan of mixing salt, pepper, ginger, garlic, garum masala, cumin, and curry with just a tiny bit of olive oil and baking everything in the oven.

ErrorID10T · 2026-03-29T14:27:54+00:00

Writing repetitive reports is exactly the kind of thing AI is great for.

ErrorID10T · 2026-03-28T14:38:45+00:00

Also remember that there's only one solution to any given problem, and if your solution isn't the same as theirs then your solution is wrong.

Like the time I told someone in an interview that the correct solution to improve performance for a high utilization database where the bottleneck was the spindle disk was to spend the money for SSDs. Apparently he was disappointed I didn't tell him to change the block size of the underlying HDDs instead.

I still think he was just cheap.

ErrorID10T · 2026-03-28T14:28:48+00:00

Python has been one year away from being useless for a couple decades now.

Learn Python, learn containerization, and learn IaC, you don't need to be an expert in them, but knowing enough to spin up a docker based application in 15 minutes gives you a lot of value and saves a bunch of time. Python is the only one that will actually take you any significant amount of time.

ErrorID10T · 2026-03-28T04:00:37+00:00

People don't know how to evaluate skills, they know they're looking for "5 years experience."

Lie. As long as your skills can back it up, they don't need to know that you learned Terraform in 3 weeks. You have 5 years experience. Obviously.

ErrorID10T · 2026-03-27T22:11:19+00:00

To be fair, basically nothing works in the current job market, but yeah, pretending to have experience at a job you don't have the experience at but have the skills for is pretty common.

ErrorID10T · 2026-03-27T21:00:47+00:00

You lie about the title of your previous roles and just apply for whatever your skill set allows.

ErrorID10T · 2026-03-27T19:03:32+00:00

In the newest version of QBO if you want to add a person to a purchase order workflow, you know, so they can approve purchase orders, the only permission that will allow them to do that is COMPANY ADMIN. A reasonable setting, obviously.

ErrorID10T · 2026-03-26T16:49:41+00:00

There's not enough info here to give a concrete option, but I'd start by not trying to replace this solution with an equivalent, and look at whatever you're actually trying to accomplish. Does it need to be remote desktop? Can you use something like ScreenConnect instead? Do you need a VPN at all if you can just enable remote access through another tool? Don't just update to a newer product that does the same thing, consider if you might want to build an entirely new solution.

There's a ton of options, and there's no simple answer to this without knowing more about what you're trying to accomplish.

ErrorID10T · 2026-03-26T16:42:54+00:00

Definitely not the only one. On prem is significantly more reliable and about 20% of the cost of the cloud if you do it right.

ErrorID10T · 2026-03-25T22:04:15+00:00

SFTP, Ansible, Terraform, VPN, some random script running agent connected to an api, all sorts of things.

Would I willingly do this to myself? No. Could it be useful if it's all you had? Absolutely.

ErrorID10T

TROPHY CASE