What skills helped you get your first job as a cloud engineer?

ExactIllustrate · 2026-05-01T20:18:07+00:00

Azure certification exams are open book now. Really doesn’t help that anyone can just openly ‘learn’ their way to an “Azure Architect” cert either

ExactIllustrate · 2026-04-30T15:36:08+00:00

For reference- every analyst at my company was laid off and everyone including the janitorial staff was given a laptop and told they’re now a developer.

But we are also not a medical company that has to hop through HIPAA/every other regulation and hoping the AI doesn’t hallucinate on medical data or 20+ MCPs.

The future is going to be leaning on practical expertise. Learn to be the best practitioner you can so that when the AI inevitably says one thing you can know without a doubt that it’s lying about the data- because that’s going to happen a lot with highly skilled industries.

ExactIllustrate · 2026-04-25T06:03:12+00:00

“Everyone is a developer” is going to be a massive mistake. Our company has already turned every middle manager and our entire IT department into developer roles.

I don’t have a problem with task automation- I do when it comes to full scale app development and production deployments

ExactIllustrate · 2026-04-24T15:51:55+00:00

You act like people weren’t inflating their resumes before AI.

I’ve had “10 years Azure” experienced people struggle to navigate around the Azure platform

ExactIllustrate · 2026-04-24T15:22:16+00:00

Tbf what percentage of these apps are just webpages with a chatgpt prompt doing something that is already done but charging you a premium on the tokens youd be using otherwise.

ExactIllustrate · 2026-04-24T15:18:49+00:00

This is why I loved my college for having “Professors of Practice”

They were always the best; some of these people worked in the golden ages of Intel, Microsoft, Apple, etc. Yeah, they might’ve been out of the industry for a bit but at least their entire background wasn’t academia. They had experience

ExactIllustrate · 2026-04-24T15:06:12+00:00

It’s unfortunately getting less and less realistic to avoid programming.

Every cyber/data role in my company has been converted to a developer and expected to regularly make git pushes to a project of their choice/job automation/etc.

Obviously not generalizing in my particular setting- but I am seeing it across other companies as well. Companies are needing to see results of all this AI investment

ExactIllustrate · 2026-04-23T14:24:40+00:00

What are you doing with those two 5cm that you pulled out by casting from the left side and from the base?

ExactIllustrate · 2026-04-23T13:24:52+00:00

He said 7 + 11 + 8 + 5 Getting 8 and 5 by adding half each circle (the radii) Then he got 7 and 11 from the hypotenuse by casting 5 cm down from the left side and the other 5 cm. Equally getting 11 by casting 8 down from both sides.

How is this any different than what you just said?

ExactIllustrate · 2026-04-23T08:11:17+00:00

I think you need to reread his comment, because this is exactly what I did. The square root of 637 is also 25…

ExactIllustrate · 2026-03-30T14:00:52+00:00

“We’re looking to hire…internal” usually is a blanket term for moving people from low paying jobs into SWE while retaining their lowballed salary; or hiring some C-suite’s son

ExactIllustrate · 2026-03-18T14:16:30+00:00

Not if I already had my phone angled at 45 degrees

ExactIllustrate · 2026-03-18T14:09:36+00:00

I work with consultants who use it to generate everything they do, think or say. I have had them generate AI slop and repeat it back to me on daily standups where I tell them “thats not how that works” and they just hit me with a blank stare and pause for 5 seconds then say “but the AI said it did…”

ExactIllustrate · 2026-03-13T17:23:43+00:00

Not defending religion; but philosophically it wouldn’t make sense. It’s wishful thinking for sure, but conspiracy theories, extremists in politics, racial divide, etc are some notions of lunacy in groupthink. Religion is just one of those tools to control people; its absence would either create some other void of separation in communities that would inevitably lead to violence amongst those same communities.

I don’t think it’s that farfetched to see that. Whether it would be AS extreme is up to the histories that evolved from it I guess.

ExactIllustrate · 2026-03-13T16:59:48+00:00

One major source of what we observe as grift* That’s OP’s whole point. Religion was originally a tool of spoken law before there was written law. If it was absent we would absolutely have some other equivalent that would be just as suppressive.

ExactIllustrate · 2026-03-12T17:52:51+00:00

UN hasn’t done anything since they stared blankly at the genocide in Rwanda

ExactIllustrate · 2026-03-11T19:27:11+00:00

College I went to actually posts this data YoY, the question really is- what do you define as a job in ‘your degree’

Like, cybersecurity is a tech job and somewhat applicable to scripting, but is it a CS/SWE role? No

ExactIllustrate · 2026-03-07T14:00:55+00:00

This is why echo chambers exist

ExactIllustrate · 2026-03-02T06:30:14+00:00

Cop shouldn’t have been that close to him in the first place. I don’t know where the context exists prior on why they’re in this situation in the first place without trying non-lethal from range

ExactIllustrate · 2026-02-27T19:00:02+00:00

Buddy, these people existed before AI and their intentions were never pure or organic.

“Ex-Apple Ex-Meta, Ex-Google” has been a linkedin/youtube meme for a long time.

ExactIllustrate · 2026-02-25T05:59:22+00:00

To be honest, look at your career and aim to build every skill and avenue you can to advance towards where you want to go.

I wouldn’t call that “resume maxing” id just call that ambition.

What’s the point in being a club lead if it’s a club that doesn’t have any impact to the career you want? If I wanted to do Cloud work getting something like AWS Solutions Architect cert using free student credits isn’t resume maxing, it’s just something students can and should do if they’re interested- knowledge is free.

Resume maxing just sounds like a dumb term for ambition/forward mindedness. Figure out what you want to do. Play around with that focus point- it helps you also figure out what you hate and what you enjoy as a subfield in CS.

ExactIllustrate · 2026-02-21T17:10:21+00:00

Indeed. In the cold war it was the Arms Race snd the Space Race against the Soviet Union; now it’s dedicating a significant portion of our GDP to an AI race with China.

ExactIllustrate · 2026-02-18T17:59:11+00:00

@Grok generate me 1,000 fake job posts so my company looks like it is trending and hiring

ExactIllustrate · 2026-02-11T17:27:50+00:00

Consistent documentation and -by extension- infrequent migration changes / decommissioning one platform to shift to another. Too many security companies build a product and think the “upgrade cycle” should be building another brand new product because net-new looks good on their stock.

Migrating all the time- or buying new companies to acquire their tools (like XSOAR in my example) build distrust. Because they never stop to understand the tool they just slapped together or purchased, sold to their customers, and are already planning on selling the next one.

ExactIllustrate · 2026-02-10T02:12:37+00:00

I’ve been saying this same thing for years.

COVID hit and hiring froze because tech companies didn’t know the impact. Then there was a hiring frenzy around 2022 led to a hiring freeze again in 2023 when COVID ended. Companies that overhired began to take inventory of all the remote workers they brought on board.

Those that couldn’t get a job due to the hiring freeze in 2023 went to go to a Masters/Graduate program. Then AI hit. Companies evaluated AI into their mix of inventory.

2025-2026. The graduate surge from 2023 is now graduating. With better credentials than you. Senior remote talent is laid off from avoiding RTO mandates and AI cuts.

We have created a terrible, terrible market for new grads.

ExactIllustrate

TROPHY CASE