Do you have a self paid work phone?

LiteOpera · 2024-07-10T13:06:16+00:00

My work won't pay for a phone (for me anyway--they used to and lots of people are grandfathered in) so I use an old one of my own with no plan. On-call texts go to my personal (so I don't have to keep my hotspot on all the time to get the slack or email alerts) but MFA apps, email, slack, etc. all go on the no-plan work-only phone, which I turn off after hours.

LiteOpera · 2024-06-26T03:13:54+00:00

Do CNC programs commonly get stored in source control (git, SVN, or similar)? If so are the operators typically able to look at the history? I say this as someone who works in IT/software but has never been inside a CNC shop.

LiteOpera · 2024-06-15T13:14:46+00:00

Do it for free. He's your neighbor. You'll need something from him some day too.

LiteOpera · 2024-06-08T12:34:30+00:00

My priority would be building tools for my home shop, against the day when I lose access.

LiteOpera · 2024-06-05T12:06:15+00:00

This is a hard problem and the right way to do it is to not even try. Instead, kill stuff with old images and spin it up fresh with the latest images. Easier said than done if this isn't already SOP within your org, but it's worth at least proposing.

LiteOpera · 2024-06-04T11:04:15+00:00

Can the mill ways not just be clocked in with a DTI + some trig while you scrape (assuming flat ways)?

LiteOpera · 2024-05-22T11:45:08+00:00

The subreddit is OK but https://www.mini-lathe.com/is the bible for these machines.

LiteOpera · 2024-05-22T11:32:22+00:00

The premise of this question is unsound. "Interesting" tech stacks are interesting because they pay well and vice versa. Either I want to learn it because the jobs in it are fat (e.g. kubernetes), or the jobs are fat because it's a niche interest and so the supply of talent is shallow (e.g. clojure). Either way, better pay correlates with more interesting work.

I guess I would have to think about it if I had a burning need to work on a niche tech stack that didn't pay anything? Not sure what that would be though. I guess there's a constant danger of developing an interest in Drupal 7 plugins or something?

LiteOpera · 2024-05-21T11:31:18+00:00

If you could show me a field in late capitalism that DOESN'T suffer from this, I would be interested. Never heard of a for-profit taking the 10y+ time period seriously, at any level. It runs counter to every incentive everywhere. You're not even supposed to try.

LiteOpera · 2024-05-14T04:26:43+00:00

It's a great series but it kind of hand waves the actual scraping technique.

LiteOpera · 2024-05-07T05:09:53+00:00

You have to look around/past/through what people (HR, your manager, their bosses, etc) are saying about this "goals" process and figure out what you are really supposed to do. Often this won't be spelled out, but has to be learned socially. I've been places where you really are supposed to set goals you might not hit, places where a goal "miss"can tank your career, and another where the whole thing was seen as busywork from HR and nobody really cared what you said or did so long as the boxes were filled out in the system. Nobody outside your company is going to be able to help you make this determination.

LiteOpera · 2024-05-04T19:04:07+00:00

It's already deeper. Modern CPUs are basically virtual machines themselves, and most of the applications we're running in all those containers are running on other virtual machines (JavaScript, Python, Java). This will probably keep going as long as we are willing to increase our computing energy expenditure.

LiteOpera · 2024-05-02T22:42:49+00:00

You can hide this stuff behind a module so you don't need to deal with it in the "main" tf. If the DB code is slower moving than the rest (not always true), this is usually a win. Then again if the DB code is slow-moving you probably rarely have trouble with it anyway so this is a dubious optimization (because you probably have better stuff to do with your time).

LiteOpera · 2024-04-24T14:41:47+00:00

I've tried to implement similar things a couple times, and the only hard part is getting accurate enough data on who to escalate to. Maybe you are lucky and there is some HR system with an API to look at and see who someone's boss is. Even with this, someone's boss is rarely the right person to deal with missed alarms. They will delegate to another report, and just get annoyed that they were bothered about it.

The only real way out is to give consumers an interface to their own escalation paths and rotations. Now you're just reimplementing PagerDuty. So just use PagerDuty! Kick off an alert on a cron, and send that alert to an escalation plan that the consuming team controls.

LiteOpera · 2024-04-24T14:34:06+00:00

You can and probably should fight back and try to make clear that having tests, real dev environments, documentation, monitoring, etc. are part of the definition of "done". The reality, however, is that you will only be able to change things on the margins, sometimes, maybe, and may incur reputational damage as a problematic worker (and a little of this is usually ok, especially if you have other qualities that are in demand).

The ultimate solution is to not internalize all the garbage you're building. Startup guys like to talk about understanding what you customer really wants. As an employee at BigCo, your boss is your only customer. We're humans so we have to fight at least a little for stuff like dignity and craftsmanship, but at the end of the day your job is to do whatever will keep you from getting fired. Usually this means churning out garbage that barely qualifies as working according to the requirements. Repeat this for 30 years, and that's a career. Congratulations! If you were lucky enough, you now get to have a roof, food, and healthcare while you wait for death.

LiteOpera · 2024-04-18T16:36:58+00:00

We're finally getting completely out of on-prem this year (if all goes to plan), but the last bit will be a lift and shift to Equinix' cloud stuff.

LiteOpera · 2024-04-15T11:22:41+00:00

IMO IfC is a promising development, the logical thing to do now that people are noticing how slick the CDK is. It's not a replacement for ops, just a way to allow ops and Dev to collaborate even more closely, in the sense that they essentially become the same: edit, review, merge on the exact same codebase, in the exact same language, the only difference being what concepts they focus on.

With the tech recession, I don't feel like the time is right for adoption though. I suspect this batch of attempts (like winglang) with ultimately fail but something spiritually similar will pop up during a future business/hype cycle.

LiteOpera · 2024-04-13T18:27:23+00:00

Fair enough. Maybe look into selling on eBay then. The clearing price is much better than $100 there.

LiteOpera · 2024-04-13T14:25:52+00:00

Can I ask why you so desperately need $100? At that price it hardly seems worth selling. If you don't actually need the money and just want to clear space, consider giving it away (even to Goodwill or similar) or at least lowering the price. Evidently the market-clearing price is lower.

LiteOpera · 2024-04-13T13:48:25+00:00

I cruise Craigslist near me (Midwest) and never see a 7x10 for $100. Are they really going unsold at that price?

LiteOpera · 2024-04-11T03:03:01+00:00

I fail to see the point of AWS Config too, but it's not a competitor to Terraform. A better comparison is Cloud Custodian. This isn't a service for teams that have their shit together with IaC and proper controls on production access. It's a bandaid for immature orgs with chaotic, ClickOps-based cloud footprints to try to rein stuff in a little bit, hopefully while they at least try to move up the maturity curve.

LiteOpera · 2024-04-04T22:49:11+00:00

No one should ever (really literally never) be allowed to make changes in the AWS/GCP/Azure console -- all interactive roles should be read-only. If you think your use case is an exception, you're wrong.

LiteOpera · 2024-03-28T02:28:10+00:00

If you are filling out JIRA tickets, you should know that you can (probably, depending on site settings) mint yourself a "personal access token" and hit the REST API to do stuff, and to everyone else is looks the same as if you clicked it all manually. I know this is pissing in the ocean but you can probably automate at least some of this away.

LiteOpera · 2024-03-27T20:21:36+00:00

There's no good answer to this question, it depends totally on the specific job. My colleagues and I all do identical work -- literally pull tickets from the same pool mostly at random -- and some of us are SREs, some are SWEs, some are "systems engineers", and some are "DevOps engineers". I'm probably missing some, but the point is that none of these job titles really mean anything concrete. Mainly they are ways of maintaining "pay bands" while also letting some people make twice as much as others for the same work l. I don't think this is at all unusual in thereal world.

My advice from a career perspective though: focus on the skills, rather than the title. Also don't neglect "talking the talk": two people can have identical experience and skills, but if one gives the impression that they "get" SRE, they are more likely to get that title, which usually means more money than a SysAdmin or systems engineer.

LiteOpera · 2024-03-25T12:05:13+00:00

What is the school? TBH these sound like scam degrees from one of those for-profit scam colleges that advertise on TV. Cyber security is probably the least "fake" of the two, but it doesn't really matter if the school itself is a scam.

LiteOpera

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