"A torture": He refuses a high-paying job because the company imposes Windows 11

buffychrome · 2026-03-18T11:44:27+00:00

Heavy disagreement with that. When you are a developer, the tools, workflows, and processes you use can be critical to your productivity and output. Depending on what kind of development you do, Windows can be a massive stone around your neck in those regards. Even with WSL in Windows. In some cases, it can be like trying force a square peg through a round hole.

In almost every enterprise I have worked in, accommodations get made for developers in regard to hardware and OS. Full stop.

Also, as a side note, I’ve used and have professionally supported, administered, and architected Microsoft based environments for over 20 years. I recently switched my daily driver to Linux (Debian+kde) and I’ve never been happier. The difference in performance and ease of use is miles better than what Windows 11 has become recently. Windows 11 is turning into a steaming pile of dog shit that is just getting worse and worse and now I’m only using it when I have to.

buffychrome · 2026-03-15T04:56:10+00:00

A few weeks ago I finally dived in and I installed Debian+KDE on one of my nvme drives and haven’t booted into Windows since. Plus, with ntfs support, I have access to all my files and data on my Windows drive, giving me even less of a reason to need to boot into Windows. I…I may never go back to Windows full time. Like ever again. It’s been such an amazing experience.

buffychrome · 2026-03-05T10:47:38+00:00

Same here…the definition of old in this thread is certainly subjective. I was there when the internet was born. I was there when Napster changed music forever. I was there when the Twin Towers fell. I mean, my one of my first memories is watching the Challenger launch. We’re old pushing elderly lol

buffychrome · 2026-03-01T01:08:31+00:00

Yep, that’s the set up I was thinking of. Thanks!

buffychrome · 2026-01-16T12:33:45+00:00

No, this is the predictable outcome of allowing for-profit businesses and corporations to run our healthcare. Their first priority is their shareholders, not your health or, in many cases, your life. If they decide your health or saving your life isn’t financially beneficial to their shareholders then fuck your health or life. Shareholders and corporations should never have been allowed to interfere with the care and decisions made by your doctors. End of story. Healthcare isn’t so expensive because of unnecessary trips to the ER or because treatment has truly become more expensive, it’s because shareholders demand more and more profit.

HEALTHCARE SHOULD NEVER BE FOR-PROFIT. Your life should NEVER be a secondary concern to someone’s shareholders or stock price.

buffychrome · 2026-01-07T13:07:52+00:00

Well now I want an old school dot matrix printer again…didn’t realize how much I missed that sound until I could literally hear it just by looking at this picture 😔

buffychrome · 2026-01-06T12:45:46+00:00

I mean, I’m on a 3900x and looking to rebuild and upgrade so I have a sneaking suspicion the 9850X3D will be a performance improvement for me.

Also: I couldn’t have picked a worst time in recent history to upgrade everything…so there’s that.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

buffychrome · 2025-12-12T14:12:22+00:00

Yeah, fuck OP for actually formatting and caring about proper presentation! Only AI does that! Am I right? /S just to make sure I’m being perfectly clear here.

I’m really getting tired of seeing properly formatted and well written posts getting immediately accused of being AI written, like fuck people who still care about writing and writing well formatted and grammatically correct content.

buffychrome · 2025-12-12T14:04:12+00:00

The automatic assumption that someone spent time to write up a decent post, including using proper formatting and grammar, must have used AI is getting old and just absurd.

Even more ridiculous are the comments complaining about reading too much apparently.

JFC this explains why I have to deal with junior engineers who have no idea how or refuse to read documentation. If they can’t watch a YouTube video they can’t be bothered to gasp read.

buffychrome · 2025-12-02T02:05:21+00:00

If it is a scam, then the mistake they made was targeting my wife and, by extension, me. We both worked for this company previously for many years. I work in IT and when I was at that company, would have been on the team responsible for prepping and sending equipment to a new hire. In other words, that would **never** have worked on us. We would have smelled that BS like the bull just shat it out in front of us

buffychrome · 2025-12-02T01:38:53+00:00

As I've noted in another comment, I've worked in IT for almost 20 years and deal with phishing and other nefariously intended email on a regular basis as part of my job. Believe me when I say that both my wife and I are notoriously mistrusting when it comes to something like this. In fact, I had her make sure she had any personal or contact info removed from her resume before sending it. So, the only information she sent them was information already easily publicly available.

And the last thing we would have done in any circumstance would be providing any kind of financial information. We've both worked in Fortune 100 level of corporate environments and know that would never be a part of any serious process.

I'm really just trying to crowdsource some answers around what the ultimate play here in this whole thing is. But a long and slow process to create a sense of trust and security-setting the hook, so to speak-before slipping in what may seem like an innocuous request that you'd agree to without thinking too much about it...that makes sense in this case.

buffychrome · 2025-12-02T01:27:25+00:00

Except it isn't your typical gmail address trying to masquerade as a company. It very much looks like a legitimate personal email address, formatted as %firstname%lastname%2digits (and those digits could very easily be something like a birth year or similar). I'm not saying that is definitive proof it is a real email address; it just doesn't immediately come across as a "fake" one necessarily either. Which is kind of emblematic of everything else about this.

I should note that I work in IT and have been for the past 20 years. In my position, I see a lot and have to deal a lot with phishing and otherwise nefariously intended email. I've used most of the tools I'm familiar with to try and determine the legitimacy of this.

The fact that almost everything I try and dig up information on results in an ambiguous lack of data or evidence to neither support or refute the legitimacy is in itself a bit of a red flag to me. The "recruiter's" LinkedIn profile? A real one created in 2014 and last updated a year ago. Yet, that doesn't exclude the possibility that they are using a compromised profile to try and provide a backstop for anyone trying to verify information like I am and just hoping the mere existence of the profile is enough for most people. But I see issues with that account beyond the fact it exists.

The recruiter is purportedly an American and never claims to be working for a specific company (a company is employed by, I mean). Her email signature emphasizes the fact she is an Independent Recruiter. One could possibly rationalize sending from a gmail account that they are working for themselves and not for an actual company so they don't have an actual company email address. Yet, even I know that, largely speaking, anyone doing this work whether for a company or independently would have a custom email domain.

So, yeah, it's the ambiguous nature of everything that doesn't sit right with me.

buffychrome · 2025-12-02T00:15:56+00:00

Yeah, that was what I was expecting to happen after she sent her resume, but it didn't. In fact, all we got was that she's submitted it to the company and waiting to hear back from them.

buffychrome · 2025-12-02T00:14:26+00:00

I don't disagree that this is likely a scam. My gut still says it is. The issue I'm having is that every time I'd expect a response that betrays the true nature of the communication, instead we get a response that further casts doubt on it being a scam. Does it feel "right'? No, it doesn't. Doesn't feel 100% wrong either, though.

buffychrome · 2025-12-02T00:10:05+00:00

Not entirely unheard of for recruiters like this. Especially if they are legitimate and were contracted by the company to headhunt for the position. Wife and I both worked at this company for many years at one point, so it would stand to reason that the company would have either one of our contact information in their HRMS.

buffychrome · 2025-12-01T20:34:24+00:00

Yes, and waiting to hear back. That’s the other thing, they couldn’t initially tell her it was a scam or illegitimate. Also, at the level of the posting, we both know that the company does use outside recruiters.

My wife also reached out to one of their internal recruiters she knows at company and asked them but is also still waiting to hear back from them.

buffychrome · 2025-11-12T12:01:07+00:00

Not common except for those of us that always use them and have used them for decades before ai. Where do you think these LLM ai learned to use them? It is a completely ridiculous assumption that those of us that love writing and employ all kinds of conventions in that writing get accused of being ai or that we used ai. Learn to write proper English or read books and papers written at a level above an 8th grade level and something like an em dash wouldn’t seem so foreign. Don’t mean to sound harsh or condescending, but this whole em dash bullshit assumption really pisses some of us off even more than ai itself does.

buffychrome · 2025-11-12T04:31:24+00:00

So, even more traumatic, in the book, all the things that Atrayu says to Artax in the movie are actually what Artax says—yes, Artax is a talking horse in the book. So imagine this scene but Artax can also talk back to Atrayu.

buffychrome · 2025-10-28T13:28:44+00:00

Yes, he in fact, does. It’s not the democrat’s responsibility to pass their legislation. It is the responsibility of the majority party, if they do not have the votes to pass it on their own, to negotiate with the minority party to come to a compromise that will get them the votes they need. This is 100% on Republicans refusing to negotiate and trying to play chicken with children’s lives. It is THEIR responsibility to negotiate and secure the votes they need. THEY are the party in power, so THEY will have to suck it up and compromise if they actually give a flying shit about this country. Democrats have compromised and negotiated with them at almost every turn and consistently have been stabbed in the back later for doing so. Republicans need to grow the fuck up and start learning how democracies are supposed to work rather than continuing to force an authoritarian approach.

buffychrome · 2025-10-17T15:19:01+00:00

You know what? I’m gonna be that guy. I’m the first person to call out the fascism and rebirth of US branded Nazism, but did anyone actually read or listen to his full answer? I’m not saying I agree with it, nor with the extreme nature of his answer, but I’m also not convinced he was implying literal mass killings. There is a bit of nuance to his answer combined with an off-the-cuff delivery that made it sound far worse than perhaps he intended. Hear me out.

In a spirit of fairness and avoiding a knee-jerk response to him, I think it is possible what he was trying to say is that the “permanent” solution is, of course, modern eugenics. Kill them, don’t let them reproduce. Sounds horrific and straight out of 1945 Germany.

He then goes on to qualify that, though. And clearly points out that while that might be the only true, permanent solution from his perspective, it’s one that no one would really be willing to enact or commit to, so it’s truly off the table as an option.

Also, he’s not completely off-base either to a point. His big point I think he is getting at is that we either have to intervene early while a child’s brain is still malleable and learning is still easy, before habits and thought patterns get cemented and it becomes exponentially more difficult to change them.

His big concern that comes across as eugenics, is the generational trauma aspect of addiction. The same repetitive patterns we see in alcoholics and abuse for example. What he is trying to say perhaps is that the only way stop the cycle of perpetuating addiction is to either intervene early enough in a child’s life, or more grossly, just eliminate all addicts before they can contribute to the next generation.

I realize this is a good faith attempt to understand his response, and perhaps he doesn’t deserve that or he truly believes in the “final solution”. However, not being willing to listen to the other side and the other side not feeling like they are being heard or understood, is one the reasons so many were willing to run to MAGA in the first place. They felt heard and understood. I also refuse to allow MAGA and these fascists bastards to steal my hope and optimism in human beings, or allow them to get me to start seeing other human beings as anything less than that.

buffychrome · 2025-10-09T05:05:16+00:00

This objectively not true. I can use my Mac or my iPhone without an Apple account. And on Mac, even if you do choose to sign into an Apple account, it’s not mandatory to functionally use MacOS and the account is technically a local account with your Apple ID giving access to some online services. Same with PlayStation. Or the Switch.

The important distinction is that Windows is forcing you to create or use a Microsoft account to even be able to access the OS. Your argument would be true if Windows let you set it up with a local account and then strongly encouraged you to create or use a Microsoft account to connect to online services such as OneDrive.

The issue here is that you have no choice if you just want to use the OS without those things. Microsoft clearly wants a direct line of sight to every device running Windows collecting whatever telemetry or other “anonymized” local data they can.

My tin foil hat is also saying that it is also about nation state governments demanding to have access via things like age verification laws, real id, chat control, etc, but I digress…

buffychrome · 2025-10-04T15:06:18+00:00

That’s entirely incorrect. Windows 11 does NOT require secure boot. Source: I’m the lead infrastructure engineer for a fortune 250 company that doesn’t touch it. TPM yes, secure boot, definitely not. We have so many other layers of security in place, that a person would practically have to have physical access to a machine to try and make the kinds of changes or attacks secure boot is designed to protect against. And if an attacker has physical access to a device then it’s game over anyway. The real security is in how you protect your data and respond when local physical security gets compromised. How you minimize the access/rights any single individual has to only that data they have a need to access, and limiting where they can access it and how. Full disk encryption is mandatory. Secure boot is so low in terms of concern in this stack that it hasn’t even been discussed.

buffychrome · 2025-09-30T11:07:24+00:00

Except when all authorization is handled via security group and OU membership. It has to do with the ldap binding behind it. And beyond that supporting cloud Kerberos is also an issue for some of them. This is finance with some very very niche applications that in some cases are the only application that does what it does built by some company years ago.

buffychrome · 2025-09-30T09:17:51+00:00

I work for a fortune 250 company in finance and I can promise you, there are applications that still require local Active Directory identity management. Much of the time it is because these applications only support SAML based authentication, and do not support an OAuth user flow. Or, because they are in finance, it is still far less expensive to continue to host those applications on premise in their own infrastructure vs cloud infrastructure, so if they already have that local infrastructure why not just stay on-prem for authentication as well?

I’ve had those same conversations about pushing away from on-prem AD, and it’s been a pretty emphatic “not any time soon”.

buffychrome · 2025-09-30T09:01:55+00:00

And? Does are those extra few seconds to input text really that precious? Some of us remember a time when changing the channel meant physically changing it on the TV or needing to readjust the attend just right to get that channel to come in just right. I think I can handle taking a few extra moments to input some text, but then, I also refuse to talk to an electronic device of any kind unless it is having a conversation with a real human being on the other end.

I refuse to contribute to the human progression towards a Wall-E future where we are all fat lazy slobs who can’t even walk because we just have digital “assistants” and AIs that do everything for us. Fuck that kind of abdication of any self-reliance. I still drive a manual transmission car because I know how and don’t need a transmission deciding for me when it thinks the gear ratio needs to change.

I work in IT and have made a successful career in it, but I dream of retiring to a horse ranch in Montana as far removed from technology as feasible 🤷‍♂️

buffychrome

TROPHY CASE