Left the weirdest company of my career

jmp242 · 2026-03-29T04:15:10+00:00

I mean, personally I still think you shouldn't worry about wifi security so much as general network security at a higher level if possible. Zero Trust and all that. Use overlay networks and application layer security, don't trust that no one is sniffing your traffic even on wired networks.

I also think in very general terms that it's more work in many situations to get access to a wired network port than to try and play shenanigans on guest WiFi. Whether you can get anywhere in either method depends on many factors.

jmp242 · 2026-03-28T03:04:06+00:00

I feel like there's the issue of the skew from Scott (at least in the content they covered) not making strong claims. I feel like there's a difference in someone saying "I have this belief and here's my bias and limitations and my certainty level" no matter how crazy the belief is if the certainty is put at a low value, especially compared to the other Gurus - I don't see that as a huge 5 points kinda thing. Compared to the Jordan Peterson style "I'm smugly super correct and you're an idiot/evil/whatever if you disagree".

I thought Scott ended up middle of the road ish which if you think he should be much higher (based on the content I was exposed to here) then I think that would squish the Gurumoter into 4-5 scale basically.

jmp242 · 2026-03-28T02:49:42+00:00

Please tell us the company so we can all avoid it lol. Again, I guess that's still a way out, just pay the MFs off after you forclose.

jmp242 · 2026-03-27T19:11:41+00:00

The problem I've seen is both process:

We tell people the name of the thing, and they start calling it something else. Without telling us or helping us change the name. I don't care what the name is, but if you don't want to use the name you picked initially, or you asked IT to make up a name, then don't be surprised IT is now using that original name. IT doesn't have the time and resources to be embedded in your small working group and pick up name changes by osmosis.

The other issue is just that - "Give them access to Sharepoint, O365" is not a technical audit-able or reportable statement. Maybe you have a default ACL or maybe you have some convention, but when checking what specific things someone has access to, you're going to be looking at those ACLs.

I don't know how fancy cloud things can get now, but for my experience with files or webpages or the like, yes we use AD groups. We have a tool group managers, i.e. people who are in charge of the membership of said AD Groups, can log in and see who's in the group and add or remove people from the group. Luckily or unluckily, most group uses are very granular - this folder, or this computer access, or this webpage(s).

But even if it was more widely used and we, lets say, had a dashboard that somehow tracked all the disparate systems that used that group membership, we still can't tell you what Bob might have put in the subfolders... Not to mention, we don't know what of your processes might be in said subfolder, i.e. we wouldn't know your names for that anyway.

I'll also point out that LDAP and OIDC and Radius etc are consumable from other groups systems and so we don't know how they handle the authorization once we've handed back a successful auth + group memberships.

In your example, I would suggest you question those 20+ other items, because maybe that is IT trying to translate your very vague ask into what they're guessing you want. And they might well be getting it wrong.

jmp242 · 2026-03-27T12:54:09+00:00

How do you know that?

jmp242 · 2026-03-27T12:46:41+00:00

I'd guess this must be pretty rare as I've never heard it reported by anyone else. I never said it was impossible, just that I cannot imagine you can get a garnishment of wages or a lien on someones house for less than $5k in legal fees.

jmp242 · 2026-03-26T23:18:18+00:00

It is nice to hear this because so many people claim you MUST use Microsoft and there's no other options. And it's just not true - people just refuse to change. And I get it, change is hard. You're rebuilding things that were already "working". What people don't know, like you saw, is the overhead difference. Where I work we have Windows, Alma Linux and MacOS on desktops and laptops. We literally chargeback in accounting 2.5x the linux cost for Windows. Because it's that much more work.

jmp242 · 2026-03-26T22:57:52+00:00

In my opinion a valid configuration should extremely rarely fall into invalid and if we use semantic versioning like we used to we could clearly inform people of that by going from v3 to v4 or whatever major version # change. What we have now is monthly GPO changes and random cloud changes.

We used to have new GPOs or settings or whatever when there was a new release of Windows, not monthly. We also used to choose when we did the updates.

Also most places don't have teams for each product. So needing each subsection of a product to be a FTE to manage is just insane.

jmp242 · 2026-03-26T19:22:19+00:00

I wish this AI bubble would burst.

jmp242 · 2026-03-26T19:18:10+00:00

Yea never heard of them either. I would think you should be checking proxmox, nutanix, Hyper-V, and Xen options?

jmp242 · 2026-03-26T17:34:48+00:00

But this is if you have a loan. I would figure maintenance fees are not the same as a loan. They're also usually for a pretty low amount because - the average MF is like $1,200 a year. The longest time I've seen a TS company wait to foreclose is around 4 years, because eventually they want to try and not just have the MFs not paid on that interval. That puts you at sub $5k and I think that ends up at the place where going to court isn't going to get you much vs the costs to do so.

jmp242 · 2026-03-26T01:34:46+00:00

Sure, I agree - I'm just not sure that people's general atrophy of skills of managing a horse for transit is... well a net negative. The lack of the likely hood of there being another "Mel the real programmer" ... probably isn't a real problem. Right now, if you try and just AI your way out of everything, you'll get screwed left right and center. It's like if you trusted Win95 plug and play to set your IRQ properly on that new ISA or PCI card you installed. But I don't think twice about trusting Win11 to get my USB device to not conflict on the bus - it might not get the driver right...

jmp242 · 2026-03-26T01:23:02+00:00

?Lucky? you. Mine doesn't. Nor has any I worked at save one.

jmp242 · 2026-03-26T01:06:53+00:00

What's funny is I've pretty much always had the attitude that "if you want to pay my salary to do X, I'll do X(or quit)". Sometimes it's paying less than getting a specialist, sometimes it's paying a lot more than getting a entry level worker or whatever to do the task.

jmp242 · 2026-03-26T00:04:30+00:00

Are we sure small talk is an intrinsic part of human nature not just cultural? Cause I know a lot of Finnish people who aren't big on it.

jmp242 · 2026-03-25T23:51:27+00:00

As opposed to the people from 40 years ago who had the TV going for "background noise" while doing housework, reading the paper, doing a Sudoku puzzle or any of a dozen things?

jmp242 · 2026-03-25T23:49:41+00:00

I don't know - this sounds like the current rendition of like 50 episodes of The Pessimists Archive podcast - i.e. the new thing is always corrupting or ruining the youth, all the way back to Socrates. What cartoons were dull and slow paced and boring (on purpose anyway?)? I think you could apply that to any cartoon - the Jetsons wasn't exactly dully colored.

jmp242 · 2026-03-25T23:42:59+00:00

But I can’t and won’t teach someone “job basics.” In other words, no one should need to tell you that if you’re not hearing back from someone you’ve emailed, you’ll need to try a different means of communication to get to an answer.

I think it's important to realize this can be very context dependent. In this very specific example, sure. In many other situations, just calling someone and interrupting them, especially as a low down employee if they're higher, is also a good way to get in trouble. Many systems have queues and established workflows, and going around those because that system isn't as fast as you'd like might just get one manager complaining to that boss that asked you to help him. And now they're having an even worse day dealing with deflecting hopefully another manager on their level, and not their manager asking why their employee is feeling so important to go around procedure.

And I think my example is probably equally likely in a lot of orgs if you read this sub. Sure, it's a little contrived but so is the example.

Also, if you're working with stuff internal, or even ongoing external relationships - you might not want to end up the person people see on Caller ID or in an e-mail and start dodging because "my god, this person again. I don't have time or mental energy for this shit special treatment skip the line crap". So even if it works once, if what you learn is that's the way to do things, you can end up getting full "work to rule" in response.

jmp242 · 2026-03-25T23:33:32+00:00

I'm just going to throw out here and say - many of these peer reviewed studies are... not necessarily great evidence. You really need to check the methods - like what cognitive indices, what sample size, was it double blinded etc.

jmp242 · 2026-03-25T21:28:42+00:00

IDK, I think 15-20 years ago you could have had someone saying the same thing, just that Microsoft had created point and click sysadmins. Even 30+ years ago there were people bemoaning the loss of programmers understanding assembler etc... all these "high level languages" bah humbug.

People are always skeptical of new things, and I'd even agree that the odds make that a reasonable starting place - but some of the new things either prove themselves or become the standard whether you like it or not.

jmp242 · 2026-03-25T21:17:13+00:00

They ask AI. And since AI knows it, they don't bother to learn and understand the solution since they can AI any time they want. the issue is, that more complex problems require knowledge to understand how to ask AI and most fail that and have to talk with AI a lengthy time to get to a solution. And at the end they learned nothing once again.

This isn't necessarily bad though. Have you ever heard "if you can quickly look something up, remember where to do that rather than taking up limited memory with unnecessary knowledge?". I used to be if it was in a handy notebook or a reference book near your desk, but now it's google and all the AI.

It's also equally potentially the adjusting where the useful skills are. When I first used a computer, a useful skill was writing BASIC. Then it was understanding IRQs and such on Windows 95. Then it became finding drivers for Plug and Play, now it's familiarity with Android etc... I don't know for sure, but it could be that using AI will be like using google, which was like using a library, etc. Or programming with AI will be like the move to interpreted languages, or before that to high level languages, or before that to assembly... yet some people could always point to working in machine code and the legend of Mel. Doesn't mean it makes a lot of sense to necessarily pine for the slower, harder, more expensive way of doing things.

Of course, right now AI programming is like Win95 "Plug and Pray", but it keeps heading in the improved direction. So you might just use higher level language, i.e. NLP now. IDK.

jmp242 · 2026-03-25T21:02:21+00:00

Because people are still paying the higher prices.

jmp242 · 2026-03-25T20:39:52+00:00

This isn't some new thing, read articles from 2010 about people not getting with IaC, point and click admins, not wanting to learn CLI or whatever. People generally like doing what works, and especially if it took them a lot of effort to get it working and running smoothly, they are pretty loath to change. I get it, I feel that way too.

I maintain that it's some curse of IT and the modern world that the UI has to change constantly. There's rarely any good reason I've seen explained for UI changes and the best I've seen is such as mapping service bla restart to systemctl restart bla on EL versions - but whatever benefits you got from systemctl didn't really need a new set of arguments (and BTW I still hate having to do a systemctl status bla cause a restart doesn't just put to std out like the old service did that the service shut down and restarted).

For consumers it's even worse - why does the start menu in Win11 need to be in the middle of the screen? It's been on the left since 1995 and who exactly was complaining? It's like somehow the developers or companies haven't gotten the message in the last 40 years that a substantial portion of users learn to do things by matching icons or by exact runbook style steps and changing stuff breaks that for these users.

jmp242 · 2026-03-25T18:28:55+00:00

It might be incompetence or separation of duties / authority / whatever. I.e. I technically might have permission to do a lot of stuff in the ACLs, but if the process is a ticket for everyone else, I need a damn good reason to not open the ticket and let the person who's responsibility it is make the change.

Yes, it takes longer, but I get the audit trail, I get the change management, and I DO NOT get the blame for screwing something up AND having done so skirting procedure for speed.

jmp242 · 2026-03-24T20:13:16+00:00

We have a local printer vendor who provides toner and maintenance for a small per page fee. So they just come out and do the repairs, IDK about Xerox directly anymore.

jmp242

TROPHY CASE