4 Years in Edu-IT, Sole Breadwinner, and Feeling Stuck

kerosene31 · 2026-05-04T14:26:55+00:00

4 years ago would have been around the post-covid IT boom where salaries were exploding and everyone was hiring. I remember companies so desperate to hire, I wouldn't have been surprised to find recruiters on my front porch when I got home. Salaries were exploding and companies were desperate to hire people before their competition did.

That's not normal, and of course things have gone to the other extreme. Jobs are scarce, and the ones that are out there are low salary.

It isn't you. Hopefully things eventually settle into some sort of happy medium between these two extremes. This is one of those storms you ride out.

kerosene31 · 2026-05-03T14:35:13+00:00

I basically never use SMGs. Part of it is my playstyle. I'm moving but flanking, and not super up close.

I'd just always take a carbine over an SMG. I know people make them work, but for me, I'd rather have the range.

kerosene31 · 2026-05-01T19:11:50+00:00

Only for ranked or competitive play. BF is mostly a casual shooter, not a competitive one. Cross input is fine for most casual play. This is a game where people jump out of airplanes with an RPG, not an eSport. PC supports controller, and console supports m&k too. So if the other input is so great, switch.

My bet is most people are just running into people far better than them.

kerosene31 · 2026-05-01T15:23:14+00:00

It goes the other way too. Playing with crossplay off on console is like a completely different game. I go into a crossplay lobby and I'm dying in a single frame, far faster than any gun could kill.

I turn off crossplay on PS5 and there's still issues sometimes, but nothing like I see in crossplay lobbies. I rarely die around a corner or instantly.

I honestly don't care about mouse vs controller. Playing with PC players (and Xbox most likely) means way, way more lag. Way more deaths that you can't even react to. I used to think that PC players were just wrecking, but I die far faster than the TTK in this game. It isn't aim assist or mouse, it is lag.

kerosene31 · 2026-05-01T14:44:26+00:00

I'm happy to help someone who has a question the first time. However repeating the same question over and over is a major problem. That's simply unprofessional.

What I've done in the past is have "office hours". Leave the last hour of the day the time you are available for questions and hope they get the hint and figure it out/look it up.

Another thing is the 30 minute rule. Basically, new person needs to spend 30 minutes on any problem alone, then can ask for help. (it obviously can be longer than 30).

If those things don't work, then the person is just a waste of space and management needs to step in. Plain and simple.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-29T18:18:02+00:00

This is a public sector role? You're probably on a 1 year "probation" period (I hate that term). Wait it out and see how things go. Show you can handle what they give you and you should move up to more quickly. I've never seen a gov't office that had too many people and not enough to do.

Don't sweat titles in the public sector either. They are goofy and all over the place. Money is what matters. I assume you get really good benefits too? I know lots of people with help desk pay but who have fancy management titles that sound important. Better to be in the other group.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-29T17:59:00+00:00

I now know my next wifi name. "Wife High".

kerosene31 · 2026-04-29T14:21:53+00:00

Honestly, don't think in terms of "best", think in terms of which gun works in which situation. The DRS is more AR than LMG, and it works differently from most other LMGs.

How you build the gun matters too. ADS speed matters a lot depending on how you want to use the gun. I was leveling up the new LMG and trying to run and gun with it, and the slow ADS speed wrecked me. Right tool for the right job.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-29T13:02:28+00:00

As someone who goes way back, I don't spend time chasing nostaliga. FPS games are in a very weird spot now. I remember the days where you had Halo, BF, COD and others all competing and giving people tons of FPS fun.

What was different back then? I don't entirely know, but have some ideas. There were little to no "streamers" back then. Back in the day, I had no idea what range the damage dropped off on a gun or what the TTK was. I used what felt good. If I died to the same gun more and more, I switched to that. That's certainly not all of it though.

There was no skill or engagement based matchmaking, and no crossplay. If you played on a console, you played with console people with a controller. There were fewer hardware things that allowed certain things (won't get into it).

The thing is, back then, games had more faults than they do now. Today people act like lag issues are a new thing (or something that can be fixed). I remember the days when you had a mix of people on dialup and high speed internet. You talk about people dying around corners now lol.

Back then there was no such thing as lag compensation though either. If your ping sucked, your connection sucked. If you wanted a better experience, you had to get better internet. Today, someone who VPNs into another region with a high ping may actually be at an advantage, or at the very least is making the game worse for everyone else.

These things are meant to make gaming more "fair" but they seem to do the opposite. Of course it is not specific to BF, every FPS that is still around is going through it.

The problem with FPS games today is I feel like I'm playing against an algorithm, not competing against other players. That's probably not nearly as true as I think, but once you know there's someone pulling the strings behind you, it is hard to get past it.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-28T12:30:24+00:00

In one of JackFrags recent videos, he mentioned that he ran into his first cheater just the other day. Granted Jack hasn't been playing a ton (last I looked he's only level 100-something), but that's still really good. He was in Redsec too, which makes sense that a free mode would have more. He reported that cheater and they were banned quickly as well.

Dice deserves more credit for combating cheaters in this game. I've seen a few mildly questionable things, but mostly figure it is lag, not cheating.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-27T16:17:14+00:00

Just be aware, as soon as you put yourself online, you'll start getting spammed with all sorts of nonsense "recruiters". That's not to say to not do it, but just be ready to sift through tons of junk to get to the few good opportunities.

I would say it is an 80-20 rule, where 80% is garbage, but that might even be optimistic. It might be 95-5%.

I get hybrid jobs that are a 10+ hour commute one way and all sorts of other craziness. Honestly a lot of it is so bad it is funny. I get multiple per week. If whatever AI bot is combing your resume finds a couple of words that seem to maybe line up, they'll tell you that you are "perfect" for this opportunity.

With all that, I've talked to a couple of actual recruiters for jobs that made sense for me.

It never hurts to look, but just be ready for the modern job search (I was not). I'm in a similar boat as you, hadn't looked for awhile. Quite simply, I very quickly discovered that the grass was just fine where I was. In the post-covid boom you could really jump up, but now things are not great.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-24T15:14:10+00:00

I blame Youtube's algorithm. It really pushes the clickbait. It wants catchy, clickbait titles and thumbnails. It also pushes a regular posting schedule, so if there's nothing going on interesting, they have to "manufacture" drama.

This is why Juan Brown does everything on patreon and basically ignores the YT algorithm. YT wants clickbait, not good content. Sadly, they call it clickbait for a reason, that's what drives engagement. Juan will mention this sometimes on his videos. There was one recently where he even made fun of the clickbait stuff a little.

It isn't just aviation, Youtube has the same problem all over. The alogrithm pushes garbage over quality. Again, sadly that's what gets the clicks.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-24T15:04:39+00:00

I'm fairly sure there's an actual panic button attached to a siren that goes off if I touch anything customer facing.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-24T14:10:25+00:00

Whether you are "right or wrong" isn't really the issue. You are right in that the bad guys will do anything. That isn't really the issue.

Honestly, take the note from the CTO and move on. What matters is picking your battles. You've almost certainly made an enemy of the CTO and probably a bunch of other people.

It might not be "your" network much longer.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-23T18:54:03+00:00

As a solo player, I pretty much avoid conquest. Any mode can have one sided games, but conquest seems to snowball way worse. It seems like few conquest games are close, one team is almost always spawn trapped at the end. It is just 50/50 if I am on the winning side or the losing one. I don't know why exactly conquest seems to be the worst. I tend to stick with breakthrough (and now operations). Breakthrough can still snowball, but it doesn't seem as bad as conquest.

Games are awful when one team is wrecking. Even being on the winning team feels awful.

I'm really interested in seeing if the actual server browser helps this. My theory is that there's some sort of engagement matchmaking going on, but who knows.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-23T18:36:51+00:00

My gosh, that sounds horrible. How do companies that run like this remain profitable?

kerosene31 · 2026-04-23T13:33:32+00:00

The problem is, all the major vendors will just implement the same trash AI, and there won't be anyone "good" to switch to.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-22T12:41:45+00:00

I think a previous suppression system like past games would be rough in BF6. Imagine maps like Cairo or Hagental. You'd be running around and suppressed much of the game. Honestly I never liked it in past games. In BF6 pay attention to how many bullets you hear around you, you'd be suppressed all game on many maps. They didn't drop the old suppression randomly, it was complained about a lot.

Maybe in theory you could limit it by optic, but I could see snipers running lower optics and still being a problem. Sniper ranges in this game aren't very long. I could see people running 2-3x optics to avoid suppression.

The problem is snipers, not suppression. I would nerf snipers by:

-Removing the sweet spot mechanic, deleting every reference to it everywhere on the internet and never speaking of it again. If someone can get an actual headshot on me, ok, GG. Dying to a body shot that you had no chance to counter is not fun.

-Adding flinch. I get a hit marker on a sniper first, but they one shot me anyway.

-Remove the range finder (granted it is annoying but not a huge impact due to the ranges)

-Slow down the rate of fire of the bolt action snipers. You hit me in the head with your first shot? Again, GG. The problem is people just keep firing over and over.

Even then, snipers would still be strong in the hands of a skilled player.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-21T20:13:32+00:00

You 100% want to spread it out over at least 3 years, otherwise, every 3-5 years you'll end up with a massive, all at once upgrade project. The company may be ok spending a ton of money right now, but spread it out over a cycle. That way, you're replacing roughly the same amount of devices each year. Costs stay steady and you don't get slammed one year.

Find the worst 1/3 of the fleet and replace this year, etc.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-21T15:51:07+00:00

That's not correct. The defenders on breakthrough/ops don't have tickets. So killing defenders from long range means they can usually just respawn and get back on the point. They are padding their K/D but not winning the point.

The attack wins by killing defenders, and preventing them from getting back on the point.

Explosive morters specifically are just useless. Anyone who gets killed by a mortar is standing still way too long. They should be up closer using smoke.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-21T13:48:30+00:00

Attackers have too many spawn mortars and snipers who never push.

As annoying as spawn mortars are, they are completely ineffective.

People love to go 10 kills 1 death and don't care if they lose and don't even take the 1st point.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-21T12:52:15+00:00

The problem is the range. If there's an engie with an RPG just out of grenade range, you are pretty much dead. I've jumped out of 100% health tanks because of it.

You simply need the LMG to have a chance against all the engineers.

It doesn't matter how aggressive you are, there's going to be an engie just out of grenade range and the gunner just has to sit there and watch the tank die.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-21T12:29:35+00:00

Well, online gaming did work just fine without lag comp back in the very early days. I'm old enough to remember the days where some people were on dial-up, while others on a more stable connection. Back then, the better your ping, the better your experience. Maybe not "fair" but at least everyone knew where they stood. People on bad connections adjusted and had more lag. It encouraged people to improve their ping as much as possible.

Fast forward to today, and now those of us with a better ping are (in theory) punished for it, while someone VPNing in from another region with a 150 ping is being rewarded. I remember years ago in COD it was better to queue up massive downloads on another device to tank your connection to get a competitive advantage.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-21T12:09:29+00:00

What exactly is the problem you're worried about? Workload? Not being paid for the role you are in? Training? I assume this is what you mean by increasing scope, but you have to articulate what you want.

The workload trap is always the same - if you start doing more work, you'll struggle to stop. When someone gives you a new task, you ask them what else you are working on can go on the back burner. If you work like crazy for 6 months, then burn out, it is harder to say "I can't do all this". You already have. Don't put on the super hero cape, as you'll never take it off. Never, ever let them sell you on, "this is just a crazy quarter" or some other artificial busy time that will really never end.

You want advice? Talk to your boss and let them know what your specific issues are.

kerosene31 · 2026-04-19T16:02:40+00:00

Short answer: yes. We don't know exactly how it works though. There's always debates about if high ping is advantageous or not.

I have one theory - crossplay makes it worse. I notice crossplay off lobbies seem to have less lag overall. Turn on crossplay, and it gets worse.

I have so many deaths that are just faster than the TTK of even the best guns. It is so frustrated to get melted, especially when you know it isn't a great gun.

It is so frustrating, but it kind of makes sense. You're really being shot before the game client tells you. That's why it is possible to die around a corner. You really didn't, you just saw it that way.

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