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!rant
After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:
1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.
2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)
3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.
4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.
5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.
6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.
7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.
8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.
9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)
10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...
These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!219 -
*Now that's what I call a Hacker*
MOTHER OF ALL AUTOMATIONS
This seems a long post. but you will definitely +1 the post after reading this.
xxx: OK, so, our build engineer has left for another company. The dude was literally living inside the terminal. You know, that type of a guy who loves Vim, creates diagrams in Dot and writes wiki-posts in Markdown... If something - anything - requires more than 90 seconds of his time, he writes a script to automate that.
xxx: So we're sitting here, looking through his, uhm, "legacy"
xxx: You're gonna love this
xxx: smack-my-bitch-up.sh - sends a text message "late at work" to his wife (apparently). Automatically picks reasons from an array of strings, randomly. Runs inside a cron-job. The job fires if there are active SSH-sessions on the server after 9pm with his login.
xxx: kumar-asshole.sh - scans the inbox for emails from "Kumar" (a DBA at our clients). Looks for keywords like "help", "trouble", "sorry" etc. If keywords are found - the script SSHes into the clients server and rolls back the staging database to the latest backup. Then sends a reply "no worries mate, be careful next time".
xxx: hangover.sh - another cron-job that is set to specific dates. Sends automated emails like "not feeling well/gonna work from home" etc. Adds a random "reason" from another predefined array of strings. Fires if there are no interactive sessions on the server at 8:45am.
xxx: (and the oscar goes to) fuckingcoffee.sh - this one waits exactly 17 seconds (!), then opens an SSH session to our coffee-machine (we had no frikin idea the coffee machine is on the network, runs linux and has SSHD up and running) and sends some weird gibberish to it. Looks binary. Turns out this thing starts brewing a mid-sized half-caf latte and waits another 24 (!) seconds before pouring it into a cup. The timing is exactly how long it takes to walk to the machine from the dudes desk.
xxx: holy sh*t I'm keeping those
Credit: http://bit.ly/1jcTuTT
The bash scripts weren't bogus, you can find his scripts on the this github URL:
https://github.com/narkoz/...52 -
What it's like to be a network engineer...translated into normal people speak
User: I think we are having a major road issue.
Me: What? No, I just checked, the roads are fine. I was actually just on the roads.
User: No, I’m pretty sure the roads are down because I’m not getting pizzas.
Me: Everything else on the roads is fine. What do you mean you aren’t getting pizzas?
User: I used to get pizzas when I ordered them, now I’m not getting them. It has to be a road issue.
Me: As I said, the roads are fine. Where are you getting pizzas from?
User: I’m not really sure. Can you check all places that deliver pizzas?
Me: No I don’t even know all the places that deliver pizza. You need to narrow it down.
User: I think it is Subway.
Me: Okay, I’ll check…No, I just looked and Subway doesn't deliver pizzas.
User: I’m pretty sure it is Subway. Can you just allow all food from Subway and we can see if pizza shows up?
Me: Sigh, fine I’ve allowed all food from Subway, but I don’t think that is the issue.
User: Yeah I’m still not getting pizza. Can you check the roads?
Me: It’s not the roads, the roads are fine. I’m pretty sure Subway isn’t the place.
User: Okay, I found it. It’s Papa Johns.
Me: Okay, I looked and Papa Johns does deliver pizza. Is it the local Papa Johns or one in a different town?
User: I don’t know. Can you allow pizza from all Papa Johns to me?
Me: No I can’t do that. Can you get me an address for Papa Johns?
User: No, I only know it as Papa Johns. Can you get me all the addresses of all Papa Johns and I’ll tell you if one of them is correct?
Me: No, I don’t have time for that. Okay, I looked at the local one and it looks like they have sent you pizza in the past and they are currently allowed to send you pizzas. Try ordering a pizza while I watch.
User: Yeah still no pizza. I’m guessing they are getting blocked at the freeway. Can you check the freeway to make sure they can get through?
Me: No, this is a local delivery. They aren't even using the freeway.
User: Okay, well then it has to be a road issue.
Me: No, the roads are fine. Okay, I just drove from the Papa Johns to the address they have on file for you and there is nothing there.
User: Hmm, wait we did move recently.
Me: Did you give your new address to Papa Johns?
User: No, I just thought they would be able to look me up by name.
Me: No they need your new address. What’s your new address?
User: I’m not really sure. Can you look it up?
Me: Sigh, give me a second…Okay, I found your address and gave it to Papa Johns. Try ordering a pizza now.
User: HEY! PIZZA JUST SHOWED UP!
Me: Okay, good.
User: (To everyone else they know) I apologize for the delay in the pizza but there was a major road issue that was preventing the pizza from getting to me. The network engineer has fixed the roads and we are able to get pizza again.
Me: But it wasn’t the roads…whatever.
User: Oh, can you also check on an issue where Chinese food isn’t getting to me? I think it may be a road issue47 -
Got this from a recruiter:
We are looking for a **Senior Android Developer/Lead** at Philadelphia PA
Hiring Mode: Contract
Must have skills:
· 10-12 years mobile experience in developing Android applications
· Solid understanding of Android SDK on frameworks such as: UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation, Network Programming, etc.
· Good Knowledge on REST Ful API and JSON Parsing
· Good knowledge on multi-threaded environment and grand central dispatch
· Advanced object-oriented programming and knowledge of design patterns
· Ability to write clean, well-documented, object-oriented code
· Ability to work independently
· Experience with Agile Driven Development
· Up to date with the latest mobile technology and development trends
· Passion for software development- embracing every challenge with a drive to solve it
· Engaging communication skills
My response:
I am terribly sorry but I am completely not interested in working for anyone who might think that this is a job description for an Android engineer.
1. Android was released in September 2008 so finding anyone with 10 years experience now would have to be a Google engineer.
2. UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation are all iOS frameworks
3. Grand Central Dispatch is an iOS mechanism for multithreading and is not in Android
4. There are JSON parsing frameworks, no one does that by hand anymore
Please delete me from your emailing list.49 -
Soms week ago a client came to me with the request to restructure the nameservers for his hosting company. Due to the requirements, I soon realised none of the existing DNS servers would be a perfect fit. Me, being a PHP programmer with some decent general linux/server skills decided to do what I do best: write a small nameservers which could execute the zone transfers... in PHP. I proposed the plan to the client and explained to him how this was going to solve all of his problems. He agreed and started worked.
After a few week of reading a dozen RFC documents on the DNS protocol I wrote a DNS library capable of reading/writing the master file format and reading/writing the binary wire format (we needed this anyway, we had some more projects where PHP did not provide is with enough control over the DNS queries). In short, I wrote a decent DNS resolver.
Another two weeks I was working on the actual DNS server which would handle the NOTIFY queries and execute the zone transfers (AXFR queries). I used the pthreads extension to make the server behave like an actual server which can handle multiple request at once. It took some time (in my opinion the pthreads extension is not extremely well documented and a lot of its behavior has to be detected through trail and error, or, reading the C source code. However, it still is a pretty decent extension.)
Yesterday, while debugging some last issues, the DNS server written in PHP received its first NOTIFY about a changed DNS zone. It executed the zone transfer and updated the real database of the actual primary DNS server. I was extremely euphoric and I began to realise what I wrote in the weeks before. I shared the good news the client and with some other people (a network engineer, a server administrator, a junior programmer, etc.). None of which really seemed to understand what I did. The most positive response was: "So, you can execute a zone transfer?", in a kind of condescending way.
This was one of those moments I realised again, most of the people, even those who are fairly technical, will never understand what we programmers do. My euphoric moment soon became a moment of loneliness...21 -
A completely normal workday.
Until suddenly... the Internet was gone. Like completely gone.
Out of nowhere the head of network administration appears right beside me, yelling completely over-pitched straight into my ear "WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY ALL SERVICES ARE OFFLINE? WTF HAPPENED TO THE CONNECTION?..."
He disappeared as fast as he had arrived. With my ears still bleeding I got myself a cappuccino.
Several hours later the Internet was back. At the construction site infront of the headquarter the Internet cable was cut.
Wait. What about a second backup cable? It exists. Unfortunately both cables split only after the construction site.
You had one job anonymous engineer...1 -
Overheard a phone call between the Senior Network Engineer and a contracted Printer-company at 9am this morning. Photocopier was giving a 'functional error' message on-screen and not printing;
N.E:
I logged this call last
Thursday afternoon. Thats 1.5 days of the photocopier not working on our busiest site! Where's the engineer??
.... yes, that's the error message.
Yes, i can log into it, you should have the IP address from the call.
Yes, it's obviously pinging too.
Yes.... we've power-cycled the printer multiple times...
yes, tried that too...
yes, I've unplugged the network cable as well... left it for 15 minutes.
... sorry. What?
What did you say?
Are you f***ing kidding me?
Would you also like me to rub the side of the f***ing machine, and say a prayer while I'm at it??
*takes a deep breath*
Fine, I'll do that but when it doesn't work, i want someone out on the site before lunchtime today!
*slams phone down angrily*
N.E to me as he stomps out of the office;
He wants me to get the user to unplug the network cable and do a power cycle. How the f**k is that going to help? Idiots! Don't know why we have a contract with them, i could do a better job!!!
*comes back into office 5 minutes later*
Me: did it fix it?
NE: yeah. Damn.
*leaves room again to make apologetic phonecall*2 -
Worst interview is the one that actually got me where I am today.
Its been 15 years ago, but I remember very well. Since it was a startup back then they didn't really have any job titles yet or what so ever. I applied for the role of network engineer, heck I didn't care I needed a paycheck.
5 minutes into the interview the smalltalk left the room and they started asking me questions, mainly about me as a person. Eventually it was my turn. After my first question I facepalmed so hard.. Do you guys have any SLA or documentation around here? Heard of ITIL? How is your load balancing?
They stared at me as if I was some kind of alien that had just invaded their little safe planet.. it was hilarious.
An hour later they called me to come back in and sign a contract.. from there on I kind of multi tasked my way around the first year.. bit of network support & design, customer support, sending and packaging orders after 5PM.. god we had long but awesome days.. hence, we were just the 5 of us. Nowadays we've got 150 developers out of 1019 total staff currently.. We also improved interview questions and processes ;)7 -
Here are the reasons why I don't like IPv6.
Now I'll be honest, I hate IPv6 with all my heart. So I'm not supporting it until inevitably it becomes the de facto standard of the internet. In home networks on the other hand.. huehue...
The main reason why I hate it is because it looks in every way overengineered. Or rather, poorly engineered. IPv4 has 32 bits worth, which translates to about 4 billion addresses. IPv6 on the other hand has 128 bits worth of addresses.. which translates to.. some obscenely huge number that I don't even want to start translating.
That's the problem. It's too big. Anyone who's worked on the internet for any amount of time knows that the internet on this planet will likely not exceed an amount of machines equal to about 1 or 2 extra bits (8.5B and 17.1B respectively). Now of course 33 or 34 bits in total is unwieldy, it doesn't go well with electronics. From 32 you essentially have to go up to 64 straight away. That's why 64-bit processors are.. well, 64 bits. The memory grew larger than the 4GB that a 32-bit processor could support, so that's what happened.
The internet could've grown that way too. Heck it probably could've become 64 bits in total of which 34 are assigned to the internet and the remaining bits are for whatever purposes large IP consumers would like to use the remainder for.
Whoever designed IPv6 however.. nope! Let's give everyone a /64 range, and give them quite literally an IP pool far, FAR larger than the entire current internet. What's the fucking point!?
The IPv6 standard is far larger than it should've been. It should've been 64 bits instead of 128, and it should've been separated differently. What were they thinking? A bazillion colonized planets' internetworks that would join the main internet as well? Yeah that's clearly something that the internet will develop into. The internet which is effectively just a big network that everyone leases and controls a little bit of. Just like a home network but scaled up. Imagine or even just look at the engineering challenges that interplanetary communications present. That is not going to be feasible for connecting multiple planets' internets. You can engineer however you want but you can't engineer around the hard limit of light speed. Besides, are our satellites internet-connected? Well yes but try using one. And those whizz only a couple of km above sea level. The latency involved makes it barely usable. Imagine communicating to the ISS, the moon or Mars. That is not going to happen at an internet scale. Not even close. And those are only the closest celestial objects out there.
So why was IPv6 engineered with hundreds of years of development and likely at least a stage 4 civilization in mind? No idea. Future-proofing or poor engineering? I honestly don't know. But as a stage 0 or maybe stage 1 person, I don't think that I or civilization for that matter is ready for a 128-bit internet. And we aren't even close to needing so many bits.
Going back to 64-bit processors and memory. We've passed 32 bit address width about a decade ago. But even now, we're only at about twice that size on average. We're not even close to saturating 64-bit address width, and that will likely take at least a few hundred years as well. I'd say that's more than sufficient. The internet should've really become a 64-bit internet too.34 -
Although im more of network engineer than a developer, I feel safe and welcomed here. I swear im not a spy!11
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I've been away, lurking at the shadows (aka too lazy to actually log in) but a post from a new member intrigued me; this is dedicated to @devAstated . It is erratic, and VERY boring.
When I resigned from the Navy, I got a flood of questions from EVERY direction, from the lower rank personnel and the higher ups (for some reason, the higher-ups were very interested on what the resignation procedure was...). A very common question was, of course, why I resigned. This requires a bit of explaining (I'll be quick, I promise):
In my country, being in the Navy (or any public sector) means you have a VERY stable job position; you can't be fired unless you do a colossal fuck-up. Reduced to non-existent productivity? No problem. This was one of the reasons for my resignation, actually.
However, this is also used as a deterrent to keep you in, this fear of lack of stability and certainty. And this is the reason why so many asked me why I left, and what was I going to do, how was I going to be sure about my job security.
I have a simple system. It can be abused, but if you are careful, it may do you and your sanity good.
It all begins with your worth, as an employee (I assume you want to go this way, for now). Your worth is determined by the supply of your produced work, versus the demand for it. I work as a network and security engineer. While network engineers are somewhat more common, security engineers are kind of a rarity, and the "network AND security engineer" thing combined those two paths. This makes the supply of my work (network and security work from the same employee) quite limited, but the demand, to my surprise, is actually high.
Of course, this is not something easy to achieve, to be in the superior bargaining position - usually it requires great effort and many, many sleepless nights. Anyway....
Finding a field that has more demand than there is supply is just one part of the equation. You must also keep up with everything (especially with the tech industry, that changes with every second). The same rules apply when deciding on how to develop your skills: develop skills that are in short supply, but high demand. Usually, such skills tend to be very difficult to learn and master, hence the short supply.
You probably got asleep by now.... WAKE UP THIS IS IMPORTANT!
Now, to job security: if you produce, say, 1000$ of work, then know this:
YOU WILL BE PAID LESS THAN THAT. That is how the company makes profit. However, to maximize YOUR profit, and to have a measure of job security, you have to make sure that the value of your produced work is high. This is done by:
- Producing more work by working harder (hard method)
- Producing more work by working smarter (smart method)
- Making your work more valuable by acquiring high demand - low supply skills (economics method)
The hard method is the simplest, but also the most precarious - I'd advise the other two. Now, if you manage to produce, say, 3000$ worth of work, you can demand for 2000$ (numbers are random).
And here is the thing: any serious company wants employees that produce much more than they cost. The company will strive to pay them with as low a salary as it can get away with - after all, a company seeks to maximize its profit. However, if you have high demand - low supply skills, which means that you are more expensive to be replaced than you are to be paid, then guess what? You have unlocked god mode: the company needs you more than you need the company. Don't get me wrong: this is not an excuse to be unprofessional or unreasonable. However, you can look your boss in the eye. Believe me, most people out there can't.
Even if your company fails, an employee with valuable skills that brings profit tends to be snatched very quickly. If a company fires profitable employees, unless it hires more profitable employees to replace them, it has entered the spiral of death and will go bankrupt with mathematical certainty. Also, said fired employees tend to be absorbed quickly; after all, they bring profit, and companies are all about making the most profit.
It was a long post, and somewhat incoherent - the coffee buzz is almost gone, and the coffee crash is almost upon me. I'd like to hear the insight of the veterans; I estimate that it will be beneficial for the people that start out in this industry.3 -
It has been bugging the shit out of me lately... the sheer number of shit-tier "programmers" that have been climbing out of the woodwork the last few years.
I'm not trying to come across as elitist or "holier than thou", but it's getting ridiculous and annoying. Even on here, you have people who "only do frontend development" or some other lame ass shit-stain of an excuse.
When I first started learning programming (PHP was my first language), it wasn't because I wanted to be a programmer. I used to be a member (my account is still there, in fact) of "HackThisSite", back when I was about 12 years old. After hanging out long enough, I got the hint that the best hackers are, in essence, programmers.
Want to learn how to do SQL injection? Learn SQL - write a program that uses an SQL database, and ask yourself how you would exploit your own software.
Want to reverse engineer the network protocol of some proprietary software? Learn TCP/IP - write a TCP/IP packet filter.
Back then, a programmer and a hacker were very much one in the same. Nowadays, some kid can download Python, write a "hello, world" program and they're halfway to freelancing or whatever.
It's rare to find a programmer - a REAL programmer, one who knows how the systems he develops for better than the back of his hand.
These days, I find people want the instant gratification that these simpler languages provide. You don't need to understand how virtual memory works, hell many people don't even really understand C/C++ pointers - and that's BASIC SHIT right there.
Put another way, would you want to take your car to a brake mechanic that doesn't understand how brakes work? I sure as hell wouldn't.
Watching these "programmers" out there who don't have a fucking clue how the code they write does what it does, is like watching a grown man walk around with a kid's toolbox full or plastic toys calling himself a mechanic. (I like cars, ok?!)
*sigh*
Python, AngularJS, Bootstrap, etc. They're all tools and they have their merits. But god fucking dammit, they're not the ONLY damn tools that matter. Stop making excuses *not* to learn something, Mr."IOnlyDoFrontEnd".
Coding ain't Lego's, fuckers.35 -
TLDR: There’s truth in the motto “fake it till you make it”
Once upon a time in January 2018 I began work as a part time sysadmin intern for a small financial firm in the rural US. This company is family owned, and the family doesn’t understand or invest in the technology their business is built on. I’m hired on because of my minor background in Cisco networking and Mac repair/administration.
I was the only staff member with vendor certifications and any background in networking / systems administration / computer hardware. There is an overtaxed web developer doing sysadmin/desktop support work and hating it.
I quickly take that part of his job and become the “if it has electricity it’s his job to fix it” guy. I troubleshoot Exchange server and Active Directory problems, configure cloudhosted web servers and DNS records, change lightbulbs and reboot printers in the office.
After realizing that I’m not an intern but actually just a cheap sysadmin I began looking for work that pays appropriately and is full time. I also change my email signature to say “Company Name: Network Administrator”
A few weeks later the “HR” department (we have 30 employees, it’s more like “The accountant who checks hiring paperwork”) sends out an email saying that certain ‘key’ departments have no coverage at inappropriate times. I don’t connect the dots.
Two days later I receive a testy email from one of the owners telling me that she is unhappy with my lack of time spent in the office. That as the Network Administrator I have responsibilities, and I need to be available for her and others 8-5 when problems need troubleshooting. Her son is my “boss” who is rarely in the office and has almost no technical acumen. He neglected to inform her that I’m a part time employee.
I arrange a meeting in which I propose that I be hired on full time as the Network Administrator to alleviate their problems. They agree but wildly underpay me. I continue searching for work but now my resume says Network Administrator.
Two weeks ago I accepted a job offer for double my current salary at a local software development firm as a junior automation engineer. They said they hired me on with so little experience specifically because of my networking background, which their ops dept is weak in. I highlighted my 6 months experience as Network Administrator during my interviews.
My take away: Perception matters more than reality. If you start acting like something, people will treat you like that.2 -
Dad: God I hate Windows!
Me: Why? You know you can just run the getmac command in CMD, right?
Dad: What? There is a command for that?
Needless to say, my dad is not a network engineer...1 -
My old job was almost perfect. I was a systems engineer for a research network. My duties were to configure, build, install, secure, manage and repair Linux hosts used for research on projects so advanced/cutting edge that I could spend days just listening to researchers explaining them and I honestly loved it! I understood less than half of the projects but just seeing how motivated and excited the researchers are made the job my favourite. Unfortunately I had to leave and get a job closer to my house because having a 2 hour (one way) commute for two years was killing me :-/ relocation wasn't an option and still isn't but I'd be lying to myself if I tried to say I wouldn't go back as soon as I could.2
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My 82 year old mother’s follow up question to family member who said her son was a moving to Atlanta, GA to be a Network Engineer.
Oh like CNN?
When she was kid her family owned a crank phone.1 -
Something is really fucking wrong with people in my company. They fucking calling me after 5PM on Friday when the server is down. What part of my role you fuckers don't understand. I'm not a Network Engineer and I don't have fucking access to the fucking server.
Call the fucking Network Engineer. If his not picking up his phone then that's his fucking problem not mine.
(Bang the Table) Fuck this shit4 -
Just got accepted as a volunteer (teacher assistant) in a non-profit organization, funded by Microsoft.
They teach high school students CS twice a week.
I know it might not be much, because I will not be payed, but I will be trained and teach alongside Google and Microsoft engineers.
The organization is called TEALS.
I hope it is a good experience and build a good network.
I do not have any friends, nor any engineer friend since I moved in USA, so I think this is a good opportunity.
P.S. Please for the love of god do not bash here Microsoft. Everyone, even the people who rant about hating Microsoft, will accept a job there if they got the chance. So please stop the hypocrisy if you intend to do some "sarcastic" comment about this organization funded by Microsoft.9 -
Devils Advocate moment: A proper PM can assist greatly on projects.
Don't get me wrong, you have all for the most part been faced with the incompetence of glorified quasi manager positions. But a proper PM can be a gift really.
I absolutely despise generalizations, I do get that percentages matter, but shitting on professions when the realm of possibilities have yet to be touched to the full extend of capabilities seems like child's play really.
remember, y'all think you are all God's gift to the world through coding experience, but a solid network engineer might have as much gripes about developers as y'all do about managers, project managers, sys admins etc, and the same shit can be applied vice versa.
Software engineering is magic, in the sense of the tv show "The Magicians" where you can make an incantation and suddenly your penis/tiddys explode: inexact science.
Be a tad bit open minded, learn enough about their shit to tell them that they are fucktards, and run from the ones that know but don't fix shit.
Peace pendejos1 -
So I've created this account specifically for this rant. I usually just browse anonymously.
I've recently been hired in a big company that is one of the biggest Microsoft users in the world and my essentially revolves on making it easier for our collaborators to work with SharePoint (and other ms software)
Never in my life have I hit that much of a roadblock. So for the past week I've been trying to integrate what Ms calls webparts. And to modify the default webparts Ms provides you need to their properties (or Metadata). Except here's the big problem these are NOT documented anywhere (unless I failed to find it, if you do know where it is documented please HMU), so I've found myself trying to reverse engineer the js scripts that are served with SharePoint to figure out what the webpart properties are called and what type of data they are! I've been going through endless github repos using the CSOM nuget package (it's the library everyone uses to interact with SharePoint) and I finally found out about this other library called PnP which is a wrapper around CSOM that makes it easier to use. That wrapper has a way for me to load existing page and look at the properties of existing webparts. So here I thought it was the end of my suffering and I could finally get an idea of what it should be. Turns out this method doesn't work because one of the dependencies it has has had breaking changes and they still updated it even though it breaks their code! So for the past two days I've been trying random combinations of key values with different data types and json serialization methods.
Oh and yeah I've also looked at all the http calls via the chrome network tab, the metadata is not served as an individual file but is computed by Ms servers when they're serving you their html files.
So uh yeah run from CSOM if you can..3 -
Back when I started my career (12 months ago lol), I was in IT support. Having to deal with people who have hard times locating and reading off a sticker, let alone telling me their IP adress, only to realize it's the whole store that's offline, not only their PC (gosh do they ever talk with each other). So I decided to code a small tool that shows your hostname and IP adress, and pings the router, firewall and Google DNS. Aaand just in case the number for the IT hotline. Plan was that we could just tell them to double-click on that one icon on their desktop and read out what it says. We deployed it and I was happily waiting for it's time to shine (still a trainee I was also kinda proud of it), but when the network engineer found out, he wasn't happy about it at all. He was afraid too many people would open that new tool without us telling them to do so and/or forget to close it, producing a number of pings to the router, firewall and google. He went on about Google maybe blocking our IP if we produce too many pings and so on.
In my opinion he was kinda overreacting, but he wasn't that wrong and is a nice guy and responsible for our network, so we recalled the tool and never actually used it.2 -
Im a network engineer just started to learn programing the past few weeks. I learnt more regarding programing from devRant than any ebooks.2
-
Sooooo ok ok. Started my graduate program in August and thus far I have been having to handle it with working as a manager, missing 2 staff member positions at work, as well as dealing with other personal items in my life. It has been exhausting beyond belief and I would not really recommend it for people working full time always on call jobs with a family, like at a..
But one thing that keeps my hopes up is the amount of great knowledge that the professors pass to us through their lectures. Sometimes I would get upset at how highly theoretical the items are, I was expecting to see tons of code in one of the major languages used in A.I(my graduate program has a focus in AI, that is my concentration) and was really disappointed at not seeing more code really. But getting the high level overview of the concepts has been really helpful in forcing me to do extra research in order to reconnect with some of the items that I had never thought of before.
If you follow, for example, different articles or online tutorials representing doing something simple like generating a simple neural network, it sometimes escapes our mind how some of the internal concepts of the activity in question are generated, how and why and the mathematical notions that led researchers reach the conclusions they did. As developers, we are sometimes used to just not caring about how sometimes a thing would work, just as long as it works "we will get back to this later" is a common thing in most tutorials, such as when I started with Java "don't worry about what public static main means, just write it up for now, oh and don't worry about what System.out.println() is, just know that its used to output something into bla bla bla" <---- shit like that is too common and it does not escape ML tutorials.
Its hard man, to focus on understanding the inner details of such a massive field all the time, but truly worth it. And if you do find yourself considering the need for higher education or not, well its more of a personal choice really. There are some very talented people that learn a lot on their own, but having the proper guidance of a body of highly trained industry professionals is always nice, my professors take the time to deal with the students on such a personal level that concepts get acquired faster, everyone in class is an engineer with years of experience, thus having people talk to us at that level is much appreciated and accelerates the process of being educated.
Basically what I am trying to say is that being exposed to different methodologies and theoretical concepts helps a lot for building intuition, specially when you literally have no other option but to git gud. And school is what you make of it, but certainly never a waste.2 -
so there is this guy on blind network who makes half a million per year... and he is worried about his job "since it might be automated away" and he is looking to switch career paths!!!!
mind boggling that a "software engineer" with that type of pay hasn't recognized that LLMs are all hype and no bite
wild
it's insane to me that people making more money in a year than i've made in my decade career know little to nothing about software
what an absolute insane time to be alive4 -
1 - I love coding because since when I was a kid I really loved to solve problems and create things
2 - I always tried to understand how computers worked, and how could yo make a program because when I was a kid I was almost always on the computer and my dream was to create a virus 😂
3 - I was studying my baccalaureate and I hadn't decided what to study in the university. I was only playing videogames and installing software to make jokes. So, my computing teacher taught me to code in VB.net and how to manage a local network so I decided to study and IT degree before going to the university, and when I was studying that I falled in love with programming so I'm currently in the university studying software development engineer -
I really don't understand this particular Government Department's IT Unit. They have a system and network to maintain except:
- They don't have a DBA
- They don't have a dedicated Network Engineer or Security Staff
- Zero documentation on all of the systems that they are taking care of (its all in each assigned particular staff's brain they said)
- Unsure and untested way of restoring a backup into a system
- Server passwords are too simple and only one person was holding this whole time and its to an Administrator account. No individual user account.
- System was developed by an in-house developer who is now retired and left very little documentation on its usage but nothing on how its setup.
But, the system has been up and operational for the past 20 years and no major issues whatsoever with the users using it. I mean its a super simple system setup from the looks of it.
1 App Server connected to 1 DB Server, to serve 20-30 users. But it contains millions of records (2GB worth of data dump). I'm trying to swing to them to get me on a part time work to fix these gaps.
God save them for another 20 years.3 -
Proper rant tonight... I was getting an upgrade to my home entertainment today. It needed an engineer visit. What a useless clown he turned out to be.
2 hrs after arriving, he left and things weren't working remotely right at all. But it was Saturday and he was off the clock so I had to suck it up. No option to back out either - it was all activated and I had to accept it.
He spent most of the time arguing with me about my home network was set up and how it was wrong and how it was important for the overall system to work. Being a geek and having done research, I couldn't understand this - that wasn't how it was meant to be, I knew. I accept my home wiring is a bit odd, but I've had a working system for years because it's all necessary.
After all the faffing about and purchase of some new powerline units (which I accept I needed anyway but where unrelated to this set up), looking more into it myself, it is now up and running correctly.
I am thoroughly pissed at the ineptitude of the engineer. He clearly doesn't understand how the system works. He doesn't understand how powerline works and how it's a life saver for people with awkwardly shaped houses or thick walls where Wi-Fi is useless. If he had, we would have had far fewer issues and I wouldn't have had the stress of thinking I'd killed our home entertainment and internet and there was nothing I could do about it.
I don't blame the provider (besides them clearly not providing adequate training). But this was arrogant uselessness. At least I had the knowledge to understand how it was meant to work and get it sorted myself.
Maybe it could be a useful sideline job if I get fed up with developing.7 -
Unable to access cpanel/whm due to IP changed error.
called HR
me : please connect me to networking team (out sourced)
hr : why ?
me : I have some issue to access cpanel. I contacted to hosting comapny but it is not their fault so may be it's our network issue.
hr : explain me in details.
me : ok
from morning I am trying to access whm because our website is out of bandwidth limit and showing 509 error ,I contacted to hosting comapny but they explained me problem from our side. SO i wanted to talk with network team about this issue because I am not using any proxy or vpn even my tor browser is off too still ip chaged error giving frustation. second reason I am frusted that my public IP and private IP is not chaged.
one more your windows pc freeze 3 times from morning.
do you need in detailed technical reason why I want to talk with them.
hr : no no no *hang up*
after 2 minute *my landline ring*
hr : network engineer on other side.
fair enough2 -
The year was 2006. During the first half of my career, I use to work in the NOC. This was before I made my transition to software engineer. I worked on the third shift for a bank services company. The company was on a down turn. Just years earlier they just went public, and secured a deal with a huge well known bank. Eventually they entered a really bad contract with the bank and was put into a deal they couldn't deliver on. The partnership collapse and their stock plummeted. The CEO was dismissed, and a new CEO came in who wanted to "clean things up".
Anyway I entered the company about a year after this whole thing went down. The NOC was a good stepping stone for my career. They let me work as many hours as I liked. And I took advantage of it, clocking in 80 hours a week on average. They gave me the nick name "Iron Man".
Things started to turn around for the company when we were able to secure a support contract with a huge bank in the Alabama area. As the NOC we were told to handle the migration and facilitate the onboarding.
The onboarding was a mess with terrible instructions that didn't work. A bunch of software packages that crashed. And the network engineers were tips off, as they tunnel between our network and the banks was too narrow, creating an unstable connection between us and them. Oh, and there were all sorts of database corruption issues.
There was also another bank that was using an old version of our software. The sells team had been trying to get them off our old software for over a year. They refuse to move. This bank was the last one using this version, and our organization wanted to completely cut support.
One of the issue we would have is that they had an overnight batch job that had an ETA to be done by 7 AM. The job would often get stuck because this version of the software didn't know how to fail when it was caught in an undesired state. So the job hung, and since the job didn't have logging, no one could tell if it failed unless the logs stopped moving for an hour. It was a heavily manually process that was annoying to deal with. So we would kill the JVM to "speed" the job up. One day I killed the JVM but the job was still late. They told me that they appreciated the effort, but that my job was only to report the problem and not fix it.
This got me caught up in a major scandal. Basically they wanted the job to always have issues everyday. Since this was critical for them, all we needed to do was keep reporting it, and then eventually this would cause the client to have to upgrade to our new software. It was our sales team trying to play dirty. It immediately made me a menace in the company.
For the next 6 months I was constantly harassed and bullied by management. My work was nitpicked. They asked me to come into work nearly everyday, and there was a point I worked 7 days with no off days. They were trying to run me so dry that I would quit. But I never did.
On my last day at the company, I was on a critical call with a customer, and my supervisor was also on the line. My supervisor made a request that made no sense, and was impossible. I told her it wasn't possible. She then scalded me on the call in front of customers. She said "I'm your supervisor, you're just a NOC technician, you do what I say and don't talk back". It was embarrassing to be reprimanded on a call with customers. I never quite recovered from that. I could fill myself steaming with anger. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I felt I really wanted to be violent towards someone. It was such a negative feeling I quit that day at the end of my shift with no job lined up.
I walked away from the job feeling very uncertain about my future, but VERY relieved. I paid the price, basically unable to find a job until a year and a half later. And even was forced to move back in with my mother. After I left, the company still gave my a severance. Probably because of the supervisor's unprofessional conduct in front of customers, and the company probably needed to save face. The 2008 crash kept me out of work until 2009. It did give me time to work on myself, and I swore to never let a job stress me out to that degree. That job was also my last NOC job and the last job where did shift work. My next few jobs was Application Support and I eventually moved into development full time, which is what I always wanted to do.
Anyway sorry if it's a bit long, but that's my burnout story. -
!tech #off_my_chest
when I look back to the earlier years of my life, I see nothing but loneliness. I had no friends in school, people didn't sit with me, only a few people barely talked with me and it was a mess.
I used to blame my parents for it: I thought they isolated me in a lot of areas which lead to hampering my growth and relations.
However, I recently got a taste of my old days and realized the root cause of the problem: DISEASES.
I used to be a very weak and sick child. I had extreme cough so much so that i will go on coughing for 1 min in every 2 mins. Cough hasn't touched me in last 10 years, but recently i caught cough again and it lead to a whole lot of revelations.
I currently have a good social network. I have one friend from past 10 years with whom I used to goto the park every day. I took off this park routine for 2 days citing sickness and he was worried. So once I felt better on 3rd day, i went to the park with him. While walking I again started coughing (albeit very less), but I could notice his expressions. he wanted to just get out of this whole situation. Next day, he didn't even bothered to message, and when i did, he started making excuses.
I had another group of home friends, who are so close to me that we went for snacks at any random time on any random day. Last year i went onto 3 road trips with them. but last weekend they straight up declined meeting me saying get better first.
---------------------------
I don't blame any of my friends or parents.
no one wants to be around a sick person, thinking that if the situation worsens, then the ill guy might need help that they couldn't provide, and if the situation went out of hand, then they would be the one to blame. And it's not just my illness, I think this might apply to anyone with an illness or a disability. everyone treats them as liabilities or time ticking bombs
Everyone wants to be in a homogenous group of healthy people with no one having any life problems so everyone could enjoy a movie life.
Guess what? THAT'S NOT HOW LIFE WORKS!!
People are at different stages of life in terms of age, knowledge, power, health, and finances. in a group of 5, if people come together to watch a movie, there maybe 1 person who is giving away his evening's dinner money for affording the tickets. another might be missing out on her sick grandma or office work just to be part of this one gathering for 3 hours.
And regarding ill people, we are not your responsibility once we are out of our patient bed!
I understand that I might need my friend's help in calling my parents or an ambulance if the situation worsens, but isn't that normal for healthy people too? what if 2 guys are walking on the street and one is hit by a car? won't the other call the ambulance?
And suppose My friend is not able to the help I needed, would I blame him for it?
NO!
Absolutely no! It was my decision to go out and meet people even when sick even if it was a risky move. Life only goes forward if we take risks. But if it backfired, then the instance where he was not able to help would be much less significant than the instance where i decided to get up and go out. That would be the only major blame area and the only person to blame would be me, myself!
The sick is just an inconvenience on people's souls, that's it.
--------
This whole experience makes me so worried about my office and professional situation. I am an excellent engineer working from home and this WFH has helped me keep my cough from worsening while working in a professional capacity.
But our office is shifting to WFO and that is a concern.
1. being in a different state, and working in office takes so much attention and focus that i often forget eating lunch or going to washroom. idk how i will treat my sickness if i got sick there.
2. being in home, i can do my work without bothering other people with my cough. at office, people will want to sit away from me and that ewould be not possible. eventually i would be forced by people to take leaves to "get better" as am bothering everyone
3. if i don't get "better" soon, which is there definition of being healthy enough to come to the office without any sickness (even though my illness doesn't hamper my efficiency), they will fire me .
i am royally fucked. even when i get better, WFO will always have a negetive factor like this. for cases of self illness, family illness, parents illness, if you are not being an 'office' slave (just being the 'work' slave isn't enough), you won't get the money4 -
I was looking at a local job posting for a network engineer. Is it odd to see one of the duties listed as, "Responsible for administration of subpoenas and warrants." ??? Telecommunication company...2
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What the fuck is this trend of pricing cloud services by the minute? I mean It's fucking great and all that I buy 2 minutes with a sql db but who the fuck actually does that?
After another night working on a server I (strongly) suggest we move our shit to a cloud service. It's cool providing I promise the costs don't rape us blind folded. Seems easy enough, right? Nope it's not.
6 hours later, halfway to becoming a fucking network engineer and I'm more lost than ever.
Seriously can't the fuck AWS and google cloud show a monthly price - even an estimate for generic shit like $x for the average crappy wp blog!
If anyone has some helpful info / experience on the true cost of hosting generic web apps - the retardedly simple app I'm trying to price is:
1 php web application with 150 domains, 3gb mysql db and 30gb ssd.
I gets has 45000 sessions with 250000 page views.
Your help would be greatly appreciated. Currently I'm leaning towards deploying a clone sending 250 000 random requests and praying my $300 cloud platform credit will cover the bill.4 -
is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?
i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :
1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.
2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.
3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .
4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too
compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)
2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.
3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.
4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.
as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.
this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.
this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?
in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?
Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/
mann i want some people skills like these guys10 -
I didn't set out to be a dev.. so not much support dev wise, but in general loads.
I dropped out of uni, went back home to avoid paying rent and at least get some form of education.. here parents are obliged to take care of kids until they finish schooling but still.. they could've bitched about me dropping out. They were just concerned I wouldn't be employable without any kind of education and with lesser grade.. anyhow, I probably wouldn't be where I am if I continued wasting their money trying to finish uni when I wasn't motivated enough (still huge problems with ocd so at that time and it was too overwhelming).
I had a plan to finish this along the job when I can afford it but the courses are for regular students only..so no way I could attend them..
Anyhow, I am information science engineer by profession (if that is even how it translates to english), should be taking care of network & computer administration..yet here I am maintaining, bugfixing & developing most 'hated' projects at this firm & I love it!!
So yeah, I hope parents are proud of me..have to ask them though..
Some details in here somewhere: https://devrant.com/rants/2870913/...
edit: typoooooossssss -
TLDR: I didn't & still not sure if it is..
I love bug hunting & fixing & figuring out how stuff works, but many will argue this is not even real programming..
Long version how I ended up programming:
Back in highschool, I was deciding between english and mathematics & computer science.. I filled in the form for the latter. Got a change of hearts but I already gave the extra/backup empty form to schoolmate..
Figured it's for the better because it's a hell to get a job as an english teacher/prof anyways + I dislike comunications with people + documentation (if any) is in english etc..
At the end of first year, I didn't even apply for all the exams because you had to have both programming 1&2 to pass or even be eligible to take the year again.. I figured I'd fail them, so once I actually passed both (& actually not with bad grades), I was fucked.. had to retake the year, which means I lost time + still had to pay the rent etc.. decided to drop out and return home and do the IT engineer course instead to at least have some formal education to help me find a job. Finished that without problems, I 'specialised' in network administration.
I got a job straight out of school as a web developer.. the irony.. got some conflicts with the boss and was terminated (material for another rant).
Later I sought out admin jobs, but got declined because I was overqualified and had programming experince. FML, right?
Ended up sending out mandatory job applications for IT administration & programming to not lose the bonuses & got called up to a meeting in the company I work for since then.
No qualifications for .net & MS technologies, but they liked my CV so the ended up setting up the interview anyway. I didn't know half of the technologies and concepts by proper name, but they figured I understand enough of the content to give me a try. A few years later, I got the most fucked up project they have because of my love for new thigs and trying to understand everything. It's aaaalmost bearable now.. still needs a lot of work, but I'm happy where I am. Saddly, I'm still second guessing if I'm doing a proper job as a dev, but they seem to be very ok with my work. (:6 -
Working full time as a "Protocol Engineer" for a big company, taking care of pretty much everything related to AS/NAS on the network layer (2G, 3G, 4G).
I hate it, but it pays really well.
On my free time, revising ML/DL stuff from Udacity's nano (finished it last year) while studying for the VR nano and keeping my coding skills fresh (basic to advanced structures, coding strategies, best practices and stuff).
Love it, but usually I pay a heavy price to keep my mind in place.
Sometimes I just wish to give everythin up and travel the world with my 2 bucks and just try to get some rest. :v
To all of you who go through this kind of stuff, how are you holding up?2 -
Welp, Guess I'm back after almost 3 years. I graduated and can now officially call myself a network & security engineer.1
-
What it's like to be a network
engineer...translated into normal people speak
User: I think we are having a major road issue,
Me: What? No, I just checked, the roads are
fine. I was actually just on the roads.
User: No, I'm pretty sure the roads are down
because I'm not getting pizzas.
Me: Everything else on the roads is fine. What
do you mean you aren't getting pizzas?
User: I used to get pizzas when I ordered
them, now I'm not getting them. It has to be a
road issue.
Me: As I said, the roads are fine. Where are
you getting pizzas from?
User: I'm not really sure. Can you check all
places that deliver pizzas?
Me: No I don't even know all the places that
deliver pizza. You need to narrow it down.
User: I think it is Subway.
Me: Okay, I'll check...No, I just looked and
Subway doesn't deliver pizzas.
User: I'm pretty sure it is Subway. Can you just
allow all food from Subway and we can see if
pizza shows up?
Me: Sigh, fine I've allowed all food from
Subway, but I don't think that is the issue.
Usher: Yeah I'm still not getting pizza. Can you
check the roads?
Me: It's not the roads, the roads are fine. I'm
pretty sure Subway isn't the place.
User: Okay, I found it. It's Papa Johns.
Me: Okay, I looked and Papa Johns does
deliver pizza. Is it the local Papa Johns or one
in a different town?
User: I don't know. Can you allow pizza from
all Papa Johns to me?
Me: No I can't do that. Can you get me an
address for Papa Johns?
User: No, I only know it as Papa Johns. Can
you get me all the addresses of all Papa Johns
and I'll tell you if one of them is correct?
Me: No, I don't have time for that. Okay, I
looked at the local one and it looks like they
have sent you pizza in the past and they are
currently allowed to send you pizzas. Try
ordering a pizza while I watch.
Usher: Yeah still no pizza. I'm guessing they
are getting blocked at the freeway. Can you
check the freeway to make sure they can get
through?
Me: No, this is a local delivery. They aren't
even using the freeway.
User: Okay, well then it has to be a road issue,
Me: No, the roads are fine. Okay, I just drove
from the Papa Johns to the address they have
on file for you and there is nothing there.
User: Hmm, wait we did move recently.
Me: Did you give your new address to Papa,
Johns?
User: No, I just thought they would be able to
look me up by name.
Me: No they need your new address. What's
your new address?
User: I'm not really sure. Can you look it up?
Me: Sigh, give me a second...Okay, I found
your address and gave it to Papa Johns. Try
ordering a pizza now.
User: HEY! PIZZA JUST SHOWED UP!
Me: Okay, good.
User: (To everyone else they know) I apologize
for the delay in the pizza but there was a major
road issue that was preventing the pizza from
getting to me. The network engineer has fixed
the roads and we are able to get pizza again.
Me: But it wasn't the roads...whatever.
User: Oh, can you also check on an issue
where Chinese food isn't getting to me? think
it may be a road issue5 -
When dealing with people that think the IT helpdesk solves all problems with custom software they didn't build or use.. and the helpdesk of the software sucks (long waiting times, almost impossible to get the right guy,..)
-
Something is fucking wrong with the network engineer. His fucking things a lot today. I think his too high today.1
-
One of my favorite parts of my job is that I’m not allowed to resolve firewall issues myself. IT ops frequently breaks my firewall config, preventing me from resolving any domain names or running dns queries in general even though I still have connectivity. So I call the support number. Remote Desktop icon appears in the corner of my screen.
“Hi I have connectivity but can’t resolve any domain names”
“Have you tried using your browser, maybe they just block pings”
“Well no because I can ping 8.8.8.8, see?”
“Hmm well have you tried from your browser?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe it’s just an issue with ping traffic”
“Well no because I’m not having issues with icmp traffic. I can still ping 8.8.8.8, see?”
“Hmm that’s weird”
*opens network config, renews dhcp lease*
“But I don’t think that’s relat...”
“I know!”
*opens my command prompt, flushes dns cache*
“But if this were a cache issue the requests wouldn’t take so long to tim...”
“I know.”
(Starting to think he doesn’t know)
“I’ll pass this on to the networking guys”
“Thanks”
Third time this has happened. Every time they claim they didn’t change anything and it fixed itself. Obviously this is not the case, because after networking guys “don’t change anything” it starts working again. Every time they talk to me like I have the technical prowess of an HR rep. Like somehow I’m the only software engineer in the world that doesn’t know what the ping command does.
I’m not upset though. They’re just giving me a great excuse to be completely unproductive on a Monday -
So you guys know how universities can sometimes have TERRIBLE old software that hasn't been updated for years, and sometimes you want to do a specific process over and over again so you end up automating it, now, we've built a tool that automates downloading projects from the University Moodle website, and we would like to publish it for other students to use.
Problem.
The University is using SSO.
And so far we've made the application to work by observing the network connections over the Android app version in order to extract the cookie session, now imagine that we publish this little tool, and tell people to do those exact steps, of course it's impractical and misses the whole point of the tool itself for being easy to use.
So, where can I read more about SSO, how can I figure out what the University uses? And if I had to reverse engineer this, where should I start? (It goes over 4 pages and I'm not able to capture those requests to even figure out what's going on)
In short is there a guide where you take a university SSO service and build on top of it? I couldn't find anything that is helpful. -
!rant
Hi fellow DevRanters! I've been studying software engineering for a while now and, while I love programming, I'm starting to think that all I'll be doing as a software engineer now a days is pulling data from a database, sticking it in a nice gui with some buttons and moving on to the next, similar, project. At the same time I am loving linux more and more, I love working with bash and other unix-like tools and I am interested in systems languages like C and Rust. It is for these reasons that I am playing with the idea of switching to Systems and network engineering. What are your thoughts on this? Is Systems and network engineering a field in which I get to program a lot? Will there be more variation in it? Is my view of software engineering completely off? Please share your thoughts and opinions! -
My way through front end started with a simple request of changing a blog CSS.. which I knew nothing of. Looking back it feels odd starting with CSS then HTML, JS and now first PHP; but oh well what ever works?
That was a couple of years ago and lately I've done couple of minor freelance projects and have helped students at my university with it (I studied network engineer because I doubted myself..).
I never felt that I knew enough of programming or front end.. that I wasn't really "good enough" to apply for a job even though I almost finish the frontend certificate at FCC, did the Android application schoolar via Google and have worked a lot with Adobe CC overall and help people with their front end issues from school, even with library's I haven't touched (mighty power of Google search and quick learning).
Now sit here as a stockmen in my lunch break being all excited for one thing based on a conclusion I took last week.. if I never try to follow my passion for it, I'll stay a stockmen.. so I applied for s frontend job and got a call in for an interview today. I still doubt myself but figure I must try.. I do not wish to stay where I have been the whole year but to move on and work as a front end Dev. If I get it.. than Santa came early and if not.. well.. keep on evolving and trying I guess. *Holding thumbs* -
That moment when you explain to your manager what the term "full-stack" means and next thing you know you've gone from being a "backend c#" to azure migration expert/dba/designer/api architect/network engineer/php wordpress developer... let's go back to when you'd never heard of full-stack
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Have you ever considered switching to IT support/help desk?
I mean, sometimes I try to analyze my own situation from a 3rd person perspective and I realize I could have a pretty much stressless job with still enough money to live a normal life.
I have a BSc and MSc(soon to have) in CS, with focus on AI/ML. I've always been a geek with a problem solving attitude, that's why I got into computers in the first place. And now I'm pondering if I should just try an IT Support position, it's the kind of things I used to do as a teenager when a classmate had a network/computer problem, it doesn't even feel like a job to me. I could call it a day, get home at 5/6pm, and spend time on my personal projects (software, infosec) with a fresh mind, going to bed (and sleep) knowing that the next day would be a nice one. No clients wanting a new feature that you gotta implement and push on a production server friday afternoon because your ceo(who is also a pseudo proj manager) just said:"Yes, we can", while you watch the technical debt rising like amazon's stocks.
Maybe this is just the burnout talking, I don't know. Maybe I should just try being a software engineer outside of Uni in the first place, and only then start pondering.
Maybe a sysadmin position...
Have a nice day12 -
Testing new server deployment in test env all works, then production it all breaks down. Network didn't allowed the right traffic. Took me whole week to find that out. Until some networking engineer said, you know there is a firewall between those networks?
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Im working 6days, than I'm free 4 days. So 2-3 days from those 4, I would like to do some internship, traineeship or call whatever you want, at isp, data center or enterprise, to kick some real life network engineer experience. Basically I have 0 real life experience even I'm preparing to ccnp. Guys, I can't even find unpaid internship... When they hear that I have finished bachelor like 6 years ago, they just don't want to hear from me. I am deeply disappointed. Sometimes I feel that I won't have an it support job even with ccie... I mean I already feel more skilled than the complete IT crowd at the company where I'm working but no one cares. If you have some advice like where to go, please share with me...1
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This is a repost of an original rant posted on a request for "Community Feedback" from Atlassian. You know, Atlassian? Those beloved people behind such products as :
• Thing I Love™
• Other Thing You Used One Time™
• Platform Often Mentioned in Suicide Notes, Probably™*
Now this rant was written in early 2022 while I was working in an Azure Cloud Engineer role that transformed into me being the company's main Sysadmin/Project Manager/Hiring Manager/Network Admin/Graphic Designer.
While trying to simultaneously put out over 9000 fires with one hand, and jangling keys in the face of the Owner/Arsonist with the other, I was also desperately implementing Jira Service Desk. Normally this wouldn't have been as much of a priority as it was, but the software our support team was using had gone past 15 years old, then past extended support, then the lone developer died, then it didn't work on Windows 10, then only functioned thanks to a dev cohort long past creating a keygen....which was now broken. So we needed a solution *now*.
The previous solution was shit of a different tier. The sight of it would make a walking talking anthropomorphised sentient puddle of dogshit (who both eats and produces further dookie derivatives) blush with embarrassment. The CD-ROM/Cereal Box this software came in probably listed features like "Stores Your Customer's First AND (or) Last Name!" or "Windows ME Downgrade Disk Included!" and "NEW: Less(-ish) Genocide(s)"!
Despite this, our brain/fearless leader decided this would be a great time to have me test, implement, deploy, and train everyone up on a new solution that would suck your toes, sound your shaft, and that he hadn't reminded me that I was a lazy sack enough lately.
One day, during preliminary user testing I received an email letting me know that the support team was having issues with a Customer's profile on our new support desk. Thanks to our Owner/Firestarter/Real World Micheal Scott being deep in his latest project (fixing our "All 5 devs quit in the last 12 months and I can't seem to hire any new ones" issue (by buying a ping pong table)), I had a bit of fortuitous time on my hands to investigate this issue. I had spent many hours of overtime working on this project, writing custom integrations and automations, so what I found out was crushing.
Below is the (digitally) physical manifestation of my rage after realising I would have to create / find / deal with a whole new method for support to manage customer contacts.
I'm linking to the original forum thread because you kind of need to have the pictures embedded in said reply to get really inhale the "Jira-Rant" ambiance. The part where I use several consecutive words as anchor links to tickets with other people screaming into the void gets a bit sweet n' savoury too - having those hyperlinks does improve the je ne say what of it all.
bit.ly/JIRANT (Case Sensitive)
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There is some good news at the end of this brown n' squirty rainbow though!
Nice try silly little Jira button, you can't ruin *my* 2022!
• I was able to forget all about Jira a month later when I received a surprise vacation home! (To be there while my Mom passed away).
• Eventually work stress did catch up to me - but my boss thoughtfully gave me a nice long vacation! (By assaulting *while* firing me (for emailing in a vacation request while he was a having a bad (see:normal) day))
5 -
Is it just me or should the tier 3 network engineer from your MSP be able to answer whether the APs have high gain omnidirectional antennas or low gain omnidirectional antennas?
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What is the the best job title if you work in a company and does everything related to Software Development. Planning, documentation, architecture, network, full stack coding, testing, bug fixes etc. Full stack engineer? Or... ?7
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Firstly give me the skill equivalent to the best in the field. If the rules allow it all of these skills listed and if not any of these :-
1. Computer networking to the point of having the same knowledge as the best in the field. Why? I am curious about that stuff and being able to work as a network engineer if I don't get a good Dev job
2. Cyber security. Why? I enjoy it and being able to make sure my code is not easily exploitable is a cherry on top. Also having a backup job in case I don't get a good dev job
3. Being able to communicate with non dev people about developer or non developer stuff easily and being a really good leader.
4. Being a good developer in whatever language I use and instantly being able to learn new programming languages and frameworks or libraries with ultra in depth information.
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