It will not surprise me at all if this becomes a thing. Advanced social engineering relies on extracting little bits of information at a time in order to form a complete picture while not arousing suspicion. This is how really bad cases of identity theft work as well. The identity thief gets one piece of info and leverages that to get another and another and before you know it they’re at the DMV convincing someone to give them a drivers license with your name and their picture on it.

They train AI models to screen for some types of fraud but at some point it seems like it could become an endless game of whack-a-mole.

I’ll second this. I would argue that .Net Core’s package/dependency management in general is way better than Python or JavaScript. Typically it just works and when it doesn’t it’s not too difficult to fix.

That’s nerve wracking. But you know what’s worse? Finding code that shouldn’t work, not being able to figure out why it works, and having to leave it in production because of you “fix” it, the whole damned thing will come fluttering down like a house of cards in a slight breeze.

“I dOnt lIkE tYpEsCrIpT. iT aDdS uNnEcCeSsArY cOmPlExItY.”

Well I don’t like the PTSD I have from trying to refactor your God awful native JavaScript codebase. It has enough magic strings to summon the Dark Lord himself.

Software engineering. I was actually surprised at how few people I’ve met in software engineering that originally came from IT. It can be an advantage because a lot of newbies in the field have no idea how infrastructure works at the enterprise level.

I was in IT Ops for 12 years and made it to the Director level. The further up the ladder you go, the less you work with technology and the more your ability to deal with corporate politics and leadership skills matters. I actually didn’t mind that part. I enjoyed helping my team grow and develop their skills. Changing jobs at that level often means packing up and moving halfway across the country. That was especially true before the pandemic. I came really close to doing that. Then the pandemic hit and the company I was negotiating with suspended all hiring. I was actually relieved. Honestly, I didn’t want to move my family halfway across the country. That’s when I decided my career in IT was coming to a close.

Software engineering isn’t for everyone. To excel at it, you gotta understand that it really is an engineering discipline. It’s relentless problem solving. It pays well when you get to a certain level but the attrition level early on is fairly high because people get into it thinking it’s easy money not realizing that 2 out of 3 projects they’ll be assigned to is just being thrown into some dumpster fire of a code base, that someone else set ablaze, and expected to make something of it. Half the time management doesn’t even know what they want the app it to do so in that respect it’s not that different from IT Ops.

One of the reasons I moved on from IT operations. Management considers your department to be nothing more than a cost center and then goes all surprised Pikachu face when they take an axe to the IT budget and then everything inevitably goes to shit.

If you had told me ten years ago that I would still be using Outlook (on desktop and mobile) I would not have believed you. It’s way more stable than it was back then and honestly it’s the mail client that I find least objectionable.

First thing I did was update my resume. I “job hopped” a bit over the last few years, out of necessity, and I’ve only been at this job for a year. I’ll probably try to stick it out for a while. It’s also a brand new tech stack to me so as far as I’m concerned I’m getting paid to pad my resume.

Edit: also I work for an unprofitable division of a much larger profitable company so not as much risk of the entire place folding.

One time I rewrote an Azure function to make it slightly more efficient. The cost savings were ~$50k /yr. Cloud services have their place but it is amazing how quickly the costs can spiral out of control.

We got reorganized last month. Scrapped almost all the projects we were working on and fired 1/4 of the workforce (mostly sales and support staff). On the plus side, I’m still employed and I’ve been able to use the last month to catch up on personal shit while the higher ups figure out what they want to spend money on next. On the down side, the new project I’m assigned to sucks and is never going to be successful. At least I don’t think it will.

But, as long as the paychecks keep rolling in…

Scrum Master: “Do we really have to make it a blocker?”

Me: “Uh yeah. It’s blocking these three other tasks.”

Scrum Master: “But is it really?”

Me: “Yes.”

Scrum Master: “Let’s just leave it on in development and we can review the progress tomorrow.”

Me: “That’s what you said yesterday.”

Scrum Master: “Alright guys. I’m going to give you back five minutes of your time today.”

Whoa! You’ve got the entire executive team.