That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
edited August 2022
It's been over a month since I heard from that other IT company about the sales engineer position. Those SOBs ghosted me. I've been applying at other places in the meantime.
Today a recruiter for a company that makes embedded computer systems reached out to me. I sent them my resume on Indeed yesterday. They told me about the job and it sounded interesting. This evening I filled out all the paperwork the sent me. I sure love filling out forms with the information that is already on my resume. /s But I know forms like these are more of a test than anything. Can you read and follow basic instructions. If you can't do that, there is little hope for you at most companies.
This one sounds really cool. They have an interesting product stack that I could get behind. And they are paying 80k base plus bonuses. Totals max out at ~$120k per year, to start.
I am pretty frustrated with my current job. The overwork and lack of pay are really getting to me. I am basically doing the job of 2-3 sales engineers. I don't even have time to go to client sites for surveys and meetings anymore. I have to rely on techs who are already scheduled to be onsite for work, to scope out projects for me. Meetings are via phone, video, or just email. The last time I was at a client's office was that Macbook project and I didn't sell then anything. I was saving a tech. Before that it had been MONTHS. I can't take it for much longer. But I know it's best to already have a job to get a new job so I'm just going to stick it out until I get an offer on the table. I am basically unfireable at this point. It would take a deliberate act of expreme malice with no show of remorse for them to re-evaluate my employment status.
I've been low key looking for work for quite awhile, as in my only real issue with my current job is its boring so I've been kind of waiting for a unicorn perfect job.
Surprisingly as I've never heard of it before I'm getting the most interest/offers for the most interesting jobs with the highest pay from a site called angel list . Would recommend anyone looking for work for smaller companies rather than giant corps check it out
3 weeks ago it was decreed that the IT on call rotation would start getting the security system alarm phone calls.
In the 3 weeks the cleaning staff have set the alarm off twice on Sundays and the owner of the company has set the alarm off twice at 2:30 in the morning because when the night shift is done at 12:30am they arm the building.... and she's still been in her office working. Gets up at 2:30 in the morning and sets off the alarm.
I've been on the hook for 3 of those calls, including both of the 2:30am calls, since I'm just coming off of my 2 week shift on call.
3 weeks ago it was decreed that the IT on call rotation would start getting the security system alarm phone calls.
In the 3 weeks the cleaning staff have set the alarm off twice on Sundays and the owner of the company has set the alarm off twice at 2:30 in the morning because when the night shift is done at 12:30am they arm the building.... and she's still been in her office working. Gets up at 2:30 in the morning and sets off the alarm.
I've been on the hook for 3 of those calls, including both of the 2:30am calls, since I'm just coming off of my 2 week shift on call.
My boss is going to be hearing from me today.
WTF are you even going to do with one of those calls?
3 weeks ago it was decreed that the IT on call rotation would start getting the security system alarm phone calls.
In the 3 weeks the cleaning staff have set the alarm off twice on Sundays and the owner of the company has set the alarm off twice at 2:30 in the morning because when the night shift is done at 12:30am they arm the building.... and she's still been in her office working. Gets up at 2:30 in the morning and sets off the alarm.
I've been on the hook for 3 of those calls, including both of the 2:30am calls, since I'm just coming off of my 2 week shift on call.
My boss is going to be hearing from me today.
WTF are you even going to do with one of those calls?
Yeah the 2:30am calls are not ideal because whoever gets woken up has to decide if the police get dispatched. Thankfully the alarm company will tell us exactly what sensors go off, and to her credit, the owner of the company has in both cases blasted a teams message to IT saying "hey that was me" so when I'm on the phone with the security company at 2:45am I was able to tell them no please do not send the police.
And our owner did personally call to apologize to me after the first incident, which I did appreciate. But its still not ideal.
The cleaning staff setting the alarm off.... yeah that's just yelling at the cleaning company (an external company) to stop doing that.
RandomHajileNot actually a SnatcherThe New KremlinRegistered Userregular
Feels like there should be a lump sum payment for each call, because if it IS in fact someone breaking in, you’ll be potentially saving the company a lot of money and headache.
Feels like there should be a lump sum payment for each call, because if it IS in fact someone breaking in, you’ll be potentially saving the company a lot of money and headache.
we do 2 weeks on call on a rotation and we do get a lump sum total for that 2 week period that, while not giant, is not insignificant. We also have an informal agreement with the boss that if a call takes more than 2 hours we take that time in lieu (i.e. take off a couple hours early the next friday, etc)
Fuck the FCC and their new BDC bullshit. This shit is going to crush small ISP's all over the country.
I don't know anything about this. What's going on?
Every 6 months they have us fill out Form 477, which is this thing where I have to take our customer database, throw it against the Census Bureau's database (btw, this has a 25% error rate. As in it won't resolve 25% of your addresses and you have to keep pounding the button and then concatenating your good results afterwards. And no, the 2020 census did nothing to improve this), poop out a csv file, and then massage it a bunch and submit it. In addition, they want to know which census blocks are in your coverage area, which requires a bunch of GIS shapefile stuff. Like everyone else, since we do wireless I pretty much guesstimate 4.5 miles around every tower site.
All that's fine, I mean it's pretty taxing and I'm sick of doing it every 6 months but it's fine.
Now they want all that, and they want all of that data again, but represented differently. I have to beg CostQuest for a license to access the very fucking data they've been getting from me, which takes days, then I beg for the data, which takes days, and then they give it to me. Then I need to somehow select locations (as in homes, businesses, abandoned buildings) that I can install if they asked.
Stop for a second. Just so everyone's on the same page here: No WISP knows whether or not they can install a site by looking at the place on satellite or because it's in a coverage area. There are a million things that can fucking get in the way. We do not survey people via google maps. We always visit the site before telling someone it's a fail, and we don't charge for doing so. So just to set the score straight, the FCC wants me to list off every building I can install, while I myself have no fucking idea if I can actually install them without visiting every fucking site I can cover.
Okay, so on top of that, they also want a supporting set of data from me to say that I can cover those sites, which includes shit like terrain density at these sites and azimuth to my access points and a bunch of other crazy bullshit, information my radios don't provide, mind you.
And on top of all that, they also want a qualified engineer to sign off on everything before I submit the whole enchilada. Meaning one of the following:
1. A Professional Engineer who is licensed by the state.
2. A Corporate Engineer, who has at least a BA in specific engineering degrees.
OR, these first 3 times we do this, we can have it waived by either:
3a. An Engineer with a BA in Engineering and 7 years of experience
3b. Someone who's been "specially trained" to do this shit and has 10 years of experience
So now all of those young punks who see that their local community is suffering with old DSL telcos and they want to try to start up a WISP to help them out? You know, that thing that's constantly fucking happening all over the world? Fuck you I guess, if you didn't get your BA in electrical engineering.
On the one hand, I understand what they're after. I just wish they'd stop fucking us over while doing it.
Ah yes, the old requiring 10 years experience doing the thing that's only existed for 2 months.
I also don't know any WISPs that employ PE's. And a PE requires passing the FE exam + 4 years working under a PE + passing the once a year exam. So if you don't already employ PE's, you can't train any employees to become a PE.
I believe there's already some legal challenges to some of those certification requirements.
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
There isn't one, and sadly they don't need one. The purpose of the whole thing is to identify what's available to people in order to justify subsidizing. But why you need a PE? No idea.
There isn't one, and sadly they don't need one. The purpose of the whole thing is to identify what's available to people in order to justify subsidizing. But why you need a PE? No idea.
Why do you need a PE?
because Comcast and the other major players already have them on staff and their competition doesn't.
Love that regulatory capture.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
What specifics do you need for the PE? RF or just a EE with a PE license?
You can likely get a design firm with a PE on staff to perform the review for you and stamp it. I know, "$Texas," but my point was any design or architecture company has PE review as a matter of course so you may be able to set up some sort of contract with them.
What specifics do you need for the PE? RF or just a EE with a PE license?
You can likely get a design firm with a PE on staff to perform the review for you and stamp it. I know, "$Texas," but my point was any design or architecture company has PE review as a matter of course so you may be able to set up some sort of contract with them.
For now I know I can get by with the waiver so that's what I'm going with, and 99% of my focus needs to be on getting this shit done before next Friday (I gotta go be a pallbearer at my aunt's funeral at the end of the month, so my deadline has gotten tighter).
I have a meeting with the FCC on Monday to discuss some of this, and I will do my best to reduce my snark and anger but at the same time I want them to know this is fucking me really hard. There are startup WISP's and fiber companies in rural areas of the state that were looking forward to capitalizing on these new subsidies and instead they're only going to be available for the big boys who have been fucking everyone over this whole time, because of these restrictions.
Did anyone comment during the comment period or have you shared your feedback? At one point I was involved with changes in OSHA around reporting requirements and they were VERY responsive to things about how it sucked and why it was unrealistic etc. to the point they just dropped the new requirement down to "future advisory" rather than anyone having to make changes.
Did anyone comment during the comment period or have you shared your feedback? At one point I was involved with changes in OSHA around reporting requirements and they were VERY responsive to things about how it sucked and why it was unrealistic etc. to the point they just dropped the new requirement down to "future advisory" rather than anyone having to make changes.
I've shared some feedback already, will do more next week. They called me an hour ago to ask if I knew this was a thing and wanted to know if I was doing it and if I knew it was required and I nearly reached through the phone and pulled out the man's soul.
Did anyone comment during the comment period or have you shared your feedback? At one point I was involved with changes in OSHA around reporting requirements and they were VERY responsive to things about how it sucked and why it was unrealistic etc. to the point they just dropped the new requirement down to "future advisory" rather than anyone having to make changes.
I've shared some feedback already, will do more next week. They called me an hour ago to ask if I knew this was a thing and wanted to know if I was doing it and if I knew it was required and I nearly reached through the phone and pulled out the man's soul.
Oh god, our phishing/email/scam whatever tests aren't run by IT for whatever reason,
So I get this shady email about new company tools , open the url on my secure testing VM which is completely empty and segregated from the rest of our network to see wtf it is in case I need to warn people and..without any further input required on the page immediately apparently fail a phishing test and get a bunch of courses automatically assigned... /Facepalm
Did anyone comment during the comment period or have you shared your feedback? At one point I was involved with changes in OSHA around reporting requirements and they were VERY responsive to things about how it sucked and why it was unrealistic etc. to the point they just dropped the new requirement down to "future advisory" rather than anyone having to make changes.
I've shared some feedback already, will do more next week. They called me an hour ago to ask if I knew this was a thing and wanted to know if I was doing it and if I knew it was required and I nearly reached through the phone and pulled out the man's soul.
I'm sure they put it down as "feedback: negative"
The few fed employees I've talked to in official capacities are very sincere in wanting to do their job better and very limited in how they can communicate to avoid the appearance of bias. They also have limited control over proposed policy making, mostly coming in during implementation.
They were pretty helpful and at least acknowledged a bit of the fucking I'm getting.
1. They did cede and agreed that I can't verify any addresses in my coverage area as 100% certainty install candidates. Therefore, as I had kinda joked around last week, I am only claiming the very customers I'm currently connected to, as well as past customers, as the locations I cover. That does make reporting quite a bit easier, but also simultaneously opens the door for someone to come in with a bunch of govt money behind them to just put us in the ground. Not a huge fan of that, but oh well. In fairness, I can't and didn't want to be telling people I had people covered when they weren't covered, either. Simultaneously, if they'd quit fucking us over we'd be able to deliver a hell of a lot more throughput.
2. They wouldn't tell me that the PE waiver was going to be extended but also said it could happen. I made clear that the PE requirement was extremely silly given that #1 is true. Like, let me just baby-bird my customer addresses into your mouth, k, we're done, go digest that and leave me alone.
3. I let them know that the Census Bureau's Geocoder database still pukes constantly and constantly misses anywhere from 50-150 of my customers, and that this has gone on for years. They didn't seem surprised and just said, "Oh that's too bad"
Did anyone comment during the comment period or have you shared your feedback? At one point I was involved with changes in OSHA around reporting requirements and they were VERY responsive to things about how it sucked and why it was unrealistic etc. to the point they just dropped the new requirement down to "future advisory" rather than anyone having to make changes.
I've shared some feedback already, will do more next week. They called me an hour ago to ask if I knew this was a thing and wanted to know if I was doing it and if I knew it was required and I nearly reached through the phone and pulled out the man's soul.
I'm sure they put it down as "feedback: negative"
The few fed employees I've talked to in official capacities are very sincere in wanting to do their job better and very limited in how they can communicate to avoid the appearance of bias. They also have limited control over proposed policy making, mostly coming in during implementation.
Probably best if you don't shit on them.
I didn't interpret this one as shitting on the employees so much as a joke about how poorly/difficult it is to conduct user feedback research on support interactions.
We are writing to inform you that we recently detected some unusual activity within portions of the LastPass development environment. We have determined that an unauthorized party gained access to portions of the LastPass development environment through a single compromised developer account and took portions of source code and some proprietary LastPass technical information. We have no evidence that this incident involved any access to customer data or encrypted password vaults. Our products and services are operating normally.
In response, we immediately initiated an investigation, deployed containment and mitigation measures, and engaged a leading cybersecurity and forensics firm. While our investigation is ongoing, we have achieved a state of containment, implemented additional enhanced security measures, and see no further evidence of unauthorized activity.
Based on what we have learned and implemented, we are evaluating further mitigation techniques to strengthen our environment. We will continue to update our customers with the transparency they deserve."
that's what you want to hear. (we use lastpass for everything @ my company)
So, I'm going to start this by saying that this is no one's fault, I'm definitely not blaming anyone. It is a bad situation with no blame needed.
My boss, the IT Manager/Director... his father was very sick for about a month, and passed last week. My boss is obviously now on leave for at least a week and I got dumped into taking the IT part of a pretty big project that as of last Wednesday didn't have a due date and now has a due date for about 3.5 weeks from now and I'm basically having to figure everything out from scratch.
And what I'm figuring out is that there are a number of things we're behind on in IT because my boss was understandably extremely distracted and things were falling through the cracks. Again, no blame to go around here because in January this year I went through a similar thing with my mom almost passing away and spending 2 months in the hospital, so I fully understand where my boss' head is or isn't at.
But mostly I'm just here needing to vent because holy hell I need to figure out if a few of the things that need to get done, like getting a fiber install in a new building done in 2 weeks is feasible because it has been sitting unapproved for 2 weeks. Or getting the rest of the equipment in and installed in about 3 weeks. And getting some of that stuff involves getting some workers up on a man lift to stick access points on poles 30 feet in the air, so it isn't like we can just go drop some of this on a desk and be done. oh and the wiring in the building isn't done yet. I have to figure out where that's at.
Litearlly the only thing that's keeping me from being completely up the creek without a paddle is that we have enough wifi AP's sitting in boxes that were earmarked for another project that I can pillage for this location because if I wanted new AP's for this build I needed to order them 3 months ago, and if I can get the fiber installed, get the router and switch set up (which mercifully we got in about a month ago), and get wifi going in the building if a couple other little things are late we can live with it.
No fault or blame being placed here, but holy crap my week is ruined and it's Monday.
On Monday my company fired my entire department who build the Kubernetes CI/CD pipeline barring the most junior guy to maintain it (who presumably had the lowest salary) after announcing they hadn't had a profitable month this year so that's going to end well for them (It consisted of over 400 pods; many of which are running things like redis and zookeeper clusters etc)..On the bright side after firing my resume out i've had 3 interviews already since then so there seems to be interest.
On Monday my company fired my entire department who build the Kubernetes CI/CD pipeline barring the most junior guy to maintain it (who presumably had the lowest salary) after announcing they hadn't had a profitable month this year so that's going to end well for them (It consisted of over 400 pods; many of which are running things like redis and zookeeper clusters etc)..On the bright side after firing my resume out i've had 3 interviews already since then so there seems to be interest.
Holy shit so sorry. If you're interested in bigger corp jobs (mostly remote), give me a shout.
On Monday my company fired my entire department who build the Kubernetes CI/CD pipeline barring the most junior guy to maintain it (who presumably had the lowest salary) after announcing they hadn't had a profitable month this year so that's going to end well for them (It consisted of over 400 pods; many of which are running things like redis and zookeeper clusters etc)..On the bright side after firing my resume out i've had 3 interviews already since then so there seems to be interest.
Fingers crossed you get out before the Jenga tower comes crashing down.
When even the digicert support agent says on the line "hrm that's weird I don't know why the generated CSR isn't working. This all looks fine and it should be working" you know you're in for a good time.
my last company laying me off *may* have been a blessing in disguise we'll see. so far I've had two interviews where the hiring managers exclaimed that I was only asking for ~110k ish; (which was a 20k jump over my old job) When other candidates with less experience/specialties were all asking for 150k+...One guy actually said he was going to put my expected salary in at 140k Because that was still lowballing all their other candidates who had less experience than me.
So we'll see if any of them actually send me any offers but it sounds like my last company may have been criminally underpaying me..
I've also had 9 interviews since i started sending my resume out last monday so fingers crossed.
Technical evaluations sure have gotten more complicated though; i got it sorted in a couple hours but one company had me send in terraform code to spin up a VPC; several load balancers; a GCP sql cloud instance; a lamp stack on a kubernetes cluster i also had to spin up and serve web content from a few gcp buckets..the last time i was looking for work it consisted of "I pinky swear i know how to do things..."
I'm not sure how salary works in software but that higher pay scale is Senior Tech / Manager level with Govt engineers.
Oh this isn't software per se; i'm 100% a sysadmin, now a cloud admin; it's just all interactions with servers in my last company and pretty much everywhere I'm looking now is done through scripts/code.. I don't think the separation of the two really exists anymore now that I think about it though except for very small companies.
Deployments, config changes etc. are all done via code true but you still need the server knowledge to track down issues and be able to tell if they're code or vm/pod/instance related.
New job get; higher pay, higher benefits, less hours and set your own work hours vs my last employer and it only took 6 days of looking. I might need to get laid off more often
I feel kinda scummy as my last company offered a significant sum, let's just say 4+ months salary to sign a contract saying I'd never bad mouth them, and I *really* wanted to tell them to go fuck themselves and I'll say what I want but it's so much I think I'm going to break and sign it
I feel kinda scummy as my last company offered a significant sum, let's just say 4+ months salary to sign a contract saying I'd never bad mouth them, and I *really* wanted to tell them to go fuck themselves and I'll say what I want but it's so much I think I'm going to break and sign it
Nothing a good anonymous Glassdoor review can't fix.
But honestly take the money if you can make good use of it, don't feel bad about it. They're not forcing you to speak good of them, just not saying anything.
Posts
Today a recruiter for a company that makes embedded computer systems reached out to me. I sent them my resume on Indeed yesterday. They told me about the job and it sounded interesting. This evening I filled out all the paperwork the sent me. I sure love filling out forms with the information that is already on my resume. /s But I know forms like these are more of a test than anything. Can you read and follow basic instructions. If you can't do that, there is little hope for you at most companies.
This one sounds really cool. They have an interesting product stack that I could get behind. And they are paying 80k base plus bonuses. Totals max out at ~$120k per year, to start.
I am pretty frustrated with my current job. The overwork and lack of pay are really getting to me. I am basically doing the job of 2-3 sales engineers. I don't even have time to go to client sites for surveys and meetings anymore. I have to rely on techs who are already scheduled to be onsite for work, to scope out projects for me. Meetings are via phone, video, or just email. The last time I was at a client's office was that Macbook project and I didn't sell then anything. I was saving a tech. Before that it had been MONTHS. I can't take it for much longer. But I know it's best to already have a job to get a new job so I'm just going to stick it out until I get an offer on the table. I am basically unfireable at this point. It would take a deliberate act of expreme malice with no show of remorse for them to re-evaluate my employment status.
Surprisingly as I've never heard of it before I'm getting the most interest/offers for the most interesting jobs with the highest pay from a site called angel list . Would recommend anyone looking for work for smaller companies rather than giant corps check it out
In the 3 weeks the cleaning staff have set the alarm off twice on Sundays and the owner of the company has set the alarm off twice at 2:30 in the morning because when the night shift is done at 12:30am they arm the building.... and she's still been in her office working. Gets up at 2:30 in the morning and sets off the alarm.
I've been on the hook for 3 of those calls, including both of the 2:30am calls, since I'm just coming off of my 2 week shift on call.
My boss is going to be hearing from me today.
WTF are you even going to do with one of those calls?
Yeah the 2:30am calls are not ideal because whoever gets woken up has to decide if the police get dispatched. Thankfully the alarm company will tell us exactly what sensors go off, and to her credit, the owner of the company has in both cases blasted a teams message to IT saying "hey that was me" so when I'm on the phone with the security company at 2:45am I was able to tell them no please do not send the police.
And our owner did personally call to apologize to me after the first incident, which I did appreciate. But its still not ideal.
The cleaning staff setting the alarm off.... yeah that's just yelling at the cleaning company (an external company) to stop doing that.
This is a clickable link to my Steam Profile.
we do 2 weeks on call on a rotation and we do get a lump sum total for that 2 week period that, while not giant, is not insignificant. We also have an informal agreement with the boss that if a call takes more than 2 hours we take that time in lieu (i.e. take off a couple hours early the next friday, etc)
I don't know anything about this. What's going on?
Every 6 months they have us fill out Form 477, which is this thing where I have to take our customer database, throw it against the Census Bureau's database (btw, this has a 25% error rate. As in it won't resolve 25% of your addresses and you have to keep pounding the button and then concatenating your good results afterwards. And no, the 2020 census did nothing to improve this), poop out a csv file, and then massage it a bunch and submit it. In addition, they want to know which census blocks are in your coverage area, which requires a bunch of GIS shapefile stuff. Like everyone else, since we do wireless I pretty much guesstimate 4.5 miles around every tower site.
All that's fine, I mean it's pretty taxing and I'm sick of doing it every 6 months but it's fine.
Now they want all that, and they want all of that data again, but represented differently. I have to beg CostQuest for a license to access the very fucking data they've been getting from me, which takes days, then I beg for the data, which takes days, and then they give it to me. Then I need to somehow select locations (as in homes, businesses, abandoned buildings) that I can install if they asked.
Stop for a second. Just so everyone's on the same page here: No WISP knows whether or not they can install a site by looking at the place on satellite or because it's in a coverage area. There are a million things that can fucking get in the way. We do not survey people via google maps. We always visit the site before telling someone it's a fail, and we don't charge for doing so. So just to set the score straight, the FCC wants me to list off every building I can install, while I myself have no fucking idea if I can actually install them without visiting every fucking site I can cover.
Okay, so on top of that, they also want a supporting set of data from me to say that I can cover those sites, which includes shit like terrain density at these sites and azimuth to my access points and a bunch of other crazy bullshit, information my radios don't provide, mind you.
And on top of all that, they also want a qualified engineer to sign off on everything before I submit the whole enchilada. Meaning one of the following:
1. A Professional Engineer who is licensed by the state.
2. A Corporate Engineer, who has at least a BA in specific engineering degrees.
OR, these first 3 times we do this, we can have it waived by either:
3a. An Engineer with a BA in Engineering and 7 years of experience
3b. Someone who's been "specially trained" to do this shit and has 10 years of experience
So now all of those young punks who see that their local community is suffering with old DSL telcos and they want to try to start up a WISP to help them out? You know, that thing that's constantly fucking happening all over the world? Fuck you I guess, if you didn't get your BA in electrical engineering.
On the one hand, I understand what they're after. I just wish they'd stop fucking us over while doing it.
I also don't know any WISPs that employ PE's. And a PE requires passing the FE exam + 4 years working under a PE + passing the once a year exam. So if you don't already employ PE's, you can't train any employees to become a PE.
I believe there's already some legal challenges to some of those certification requirements.
I'm also looking forward to seeing how these magic beans turn out when I plant them tonight. I heard they're magical!
There isn't one, and sadly they don't need one. The purpose of the whole thing is to identify what's available to people in order to justify subsidizing. But why you need a PE? No idea.
Why do you need a PE?
because Comcast and the other major players already have them on staff and their competition doesn't.
Love that regulatory capture.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
You can likely get a design firm with a PE on staff to perform the review for you and stamp it. I know, "$Texas," but my point was any design or architecture company has PE review as a matter of course so you may be able to set up some sort of contract with them.
I don't really know or understand it all that well, here's the FCC's notice on it: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-22-733A1.pdf
For now I know I can get by with the waiver so that's what I'm going with, and 99% of my focus needs to be on getting this shit done before next Friday (I gotta go be a pallbearer at my aunt's funeral at the end of the month, so my deadline has gotten tighter).
I have a meeting with the FCC on Monday to discuss some of this, and I will do my best to reduce my snark and anger but at the same time I want them to know this is fucking me really hard. There are startup WISP's and fiber companies in rural areas of the state that were looking forward to capitalizing on these new subsidies and instead they're only going to be available for the big boys who have been fucking everyone over this whole time, because of these restrictions.
I've shared some feedback already, will do more next week. They called me an hour ago to ask if I knew this was a thing and wanted to know if I was doing it and if I knew it was required and I nearly reached through the phone and pulled out the man's soul.
I'm sure they put it down as "feedback: negative"
So I get this shady email about new company tools , open the url on my secure testing VM which is completely empty and segregated from the rest of our network to see wtf it is in case I need to warn people and..without any further input required on the page immediately apparently fail a phishing test and get a bunch of courses automatically assigned... /Facepalm
The few fed employees I've talked to in official capacities are very sincere in wanting to do their job better and very limited in how they can communicate to avoid the appearance of bias. They also have limited control over proposed policy making, mostly coming in during implementation.
Probably best if you don't shit on them.
They were pretty helpful and at least acknowledged a bit of the fucking I'm getting.
1. They did cede and agreed that I can't verify any addresses in my coverage area as 100% certainty install candidates. Therefore, as I had kinda joked around last week, I am only claiming the very customers I'm currently connected to, as well as past customers, as the locations I cover. That does make reporting quite a bit easier, but also simultaneously opens the door for someone to come in with a bunch of govt money behind them to just put us in the ground. Not a huge fan of that, but oh well. In fairness, I can't and didn't want to be telling people I had people covered when they weren't covered, either. Simultaneously, if they'd quit fucking us over we'd be able to deliver a hell of a lot more throughput.
2. They wouldn't tell me that the PE waiver was going to be extended but also said it could happen. I made clear that the PE requirement was extremely silly given that #1 is true. Like, let me just baby-bird my customer addresses into your mouth, k, we're done, go digest that and leave me alone.
3. I let them know that the Census Bureau's Geocoder database still pukes constantly and constantly misses anywhere from 50-150 of my customers, and that this has gone on for years. They didn't seem surprised and just said, "Oh that's too bad"
I didn't interpret this one as shitting on the employees so much as a joke about how poorly/difficult it is to conduct user feedback research on support interactions.
Dear valued customer,
We are writing to inform you that we recently detected some unusual activity within portions of the LastPass development environment. We have determined that an unauthorized party gained access to portions of the LastPass development environment through a single compromised developer account and took portions of source code and some proprietary LastPass technical information. We have no evidence that this incident involved any access to customer data or encrypted password vaults. Our products and services are operating normally.
In response, we immediately initiated an investigation, deployed containment and mitigation measures, and engaged a leading cybersecurity and forensics firm. While our investigation is ongoing, we have achieved a state of containment, implemented additional enhanced security measures, and see no further evidence of unauthorized activity.
Based on what we have learned and implemented, we are evaluating further mitigation techniques to strengthen our environment. We will continue to update our customers with the transparency they deserve."
that's what you want to hear. (we use lastpass for everything @ my company)
My boss, the IT Manager/Director... his father was very sick for about a month, and passed last week. My boss is obviously now on leave for at least a week and I got dumped into taking the IT part of a pretty big project that as of last Wednesday didn't have a due date and now has a due date for about 3.5 weeks from now and I'm basically having to figure everything out from scratch.
And what I'm figuring out is that there are a number of things we're behind on in IT because my boss was understandably extremely distracted and things were falling through the cracks. Again, no blame to go around here because in January this year I went through a similar thing with my mom almost passing away and spending 2 months in the hospital, so I fully understand where my boss' head is or isn't at.
But mostly I'm just here needing to vent because holy hell I need to figure out if a few of the things that need to get done, like getting a fiber install in a new building done in 2 weeks is feasible because it has been sitting unapproved for 2 weeks. Or getting the rest of the equipment in and installed in about 3 weeks. And getting some of that stuff involves getting some workers up on a man lift to stick access points on poles 30 feet in the air, so it isn't like we can just go drop some of this on a desk and be done. oh and the wiring in the building isn't done yet. I have to figure out where that's at.
Litearlly the only thing that's keeping me from being completely up the creek without a paddle is that we have enough wifi AP's sitting in boxes that were earmarked for another project that I can pillage for this location because if I wanted new AP's for this build I needed to order them 3 months ago, and if I can get the fiber installed, get the router and switch set up (which mercifully we got in about a month ago), and get wifi going in the building if a couple other little things are late we can live with it.
No fault or blame being placed here, but holy crap my week is ruined and it's Monday.
Holy shit so sorry. If you're interested in bigger corp jobs (mostly remote), give me a shout.
Fingers crossed you get out before the Jenga tower comes crashing down.
bold move cotton, let's see if it works out for them
Oh come on, nothing ever goes wrong with a CI/CD pipeline.... provided you never deploy anything ever again.
So we'll see if any of them actually send me any offers but it sounds like my last company may have been criminally underpaying me..
I've also had 9 interviews since i started sending my resume out last monday so fingers crossed.
Technical evaluations sure have gotten more complicated though; i got it sorted in a couple hours but one company had me send in terraform code to spin up a VPC; several load balancers; a GCP sql cloud instance; a lamp stack on a kubernetes cluster i also had to spin up and serve web content from a few gcp buckets..the last time i was looking for work it consisted of "I pinky swear i know how to do things..."
Oh this isn't software per se; i'm 100% a sysadmin, now a cloud admin; it's just all interactions with servers in my last company and pretty much everywhere I'm looking now is done through scripts/code.. I don't think the separation of the two really exists anymore now that I think about it though except for very small companies.
Deployments, config changes etc. are all done via code true but you still need the server knowledge to track down issues and be able to tell if they're code or vm/pod/instance related.
Nothing a good anonymous Glassdoor review can't fix.
But honestly take the money if you can make good use of it, don't feel bad about it. They're not forcing you to speak good of them, just not saying anything.