Not that it will matter to anyone at all, but I won’t be following anyone to Mastodon, reading anything on Mastodon, using Mastodon, nor otherwise doing anything Mastodon-y. I don’t waste my time on trash tech.

Why does the IT Department always become the “fixers?”

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years. It happens in every company. IT becomes the go-to for any complex task.

And I think it’s this: troubleshooting is a rare skill and being able to dynamically execute a series of steps is as well. I’d guess that in the general population, the rate of those being present at a competent level is maybe 0.5%. Due to its nature those skills exhibit themselves at about a 20% rate in the IT world. This means that even though most IT people also are not good troubleshooters or systems-comprehenders either (still only 20%), the prevalence rate is 40x higher there than it is in the general population.

Thus, IT gets many, many non-IT tasks because they are literally the only group likely to be able to execute them at some acceptable level of competence.

Insane Clown Posse was not really wrong about magnets, by the way.

No one — and I mean no one at all — really understands how or why electromagnetic charge is a thing. It’s just a fact of the universe. There is no deeper understanding and may never be one. Yeah, physicists will prattle on about Noether’s Theorem and gauge symmetry and all that but that doesn’t really explain anything, but is just a very convoluted way of saying this: “Charge emerges from how the universe is, and we don’t know why, but here is a circular definition that convinces those without the mental horsepower to understand it that we know more than we do.”

As I’ve become more capable of understanding more and more of science over the years, it turns out that a lot of it is like that. That is, it’s deliberate obfuscation to conceal lack of knowledge from the hoi polloi, rather than explanatory.

How to self-educate if you’re young:

1) Read any and every book an adult tells you is “too advanced for you” or where an adult says anything about the work like “you shouldn’t be reading that at your age.”

2) Start reading undergrad textbooks and such as early as you can understand 50% of what’s in there. Look up what you don’t. (This is much easier in the age of the internet, though I expect that’ll be taken away soon enough.)

3) Find a mentor to help you learn what to ignore (hint: most of school) and what to study intensively.

4) Establish a firm base of philosophy. This helps you with all else — even (and especially) STEM.

5) If there is anything separate of point 1 above that an adult tells you that you should not be studying, concentrate on that very damn closely.

This is pretty much what I did and how my brain got so damn big.

Just remember: China’s Zero Covid heinousness is how many Covidians wanted the rest of the world to look basically forever. Can you imagine that? What a interminable hell that would’ve been; let’s all be glad we did not go down that path.

This is very much how my industry works. Seen it dozens of times. Have even seen IT departments gutted because they “aren’t doing anything.” And then a few months later, nothing works, systems are down all the time and the MBAs are like, “Don’t know why this is happening! The IT department wasn’t doing anything anyway!”