Leave the Field

I quit IT.

I understand this urge. I’m staying in the field myself but I truly do understand.

I canโ€™t keep up with the tools I have to learn that pops up every 6 months. I canโ€™t lie through my teeth about my qualifications for the POS Linkedin recruiters looking for the perfect unicorns. Maybe its the brain fog or long covid everyone talking about but I truly can not grasp the DevOps workflows; itโ€™s not elegant, too many glued parts with too many different technologies working together and all it takes a single mistake to fck it all up

Yeah, DevOps and the terrible tech around that is just an enormous mess. It’s like if you welded together a tractor-trailer, a 737, a scooter, a bus and a Hot Wheels car and expected that to work well. Or at all. But that is where the industry is now — and as usual, with complete fucking bozos coming out of the woodwork telling you it couldn’t be any other way.

When of course it certainly could be another way, because we used to have tech that worked better, much more safely and more quickly doing the exact same thing for vastly less cost. Why that tech was abandoned is too long to explain here but it basically came down to the imperatives of the cloud hosting companies, that my industry tends to forget hard-learned lessons every decade or so as new people flood in, and that everyone feels the need to make their mark, even if it is with trash tech discarded for a very good reason in the past.

IT is also the only field that if you don’t make a huge effort to keep updated and current (meaning constant learning, training and certs), most of your knowledge and abilities are completely outmoded and useless in 2-3 years.

Leaving makes sense for anyone who can’t hack that. Working in my field is a constant sprint to do nothing but inevitably fall ever-further behind.

Gone to California

The Red State Brain Drain Isnโ€™t Coming. Itโ€™s Happening Right Now. As conservative states wage total culture war, college-educated workersโ€”physicians, teachers, professors, and moreโ€”are packing their bags.

Told ya so. We drained our brains off to California for instance. Red states are going to go into a steep decline as this really starts hitting them. All the smart people leave, only dumbasses and bozos left == bad times, man.

NTLM

We, Microsoft, are deprecating NTLM, and want to hear from you.

Holy crap, this is going to break half the world. Deprecating NTLM is like banning all the standard locks on all doors and mandating that you can only use biometric-based locks that scan your iris — and then just hoping people can do it. This is going to suck if they actually try to enforce this and do in fact take away NTLM.

I don’t feel like writing a whole long post about NTLM — what it is and does — but Microsoft is going to nuke a whole lot of shit when they do this. Currently, the documentation for how to transition away from NTLM is terrible and nearly-unusable, many applications and devices do not support Kerberos (the newer alternative to NTLM), and many companies will not be able to comply with this at all for at least 15-20 years.

This is going to break a vast amount of stuff. I need to schedule a very long vacation when Microsoft does this craziness. Don’t want to be anywhere near this pointless disaster.

This is yet another example of fake security that makes many, many things harder or impossible to use for extremely little gain. It just makes life roundly more difficult “for your own good.” Really, though, it is being done so you have to buy more Microsoft products and get further locked in to their ecosystem.