Broken/buggy software usually is not developers/QA’s fault but management and clients.
Consulting want something that conforms exactly what is signed and as fast as possible, if there are later bugs that doesn’t invalidates what was agreed or new features take longer to introduce it means more money as maintenance/evolution contracts.
Clients often don’t see why they should pay extra and include extra time for better code. Also they prioritise stupid things like changing the font in a page over fixing a bug in the checkout page.
The bespoke software that runs most of the business world is actually way simpler than a lot of people think.
If you’re a university student and some company hires you on the first year to work on a business analysis system to be used by a major regional retailer, you might be thinking you must be some kind of a wunderkid, but it also just might be because this system really isn’t that complicated, and you had no idea about the average salaries on this field, so they hired you on the cheap.
Most public school teachers have very little say about what happens in the school or the curriculum. We’re just carrying out orders and hope that students will go along.
Student discipline can only be applied with parent and administrator cooperation. If admin doesn’t do anything about bullying, fighting, or cheating, then the school is screwed.
Financial institutions are not as secure as you think.
Every once in a while I will see someone ask “We bank online why can’t we vote online?” Banking is secure enough that the money the banks lose is less than the money they make. Also not all lose of funds will hurt the bank if the individual is scammed, since individuals are supposed to keep their accounts secure and not fall for scams.
Your bank is using old technology and Excel for a lot of internal records keeping. Most fraud detection is a cost to the bank not a money maker. Stopping money laundering, human trafficking, ect means the bank doesn’t get that money and has to pay people to investigate it and shudder report to the government.
Like almost every other business out there they work off of poorly made or old tech and the lowest paid people are push to more work with less time and resources.
Millions of government employees work hard every day on so much shit you’ll never see or understand that does in fact make your life so much nicer than you deserve when you complain about government workers.
And I’m NOT talking about the cultic worshipped military. I’m talking civilian civil servants at all levels of government.
SOME people are really gonna wonder why everything’s getting shittier and never make the connection that their idiotic notions about government led to it.
I have some gov contracts and I can confirm this.
Also: the big complaint about working with gov is either apparently expensive stuff and/or apparently slow progress .
Reality? We as citizens require a crazy amount of justified checking and validation from every part of gov because it affects people’s lives that things take longer and cost more to do right … and many times that to back out a fuck-up and not kill anyone. (Oh Hi Elon)
I see people who openly complain about government workers as no different than those shitheads who are willing to mistreat food service workers.
Also: the big complaint about working with gov is either apparently expensive stuff and/or apparently slow progress .
And it isn’t different in the private sector. Except that there is less controls usually.
Academia, USA.
You’re getting the exact same quality of education for introductory classes at a community college, state school, and private school.
I know because I teach the same suite of classes at all 3 as an adjunct. Same book, same syllabus, same schedule, same assignments. The only difference is the price tag, and I’m hardly alone in that.
Actually, scratch that. You’re getting a better education at the community college because the people in charge there bother to remember that I exist and treat me as an equal.
I got degrees from both a community college and a major research university. The two don’t share instructors, but on average, the quality is much better at the community college.
Community college instructors are there to teach. They go to continuing education classes to learn how to do it better. Some classes at a research university are taught by similar, dedicated instructors, but some are taught by the professor who drew the metaphorical short straw that semester, and who’d rather be focusing on her research. She will put in her best effort, don’t get me wrong, but her first priority is research.
That is to say, for anyone thinking about a degree, don’t overlook the value of community college.
(ETA: I work at a research university now; the research professors who also teach are some of my co-workers.)
Working with electricity is actually quite simple in a lot of respects, and I make a lot of money mainly because people are afraid of it (and rightfully so, me too). But many of the small things like changing plugs/switches out and hanging fixtures can be done easily by anyone with a basic knowledge hand tool use and basic rules like a) turn off the main if you don’t know which breaker you’re working with, b) check that it’s off with a meter or hot stick, c) even then, don’t directly touch the shiny parts, and d) match your colors exactly as you found them (take pictures to be safe). Granted I’ve been doing this for 10+ years, but even a layman can save themselves a service call with a couple basics and YouTube is a great resource for such things.
My favorite electrical tip is swapping the capacitor in your AC when it stops working. $12 on Amazon. $175 for a service call. I keep a spare.
Better yet, having a (halfway decent) multimeter and knowing how to use it is huge. A good one can test capacitance, but simply tracing voltage isn’t too tricky.
This. I just recently hung a ceiling fan with the help of YouTube and it’s still on the ceiling.
Hope the box you mounted it to was rated for a ceiling fan :D
The better you get at coding, the less you’ll probably write code. This is for two reasons: you can’t fuck up code that isn’t written and you need people that understand the bigger picture to focus on making that picture clearer. This unfortunately leads to junior and mid-level developers writing most of the code. But it’s not like things would be 10x better if senior devs wrote everything, because even for someone experienced coding well is fucking hard.
Coding: expert level fitting a square peg into a round hole. Every now and then you find a square or rectangle hole.
When I worked in local television news, people would probably be shocked about how frank and open newscasters often were during commercial breaks. We got direct satellite feeds of the national newscasts, and they didn’t mute the mics or turn off cameras during breaks. We got to still see and hear them while local commercials ran.
I remember Katie Couric going off about a bunch of dumb shit during commercial breaks. I especially remember her being a demented cheerleader for the War on Terror, especially behind the scenes.
There used to be a video of her cutting a Native American historian from a special on Columbus Day and saying “what does he know about Columbus anyway?” after chiding him for having negative things to say about Columbus. Since they were short on time, they made the decision to cut him from the program. I’m having trouble finding it now.
The 1995 film Spin is made entirely from direct satellite feeds from between commercial breaks. It was specifically about the 1992 election and how both Republicans and Democrats “massaged the message” with the news media, but watching it you’ll get an idea of how it works, because a lot of the clips are from commercial breaks. (The video I mentioned about Couric and the historian might even be in this film, it’s been a while since I’ve seen it).
Mediaburn has a copy of the film to watch on their website.
In IT the first problem/question should always this:
Is it a people problem or a technology problem?
IT can fix technology problems, managers need to fix people problems
if someone gives an IT person a people problem and they try to fix it, it will probably not go very well
same if you give a manager a technology problem and ask them to fix it
this is the most important lesson that leaders needs to understand
My supervisors will try to fix it for 3 minutes and post a question in the chat.
If that doesn’t’t make it work, it’s an it problem.
The drinking water systems in the United States are so precarious and vulnerable, that I’m genuinely shocked we haven’t had more widespread issues with the water supply. The systems are made up of thousands of locally-managed interconnected intakes and outflows, and oversight is spotty and combative.
Please use a water filter. And thank your local utilities and maintenance people for their hard work keeping us alive.
I saw a survey of small town watertowers in the US. There were a terrifying amount of dead birds in there, and living birds shitting.
And that was with the EPA in existence. Just wait until the rivers catch on fire again. Psychotic idiots.
It’s often really fucking stupid to get a phd.
This can’t be said enough. It’s almost always not worth the strain on your mental health. You’re not a student but a worker for your professor and getting paid way too little
Youth worker here: How much fucking work it is to just keep things from falling apart constantly. People assume most of my work is planning and doing activities with teenagers. But a lot of the time I’m like 50% caretaker.
Entropy is a real monster that rarely is part of the forward thinker. It is great to understand it as a young person, it will make you a master of your trade when you reach the leadership spaces
All big banks run on horrendous excel spreadsheets ridden with errors
They’re not errors. They are expected deviations from reality. And if you fix them, YOU are wrong.
I’m in accounting and considering what I read in the news, it was surprising to me how honest it is in real, regular, non public companies. We get real audits that are trying to validate our records, we give them our real work to look at, try so hard to figure out the real cost and revenue each month and year, to allocate things correctly, nobody is pushing for some fake result, only for a clear picture.
Those companies with fraud? A lot of things have to go wrong, and someone has to be really trying hard to defraud, and needs to convince others to go along with that. Most companies hire accounting because they actually want to have a good picture of what’s going on financially.
