Every industry is full of technical hills that people plant their flag on. What is yours?
Cleaning, organizing, and documentation are high priorities.
Every job I’ve worked at has had mountains of “The last guy didn’t…” that you walk into and it’s always a huge pain in the ass. They didn’t throw out useless things, they didn’t bother consolidating storage rooms, and they never wrote down any of their processes, procedures, or rationals. I’ve spent many hours at each job just detangling messes because the other person was to busy or thought it unimportant and didn’t bother to spend the time.
Make it a priority, allocate the time, and think long-term.
Starting a new job soon, and I’m paying for some holes in documentation as I prep my offboarding documentation for my current team. Definitely making it a priority to do better going forward! Being lazy in the moment is nice but the “stitch in time” adage is definitely true
I’m so hot for you right now.
Make it a priority, allocate the time, and think long-term.
In many jobs, someone with the power to fire you makes the priorities, allocates your time and does not think long-term.
Cognitive behavioral therapy/dialectical behavioral therapy are not the universal cure for everything and they need to stop being treated as such
I’ll join you on this hill, soldier.
CBT is the only one they’ve tested, and they tested themselves, and of course they look great. It offloads all success and failure 100% to the victim, and so many failures don’t reflect on the process; ever. It resembles a massive sham.
My counsellor friend calls it “sigma-6 for mental health” and notes how it’s often not covered by insurance (even outside America’s mercenary system) so it’s a nice cash cow for the indu$try.
So what are the alternatives? When I think about non-CBT therapy I think of like, Freud asking about problems with papa und penis, which just from a common sense angle seems more questionable.
Somatic focused therapy has been much more helpful and less gaslighty for me, but it’s also not right for everyone.
Say you have anxiety that’s more top down. You usually aren’t feeling anxious, but then you start thinking anxious thoughts and that spirals out of control and now you’re an anxious mess on the verge of a panic attack. CBT could make sense for some people in this situation because you’re reminding yourself there’s nothing to really be anxious about in the moment and redirecting your thoughts to less anxious things.
If your anxiety is more bottom up, you might not even have to think about anything that makes you anxious. Your nervous system is just in a chronic state of activation/hyperdrive, and warning you there’s danger even if there’s not. You can think calming thoughts all you want but that doesn’t usually change the fact that your body is kicked into survival mode.
Instead of trying to redirect your thoughts, you can focus your thoughts on noticing physical sensations and putting a label on the way your body is feeling.
So you wouldn’t say “I am safe.” You would stop and acknowledge how you’re feeling, and acknowledge it’s your body’s way of trying to communicate danger to keep you alive. You don’t want to necessarily act based on that warning (unless you are truly in danger, which is the case sometimes), but instead of just dismissing it, recognize what you’re physically feeling. Ok, my heart is beating really fast, my chest is kind of tight and I feel physically unsafe. What are some other physical sensations I feel right now that I know are safe?
A popular one is focusing on your “sit bones” or the way a surface you’re sitting on feels beneath you. Or focusing on your posture, if how the floor feels beneath your feet when they’re planted flat on the ground. It works surprisingly well to reset/calm your nervous system.
This guy offers a free course of several short videos that are really helpful. I started them last year but let it drop off. Reminds me I need to pick up where I left off and finish them
Sounds a bit like the mindfulness thing, as well. Thanks!
It’s popular because it does work for a lot of things, from fear of spiders to eating disorders. Of course they would try it on as many different problems as possible.
Beats the currently popular “that’s just the way you are and if it affects other people that’s their problem. In fact, you’re actually better than other people.”-therapy
CBT is just a rip off of psychoanalysis with different words.
the hill i am willing to die on is: FUCK AI. I’ll be dead before I let it write a single line of code.
I don’t let it wrote code per se but I’ve found it useful for writing regex for me to paste into notepad++ find/replace commands.
Holy shit, that’s a thing you can do? Like a sed type function works in Notepad++?
I bet someone smart could, but i just have Gemini or Claude open on the side where I tell it what I want to do with a regex in NP++ (or Geany now in Linux). Then I paste it into the regex box of the Find/Replace and test it then run it.
Technisation and standardisation are good for the EMS sector.
The whole “it was better when we could do what we want and back then we had only real calls with sicker people and everything was good” is fucking aweful and hurting the profession.
Look, you fucking volunteer dick, I know you do this for 10 years longer than me (and I do it for 25 now),but unlike you I did it full-time and probably had more shifte in one year than you had in your life. Now my back is fucked because back then there was no “electrohydraulic stretcher”, no stair chair, the ventilator was twice as heavy (and could basically nothing), the defibrillator weighted so much we often had to switch carrying it after two floors up.
And we had just as many shit calls,but got actually attacked worse because the shit 2kg radios were shit and had next to zero coverage indoors, and so had cellphones which led to you being unable to even call for backup.
And of course we had longer shifts,needed to work more hours and the whole job market was even more fucked.
“But we didn’t need this and that,we looked at the patient”. Yeah,go fuck yourself. MUCH more people died or took damage from that. So many things were not seen. And it was all accepted as “yeah, that’s how life is”.
So fuck everyone in this field and their nostalgia.
In the medical system here, there is a trend toward imaging and other tests but no actual examination of the patient.
I have a friend whose injury didn’t look too bad on MRI. But a lesser scan (CT?) they don’t value as much showed the actual problem and confirmed the complaint. Our greater trust for the new hotness, and discounting tools we needed to use before the new exam tools even when the patient begs, is not a perfect solution.
It seems we could be doing both and getting a better understanding.
I totally agree with everything you say about the heavy tools and bad radios - family was in rural EMS, and the bodily wear and tear seems to be prevalent among all the old peers.
I think too much safety is annoying and stupid. To me safety is often about mindset. I think companies like to force a bunch of stupid safety rules on people so they can try to get out of being sued for doing really dumb shit like hiring drug addicts or people with zero experience to do dangerous jobs. I think it’s really insulting that as an adult, you have to be uncomfortable all day and deal with stupid stuff to work at a job you are being massively underpaid for anyways.
Safety is important sometimes. You should definitely be careful around machines and wear safety glasses sometimes, but for some reason the people who do most of the work at companies often end up being abused by shitty companies who want to lobby the government for tax breaks, but never on behalf of their workers.
It’s quite sad how people spend decades wearing uncomfortable clothing working long hours, and have to subject themselves to humiliation by wearing stupid and ugly clothes simply to get a bit of sympathy from our extremely materially obsessed society and our toxic capitalist system.
Workplace safety is quickly turning from a factual and risk-based field into a vibes-based field, and that’s a bad thing for 95% of real-world risks.
To elaborate a bit: the current trend in safety is “Safety Culture”, meaning “Getting Betty to tell Alex that they should actually wear that helmet and not just carry it around”. And at that level, that’s a great thing. On-the-ground compliance is one of the hardest things to actually implement.
But that training is taking the place of actual, risk-based training. It’s all well and good that you feel comfortable talking about safety, but if you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re not actually making things more safe. This is also a form of training that’s completely useless at any level above the worksite. You can’t make management-level choices based on feeling comfortable, you need to actually know some stuff.
I’ve run into numerous issues where people feel safe when they’re not, and feel at risk when they’re safe. Safety Culture is absolutely important, and feeling safe to talk about your problems is a good thing. But that should come AFTER being actually able to spot problems.
The mining industry emphasizes safely culture, just like what you said, and a lot of it is focused on wearing PPE.
There are still too many preventable deaths and accidents.
I think safety is talked about and vibe-based to please investors.
I’m always in favour of actually testing safety stuff.
Does that fall arrest line actually work? Go walk over to that way until you can’t.
Can this harness hold you without cutting circulation off to your legs? Go sit in it for an hour and see.
Commercial providers for space programs cost more money than if NASA just hired civil servants to do a lot of the work. Big corps just take longer, then don’t want to share development info that taxpayers funded, making integration into other elements a huge safety problem that can’t be fully resolved due to the protection of the provider’s intellectual property.
Then they get shit workers that put up with job instability caused by a fickle Congress. This has gotten progressively worse for decades, and now NASA is reduced to a corporate subsidy program for parasitic billionaires and huge companies that don’t deliver well. Nothing like someone asking me if a design will function properly with another, and me basically saying I have no fucking clue because everything is a goddamn secret.
NASA’s commercial provider obsession was bought by lobbyists, and it’s a fucking terrible idea. I’ll die on that hill.
Take the time to do it right the first time but also don’t waste time if it doesn’t add value.
Having a process is great but if the process exceeds the value then the process not only harms profit margins but also erodes morale. If the reason a process exists is to counter bad behavior then it’s an employee problem not a process problem.
Open office floorplans are a terrible idea!
Work from home shouldn’t be considered a given based on the job tasks but a privilege and benefit extended to those employees that have shown the discipline and reliability to work from home. But the in office requirement shouldn’t be forced on everyone just to satisfy a “butts in seat policy” or a managers insecurity.
There are a load of things in IT where using a processor is the wrong choice, and using an FPGA instead would have made a lot of problems a non-issue.
Is that controversial? I’ve always assumed people avoid FPGAs just because they’re unfamiliar with them.
I think it’s because FPGAs are an intermediate to just making your own ASIC.
If you’re at a scale where making a new ASIC is your go-to, congratulations on your job at Google or Apple. I don’t even know if FaceMeta would do that. Designing and founding a new chip is a whole thing.
Agreed. If you’re not moving hundreds of thousands if units, there probably is no return in investment. Those things have expensive up front costs.
Tell that to the people who think they will soon replace this expensive and complicated FPGA stuff with something running on a cheap MPU programmed by an intern. For thirty years now…
Yikes.
Welcome to my world.
I wish FPGAs and other more purpose built and purpose suited options were available in my IT equipment. They can do amazing shit, better and more efficiently. Just wasn’t ever available to use for me at least.
One problem is that programming an FPGA is a rare skill. A lot of even good programmers simply don’t get their heads around how they tick.
Coming from a digital hardware background, an FPGA was amazingly straightforward, so I’m one of the rare breeds who does both FPGAs and microprocessors.
That’s awesome! I bet that gives you some really good insights to the two platforms.
Snapshot tests suck. That’s a test that stores the dom (or I guess any json serializable thing) and when you run the test again, compares what you have now to what it has saved.
No one is going to carefully examine a 300 line json diff. They’re just going to say “well I updated the file so it makes sense it changed” and slap the update button.
Theoretically you could only feed it very small things, but if that’s the case you could also just assert on what’s important yourself.
Snapshots don’t encode intent. They make everything look just as important as everything else. And then hotshot developers think they have 100% coverage
I do ameuter music production, one hill I will die on is there is no right way to mix a track of music it is entirely subjective and mixing a track of music is way more creative of a practice then some faceious salesman make it out online
Your favorite AI enabled LLM does a very, very good job of simulating language tests based on previous tests and there’s no reason at all not to use it to study and prepare.
It can write you a poem, it can’t write you a play.
More like it can write you a poem but it won’t make you a poet.
It can’t write you anything that hasn’t been written a million times before, but it can give you a paragraph and tell you to find the verbs, and then mark the exercise to a shocking level of accuracy. It can explain what you did wrong and give accurate examples and details. Then you can say “I don’t get it…I still don’t get it” a hundred times and it will try and try to explain it to you, endlessly, and it will never get frustrated or impatient.
This is a non technical hill but it is applicable to my technical career. The hill is that REMOTE WORK WORKS. I am so frustrated that so many businesses are going back to hybrid or full RTO.
RTO mandates are employees reduction schemes, nothing more.
RTO is about control and management/owners thinking that everyone else is lazy and would not do anything if not constantly pushed. I believe that is because they are the kind of people who would need that kind of supervision.
The financial side is that making people go to work maintains value. The money you spend on lunch, travel, dry cleaning, maintenance of cars, and the increased value of property near places of business add to the ownership class’s wealth. All that money you spend traveling to/from and while you are at work goes to them. If you save that money by working from home, the wealth stays with you.
Hear hear. My job’s about to force RTO starting January. Precious few other engineering jobs offer WFH to non-SW engineers.
Not everything needs to be deployed to a cluster of georedundant K8s nodes, not everything needs to be a container, Docker is not always necessary. Just run the damn binary. Just build a .deb package.
(Disclaimer: yes, all those things can have merit and reasons. Doesn’t mean you have to shove them into everything.)
Docker is the source of my secret nerd shame lol. I feel like I’m reasonably competent with computers - I’m no pro but I can install and setup Arch (BTW) without using Archinstall and stuff like that. But I just don’t understand Docker. I’ve read so many ELI5 guides and I understand in a really general way what it’s meant to do, but I just… cannot picture in my head what it’s doing. I don’t even know where it is on my machine! But I still have two apps that I run in Docker. They just… exist somewhere and if they ever break I’m lost.
That makes two of us. I’m in IT rather than development but I deploy VMs and containers semi regularly at work and at home. Docker seems to be designed to be an ephemeral isolated environment for repeatable testing, but oh so many server applications are distributed primarily as docker images.
But then how will I ship my machine seeing as it works for me?
Damn, I haven’t thought of that! Looks like I have to use a subdirectory of your Homedir from now on.
Just symlink my home folder to your PC and we are good to go.
I see you are well-versed in the ways of Citrix.
Genius!
A plain text physical password notebook is actually more secure than most people think. It’s also boomer-compatible. My folks understand that things like their social security cards need to be kept secure and out of public view. The same can be applied to a physical password notebook. I also think a notebook can be superior to the other ways of generating and storing passwords, at least in some cases.
- use the same password for everything: obviously insecure.
- Use complex unique passwords for everything: You’ll never remember them. If complex passwords are imposed as a technical control, even worse if you have to change them often, you’ll just end up with passwords on post-its.
- use a password manager: You’re putting all your eggs in one basket. If the manager gets breached there goes everything.
But will you be diligent enough to make a new password for every single website using this method?
I understand, somewhat, this being discouraged at work but I agree that doing it for personal passwords with the notebook at home is fine. I’ve met people opposed to ever writing down passwords and I think it’s just a rote reaction based on work training.
If you have a notebook at home with all your passwords then somebody needs to break into your house to get them, which is pretty good security.
