Sylamore

Highest Paid Person?

While I agree in principal, speaking as someone who's been that person it creates a lot of stress when it's just one person. You never get a break from enhancing or fixing and maintaining the tools that the rest of the team is using, and probably lose opportunities in your "other" skills. You'll probably get no support from the actual dev groups in the company, never get funding to hire a contractor (which almost never works out anyway), potentially end up stuck career wise because if the tools are really useful your manager isn't gonna want to lose you to a promotion.

A small "tools" team shared across some related disciplines under common leadership would be more ideal in my experience, but normally it's either beg for the real dev teams scraps or go rogue.

I like using code to solve problems and automate things, but I have no desire to be a full time coder just like I don't have a strong desire to be a people manager.

One of the privileges of previously being an Exchange admin was being able to send the "Do not reply all" message and then setting up a rule on the server to kill all further messages.

But it's also why I had a script to lock down any distribution list with more than 100 members to authorized senders only.

Logitech still supports the Harmony devices, for how much longer remains to be seen. I just recently replaced some that had broke so I'm good till the next device failure as long as I don't make any major replacements either.

I know I'm part of a dwindling customer base that still uses separate A/V gear and not just built-in streaming apps and a soundbar, but it seems like there would have still been a market for competent universal remotes that you could customize.

I hated how almost every generation of their remotes got harder to use and program compared to pre-Logitech Harmony. The Touch remotes were practically unusable because you had frequently used buttons in poor locations and a touch screen that you had to scroll through to find the correct soft touch button for that wasn't especially responsive, the old models with all hard buttons were vastly more usable.

Ultimately it was the need to buy a new phone every couple of years even when I otherwise wouldn't need to that pushed me to Apple devices. I only this year had to replace my daughter's iPhone 7, but not because it wasn't supported as a 4 year old device. Granted it won't get iOS 16 or 17 but 15 is still supported.

I work on and off with both, AWS may be more feature complete in some areas but Azure is frankly easier to work with for me, I can actually get support on issues I have from Microsoft. And while I've generally only done so from the large enterprise account perspective, Microsoft is way more open to feature requests/enhancements than Amazon is. I don't have any experience with GCP so I can't speak on that.

I'm surprised this hasn't happened before, @list.att.com is just a standard listserv type system, internally anyone can create and manage lists of email addresses with internal or external addresses in it and those lists are all open to the public internet if you know their address.

I can't remember if there is any kind of access control that the owner of the list can implement to prevent external messages to the list address but no longer have access to check.

I knew when I moved from AZ to NC I was going to miss Fry's (RIP), I should have checked to see if there were any micro centers within a 50 mile radius when trying to figure out where to move.

AT&T's billing system (Telegence) is so convoluted, even their own staff can't tell you what your month to month charges will be, it's why they only give you an estimate when you sign up for a new line.

I worked in an office bullpen type environment briefly with everything director and below being required to sit in the bullpen, and they were so proud of the set up till the nearly universal complaints of all the noise from everyone on the phone and all of the privacy offices being in constant use with nobody using the reservation tool to book them and they added white noise machines in the ceiling. Well that kind of helped with the cacophony of conversations a bit, but lead to just high noise floor so everyone just talked louder. At least with the white noise machine the noise cancelling headphones were a little more effective, but it still doesn't stop people from tapping you on the shoulder while you are trying to focus.

Some companies like AT&T are taking this a step further. People who have spent their entire 20+ year careers working remote are now being told they must report to an office. And to address the inevitable hypocrisy of forcing you into an office that may not be the same office as your team, they are designating specific offices for each team and you have to relocate to that office at your own expense.

Now it's obvious this is just another massive layoff in disguise for them in particular, but apparently their wave 1 impacted group (relocate this year) is somewhere about 50/50 on people committing to relocate vs effectively volunteering to get laid off.

I didn't mean aggregate as in summarized data, but aggregate as in a common repository of multiple different data sources as a single massive data warehouse. If I needed to group or summarize the data, I had to do it in my own queries.

In multiple orgs now I've had raw access to data warehouses (DB2 and SQL Server based) that had aggregates of petabytes of data from ETL that I was free to access via Excel PowerQuery, direct SQL tools, Python or R, or even PowerBI.

Yeah, a common refrain internally was the I stood for India.

I know the Kyndryl spin out recently made a decision that US based roles will be limited going forward due to cost goals and have been "workforce rebalancing" teams instead of allowing them to go to the bench to find new roles. The same is not true for offshore resources.

There are a lot of US Restricted roles due to government contracts - I can't remember if it's a legal requirement or a contract restriction. However I do know it's not universal as less sensitive work absolutely did use off shore resources.

Speaking as an ex-IBMer, even if you reskill they'll still resource action you in favor or someone younger and less well compensated because experience isn't on the list of check boxes they care about.

All the talk about reskilling is just so you stay calm and comfortable while the cows in front of you get a bolt to the head.

Reskilling is useful to help you find an external job more than an internal one in my experience.

And make it monthly then it's a real offer

That's kind of what HP NonStop is, a distributed operating system operating as a huge cluster.

If you followed their coding practices and used their native libraries you could almost always do things like freeze a process, move it to an entirely different CPU (which could be a totally different physical server) then restart it without losing the work in progress, processes could auto-restart and resume from the last checkpoint, add more processes to handle the messages in the queue and all kinds of built into the OS and layered services niceties that everyone keeps reinventing.

As a capacity planner I tried to argue in favor of tools like Hystrix being built into our middleware services because when we had large IPPV events cascading failures was the biggest risk to our availability and it happened because 99% of the time our services could process any queues before downstream timeouts occured but during high volume events the queues would grow due to nearly instant demand occurring (normally within 5 minutes of the PPV event start time) and causing the queues to go deeper than our timeouts. Combine that with the queues not being durable if a process restart was needed and things got real ugly real fast under extreme load. Automatic retries + deep queues + short timeouts = service issues that take hours to unwind often requiring a coordinated cold restart of the entire middleware pipeline and millions in lost revenue.

To compensate we had to scale our systems for the absolute instantaneous peak demand because being legacy systems (pre containers) with a lot of rigid plumbing in them we couldn't just scale on demand. Things did not degrade gracefully once you hit the timeout limits in the composite API calls.

>What would have stopped that would have been having a way to restrict a charge to a particular merchant so the attacker couldn’t have been able to get the money out.

This is one of the primary use cases for privacy.com (if you are in the US). The virtual cards are either single-use only or they are merchant locked, plus you can set spending limits on the card. I use these for 100% of my online and recurring payment transactions now. The only downside is that it's linked to your bank account so it's debt transactions only, but that's not necessarily a downside to me.

Don't forget to pop-up a full overlay on the screen if I happen to move my mouse outside of the browser rendering window asking me for my email address, so that if I did tab away from the page now all I see is a full screen ad and not the content I was looking at before.

Yeah, it was creepy the first few times Chase bank begged for more ways to contact me "because you don't seem to read our emails" for marketing. So far they haven't threatened to move me back to paper bills I guess cause the email isn't bouncing.

I've noticed over the last couple of years in particular that more and more emails coming in are image based only, with no plain text or even alternate text so that if you won't load images you can't even tell what the email was about. Yeah those I never read.

The faster a web site asks me for an email address determines how fast I bail on even looking at their product/tool, or if I have no choice I put in a bogus email address to get past it, if it is one of those damn forms that sends you a link I use one of the various public inbox/temporary email address sites so I don't have to deal with the attempts to bring me back into the conversion funnel when I was just seeking information.

I've worked remote now for 8 years, I do sometimes miss being in the office with the people I'm collaborating with, but it's not something I would want to do 5 days a week. I'd be totally fine with 1-2 days mandated in the office per week if I was within a reasonable commute distance to my team, but my current team is geographically dispersed anyway (think co-workers who've never met face to face in 15 years) so it makes no sense to require any of us into an office. I'll choose WFH every time because I know I'm far more productive that way - if I was forced to go back to commuting work, I would effectively restrict my office time to no more than 8 hours per day and refuse to ever work outside of the office, where as today I'm effectively available to do work about 11 hours per day even though I seldom do.

This seems to be the real reason that AT&T is pushing RTO, including telling people that have worked remote for their entire careers and never seen an office in 20+ years that they must relocate to a designated location either by the end of 2023 or 2024 depending on their wave. If they reject immediately they will get severance, but if they accept and don't relocate later they will be terminated without severance.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/at-t-tells-60000-m...

Although the story says that "managers" (e.g. non union individual contributors) get to choose from the 9 locations, that's not the reality, your work stream is assigned a designated location, there may be an alternate location you can petition to go to instead but it must be approved first.

AT&T had bought Vyatta before selling it to it's current owner, but I know they used a REST API internally when deploying it for 5G Edge use cases. It looks like VyOS gained an API in 2019.

I was doing the same thing with physical SIMs for over a decade before eSIMs even existed. I even could use SIM trays to make the same one fit in different form factors.

Thanks for the insight, when I was with DTV our HP/Tandem rep always made a big deal about their footprint in AOL in what would have been the same time era you were there (mid 90s) and how they "created the internet you know today" but they always sounded more like sales guy tall tales than anything else. We kept their footprint constrained to database caches (effectively) because our Superdome couldn't handle the dual workload of Siebel and lots of read requests from APIs, which was a role they excelled at for us.

Old versions of NT4 and 2000 supported SCSI disks in the cluster. We had one for a "high availability" file server from Compaq and always regretted it - I'm pretty sure a single box would have been more reliable. There was a cross-over LAN cable between the boxes and there were SCSI heartbeats (using persistent reservations IIRC) over the SCSI bus, but we would almost always have an issue with the SCSI drives deadlocking and the cluster failing BOTH nodes due to a fight over disk ownership. We replaced it with a netapp NAS eventually.

I was under the impression that AOL was a big Tandem shop at one point, was that not the case?