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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • 100%. I’m not a manager but the higher I get, the more I’m paid and the less useful work I do. I just end up telling people smarter than me what I need them to do.

    Coming from a working class background, it’s a difficult thing to rationalize in my mind but a friend described it well by saying “Can you do their job? - No? Then you can be the buffer against the politics and BS and keep them organized and working on the right thing so they don’t have to worry about that”

    It’s a lot less fulfilling than doing practical work but I also feel like I have a lot more agency (for better or worse) than I did at lower levels.





  • A lot of this is often down to shitty IT practices by the vendor who has little IT knowledge let alone decent security insight.

    I helped support a new PCL installation (technician control PCs and software upgrade) in this exact scenario many years ago. The vendor came in expecting to treat our system as their own. Direct remote access to several over-specced, physical servers from the outside world, available on our core network, shared account names (and passwords!) across all devices, every account a local admin and their own domain admin account so they can make changes as required… Needless to say our security guy almost broke a rib from laughing so hard!

    What they got was very different. I ended up doing fairly basic troubleshooting to get the shitty software working without it needing admin rights to run - XP era software running on Win7 clients so it was meeting basic folder and reg key write permissions - everything else was locked down as tight as we could. They didn’t even get admin on the servers.

    A few years later I heard they’d reported that our site was their most reliable. Probably due to the fact that they (or the techs) couldn’t fuck with anything without our permission. Apparently their original configuration is normal in the industry… Shudder









  • That’s a good point and something I haven’t really considered but will keep that in mind moving forward - that’s part of my problem is not really being aware of what already exists or the most suitable method (or for different distros).

    That’s what ended up getting me into trouble on Bazzite when I was attempting to use Fedora documentation thinking it’s similar and broke boot trying to mess with fstab. Only recently found out why that didn’t work!