If you ask a computer expert to fix the weird thing Outlook just did, or explain why Excel is suddenly writing Gibberish into your tables –
Even if we wanted to explain it to you, we can’t. No human being alive on earth knows the reason and how to fix it.
Some of us are really good at poking it till it behaves again.
Others are brave enough to venture into the dark lands of learn.microsoft.com .
But what awaits us there are articles written by Copilot about how it worked before Microsoft changed it again for no reason.

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.

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.

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.

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

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’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.

I don’t work in a kitchen anymore but the amount of single-use plastic used in chain restaraunts is soul crushing. Most folks have no idea

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.

Your house is insanely easy to break into unless it’s built with special materials or has steel bars over all openings.

Disregarding the fact that windows break, pretty much every residential door (both interior and exterior) can be busted down by anyone with a decent body weight or with a framing hammer. Hammer thru the door skin, or claw pry on the jamb to force the latch to release, or even just bodyslamming it can be enough to separate the lock block and stiles and the doors will simply fall apart from there.

All big banks run on horrendous excel spreadsheets ridden with errors

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.

This is common knowledge by now I think, and yet evidence shows common doesn’t mean people remember. If you ship anything, fragile or not, be sure to pack it like it’s going to be thrown, dropped, get wet, and stepped on. It’s not even that workers in shipping do this (most damage is usually either bad packaging or mechanical damage in the automated parts), but things happen between point A and point B, many of them unavoidable. And I see SO MANY packages that consist of just some thin cardboard with a few pieces of tape, or a plastic bag that’s easily torn, or documents/letters that are smaller than the label we put on them(??? That won’t get lost :/ )

Pack things like you want to to make it there. Just look at packages you get successfully, and I guarantee on many you’ll see marks of the war zone they went through. Now imagine if they had been sent with an old worn out box you found in the garage and threw some tape on and didn’t bother putting any protective packing inside because “it’ll be fine if it bounces around a bit”.

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.

It’s often really fucking stupid to get a phd.