Musings of an IT Fossil

AI is Turning Everybody into a Fool

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

So a few weeks back, I was helping to administer a live coding interview with two of my peers at work. This happens more frequently than I’d like. I hate interviewing and I hate being interviewed. What makes this incident notable is that one of my peers decided to spend half of our alloted 90 minutes doing Q&A with the candidate rather than spend most of the time going through the live coding exercise.

Welcome to Our New Proprietary Fucked Up Normal

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

So 2026 is proving to be quite the fucking year, is it not? We aren’t even two months in and I can’t help but to marvel at the new level of chaos of and insanity that is apparently becoming our new normal. So those of you who follow along with the blog, probably aren’t surprised by the lack of output given what I had to say about my vision for this year in my New Years Day post.

Same Shit Different Year Only... Is It?

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

So for those of you following along you probably noticed that I didn’t post anything here last month. There are a lot of reasons for this, but ultimately the biggest one is that I wanted to take a break from writing ITF content. Why? Well as it turns out I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last month and I’ve started to make just a little progress towards figuring out what my next step past IT / Tech is. Spoiler alert: As of right now that step doesn’t involve writing about these topics, at least not in anyway that would be expected to keep the lights on and put food on my table.

This Year I am Thankful for my Brain

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The handful of you who know me personally, probably know that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. To me it is the last vestige of celebration rooted around being reflective and ultimately being thankful for everything that we do have. This year though it is really hard to find things to be thankful for. The world seems like it is coming apart at the seams. In particular the tech world seems to be awash in an ever growing sea of insanity. So with that in mind I want to publicly declare that this year I am primarily thankful for my brain.

We Are The Damned

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

So it’s mid-afternoon on a annoyingly warm November day and here I am sitting here in my home office staring at a nice glass of Irish Whiskey. I didn’t take today off. I’ve just decided that I’ve had enough of the bullshit for one day. That’s where the whiskey comes in.

Of course this week had to be the week that I committed to taking a THC tolerance break. That’s a shame. But honestly, the whole point is to [a] make sure I’m not over-indulging, [b] to reset my accumulated tolerance and [c] make sure there isn’t anything pertinent being left on table by numbing myself to all kinds of external shit I’d rather not deal with. Well it’s been three days and I’m already regretting this move. With any luck my therapist will see this and we’ll have a nice long chat about it later this week (coin flip chance on that - she sometimes reads this blog - sometimes doesn’t). In any event, I haven’t actually taken a T-Break since before the election of our esteemed piece of shit and chief, Donald J. Trump. It’s been a minute.

AWS is to Drugs as Amazon is to Pushers

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

So unless you were clinically dead on Monday October 20th, 2025 then you noticed the same thing everybody else noticed: A ton of tech shit wasn’t working. So what happened? AWS (aka Amazon Web Services) had their most important data center region, US-EAST-1 go down hard due to a misconfiguration. It took hours for them to fix this. As if that wasn’t staggeringly incompetent enough, it then took them hours to actually bring everything else of theirs back online. Their customers took even longer.

Greed Cut the Throat of our Respect for Expertise

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

So its a lazy Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting here in my recliner, a bit stoned, and I have finally decided to write the post that I’ve been dancing around on this blog for awhile now. It won’t be as angry because I’m writing while listening to the Simon and Garfunkel “The Concert in Central Park” LP I picked up while out of town last month. You can’t really be angry while listening to that kind of wonderful harmony.

Deported From America

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Original Song with the Original Lyrics

Far
We’ve been marched far
Exiled from a home
Which turned bizarre

Free
We used to be free
We huddle close
Mourning our dead dream

On the boats and on the planes
Deported from America
Never coming back again
Deported from America

Love, don’t it seem so far away
MAGA spreading hate today
Ignorance is the norm
Ignorance is the norm

Exiled, to a shittier place
Make our bed, and collapse in place
Fascist flames now a swarm
Fascist flames now a swarm

Charlie Kirk is Dead - Fuck Those Who Mourn Him

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Tonight we aren’t going to talk about tech. Instead we are going to talk about assassination of Charlie Kirk, a conservative political commentator who was shot dead while speaking at an event in Utah earlier today. He was shot once in the neck, taken to the hospital in critical condition and pronounced dead soon after. MAGA is up in arms and foaming at the mouth. Non-Fascists and Democrats are stumbling all over themselves to decry political violence in general and express their sympathies.

Modern Software Mostly Sucks And Nobody Gives A Shit

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Have you noticed what I have noticed? Can you see what I see? Software today mostly sucks and nobody gives a shit. We’ve grown so used to circumnavigating quirks and accepting fault that it’s barely a fact worth mentioning. But unless you are living under the proverbial rock, you know it’s true. Modern software mostly sucks.

Let’s quickly explain why. Its because the business models driving software today don’t benefit from quality, but rather they benefit from always keeping you waiting for the next update or set of changes. Bug free software doesn’t align with this goal. Bug free software in fact flies in the face of this goal as providing a user with a bug free, well-written piece of software that solves their problems is more than likely going to inspire them not to upgrade it.

We are the Wage Slaves who build Big Tech Empires

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For those of you who don’t know me, let me introduce myself: I’m an IT Fossil and the end of my career path is tantalizingly near. Yet it’s not quite over yet. So in the final years I have decided to speak truth to power in the form of this anonymous blog. But who are you? Well if you are reading this then the odds are that we have something in common: We are the Wage Slaves tasked with building and maintaining the empires of Big Tech. No matter what they ask us to do, we generally do it. If we reject the notion, they just find somebody else who will.

Oaths of Dust Buried in Twilight

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I pledged once upon a time
To uphold principles quite sublime
Yet at the crux of the long eclipse
The words now refuse to leave my lips

Vestiges of the past are crumbling
Armies of discontent ever rumbling
The time for idle chatter is ending
Nobody cares what they are defending

Blood lust shall soon fill their hearts
The result of decades of false starts
Honesty the antique championed by fools
Violence allows anybody to remake rules

Drowning in a Wasteland of Primordial Soup

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last month, I’ve been more quiet than usual. I’ve been less prone to speak when the opportunity presents itself. To be clear this isn’t because I don’t have anything to say, but rather because an ever growing part of me feels tired. I feel so tired on some days that it’s all I can do to pretend that it’s worth my time to bother considering the alternative.

I imagine the armchair psychologists reading this have already arrived at what I too presume to be the obvious conclusion: I’m depressed. Well yeah. Who wouldn’t be? Does this blog strike you as the kind of chronicling a well adjusted non-depressed about the state of the world kind of person would produce? Surely not.

Principles are a Liability

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As Americas newly anointed Tin God, Donald J. Trump, deploys National Guard troops to quell the entirely legitimate and almost completely peaceful protests against ICE raids being staged in LA, a thought occurred to me this morning: Principles have become a liability.

This isn’t just in regards to politics though. Its also applicable to those of us working in tech. At this point, I feel certain that it goes beyond that. It’s scary to observe that this trend now eclipses simple spheres such as politics or tech. In my darkest moments as of late I find myself wondering whether humanity itself is devolving. In the moments beyond those, that even I am loathe to speak of, I wonder if humanity has ever actually evolved at all. Maybe we’ve just been lying to ourselves all along.

Am I Part of the Cure or the Disease?

Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

So this morning I was taking a shower while listening to Coldplay which I had instructed Siri to play throughout the house and it just so happened to play one of my favorite songs: Clocks. Why is this one of my favorite songs? Well like so many of my favorite songs it comes down to a single line within the lyrics that just happens to resonate with me:

Am I a part of the cure? Or am I part of the disease?

The Tale of Trump the Traitor

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post has been a long time coming. The truth is that I have wanted to write this for weeks now, but until a certain series of technical adjustments were made, I dared not publish this as an American citizen. That’s because our president, Donald J. Trump, is a traitor to the republic. Despite that his quest to devolve our nation into a fascist state appears to be, at least for the moment, experiencing success.

Vibe Coding and Endless Optimization are for Fools

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

So over the last week I’ve been subjected to multiple uses of the term “vibe coding”. Now back here under the rock that I live, that term struck me as rather peculiar so I queued up some videos to watch and took a tour of the idea this morning. Now now, don’t worry. This isn’t going to be just another anti-AI rant. We’ve had our fill of that, right? No instead we are going to focus on the flaws of the Venture Capitalist class, courtesy of the people running Y-Combinator.

Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of Class War

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

So with each passing day I’m being forced to face the cruel reality which darkly looms: My country, the United States of America, is basically speed-running its way towards collapse. What does that look like? I can’t give you specifics, but I know for a fact that short of a sudden and abrupt change to either our leadership or the political institutions our leader has surrounded himself with, the world that we know and take for granted is about to come to an end.

Through the Looking Glass of Trump Fascism

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

You know what this blog post is about. You are probably surprised that it took me so long to write it. Well for starters I’ve been very sick over the last five weeks which has proven to be rather distracting. Secondly, I was scared shitless to publish this post. Why? Well because I’m a US citizen and this website was hosted on a free service within the United States which was controlled by a tech company that has already shown a willingness to bend over backwards to sate the ever increasingly insane desires of our new Crimson King, Donald J. Trump.

Fuck the Fascists

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Psychos have taken over
Emboldened like a mother fucker
They believed the lies
Cause they are a bunch of suckers

Bad enough the first time
They wont get a pass for the third
Some idiots shouldn’t vote
Cause they only deal in the absurd

Cutting the poor subsidies
While handing Elon stacks of cash
Do you want a revolution?
This is one way to kick off the clash

Reader make no mistake
These orders are a prelude to war
Guns and ammo wont matter
When we cant feed ourselves anymore

Money Hungry Mob of Extortionists, Grifters and Rent-Seekers

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

So the other day on Mastodon I posted a link to this amazingly depressing video in which the author laments the fact that he lost one of his freelance writing gigs to AI powered tech. I also said that “the tech industry has devolved into a money hungry mob of extortionists, grifters and rent-seekers” and promised a subsequent blog post on the topic. This is that post.

So let’s start this post off on the right foot by making some declarations most of you will likely regard as a sign of premature-dementia on my part, shall we?

2024: Rant of the Tech Grinch

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So as was typical with my end of year posts that I used to make on my previous blog, this is an end of year post. All of my end of year posts are basically rants regarding the state of the world and the state of tech more specifically. This time around I am going to focus primarily on tech as there is only so much shit my brain can suffer through at once. So how was 2024 in tech? In a word: terrible. Let’s dig into that.

Eat the Rich

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

On December 4th, 2024 somebody brazenly murdered the CEO of United Healthcare, Brain Thompson, in broad daylight. Health Insurance company executives around the country are wiping their websites of their identifying information in fear that any one of them might be next. Nationwide law enforcement is hunting for the shooter, but thus far he appears to have slipped through their fingers. What do I think? Well I hope he escapes because I love the smell of justice in the morning.

Scientific Reports Call Out

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Fuck this its pissing me off
This AI shit aint getting nobody off
Scientific Reports, calling y’all out

First off LLMs don’t fucking understand
How to speak to the heart via vocals and band
Scientific Reports, fuck’s that about?

Secondly they just word clouds on crack
Pretending they got brains is just whack
Scientific Reports, you some kinda lout?

Last there ain’t story or love to share
Cause there’s only matrix math up in there
Scientific Reports, losing their clout

AI is a Thief

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So let’s get right down to it: If you use AI, you are a thief. If you don’t use AI and you have published content online that can be accessed without going through some sort of paywall, you have probably been robbed. Does this sound extreme? Well I’m truly sorry to say that it isn’t.

To those of you in the know, these statements are likely not going to shock you. The rest of you are likely just shaking your heads in disbelief. So let’s get into the nitty gritty of this. The first step in understanding how I can make such a broad statement and legitimately claim that its accurate is to understand how copyright works:

Cant Ever Go Back

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I had pep in my step
But then I realized
Getting back to the past
Is a big ole pack of lies

We cant ever go back
There is no path
No matter our desire
It dont balance with math

Reality is tough
Shit is going off the rails
River of shit oncoming
Gonna need a lot of pails

Fascists on the march
Sieg Heil like a motherfucker
If you believe this ends well
Youre just a useful sucker

JIRA Board Ballads

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

99 Epics on the Board Link to heading

99 Epics on the Board
99 Epics on the Board
We take one down, code all around
134 Epics on the Board

134 Epics on the Board
134 Epics on the Board
We groom one out, disagree aloud
2673 Epics on the Board

I’m a Bug Ticket Link to heading

I’m a bug ticket
Easy and quick
Here is my repro
(one eye on git)
Here is my AC
(other eye on my slack)

The Terrified Within

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Well its the day after the US Election and I’m more than a little shocked. Sure I learned the primary lesson of 2016 which was to “never count Trump out”, but despite that I went into the election last night thinking that a lot of the early indicators favored Harris. Obviously in the sobering light of mid-morning in which Trump has rightfully declared victory and thus far nearly every declared swing state seemed to go his way, this was tom-foolery.

Lady Mary

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

She comes in so many forms
But in each her effect is so divine
No matter the delivery
She distills the pain into wine

Human quest for fleeting joy
Seems a cruel joke in a cold universe
Being alive with questions
Is a wonder that evolves into a curse

In those times that I desire
To turn off the crisis and forget
In an effort to escape
All of the learned pain and regret

Process Parley

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

There is trouble in the world
I wanna solve it
Sadly there is a process to follow
Goddamn we gotta evolve it

I got a fix for the problem
Waiting on a sucker to hit a button
They will gorge themselves on my pain
Like an addicted glutton

Nothing ever changes
Each day brings more of the same
Slowly devouring every urge
I got to keep playing the game

Every solution we devise
Births a dozen more epic fails
Every engineer in the mix
Can tell many sordid sad tales

WordPress Wankery

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Mullenweg be tripping
Punch drunk and trifling across the web
Preaching that he needs our fealty
Because he is lord and we are mere plebs

WordPress is straight shit
But it managed to set the world on fire
Constant updates to its insecure code
Is the only thing we really requires

Even though he is rich
He greedy like a strung out crack whore
Even though he has it all
He sending bill collectors to WPEs door

The Advice Trap

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So here you are. Back at the ITF blog, salivating at the mouth, hoping to read some more spicy confessionals bolstered by what I hope is a reasonably accurate sense of anonymity. Fair enough. Today’s confession is this: My advice is worthless.

There, I said it. Man it feels good to publish those words. Now don’t get me wrong, I have been asked for advice a good bit over the years, especially when it comes to tech related subjects. But the truth is: Almost nobody actually takes my advice. Now I can already hear you saying, “Well yeah but free advice typically isn’t worth that much”. Well sure, maybe not. But even when I’m getting paid to proffer it, my advice is generally not taken very often. In fact the cost of the advice seemingly has very little relationship to how seriously the recipient seems to take it.

Diagram Sans Venn: How I Became a Fossil

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So today while brainstorming new and exciting ways to conceal the fact that I’m a dinosaur and totally underqualified to hold my current position, I decided to take a quick break and catch up on one of my favorite tech blogs, Ludicity. For starters let me just say, if you are reading this blog and you aren’t reading that one, you should absolutely be reading that one too. If you only have time to read one of them, you should read his.

Going Down with the Ship

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

On June 18th, 2023, a submersible called the Titan made its final trip down to the wreckage of Titanic (which is about 3800 meters beneath sea level). It was carrying five passengers, some of which had apparently paid serious money to be part of the voyage (tickets were reportedly 250k a pop). Somewhere along the way, something went wrong, the vessel imploded and the people on board died.

So why are we talking about this? Because the Titan submarine was the brainchild of an entitled silver spooned second-generation job creator known as Stockton Rush. He founded OceanGate which was the company that designed, built and operated the Titan. Funnily enough if you click through and look at Stockton’s wikipedia page, you’ll see that he was originally employed by McDonnell Douglas (the entity Boeing eventually merged with which now produces an epic fail line of space ships and airplanes) as a Test Flight Engineer.

The Surprisingly Empowering Loss of Zeal

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Promising to myself that I would figure out “something else to do with my life” within the next five to ten years has yielded some unexpected side effects. Namely I have started to become more detached from the day-to-day drama of working in the industry. This makes sense because if I don’t plan on working in tech five to ten years down the road, what difference does it really make? While this proclamation was at odds with my tradition of positioning of myself as a concerned craftsman, it does yield several benefits: Namely I’m not nearly as pissed off as I once was.

That's the Sound of Devs Working on the Chain Gang

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Are you a manager desperate to cover up their own lack of productivity and general uselessness by implementing a system that will allow you to constantly lament your underlings apparent lack of productivity? Well if you are managing Software Engineers, I have some really good news to share with you today. Some people over at Microsoft Research, Github and the University of Victoria have devised the answer to all of your problems. And all it took to get there was a global pandemic and resulting lock down to allow them to refine this miraculous idea and unleash it upon all of us unwashed non-productive engineers!

Our Users Deserve a Bill of Rights

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I think the one thing that really ticks me off about this industry more than any other is the fact that we constantly treat our end users very poorly. Now those of you reading this are likely of one of two minds: Some amount of you think this is a very true statement and the rest of you think its complete and utter bollocks. Which group are you in?

Let me start off by explaining why I’m part of the former group. To put it simply I think despite the endless hemming and hawing around user experience we actually treat our users very poorly. Consider the consequences when anything goes “down” in tech. Does the provider who kicked off the unforced error pay the price? Not based on their contractual obligations, no. Do they lose money? Generally not. Do they lose productivity? Maybe. Their end users on the other hand suffer in all of these ways. Do the providers find a way to compensate their end users for the chaos their unreliability injected into their day to day existence? Almost never.

Optimizing All the Wrong Things

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Over the years I’ve oscillated between reading quite a bit and reading not much at all. Lately I’ve been trying to read a lot more and the book I’m currently reading is called “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot”. Well while escorting my wife to a doctor’s appointment this morning I read a chapter that I found particularly striking as it spends most of it’s time dissecting this famous Donald Knuth quote:

CrowdStrike can Die in a Fucking Fire

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In case you didn’t know CrowdStrike makes anti-malware software for enterprises and they pushed out an update late last night that basically broke Windows machines running it. These machines need to be manually fixed via a process that involves either booting Windows into recovery or safe mode and then manually deleting the offending driver file. If your drive is encrypted this is made far more difficult by you having to manually key in your Bitlocker recovery key, assuming you even have access to it at all. This is a nightmare for end users as well as IT people.

The Separation of Ego and Engineering

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Up front I’m going to say this: It’s really weird sitting down to write this blog post less than a day after former president Trump just survived an attempted assassination. While this post has been forming in my head over the last few days, give or take, it still feels weird to write about something that isn’t exactly at the top of my mind at the moment. One thing I’m sure of is that not only will the consequences of yesterday’s failed assassination be far reaching but that there will be plenty of time for content creators such as myself to more fully consider what those consequences are. But I’m guessing that just like me, y’all could use a break from all of that.

America We Grieve Your Untimely Demise

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you are at all keeping up with the affairs of the world, then today you heard just as I did that the Supreme Court of the United States overwhelmingly granted immunity to the President of the United States for core and official acts while happily providing no framework for what constitutes an official act. I wish this was a joke or that I was not writing these words, but alas I’m not quite that big of a jerk and this actually happened.

Proprietary Software is a Dead End

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Over the years I’ve written a lot of blog posts that have danced around the argument I am about to make and the reason for that is very simple: I write proprietary software for a living. Expressing that opinion in a forum directly associated with my professional identity would essentially be career suicide.

So why am I doing it now? Well that’s the beauty of having an anonymous blog platform of course. I don’t have to self censor. I don’t have to worry that my employer or one of my clients will stumble on this and see that even though they are paying me and I’m doing the work, that I think its generally a waste of everybody’s time and money. Sure its okay to imply that without saying it because that leaves some level of doubt that deniers can use to reassure themselves. But actually saying it? No that’s just straight up career suicide.

We are Snake Oil Sales People

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: Today’s post is going to be a good ole fashioned rant. The tech industry has lost its mind. If this is where you are hearing it for the first time, I need you to know that I won’t apologize for being the one to tell you. You were bound to find out sooner or later. What do I mean by this? Well pretty much everything is AI now. Nothing else matters. Just AI.

Heart Shaped Promise

Sun, 19 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is the final leg of my career as a software developer. I know that because I made a promise to myself. This is the kind of promise that I wouldn’t have dared to make even a few short years ago. This revelation will probably surprise more than a few of you, especially in light of all the kvetching I’ve been doing about my career for such a long while.

Deja Vu

Sun, 05 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So between the end of my previous job and the beginning of my current job I took a few weeks off. Let’s be clear: by “off” I mean mostly stoned and chilling my ass out. My time off was refreshing and gave me an opportunity to not worry about anybody else’s tech / shit for two whole weeks. It’s been forever since I’ve had the chance to do that and I strongly urge any of you who have the opportunity and means to do it.

People are People

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So here in my neck of the woods, its a beautiful Sunday morning. I’m sitting on my deck watching the remaining nub of the Black and Mild I have almost finished smoking smoulder into less than nothing. There are still a few more puffs to be had there, but in relatively short order our brief affair will end when this little baby cigar ends up being snuffed out of existence.

The Dream of the Perfect Team

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So if I weren’t practicing reasonably decent op-sec (please state actors don’t take this as invitation to diminish my use of the adjective “reasonably”) you would know that I have worked at my fair share of different places over my career as a Software Developer. Over the course of this career I have worked in all kinds of different scenarios which range from being the single IT resource that does it all for the client to playing a part on a well organized SCRUM team.

An Ounce of Confidence is Worth a Pound of Pain

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So if you follow me on Mastodon you know that I’ve been deeply engrossed in my own job search as of late. Currently despite being a fossil, I’ve got two prospects that I’m juggling. One gave me an offer yesterday and I’m hoping to get an offer from the other one today. Despite my intense distaste for tech interviews, I went through the ringer with two companies at the same time and surprisingly managed to do rather well on the technical portions.

Career Suicide Is A Compulsion

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Thus far I haven’t really indulged myself on this new blog. Tonight that changes. The content that I have already posted has basically been a slightly less PC version of content I once posted on my actual blog (now redacted so that I can appear sane and employable) back when that was a semi-functional entity of concern. Tonight I’m going to say a whole mess of shit that would basically amount to career suicide if I posted it on a medium that could be easily traced back to my actual identity.

Performance Measurement Is A Lie

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today I’m going to delve into why anybody and everybody who claims to have a way to measure the performance of an IT professional is basically lying. To be fair, it’s probably not their fault.

Why Employers Need to Measure Performance Link to heading

So let me start off by saying this: I understand why employers want to measure the performance of their employees. I also like having my performance measured… but only in situations where the system is capable of accurately measuring performance. The purpose of this post isn’t to rail against employers for attempting to measure the performance of their IT staff but rather to skewer them for adopting half-ass methodologies that do not even come close to accomplishing that.

Tech Interviews Are the Worst

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today I’m going to delve into speaking my piece on what tech interviews are, what their purpose is and their many many failings…

What is a Tech Interview? Link to heading

A Tech Interview is basically a term we use to refer to a multi-stage marathon in which a company looking for talent decides to put applicants through a series of rigorous and ultimately pointless exercises in an effort to prove that they have enough willpower to work there.

About

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Who am I? Link to heading

I’m a soon to be displaced cog in the land of Corporate IT. I have spent most of my time over the last twenty years writing web applications. I have also spent some of that time administering systems, designing systems and handling end user support. In addition I have spent time creating integrations between disparate systems.

I have a lot of experience in IT.