Re: Up next
As per TFA - it might be obvious but there's still manglements to persuade.
33111 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I don't know where you work but a great proportion of jobs are in cities so large that they require a few thousand square miles of commuter belt to house the workers. Property within 15/20 miles of work is likely to be hideously expensive and it's only practical to supply a small percentage of that space with single ride public transport so that property in that percentage is also likely to be hideously expensive..
Yes, "we" as a society have done this to ourselves. "We" as a collection of individuals haven't. It's been an article of planning policy for all my working life and earlier to separate workplaces and homes. It was done in the name of getting rid of slums surrounding factories. No thought was given as to how the gap between the two was to be bridged; hand-waving assisted public transport was probably envisaged.
It was stupid. It is stupid. Will you ever get the planners to admit it was stupid? Not until the whole lot collapses in a heap. Hopefully the present situation might give it the push it needs but if the "come back to the office" movement succeeds we're going to have to wait for an even bigger failure.
Sometimes this - deservedly - backfires on the unions.
For some reason the union representing scientists in the NI Civil Service (a) seemed to have more money than those for the general service grades and (b) was quite complacent about the fact that we were paid less than the equivalent general service grades and had crap promotion prospects.
One day they inveigled everyone to take a day off which wasn't quite called a strike because pay negotiations were going badly. Afterwards it transpired it wasn't even our pay that was being negotiated, it was general service grades'. A union official came to try to pacify the staff and got roasted. In this case the staff kept their jobs but the union must have lost at least 30 subscriptions members.
I remember an outfit that was stealing them and melting them down for scrap. I don't think the tracker would help with that. The cheeky bit was that the forensic lab started out as a wing of an industrial lab and they were bringing the ingots in to the industrial side to get an analysis to show when they were sold on.
My current point of interest is a login screen which will throw an error on the first attempt irrespective of what credentials if any are given to it. It might, I suppose, be an attempt to discourage any bot with a set of leaked credentials for the site. I now just click on the login button before entering anything and then log in.
I suppose an ideal way of handling those would be to automate bundling up the entire pile of crap and bundle it back to the third party's support email - assuming they have one and failing that the CEO's email address and simply advise the user that there's been an error which has been passed to $Named£rdParty. Bonus points for giving the user the ticket number to chase up themselves.
"the fragmentation of desktops and distributions still stops it from ever happening."
Ah, yes. The fragmentation of desktops. Nothing like Windows where W10 is just like W7 is just like W2K etc (leaving out a couple that even Windows fans would be hard pushed to praise).
I've got news for you. If you run Windows you're stuck with whatever look MS push out today. If it doesn't work for you, tough, just use it all the same. If you have a choice of desktops you have...well...choice. Maybe that's too hard a concept to deal with?
What's that? You can change the wallpaper? That's fine.
OK, let me give a more considered answer which yes and no.
The skills you have as a Windows admin or whatever are in wide demand but a lot of people have them. They're a commodity to be traded, at least that's the way agencies and HR will look at them and at the people who have them. Wages will stagnate because there's always somebody who hasn't got a job will take your job at a low wage.
So, yes, your response should be to teach yourself new stuff but no, not so you can stay in the low wage trap. You do it to get out of that trap. What you need is to know stuff that's just coming into demand but that relatively few people have.
You also have to remember that the new stuff you learn will become a commodity skill in due course by which time you need to be somewhere else.
Bragging about this in their prospectus wouldn't look too good anyway. Admitting it would be ethical - it would tell the candidates to look elsewhere if they don't want the University's reputation hung around their necks when they graduate. But it seems their motto is "Any way but Ethics".