Recent content by alavaz

  1. alavaz

    IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

    It's not that bizarre - don't overthink it. I just don't like it. I like to fish with a rod and reel, not with a net. I don't deny the net is faster, produces more fish, people who use the net will be overall more successful.... or any of that. I just don't like doing it. I'm still in a...
  2. alavaz

    IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

    I guess I'm old enough now to empathize with people who cling to the good old days haha. AI is joyless to me, and if I were in a position where I had to spend tons of time using it, I'd definitely be looking to move on to something else. So while yeah, it's probably not smart for your bottom...
  3. alavaz

    IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

    I am also genuinely curious about this one. We had 100s of millions invested in VMware and migrated all of it to Nutanix. Not even because the VMware quote was unreasonable... it was because we got straight up ghosted.
  4. alavaz

    Operation New Career

    Have you been to Redmond? Spend some time there if not and feel it out. It's uber expensive to live within an hour commute of MS. I used to commute from Tacoma and getting stuck in traffic on the 405 for 2+ hours in the morning was not uncommon. Other than that, MS pay and benefits are top...
  5. alavaz

    Routers & Other Networking Stuff

    I've been rocking the Mudi 2 for a couple of years. Works great with any SIM i've thrown in it. I actually like all of the GL products. I use the travel routers pretty extensively for work with various VPNs and they've all been solid.
  6. alavaz

    Job Hunting

    Just saw this, but most of the work that I do as an integrator involves planning out some kind of system-of-system and then executing. So we may have a task like displaying a manned ISR feed on some TV's that are side mounted to the wall of a helicopter (this is a simple but recent example). So...
  7. alavaz

    Job Hunting

    Ever consider shifting to Systems Integrator in like Aerospace / Defense? You already have all the skills more than likely.
  8. alavaz

    IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

    It's probably a wise decision not taking a job you know you wouldn't like... that being said my emergency plan for if I ever got laid off by surprise would be to take any job that pays me more than unemployment (and that shouldn't be hard) and then immediately start searching for a more long...
  9. alavaz

    IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

    AI models are choking on junk data | Fortune - No one saw this coming
  10. alavaz

    Taxes / Tax return questions

    I've always used olt.com - it's ancient and janky but relatively clear to follow and I've never had to pay to file federal taxes. The state stuff is like $8 which is also the cheapest I've found. https://kb.olt.com/KB/articles/indiv_article_detail/schedule-c-2025-report-business-income-deductions
  11. alavaz

    IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

    I'm a little worried that all of the chip makers are going to shift to making these AI tensor bullshit chips and good old fashioned general purpose computing is going to be hard(er) to come by. On the security topic, I've seen some wild stuff than can happen with model poisoning and other AI...
  12. alavaz

    IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

    For the type of work that I do, I would definitely think I am hitting the ceiling on salary (tech companies included). The big pay raises would come from jumping to specific tech companies and probably involve taking a more managerial type role. I'm sure one day I'll go this direction but the...
  13. alavaz

    IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

    I find myself valuing job satisfaction over money these days. Or at least that's what I am telling myself lol. I am 100% dead sure (not shooting for a weird brag here - I promise) I could probably get close to 100k annual more than what I make now, plus all of the stock wizbang shit. The...
  14. alavaz

    IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

    Ironically, we've been doing this for a couple of years. You can add RAGs pretty quickly to your own LLM chatbots and create collections of documentation for it to reference. It's a poor mans enterprise search but it's been way better than anything we've had up until now. It obviously doesn't...
  15. alavaz

    IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

    They probably have Nessus or something running a canned DNS attack surface scan. It can be a real vulnerability - i.e. you have a CNAME of company.com pointing to myshit.s3.amazon.com, but deleted the myshit bucket. Someone could theoretically take the "myshit" name and then your CNAME will...