The_Black_Log Foler
PalsCo CEO - Stock Pals | Pantheon Pals
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IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.
- Thread starter Traak
- Start date
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
TJT
Mr. Poopybutthole
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Yeah, I have a 24 year old I am working with. Not unskilled but his ability to communicate in English is terrible. Nobody understands a third of what he says.
He also is shit at reading apparently because just today he thought an explicitly named datasource with "unmet" in it was the same as "unmatched." While yes these could be considered synonyms at times one of these exist in the system and one does not at all. Which means you just wasted days of multiple people's time as they attempted to hunt down a non existent object to fix it.
He also uses <> and not != in his code which makes me rage uncontrollably.
Omi43221
Trakanon Raider
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Okay so son has job offer that is excellent experience and in good location. 75k. He has second interview tomorrow with company on his current base. He's expecting them to offer 85k. Second job is night shift and he feels less better experience. Sucky location. ( He knows current contractors doing the work so why he thinks he knows what to expect.) We talked about it and think he should make counter offer of 90k. What if they ask him what the other job is offering him. How would you suggest to reply to that. Any other suggestions on how to handle the situation?
Noodleface
A Mod Real Quick
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Besides the job offer what leverage does he have (YOE, specific skillset, technologies, etc)? If he's brand new, it'll be tough to negotiate a 20% salary increase unless there's strong leverage.
I would counter any offer, but be prepared to outline exactly why you think you're worth the salary increase. Things I mentioned that can be brought to the table if hired are what id start with. I'd reserve the other offer if they balk.
I would counter any offer, but be prepared to outline exactly why you think you're worth the salary increase. Things I mentioned that can be brought to the table if hired are what id start with. I'd reserve the other offer if they balk.
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agripa
Molten Core Raider
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We pay our SOC 2nd shift a shift differential of around 20%. Good wage but Night shift loses big on face time with senior leadership and networking goes a long way with advancement.
Phazael
Confirmed Beta Shitlord, Fat Bastard
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Every fucking Poo I have worked with is the same way. They want a specific flowchart to follow, from which they will never deviate and only do the bare minimum and call it done. And they all love to try to game metrics, but they are too fucking stupid and obvious to win at that game. All my biggest PITA reports and peers are the fucking poos. The degree to which they will struggle to not do work boggles my fucking mind.
As far as Kuro's situation, I have found since 2000 that shitty environments may not provide the best pay, but they do offer the best job security, if you take ownership and consistently deliver. The lazy fucks and office politics players do not want to do the work it takes to replace you if you are getting shit done unless they think they can free up money by hiring two millennial noobs for half the price to try and replace you. That never works out and it usually only takes middle managers time experiencing that hell to learn their lesson. Case in point, I am probably undercompensated for my role (T3 Support combined with some project, leadership, training, and SysAd duties) but I make enough for my needs and do my job well. Every time I take a longer vacation they get a good idea of what would happen if I were not with the company, so they have not fucked with me for quite a while. They can't pay enough to lure anyone better from bigger companies to cover what I do. And even if they did, there would be no guarantee that the person would actually pan out. So for a few dollars less, I get great QoL and high job security.
Entry level folks? Yeah get some experience and learn, while eating that shit sandwitch. Then move on immediately, in fact be looking the day you start. Because any company hiring someone with zero experience is in that mindset of "We can get a young guy/poo for less money!" which makes for the worst work environment for IT out there. So get that first notch on your Resume, sponge up all you can, and already be on your way out the door when you start. It sucks at first, but a couple years of doing good work and being flexible on hopping will set you up long term.
As far as Kuro's situation, I have found since 2000 that shitty environments may not provide the best pay, but they do offer the best job security, if you take ownership and consistently deliver. The lazy fucks and office politics players do not want to do the work it takes to replace you if you are getting shit done unless they think they can free up money by hiring two millennial noobs for half the price to try and replace you. That never works out and it usually only takes middle managers time experiencing that hell to learn their lesson. Case in point, I am probably undercompensated for my role (T3 Support combined with some project, leadership, training, and SysAd duties) but I make enough for my needs and do my job well. Every time I take a longer vacation they get a good idea of what would happen if I were not with the company, so they have not fucked with me for quite a while. They can't pay enough to lure anyone better from bigger companies to cover what I do. And even if they did, there would be no guarantee that the person would actually pan out. So for a few dollars less, I get great QoL and high job security.
Entry level folks? Yeah get some experience and learn, while eating that shit sandwitch. Then move on immediately, in fact be looking the day you start. Because any company hiring someone with zero experience is in that mindset of "We can get a young guy/poo for less money!" which makes for the worst work environment for IT out there. So get that first notch on your Resume, sponge up all you can, and already be on your way out the door when you start. It sucks at first, but a couple years of doing good work and being flexible on hopping will set you up long term.
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ronne
Nǐ hǎo, yǒu jīn zi ma?
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For anyone that got laid off this year: jobs do actually exist, they just suck to find.
My last day of work at my previous company was Dec 1st last year, and it took all the way until today to finally get an offer that wasn't an offensive lowball for an awful helpdesk position with a gussied up 'admin' title.
Government-adjacent non-profit place so the insurance is stellar, and close to a 50% raise makes this nearly year long gap of boredom and mental damage from increasing imposter syndrome kinda worth it.
My last day of work at my previous company was Dec 1st last year, and it took all the way until today to finally get an offer that wasn't an offensive lowball for an awful helpdesk position with a gussied up 'admin' title.
Government-adjacent non-profit place so the insurance is stellar, and close to a 50% raise makes this nearly year long gap of boredom and mental damage from increasing imposter syndrome kinda worth it.
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Palum
what Suineg set it to
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ronne
Nǐ hǎo, yǒu jīn zi ma?
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Thanks bro, this is the longest period in my life since being a teenager that I've not had a job and it was definitely getting....weird lol
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TJT
Mr. Poopybutthole
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Does make me wonder the impact of people like me who are consuming at least 2 job slots though...
Palum
what Suineg set it to
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I feel that. I don't look forward to if/when that day comes. I've had a job (often 2-3) since I was 16, even if it was part time in HS/college, never been unemployed.
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Noodleface
A Mod Real Quick
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With the amount of layoffs we are having "until the end of the fiscal year", it's just a matter of time.
Meanwhile they want me to port my feature to an entirely new CPU architecture.
Meanwhile they want me to port my feature to an entirely new CPU architecture.
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ronne
Nǐ hǎo, yǒu jīn zi ma?
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Yea since having a paper route at like 12 I've always had *something* going on for work. Having legit nothing on the horizon was fun for a couple of months but it got old shockingly fast.
Mist
REEEEeyore
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"AI" as in LLMs don't "analyze" anything, which is why they're notoriously bad at math without adding additional hacks to the input/output layers of the application. The model just tries to fit a pattern it's seen in other texts, to predict the next word that it thinks you want to hear based on the human feedback it received during the tuning phase. That sometimes you get something that looks like analysis is incidental, it is just telling you what it thinks you want you to hear (which is often true, but often isn't.) Also, the data in the training set is just based on stuff that was scraped from the internet anyway.
Finding multiple independent sources of corroborating evidence on the internet is likely more accurate than AI output.
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Break
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Can the output of an AI literally ever be considered proof or evidence of anything by itself? I would argue no, never, the output might indeed be true or a fact, but I think what most people don't understand yet about AI is that without independent corroboration of whatever the output was it's no better than a random "I'm feeling lucky" google search. It's predictive like you said and what it predicts, even when it's not hallucinating might still be completely wrong if it's LLM is full of erroneous data or it's data just isn't rich enough to predict the correct edge case.
I recently tried using some Image to Video tools with some family photos, the best one I found by far was Kling.AI but it invariably turns every photo I fed it into Asian people. It's pretty cool tech but it really shows how input biases lead to output biases and the output bias isn't just a side effect, it's an inescapable feature of the current tech.
Mist
REEEEeyore
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Perplexity and MS Copilot Pro do a pretty good annotating their sources. But again, it's still just basically googling for you, or binging for you *shudder.*
ChatGPT and Claude have gotten really good at HTML, Javascript, Python, etc, as in they can do anything an average 2-3rd year CS student can do, but do it in seconds. Otherwise, I find them no better than Wikipedia, and often much worse, for research. But they do have a neat natural language style interface for querying ideas, even if the information isn't accurate, it can give you ideas on things to go searching for.
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It's decent for giving you a decent base for writing ad copy and such to fine tune. But it's sucks the balls for knowledge.
Midjourney is great for creating ad images and synthesizing seed images to get decent outputs as well.
Noodleface
A Mod Real Quick
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I trust the Internet first. This is just based on how often I've found AI wrong in answering questions or writing code for UEFI.
I realize I am in quite a niche role.
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Break
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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I do use chatGPT sometimes at work too so I'm not saying it's useless, especially not for coding. "Write me a python script that opens a CSV file from a path passed as a command line argument, iterate the file and for each line if the second column begins with X or Y then run this certain CLI command and write the results of the command to a new column called Z, and order the output csv file by column 3 and save it to the same place as the input and call it modified.csv"
It's really, really good at correctly interpreting this kind of request.
It's really, really good at correctly interpreting this kind of request.