It gets better. Both in the “PTSD” and they got what’s coming to them sense. Some additional context: This was a switchover from one system to another.

They agreed to a specific special solution that my team would set up for them, different from our standard switchover for everyone else. We just needed some incredibly basic info from them that any member of that team should have been able to provide in 30 seconds.

They got the info to us two days before the deadline.

So, some stuff happened and while we had everything switched over to the new system, we didn’t actually shut down the old system for a few more weeks past the deadline we had shared. Before we shut it down I did a final scan and notified any person/team that still appeared to be using it. These problem children were, because of course they would.

Sent them the “Hey guys, you didn’t turn off your old shit pointing to the old system when you were supposed to. You’ll need to find an alternate solution now” email on a Monday. One member of their team puts in a ticket about something only tangentially related, but definitely caused by the old system shutdown, not working on Wednesday. It doesn’t reach me personally due to lack of any useful details, instead just sitting in my team’s generic queue.

That Friday, 30 fucking minutes before we close for the week, I get a response from the next manager up the chain from the one that played games with this shit earlier. Clearly the shitty manager is trying to play politics now by bringing in his own manager, who hadn’t been in the chain. “Thanks for letting us know, we’ve been trying to troubleshoot this all week! How do we resolve this?”

So, their team ignored my email. Still didn’t understand anything from any of the previous emails in the chain or else they wouldn’t have had anything to waste time failing to troubleshoot. You tried to send data to a system/server that no longer exists. Then this power play right before closing in what I think was an attempt to be able to blame me for being a week behind on something.

“You would need to follow the instructions I’ve attached from my first email about this sent to [shitty manager] on [over a month ago]. Please let me know if you jave any questions!”

Last I heard from them. Hooray!

Yep. To anyone saying it takes up time that they need to get work done, remember the magic words “What would you like me to prioritize?”

Oh my god. Spend time making shit clear and concise, send the email to the manager. No response. Multiple other teams already responded to the initial email and moving smoothly.

Send a short follow up a week later with the rest of the team cc’d. Manager responds to the initial email, dropping the “hey fuckface, do your job” email from the chain.

“Please schedule a meeting with my team to discuss.” (Literal words. Nothing the fuck else.)

(Putting the dropped email and the full team back in) “According to calendars, your team is not available as a full group for two weeks. Given the tight deadline on this, if you or your team have any specific questions, I’d be happy to discuss over email.”

Nothing for two weeks, in the meeting it’s clear that none of them even attempted to read any of it.

It’s also sometimes a necessary tactic to cover your team’s ass. Very often, the people holding things up will blame another group on the project. Getting everyone on the same call so the bullshit can be called out in front of everyone can be necessary to protect your team’s reputation.

Holdups: “Well, we can’t start testing until Infrastructure builds our servers!”

Infrastructure: "You asked for a 3TB server. The largest in our environment is 1TB, and it handles [heavier thing than this]. Two weeks ago we suggested a smaller size to begin with and that we would increase it as need was demonstrated, asking for your confirmation before we continued. We also asked [group owning the vendor relationship] to see if we could schedule a chat with a technical resource at the vendor to help us better understand the need for something so far outside our standards.

We’ve not seen a response regarding our suggestion. Can you confirm that our suggested solution is acceptable during this meeting, or do you need to confer with other people in your department?"

Happens all the fucking time. Instead of admitting that the timeline isn’t possible, or rightfully blaming the vendor for absurd requirements (no, we aren’t giving you fucking domain admin), teams will just play pass the blame all the way to whatever department owns the deepest part of the tech stack or access management.

The easiest way to push back is to state how unambiguously bad their request was, and that they’ve not replied to you, in front of everyone. If you’re lucky, all that takes is an email. If it’s a project involving people who think they’re too important to read email, then you need the call/meeting. Unfortunately those “too important” people are also the ones who have the biggest sway on the business.

It’s stupid, but as long as people are involved in business, there will be people problems to solve. Those often don’t work in the realm of “most efficient” or “most sensible”.

Whatever your level of digust at it is, the soomer you learn to start looking at the “business politics” side of things the better you’ll do.

This is also what good project managers are for. Unfortunately those are rare.

Same as it ever was

Or maybe it’as not. Either way, being upset about it isn’t going to stop the bombs if they come.

If your apocalypse comes to pass, then what? You get to feel smug while you die of radiation poisoning?

Work on what you can impact, be aware of the rest, and most importantly don’t worry about what you can’t change.

Lol, this is why we don’t tend to give software engineers local admin, and why most places hire separate UX designers.

Don’t even need to go that far. Pro and using Group Policy covers most of it. A registry entry here, a powershell command for uninstalling some bloat there… LTSC just saves uninstalling some of the bloat still on Pro.

If your laptop doesn’t have enough ports built in.

I don’t know what this guy is smoking. Copilot had administrative controls before it rolled out, through Intune and Group Policy.

I won’t deny it’s godawful to have shit split across AD, Group Policy, Regedit, and Azure/Entra/Intune.

But they very much still have controls for all this shit, almost always available before the feature rolls out. I’ve literally never seen this shit make it through to our end user devices in an un-intended fashion.

Hell, just hold non-security updates for a period of time for review before pushing it to your entire environment if this (not actually happening) issue is a concern. That’s like basic table stakes for Windows environment administration: update cadence management and pilot machines.

Please don’t claim to speak from a place of authority on this and then spread falsehoods. There’s plenty of shit to hate without making things up.

Like the third party app approvals in Azure and Teams defaulting to allow any non-admin user to be able to approve any azure app access to all of their data with no oversight. You can (and should) lock that the fuck down. It’s a batshit default, not a lack of controls.

With PXE boot you don’t even need a USB. Boot into the imaging “OS” over the network.

My workplace has a couple of dedicated network switches on a dedicated “imaging” VLAN in the hardware room, that way normal users can’t accidentally reimage their own machine. I think the desktop guys can get 32 going at once, and the complete automated setup time for one is like 40 minutes.

I grew up with that too, but the only time I’ve had any sort of slowdown from grouped icons is when I’ve been juggling like 4 excel sheets. I don’t often find myself with that many instances of the same program open often enough for it to matter.

It was an adjustment at first back in… Windows 7 I think, but I really haven’t missed it since.

There are also various browser extensions to show you an image from the middle of the video instead of a thumbnail. I personally prefer that.

The comic says in 30 minutes.

Edit: and from what I’m seeing online, depending on some factors like the type of beans used, four espresso shots could end up around 300mg. 3/4 of the daily reccomended limit in 30 minutes is going to be tough on most people, especially to someone looking at it “as a treat” instead of just their regular coffee/caffeine for the day.

I work in tech and I can’t drink alcohol, so I’m no stranger to caffeine. It’s one of a few vices available to me. But I’m not going to pretend that my worst of drinking 64oz of coffee, a caffeinated soda or two, and a caffeinated mint is normal. Or that wouldn’t make me feel ill if I did it all in 30 minutes even with my tolerance.

Lol, you mean “go outside”? Pretty high bar for some internet denizens.

I’ve had plenty of conversations with religious folks that didn’t touch upon their holy texts at all. And plenty of conversations with atheists that were interminably about what they thought those texts said.

Whenever someone generalizes a group so drastically like this, I tend to wonder about how limited their life experiences must be.

Holy shit, I can’t be reading that right. FOUR espresso shots?

The issue isn’t your anxiety, it’s your completely unhinged idea of what a cozy little coffee is.

That’s close to the FDAs safe reccomended daily limit for caffeine, of fucking course you’re gonna spike your anxiety.

- O U T - O F - I D E A S -

Can’t see see that saying without this starting to jam out in my head.

Credit where it’s due, science built the plane.

Not sure if it was taken off FDroid for lack of updates or something, but I’ve found the github here. https://github.com/jakehilborn/speedr