Youth worker here: How much fucking work it is to just keep things from falling apart constantly. People assume most of my work is planning and doing activities with teenagers. But a lot of the time I’m like 50% caretaker.
Your field is chronically under staffed, right?
It’s probably not going to change until the workers stop thinking they’re doing this to help people and start realizing that they also have a job to live off themselves. This goes for most health and care related professions here in Germany. Bad pay and very long hours, many in the field still think that exploiting yourself is virtuous.
Common sense tells you that people get paid in relation to what importance their job has or how hard it is. That’s not the case though, people get paid what they can be paid.
I don’t work in a kitchen anymore but the amount of single-use plastic used in chain restaraunts is soul crushing. Most folks have no idea
I don’t work in a microbiology lab any more, but OMG the amount of plastic waste was unbelievable. Keeping everything sterile (as in germ free and DNA free) does not come cheap! If it’s small and cheap enough, it’s going in the trash. If it’s small but expensive, you’ll autoclave it. If it’s big, you’ll squirt lots of ethanol on it and hope it doesn’t ruin your day.
Spoiler
Sooner or later it will.
Oh you think that’s bad, don’t look at the medical field
Going through hospice with my parents I saw this first hand even in that brief time, and imagined how it must be going on constantly in every hospital and facility everywhere. And the thing is, it’s necessary in most cases because going back to how it was done before would be a nightmare just from the aspect of things being sterile.
I’m in accounting and considering what I read in the news, it was surprising to me how honest it is in real, regular, non public companies. We get real audits that are trying to validate our records, we give them our real work to look at, try so hard to figure out the real cost and revenue each month and year, to allocate things correctly, nobody is pushing for some fake result, only for a clear picture.
Those companies with fraud? A lot of things have to go wrong, and someone has to be really trying hard to defraud, and needs to convince others to go along with that. Most companies hire accounting because they actually want to have a good picture of what’s going on financially.
In IT the first problem/question should always this:
Is it a people problem or a technology problem?
IT can fix technology problems, managers need to fix people problems
if someone gives an IT person a people problem and they try to fix it, it will probably not go very well
same if you give a manager a technology problem and ask them to fix it
this is the most important lesson that leaders needs to understand
My supervisors will try to fix it for 3 minutes and post a question in the chat.
If that doesn’t’t make it work, it’s an it problem.
When I worked in local television news, people would probably be shocked about how frank and open newscasters often were during commercial breaks. We got direct satellite feeds of the national newscasts, and they didn’t mute the mics or turn off cameras during breaks. We got to still see and hear them while local commercials ran.
I remember Katie Couric going off about a bunch of dumb shit during commercial breaks. I especially remember her being a demented cheerleader for the War on Terror, especially behind the scenes.
There used to be a video of her cutting a Native American historian from a special on Columbus Day and saying “what does he know about Columbus anyway?” after chiding him for having negative things to say about Columbus. Since they were short on time, they made the decision to cut him from the program. I’m having trouble finding it now.
The 1995 film Spin is made entirely from direct satellite feeds from between commercial breaks. It was specifically about the 1992 election and how both Republicans and Democrats “massaged the message” with the news media, but watching it you’ll get an idea of how it works, because a lot of the clips are from commercial breaks.
Mediaburn has a copy of the film to watch on their website.
How to read well and closely as well as how nonsense academia can be. A recent work I read had multiple minor claims that were not factual while maintaining their main point. It made me realize how it’s hard to have everything right in a work but also how academia and research in general is like a tower of dominos, unless one person questions it the field will continue to build on bs claims.
I am glad Cory Doctorow has come a long way, but man, this was a major gripe from me about him when he was first getting popular in the blogosphere. He made some outright false statements about the history of Napster in the early 2000’s, and it made me furious. I remember being like “motherfucker, you lived through this how did you get it so wrong?” He’s been a lot more consistent for about a decade now.
Thanks for getting me to look up who that is! I knew his work but not his name.
That’s very frustrating. I wonder if that’s better or worse than in academia? People get called out and theories challenged, maybe a new edition is printed, or books challenging it. In blogs will someone often edit old posts for accuracy like the news does recently?
Oh, that’s part of what frustrated me so much about it at the time! I had a friend who had just gotten his Masters whose thesis had been on the co-evolution of control and resistance in digital networks, talking about things like Napster and Bittorrent specifically, and he couldn’t find a fucking job as a teacher to save his life. Meanwhile, Doctorow, with all his mistakes, was being asked to teach a class at UCLA.
That’s a really cool thesis! That must have depressed the hell out of them. I hope they found a good job for them.
Sometimes this sort of occurrence makes me really question the assumed validity of research. People can get away with a lot just because of a credential. I say this as someone in academia not a nut job conspiracy theorist.
The better you get at coding, the less you’ll probably write code. This is for two reasons: you can’t fuck up code that isn’t written and you need people that understand the bigger picture to focus on making that picture clearer. This unfortunately leads to junior and mid-level developers writing most of the code. But it’s not like things would be 10x better if senior devs wrote everything, because even for someone experienced coding well is fucking hard.
Coding: expert level fitting a square peg into a round hole. Every now and then you find a square or rectangle hole.
That business is just constant problem solving one after another and going through as many to-dos as you can day after day, while still maintaining sanity. That is persistence.
That business is always a house of cards that can fall apart anytime and so you must always keep your eyes on it. That is exhausting worry.
That business is so hard, you’ll be tempted to quit everyday. To overcome that urge to quit you’ll need a much bigger purpose or mission that drives you. Purpose brings determination.
That business really is about value creation for the entire ecosystem (customers, employees, vendors) and that a business is not above that ecosystem. Wall St & American capitalism is short sighted because it demands you pass lesser and lesser value to that ecosystem quarter after quarter, and that is like a slow axe to your own foot.
That most modern economic theory taught in business schools and used by execs in the biggest companies worldwide is all flawed because it fully relies on capturing and optimizing all sorts of business data, but the truth is that it is impossible to capture real world in data.
If you ask a computer expert to fix the weird thing Outlook just did, or explain why Excel is suddenly writing Gibberish into your tables –
Even if we wanted to explain it to you, we can’t. No human being alive on earth knows the reason and how to fix it.
Some of us are really good at poking it till it behaves again.
Others are brave enough to venture into the dark lands of learn.microsoft.com .
But what awaits us there are articles written by Copilot about how it worked before Microsoft changed it again for no reason.You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and AI generated answers.
answers
answers dot microsoft dot com
Nice try, but still bunch of losers compared to MS…
Seems like everyone’s solution there is to reinstall Windows first before troubleshooting.
First, I do NOT work in IT or anything like that. But I seem to be the most tech savvy of all my coworkers. Occasionally one of them will ask for help and I’ll fix something for them. Sometimes one of them will comment that I am good with computers or something. Honestly, I figure things out just by clicking on everything. I think sometimes people are too afraid to click too many things for fear of breaking stuff, but there’s not a whole lot that can go catastrophically wrong imo. I tend to just click shit until I figure out what to do.
I do work in IT and make six figures clicking on shit till I figure it out.
Shhh! Don’t give away all the trade secrets!
Tech support is mostly turning things off and on since it fixes a lot of things. And I mean actually turning them off and on, not just turning the screen off and on. Then turning setting off and on. Lots of checking what should or shouldn’t be on and trying it the other way.
Speaking of Excel, here’s a fun little experiment into the nature of binary numbers and rounding errors.
Start with some number and add a fraction like =A1+(1/3) to it. In the cell below, add that same fraction to the previous one. Copy this formula downwards and watch the numbers grow. After about 50 rows, you’ll have a number that looks like something specific, such as 71, but it isn’t exactly. There’s a sneaky rounding error hidden in there. The actual number is very close to the one displayed, but not exactly what you think it is.
If you’re using IF statements or XLOOKUP with numbers like this, you’ll run into some perplexing errors. If I recall correctly, you can even test the number with =A50=71, which will return TRUE but the xlookup still fails. It’s been a while since I tested this one, but I remember it being really weird in all sorts of unexpected ways. It’s weekend, so I’m not touching my work computer today.
You just need to know that a long series of fractions causes weird binary rounding errors to happen behind the scenes. Adding a series of whole numbers and neat decimal numbers was perfectly ok though.
Also, trying to explain this to some coworkers won’t be worth the effort.
The drinking water systems in the United States are so precarious and vulnerable, that I’m genuinely shocked we haven’t had more widespread issues with the water supply. The systems are made up of thousands of locally-managed interconnected intakes and outflows, and oversight is spotty and combative.
Please use a water filter. And thank your local utilities and maintenance people for their hard work keeping us alive.
I saw a survey of small town watertowers in the US. There were a terrifying amount of dead birds in there, and living birds shitting.
And that was with the EPA in existence. Just wait until the rivers catch on fire again. Psychotic idiots.
This is common knowledge by now I think, and yet evidence shows common doesn’t mean people remember. If you ship anything, fragile or not, be sure to pack it like it’s going to be thrown, dropped, get wet, and stepped on. It’s not even that workers in shipping do this (most damage is usually either bad packaging or mechanical damage in the automated parts), but things happen between point A and point B, many of them unavoidable. And I see SO MANY packages that consist of just some thin cardboard with a few pieces of tape, or a plastic bag that’s easily torn, or documents/letters that are smaller than the label we put on them(??? That won’t get lost :/ )
Pack things like you want to to make it there. Just look at packages you get successfully, and I guarantee on many you’ll see marks of the war zone they went through. Now imagine if they had been sent with an old worn out box you found in the garage and threw some tape on and didn’t bother putting any protective packing inside because “it’ll be fine if it bounces around a bit”.
Working with electricity is actually quite simple in a lot of respects, and I make a lot of money mainly because people are afraid of it (and rightfully so, me too). But many of the small things like changing plugs/switches out and hanging fixtures can be done easily by anyone with a basic knowledge hand tool use and basic rules like a) turn off the main if you don’t know which breaker you’re working with, b) check that it’s off with a meter or hot stick, c) even then, don’t directly touch the shiny parts, and d) match your colors exactly as you found them (take pictures to be safe). Granted I’ve been doing this for 10+ years, but even a layman can save themselves a service call with a couple basics and YouTube is a great resource for such things.
This. I just recently hung a ceiling fan with the help of YouTube and it’s still on the ceiling.
Hope the box you mounted it to was rated for a ceiling fan :D
My favorite electrical tip is swapping the capacitor in your AC when it stops working. $12 on Amazon. $175 for a service call. I keep a spare.
Better yet, having a (halfway decent) multimeter and knowing how to use it is huge. A good one can test capacitance, but simply tracing voltage isn’t too tricky.
I’m a software developer making big bucks and I’m lazy and stupid
Your house is insanely easy to break into unless it’s built with special materials or has steel bars over all openings.
Disregarding the fact that windows break, pretty much every residential door (both interior and exterior) can be busted down by anyone with a decent body weight or with a framing hammer. Hammer thru the door skin, or claw pry on the jamb to force the latch to release, or even just bodyslamming it can be enough to separate the lock block and stiles and the doors will simply fall apart from there.
Learning how locks work made me realise that locking a door is basically just like putting a sign on my door saying "please don’t burgle me :) ". That terrified me at first, but I came to realise that nothing had changed and that I was no less safe than I was before. Turns out that the social contract is the main thing that keeps people in line
Half of security is just making them be noisy enough to get worried someone will check
You reminded me of this old film from the 1980’s:
B & E from A to Z: How to Get In Anywhere, Anytime
- “Haha, deadbolt… I just smash the door in.”
- “I can pick most locks with a credit card.”
- “I know when you’re home… and when you’re not.”
All big banks run on horrendous excel spreadsheets ridden with errors
They’re not errors. They are expected deviations from reality. And if you fix them, YOU are wrong.
