Now f’elon seems to be ramping up the boring company as the next round of “ipo my company and use Tesla (and now spacex) to buy its shares.”

I ducked into grad school thinking it’d help.

Then it was a single skill I picked up on my undergraduate that landed me a job. From there I just pick up experience where I can and take on responsibilities of higher jobs and then apply to those jobs elsewhere.

It took me 2 years to start making more than 80% of my graduate professors and 7 to make more than all of them.

The key is recognizing your worth. I’m this programmer from this example where I work. In the last 3 years I negotiated two separate times for higher pay, collectively increasing my pay 80% and it was relatively easy. You have to be willing to walk out the door though if it doesn’t work out.

I was thinking about buying some for recording my kids’ events like schools graduations, performances, etc. I just hate watching everything through my phone instead of them and thought this would give the best of both worlds. As it stands now I do a lot less recording so I don’t “miss” it.

Now I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t.

I had a very slow decline over a couple years. Basically a senior VP got a married male coworker drunk at lunch and then they “stopped by VP’s condo real quick” where my coworker was SA’d.

The coworker tells everyone, HR gets involved, coworker gets a huge promotion reporting directly to the VP, and suddenly coworker “think it may have happened differently” when I asked him what in the gd fuck he was doing.

Over 2 years my team of 8 + director bailed. I stayed thinking I’d outlast the shitty leadership and be a shoe-in for the vacant director position. Instead I got put on another team where I trained a handful of actually nice people on how to work with a data warehouse but leadership was still soured on me. What broke me finally was when my new director gave a promotion related to the job I’d been teaching everyone to another person. Also after hours one day while I was teaching a different coworker how to code and my new director came by to ask if it was done. I told him it wasn’t but it would be as I was letting this person take the reigns while I watched. My director told me “just quit bitching and get this shit done.”

At our standup the next morning I resigned in front of him and the entire team. The calls I got for MONTHS after that still help me fall asleep some nights. I’m talking about being asked to debug entire log files and providing admin credentials for the database that I “couldn’t remember exactly” but they were “stored somewhere on [a cluster of 16 different servers”.

So I took a lateral move to another agency where I had the same pay but since then have more doubled my salary and been promoted 3 times in 7 years.

What I learned was actually from something my douchebag director told me: “you can’t make people act how you want to” which was a dig at me but I’ve thought about it a lot. I wanted my agency to see the wrongs, see the people fleeing, have my coworker be honest about the SA that he almost resigned over, and I wanted to be vindicated. But that’s just not what happened.

If you’re in a toxic place where someone like my old VP has the ear of leadership and turns them against you, just bail. I knew my time was coming when I’d turn the corner on a city block and see my building and I’d feel my heart race. It’s always good to fight the good fight and we all need to but you’ve also gotta realize when it’s best to walk away and do what’s solely best for you, not some higher broader moral principle.

It also taught me a lot about workplace politics. I shouldn’t have been so open about about my displeasure and the betrayal of the coworker getting everyone involved and then doing a 180 when he got a promotion to be quiet. I’ve learned to keep the smile on my face and be more covert; otherwise the people you don’t like see it coming.

A funny part is that within a couple years of me resigning my old agency fired all the top brass - president, CIO, top VP and the VP who SA’d the coworker and that coworker also resigned. I think something blew up or happened again and it wiped that place out. It’s also seen a 70% turnover in the time I’ve been gone with 50% of that being within a few years of me leaving. It’s also never quite recovered and they’ve had to bring in “morale experts” because people breakdown and are seen crying in the hallways.

As someone who prefers linux but is relegated to Windows, my wife is strictly an Apple person and I have to say I’m impressed with them.

She doesn’t use a laptop a lot but she has some upcoming certifications to renew and so she brought out her 2015 macbook pro. It was outdated and had no recent OS updates available. However after a simple manual installation of a few year newer OS it runs just fine. At one point we considered buying her a new laptop this time. While looking at new laptops I told her we could get a cheaper Windows one that would be ok for a few years or another, slightly more expensive macbook that would last another 10. I don’t think we’ll need to buy a new one though as her 2015 seems ok to run at least until 2028 and that’s only because of available OS upgrades.

Our kids were also using her iPad 2 when they were younger from 2011 and it ran fine until 2022 and again, no hardware issues, just old performance and lack of support.

But probably the biggest thing is when I put a pihole on my network. Almost EVERY device be it google, Samsung, Windows, LG, smartphones, printers, TVs, etc etc is CONSTANTLY pinging outside your network. To the tune of thousands of blocked attempts per day per device. Yet Apple products are constantly at the bottom of the blocked attempts list, closer to about 100 per device per day.