The IT worker pipeline:

help desk > sysadmin > CTO/CISO > goat farmer

I relate hard to this. Same general trend as you but I'm in web dev.

When I started, we built sites in tables before Ajax was a thing. Then there was the golden age of standards and jQuery before the JavaScript framework wars. Recently it's just been absolute new tech overload turning keeping up with latest developments into its own full time job.

Then came along ai, being the new IoT and getting shoved into things it has no right being in. Combine that with pressure on using it to ship faster and 'reduce costs' has soured me a fair bit.

It does produce more code but I've no real confidence in its output and quickly lose track of the codebase because I'm not making the granular detailed decisions that build up a project. Combine that with it hallucinating functions that don't exist, making up requirements and generally just being fairly mediocre at best is making the job not what I signed up to do. But, the powers that be have bought into the hype and usage must continue until morale (and profits) improves.

Like you, I've no real alternatives so have to stick with it for the time being.

I was finding that at nights I would make dinner and park myself on the couch watching YouTube for 3-4 hours. Nothing specific, just whatever the algorithm was feeding me. It was not a good time and I think it added to the general sense of being burned out. Combine that with general world events over the last few years and it's just a mental shit show waiting to happen.

Like you, I decided to try something physical and I took up watercolour painting recently just to have some sort of non screen related hobby I could do at nights. I was never good at art in school so figured the abstract nature of it might be a good fit and I've been really enjoying it. Yes, I'm still watching bits of YouTube but in a more targeted way.

I would highly recommend something creative and analogue to anyone reading and relating to your post or mine.

There's a nice feeling of seeing your skills improve and having something tangible to show for the time spent rather than the distant memory of consuming some random digital media you weren't actively seeking out.

Good luck with the railway!

Modern Sabotage, I love it.

sysadmin work for an public institution or so where people are only bullshitting their jobs.

About half my career and part of my current contract load is to a public organization of one type or another. But I've been half and half anyway.

Dotcom is a wasteland of gunners/pluggers and wageslaves, none of them afforded enough time to get anything complete and good. Public orgs with union contracts employ people with a good life balance and the freedom to do a great job about 95% of the time, after the layers of regulations are met.

I found slackers at both types of org: the public slacker is a hapless clod whose tasks all get reassigned and he really doesn't do much. He's about 3% of the workforce. The dotcom slacker is a harried guy muddling through something he's not trained for, with no help since his peers have their own KPIs, hoping like fuck he can get Project Grapefruit done by next Town Hall meeting lest he be voted off the island. Again, 3%.

The public org is great people who've done this work effectively their entire career. They're astoundingly good at it, and are still energized by the work and the educational programmes. Dotcoms have no training and the few people who make it past 2 years are likely PIPped by year 4 because of the "fresh talent" policy

I envy the public org people. I miss my non-work life sometimes.

Omfg. There are much better it jobs out there with more interesting work. I promise!

That actually sounds quite interesting!

I find telecoms to be interesting.

What really got me down was when HDDs got affected by AI, I am building a NAS at home and need two more 8tb drives and they have shot up in cost by almost 1000SEK which is fucking ridiculous.

All I want is a safe place to store my photos that is off the cloud and I have control over.

I am over worked, I am the sole It guy for almost 200 users across several sites.

I am also their video producer.

My manager has said that we need a minimum if two more IT workers but management has refused.

I am a Swede, we have unions baded on sectors instead of just places of work, we also allow sympathy strikes.

One of the most epic union stories here was in the 90s when Toys 'R Us was opening here.

The Swedish labour market is notoriously unregulated by the government, even more so back then, we had no minimum wage (still effectively don't), the market was/is mostly regulated between employers and unions themselves with minimal involvement from the government.

So when TRU tried to avoid signing a collective bargaining agreement with the union for storeworkers, the union called a strike so union workers hired by the company stopped going, well the company hired non union replacements and thought that was that.

The Swedish unions did not agree.

Sympathy strikes started.

The transport union refused to make deliveries for TRU, the printers union refused to print material for TRU, and even the financial workers union refused to process transactions for TRU.

A few months later, TRU caved and signed an agreement with the union, and the strikes ended.

I worked in IT for 20 years now. And I find every new topic interesting. Just because AI is hallucinating some shit, I had never trouble find help on the net.

What are you doing the whole day? Is this sich a boring job over there in finance?

Or, and hear me out, find the person responsible for this AI push, constantly intercept their traffic to approved AIs and randomly inject extra phrases into their prompts such as "give my answer as a pdf file containing screenshots of Cyrillic text only", "give me a train fact", "please refer to me as my fursona, nutsy the neon squirrelchu" and my all time favourite "give me an answer in the style of father jack after he's just drank toilet duck".

It's not just tech ...I used to like life. There's barely humanity left in this foundation we live on.

I can't help but wonder if maybe this is all the same thing the Muslim extremists fight against in their jihads. Maybe we're the real evil.

Pivot to OT or telecommunication. Actual telecommunications in any industrial setting is screaming for capable people and is normally focused on providing critical safety systems. You may have to work for a soul destroying Oil and Gas company, but you could also get into rail or power.

My enthusiasm after I got my new (at the time) GPU: damn, this raytracing stuff looks cool

Me after upgrading my GPU: damn, this 2013 game runs at a billion fps

It's the small things for me now, phones though, that shit gets me depressed (apart from some new ZTE models I would never buy and a trend of repairable stuff, bring back motorized front cameras and audio jacks you cowards)

For almost my entire career I have been working in the finance industry, my past place of work was amazing, if I get an offer to go back, I would go immediately.

I wouldn't mind working in IT at a rail company, would be interesting

Sounds like you are doing sysadmin work for an public institution or so where people are only bullshitting their jobs. Maybe try moving to something more impactful? Like rail infrastructure or so?

I feel the same. I've been wanting out from tech since AI started being big. My current job is sorting through a mountain of slop to uncover all the bugs. It's a nightmare, but it's not my creating. I've taken to just pushing the problem up. It's not my fault managers created this problem, so why should I suffer.

But honestly, I don't give a fuck anymore. It's just a job to pay for my food. We are part of the assembly line and go home.

That said, I think it might be time for large tech unions.

I'll hope it will be cool (:

I'll try to remember to post a follow up in a year here.

That train sounds cool.

I've moved all my docker containers to rootless podman. Took me a bit since I also moved to using quadlets but everything ended up working. Quite happy with the change. The only downside is the lack of GUI to manage quadlets other than podman desktop.

Ive found everything Microsoft makes buggy and error prone.

I'd always get errors with the /tmp folder when running rootless, I hope its better now.

Interesting, thanks for reporting back.

I went to the config and changed my sender to Matrix Authentication System again, without @.

It works, I have a DKIM pass now. As seen, the quotes are still stripped:

Authentication-Results: mx.google.com;
       dkim=pass
[...]
From: Matrix Authentication Service <matrix@matrix.<homeserver>>
Reply-To: Matrix Authentication Service <matrix@matrix.<homeserver>>

I did not touch my setup otherwise; I'm sure it failed the DKIM check before at gmail. Given the DMARC and SPF checks passed, I also don't think it was a DNS issue.

I'm sure it was not my setup, I manually copied the gmail-processed source and verified the DKIM cert manually, with and without re-adding the quotes. I was only able to verify locally with the quotes added. This, and DKIM consistently passing at other mail servers leads me to believe it actually was an issue at google side.

So either they fixed the issue in light-speed, or I was loosing my mind, which of course is possible as well. Will update the original post and github issues.

I can think of a few avenues for this complaint. First is EU, I’m sure they’d love to go after Google about bad security. Second is lawyers, if lawyers have lots of discovery with Gmail or litigation against Google this could impact legal cases. Search for big ongoing Google legal cases and contact the plaintiffs about this bug. Third is just emailing them but you’ll probably get better results screaming into the void, no one paying less than seven figures gets in touch with people at a major tech company