@DustinB3403 said in Nine Out of Every 10 Silicon Valley Jobs Pays Less Than In 1997, Report Finds:

To be fair, a lot of them likely do make a ton of money, just not for the area. But when a 1000 sq ft house cost $400,000 on the median your 6 figure paycheck is a joke.

Well, I remember when a good engineer could make $125K a year, now they're lucky if they make $60K. In IT it's roughly a similar drop, but even lower, most IT guys I know make around $40K, some as low as $20K. That's just nationally. Obviously certain markets like Silicon Valley, New York, etc will be shift upward, but the difference is seemingly the same.

And I'm totally disregarding all those people on SW, especially those who threatened to kick my ass for pointing out ITT Tech was a scam, who claim they make $80K+ working at a local doctor's office or credit union or whatever and act shocked that not everyone else is, even though I think most are liars. There may be a few that are telling the truth, but I imagine they know they're lucky and I hope they've got a good savings plan.

@DustinB3403 said in Nine Out of Every 10 Silicon Valley Jobs Pays Less Than In 1997, Report Finds:

@tonyshowoff said in Nine Out of Every 10 Silicon Valley Jobs Pays Less Than In 1997, Report Finds:

SW-warriors

Are those warriors from ?

I'll say it's a place full of both good and bad IT people and there's a large subset of bad ones who insist that they're essentially geniuses who make at least twice as much as the average IT person despite being both incompetent and novices. I'll leave it at that.

Nine Out of Every 10 Silicon Valley Jobs Pays Less Than In 1997, Report Finds

Nine out of every 10 Silicon Valley jobs pays less now than when Netflix first launched in 1997, despite one of the nation's strongest economic booms and a historically low unemployment rate that outpaces the national average.

While tech workers have thrived, employees in the middle of Silicon Valley's income ladder have been hit hardest as their inflation-adjusted wages declined between 12 and 14 percent over the past 20 years, according to a study from UC Santa Cruz's Everett Program for Technology and Social Change and the labor think tank Working Partnership USA, which examined the economic impact of technology companies.

Technology workers saw a median wage increase of 32 percent over the past 20 years, the study found. But Silicon Valley workers in virtually all other areas lost ground during that time. Across all jobs, wages for even the highest-paid 10 percent increased just under 1 percent, the study found. Meanwhile, the region's economy has been booming. Since 2001, the amount of money generated per Silicon Valley resident -- the area's per person GDP -- has grown 74 percent, the study found. That's more than five times faster than the equivalent national growth.

Editorial: I've been saying quite a while that the wages are down but I just get shot down a lot by SW-warriors and the Valley toxic waste run off all insisting they're all making the big bucks. I'm sure they'll all say they're just exceptions to this report. I think nine out of ten of them are just liars.

Like I said above, IT and software engineering have a lot of knowledge overlap and I think that's why outsiders are confused as SAM talks about. There's a similar issue in web development, confusion with web design. People think because I make web apps that I must be a web designer, can make logos, etc but being a designer almost always implies that you're terrible at programming and visaversa. That contrast isn't true between IT and software engineering in the reverse, there's no significant sample size I've ever noticed where IT and software engineers have totally incompatible skills and knowledge, most IT people I've known just hate programming, they do the scripting they need to do and hate the rest. And the reverse is, programmers who don't understand infrastructure or how businesses benefit from networks other than mantras about client-server architectures are just bad programmers.

@Obsolesce said in SQL security over the LAN:

@tonyshowoff said in SQL security over the LAN:

@Obsolesce said in SQL security over the LAN:

@tonyshowoff I think you're either misunderstanding what IT is, or why an IT member would be there.

Define it for me then.

Youtube Video

So according to SAM's words, "the purpose of IT is to deliver business infrastructure, it's a business unit, and what it gives to the business is the infrastructure for operating the business."

And I said:
"I think you're over valuing IT people from network and infrastructure managers and maintainers to making them consultants in software and that's really not done."

Yeah, I have no idea what IT is.

@Obsolesce said in SQL security over the LAN:

@tonyshowoff I think you're either misunderstanding what IT is, or why an IT member would be there.

Define it for me then.

@JaredBusch said in SQL security over the LAN:

@tonyshowoff While it would be great if everyone knew this, that is unrealistic.

The best software comes from a team with software development done by programmers and someone form IT to apply the needed skills to the development process.

Only really huge projects ever have specialists on them like IT people, and those projects are almost always garbage. I see no connection. RFCs for network communication are not written by non-programmers, not the successful ones anyway. And infrastructure goes and in hand with that, such as the origins of ARP tables. There are IT centred programmers, but IT people are not consultants on projects in of themselves, not that I've ever seen personally for certain, but it probably happens for whatever reason.

All the examples above are absolutely not done this way. That is the problem.

For a small software house, they won't have the overhead for that separate person, so yeah, then they need someone like you to wear both hats.

I worked at AOL, the understanding of IT vs no understanding of it is reflects in the garbage scale of much of their network through the late 90s and early 2000s. They often just refused to listen to programmers and IT people had a weird smugness I'd never seen before or since.

I think you're over valuing IT people from network and infrastructure managers and maintainers to making them consultants in software and that's really not done.

@JaredBusch said in SQL security over the LAN:

@Donahue said in SQL security over the LAN:

@tonyshowoff said in SQL security over the LAN:

but if the company is basically dismissing concerns over encryption by saying "it's up to you to secure your network" that's basically saying "what's encryption? We're morons."

I have a suspicion that this is true. I feel like there are maybe two sides to software development, there is the functional aspect of the SW itself, but then there is how it incorporates into the overall IT plan for a target business. It feels like all of this company's development resources go into the first category, and none in the second.

In general, actual software developers have no idea what IT is. They shouldn't. Otherwise they would be in IT. A good software development house should have staff on hand to handle how the software works in relation to IT needs though.

Actually you're describing how bad software is written, in my experience of 22ish years programming professionally, the programmers who know about IT and hardware do the best over people who know neither. I'm not an IT person, and yet I get hired to do things a lot of IT people couldn't figure out, largely because they were inexperienced, and it's not my job, I just understand networks, domains, and so forth enough to get by but it also had helped me write good client-server programs, know how to authenticate and deal with AD, and so on. And I'm not the only one, a lot of good programmers do this work a lot, either as favours or between projects.

Just because a development company has an IT person doesn't mean it's because the programmers need them because they don't understand IT, it's usually because the programmers are too busy to deal with IT problems. Good programming talent is incredibly hard to find, not necessarily because it's rare, but because the market is overflooded with incompetence, just like IT is, especially with outsourcing to the third world and young people who think they know everything because they've changed video cards or configured printers (this applies to IT and programming). Just look at Spiceworks.

If you want good programming with concepts of how security works such as GPO, and good network design (such as IRC networks, MySQL clusters, etc), and an understanding of load balancing, how infrastructure works and how it relates to your programming, how data travels over networks and why encryption matters, etc you need a solid IT understanding. You can't just try to find some IT person who happens to know what you need to know so you can write your programs, then try to explain to them any issues or design questions you have with your project only for them to have no idea how to program. You need to be able to answer these things yourself and all good programmers are very good IT people, some of us just can't crimp rj45 connectors, I can't see those tiny ass wires!

I have known programmers who don't know the first thing about IT, they were all terrible, wrote terrible software, and shrugged at essentially all security concepts. The descriptions in posts above about the incompetence of companies not understanding network encryption (that ERP company) and not understanding the basics of network latency (Eaglesoft) and not understanding why a program needing local admin rights is stupid (Eaglesoft) are not virtues to suggest they should fall on some IT guy to solve the problem rather than the programmer know what he's doing.

Anyway, it's like suggesting IT people are best that don't know scripting because then they'd be in programming. While really experienced IT people will certainly know things even good programmers don't, they do have a hell of a lot of knowledge overlap, it comes with the territory.

I can't recall my username, but I did sign up because my wife did and I selected German as she had and on the first day, in a couple of hours or so, I just sat there and went through about half of all the available lessons/checkpoints/whatever available just to irritate her before I got bored with it. It's really easy when there's no challenge at all. I then tried Spanish and it was much slower, much, much, much slower when you don't speak the language. Learnin's hard

Edit: I see now they have way more languages, they didn't even have Russian, only Ukrainian for some weird reason, back when I signed up. I think I might sign up for the Hungarian one to see if I can recapture any lost childhood skills since now if I try to speak Hungarian it sounds like someone that was thrown from a moving vehicle and landed on their head. When I was a small child I did much better, I only sounded like one of those moronic children people barely understand, rather than as an adult someone totally incomprehensible.

Aside from MongoDB's licensing, it also has a habit of losing data due to the fact it doesn't guarantee writes, even though ScyllaDB is not ACID compliant either it doesn't suffer from this disappearing data problem to the same extent it seems. This on top of retrieving data, you can get unexpected or not-expected results such as requesting the same information twice but the second time being older data than the first one. This has been a design problem for years.

It also is only single master so your scaling is limited to reads rather than writes, you'll have a write bottleneck always. Further due to the single master problem, if you want constant uptime then MongoDB is not what you're looking for because depending on data and network size, it can take up to a minute before one of the slaves becomes the new master. Plus you have to write in extra code in your application to automatically understand this or deal with another external MongoDB service.

If you know SQL at all then you'll have less to learn since ScyllaDB has SQL access where as MongoDB uses JSON(B) which can get clunky sometimes, though if you're writing you're app in node.js it's pretty straight forward.

@black3dynamite said in BlackBerry to Acquire Cylance for $1.4 Billion in Cash:

From their website, they are in the business of cyber security related services.

That could easily be the acquisition though, the question is what did they do before that? When it comes to cyber security, I don't recall "BlackBerry" ever being a name uttered by anyone.

@black3dynamite said in BlackBerry to Acquire Cylance for $1.4 Billion in Cash:

Damn, where are they making their profits from?

My guess is likely some sort of drug trafficking empire.

BlackBerry to Acquire Cylance for $1.4 Billion in Cash

BlackBerry on Friday announced that it has agreed to acquire next-generation endpoint security firm Cylance for US $1.4 billion in cash.

In addition to the cash payment, BlackBerry will assume unvested Cylance employee incentive awards. The deal is expected to close before the end of BlackBerry’s current fiscal year (February 2019), and Cylance will operate as a separate business unit within BlackBerry.

At risk of editorialising, where in the world did BlackBerry get $1.4 billion? Even governments have largely stopped using their hardware and most of their software. I know they have some niche areas in email still, but enough to raise that kind of capital? Perhaps Alicia Keys was able to secure some financing before they dumped her for the stupid stunt she was? In all honesty, I thought they went bankrupt, they were so good at making all the wrong decisions.

1. What are you thankful for in your career / current job?

That I'm in control.

2. What are some career-related items you should be thankful for but have not been in the past?

I recently realised that if I had to do a helpdesk job, I'd quit and be a janitor. That's not an exaggeration. So I'm thankful I am not in helpdesk, but I imagine if I was one of those delusional people who think helpdesk is the gateway to IT then I'd be fine with it, because then I can say that any day I'll somehow get moved to the IT department just like some guy online claimed he did. He makes $150,000 a year, he said so on Spiceworks, it must be true.

3. What has the effect of your job been on your holiday experiences (i.e. allowed you to unplug, forced you to work, etc.)?

I've never taken a holiday from a job in my entire life.

4. How do you allow yourself / force yourself to unplug on holidays (assuming you get some time off)?

I've never had time off except to handle other business or things that needed to be done, typically bureaucratic government nonsense or dealing with family. By limiting family troubles to only my children I've saved a lot of money and time previously wasted on my extended family, more so by simply not speaking to any of them anymore. I regret not having done that earlier.

5. From a professional standpoint, what are your resolutions for 2019?

To work more.

@manxam said in Bills and clients subscription management software:

@tonyshowoff said in Bills and clients subscription management software:

Invoice Ninja is pretty good I just wish I could host it.

Why can you not host it?

I was just being ironic

@flaxking said in SQL security over the LAN:

@tonyshowoff said in SQL security over the LAN:

@flaxking said in SQL security over the LAN:

@tonyshowoff said in SQL security over the LAN:

@flaxking That may work and is worth a try, but it's likely not to work because the client is passing along to SQL Server and it's not known whether or not they implemented, or allow, encrypted traffic within their SQL Server connection library. Even if implemented in the library, it doesn't mean the client allows it, and even may be intentionally disabled for God only knows what reason. It isn't an SQL client, it's an application which just connects to SQL Server or passes raw SQL along to an application server to avoid client connection licensing limits.

How would that avoid licencing? The MS SQL licencing doesn't care how a user connects, you have to get CALs for the actual users using it no matter the method used. (Unless using SQL Express)

Because it opens one connection between the application server and the SQL Server rather than a new one for every single client. You can avoid user CAL issues because it's one connection from one user.

I can't speak to there possibility being a point in time when this was true, but it is not true now. You have to get CALs for each actual person, even if they themselves are not in direct communication with the MS SQL Server

I am aware but it isn't relevant, that's just why people do it in the ERP world in addition to having license control over their own client application. There's no inherent transparent encryption with a third party library connecting to SQL Server though. It should be straight forward from the development perspective considering they must be using a fairly modern one to be using SQL over SMB2, but if the company is basically dismissing concerns over encryption by saying "it's up to you to secure your network" that's basically saying "what's encryption? We're morons."

Invoice Ninja is pretty good I just wish I could host it.

And I raise your woman in a pool with a woman in the ocean:

Youtube Video

@flaxking said in SQL security over the LAN:

@tonyshowoff said in SQL security over the LAN:

@flaxking That may work and is worth a try, but it's likely not to work because the client is passing along to SQL Server and it's not known whether or not they implemented, or allow, encrypted traffic within their SQL Server connection library. Even if implemented in the library, it doesn't mean the client allows it, and even may be intentionally disabled for God only knows what reason. It isn't an SQL client, it's an application which just connects to SQL Server or passes raw SQL along to an application server to avoid client connection licensing limits.

How would that avoid licencing? The MS SQL licencing doesn't care how a user connects, you have to get CALs for the actual users using it no matter the method used. (Unless using SQL Express)

Because it opens one connection between the application server and the SQL Server rather than a new one for every single client. You can avoid user CAL issues because it's one connection from one user. This isn't really as big of an issue today as the licensing has become much more free, but many years ago there was a much harder limit on user connection count and how many different users could be connected and it was limited to version of both SQL Server and sometimes even the OS, and the licensing that, that implies. My guess is they may be having their application work with a newer version of SQL Server but I doubt they're using any features not also available on SQL Server 7 from 1998... and that isn't meant to be a joke, from what I've seen that tends to be the standard.

@Obsolesce

After that point I don't know if there is a maintained secure channel from the authenticated app to the SQL server.

Not if you don't use one of those. Having the option doesn't mean it's setup automatically, which I imagine you know, but I'm saying it rhetorically to point out the unfortunate situation.

@Obsolesce said in SQL security over the LAN:

The AD authentication process is secure... Kerberos and all that which MS SQL server can use. After that point I don't know if there is a maintained secure channel from the authenticated app to the SQL server.

Not if you don't use one.