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Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent

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  • That and also - humans not knowing something can man up and learn it. When they need, they'll learn.

    And OP's question about European clouds - it depends really. A lot of what this endeavor needs is just advanced use of OpenStack. I'm confident there are plenty of people with such skills in the EU countries.

    As for the post content - I dunno, my experience with Kubernetes consists of using it, but not trying to understand or touch it too closely, because it stinks. Maybe those engineers were like that too.

    When they need, they'll learn.

    100% agree. But.
    If you are a principal engineer claiming to have experience hardening the thing, you would expect that learning to have already happened.
    Also, I would be absolutely fine with "I never had a chance to dig into this specifically, I just know it at a high level" answer. Why coming up with bs?

    Maybe those engineers were like that too.

    I mean, we are talking about people whose whole career was around Kubernetes, so I don't think so?

  • You were at screening level #1. When I applied for work in Manhattan in 1988 it was like that: 9/10 jobs you applied to weren't the actual employer, they were agents building a pool of candidates to be able to present to the actual employers at a moment's notice if the employer should ever actually call asking for candidates.

    Today I bet it's rare to get hired without at least 3 screenings before you actually meet the people you might be working with.

    Maybe, but that doesn't quite track with what I experienced. It was for a fairly well known company that builds industrial tools and machines, and I interviewed at their HQ, so I don't think it was an agency building a pool.

    The screening part sounds right, but I think these guys were doing it in-house.

  • That has been my experience with security people, too. They are button pushers and copy pasters. But I don't think it's cloud computing causing it. They were like that before clouds.

    Yeah, they are frequently just parroting things like CVE notices as highlighted by a fairly stupid scanning tool.

    The security ecosystem has been long diluted because no one wants to doubt a "security" person and be wrong, and over time that has made a pretty soft context for people to get credibility as a security person.

  • My take on how a decade (or more) of using cloud services for everything has seemingly deskilled the workforce.

    Just recently I found myself interviewing senior security engineers just to realize that in many cases they had absolutely no idea about how the stuff they supposedly worked with, actually worked.

    This all made me wonder, is it possible that over-reliance on cloud services for everything has massively deskilled the engineering workforce? And if it is so, who is going to be the European clouds, so necessary for EU's digital sovereignty?

    I did not copy-paste the post in here because of the different writing style, but I get no benefit whatsoever from website visits.

    Nah brah, knah waddahma? Running my own Nextcloud instance is basically what drove me to become a linux novice.

    I used to be a windows gamer. Now I run my own home-LLM server for the self hosted cloud assistant.

    People should try, it's fun!

  • Nah brah, knah waddahma? Running my own Nextcloud instance is basically what drove me to become a linux novice.

    I used to be a windows gamer. Now I run my own home-LLM server for the self hosted cloud assistant.

    People should try, it's fun!

    Juat as a reality check:
    What you and me consider fun isnt fun for most outside of the lemmy techie bubble.

  • Maybe, but that doesn't quite track with what I experienced. It was for a fairly well known company that builds industrial tools and machines, and I interviewed at their HQ, so I don't think it was an agency building a pool.

    The screening part sounds right, but I think these guys were doing it in-house.

    That tracks with expectations. Many larger companies don't use external recruiters at all, I'd guess the threshold is probably around 10,000 employees - more or less - above that they'll have it vertically integrated in-house.

    I've worked with a 100,000 employee company where HR will pre-screen candidates at job fair type interviews, just to file them away against potential future openings. They won't usually task actual staff with doing interviews for openings that aren't funded, though sometimes it feels like they are doing that - sending so many bad-fit candidates that it takes us 8-10 to find one that might possibly be a net-positive asset to the team.

  • My take on how a decade (or more) of using cloud services for everything has seemingly deskilled the workforce.

    Just recently I found myself interviewing senior security engineers just to realize that in many cases they had absolutely no idea about how the stuff they supposedly worked with, actually worked.

    This all made me wonder, is it possible that over-reliance on cloud services for everything has massively deskilled the engineering workforce? And if it is so, who is going to be the European clouds, so necessary for EU's digital sovereignty?

    I did not copy-paste the post in here because of the different writing style, but I get no benefit whatsoever from website visits.

    nah, I was incompetent long before cloud services.

  • When they need, they'll learn.

    100% agree. But.
    If you are a principal engineer claiming to have experience hardening the thing, you would expect that learning to have already happened.
    Also, I would be absolutely fine with "I never had a chance to dig into this specifically, I just know it at a high level" answer. Why coming up with bs?

    Maybe those engineers were like that too.

    I mean, we are talking about people whose whole career was around Kubernetes, so I don't think so?

    Ah. OK. Yep, people lie in their CV's.

  • Juat as a reality check:
    What you and me consider fun isnt fun for most outside of the lemmy techie bubble.

    Haber most people reconsidered what they consider fun though?

    They're missing out!

  • now I know a fair amount about EE

    But, did you ever use a Smith's chart to assist in antenna design / analysis?

    I know what a Smith's chart is, but I never needed to actually use one. I'm a software guy who knows some random details about RF, and that sometimes helps with random things like identifying issues with WiFi or whatever.

  • The quality of your recruiter matters quite a bit

    Absolutely, but in a big company you don't get to choose which recruiters you use - corporate just sends you candidates.

    And those candidates are usually trash, especially in a company like mine where there are maybe a few dozen software roles and many hundreds of other roles. They just don't know how to recruit devs, they usually recruit marketing or domain specific people.

  • I know what a Smith's chart is, but I never needed to actually use one. I'm a software guy who knows some random details about RF, and that sometimes helps with random things like identifying issues with WiFi or whatever.

    Yeah, I was an EE in college so I took the Smith's chart class, did the exercises, then promptly started using newer tools when such things were called for... mostly I worked in software after school so all those exercises were... academic.

  • And those candidates are usually trash, especially in a company like mine where there are maybe a few dozen software roles and many hundreds of other roles. They just don't know how to recruit devs, they usually recruit marketing or domain specific people.

    I was recruited as an R&D engineer by a company that was sales focused. It was pretty funny being recruited like a new sales hire: limo from the airport, etc. Limo driver didn't work direct for the company but she did a lot of work for them, it was an hour drive both ways to/from the "big" airport they used. She said most of the sales recruits she drove in were clueless kids, no idea how the world worked yet at all - gunning for a big commission job where 9/10 hires wash out within a year. At least after I arrived on-site I spent the day with my prospective new department, that was a pretty decent process. The one guy I didn't interview well with turned out to be the guy who had applied to the spot I was taking and had been passed over. As I was walking in on my first day he was just finishing moving his stuff out of the window-office desk he was giving up for me, into a cube. I can understand why he was a little prickly.

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    There is a huge difference between an algorithm using real world data to produce a score a panel of experts use to make a determination and using a LLM to screen candidates. One has verifiable reproducible results that can be checked and debated the other does not. The final call does not matter if a computer program using an unknown and unreproducible algorithm screens you out before this. This is what we are facing. Pre-determined decisions that human beings are not being held accountable to. Is this happening right now? Yes it is, without a doubt. People are no longer making a lot of healthcare decisions determining insurance coverage. Computers that are not accountable are. You may have some ability to disagree but for how long? Soon there will be no way to reach a human about an insurance decision. This is already happening. People should be very anxious. Hearing United Healthcare has been forging DNRs and has been denying things like treatment for stroke for elders is disgusting. We have major issues that are not going away and we are blatantly ignoring them.
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    I guess that's why you pay your soldiers. In the early summer of 2024, months before the opposition launched Operation Deterrence of Aggression, a mobile application began circulating among a group of Syrian army officers. It carried an innocuous name: STFD-686, a string of letters standing for Syria Trust for Development. ... The STFD-686 app operated with disarming simplicity. It offered the promise of financial aid, requiring only that the victim fill out a few personal details. It asked innocent questions: “What kind of assistance are you expecting?” and “Tell us more about your financial situation.” ... Determining officers’ ranks made it possible for the app’s operators to identify those in sensitive positions, such as battalion commanders and communications officers, while knowing their exact place of service allowed for the construction of live maps of force deployments. It gave the operators behind the app and the website the ability to chart both strongholds and gaps in the Syrian army’s defensive lines. The most crucial point was the combination of the two pieces of information: Disclosing that “officer X” was stationed at “location Y” was tantamount to handing the enemy the army’s entire operating manual, especially on fluid fronts like those in Idlib and Sweida.