IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

In my experience unlimited really is mostly unlimited. If you start taking like 6 weeks off during the year and you're also not crushing your actual work they will start getting on your case about it. Otherwise you can safely take 4 or maybe 5 weeks off during the year without issue. On top of any other holidays you may get.

Yes, no job will tolerate you being gone for months at a time. But you can indeed try I guess.

Don't be absurd with this literalist nonsense. No job has unlimited PTO where you can just absently collect your salary being gone all year. Everyone knows that. Unlimited is being unlimited on paper but with soft restrictions rather than strictly recorded holidays and absence balances.

I get that. But it is nice to not have to accrue days and just do what you want. I absolutely fall into the trap of my work ethic leaving me to not take enough days off a year. I have broke free of that more recently and borderline abuse it now. But for years I was the guy who never took vacation. Mostly due to retardation.

Had an interesting discussion with my director again today (this is my direct manager). TomServo it looks like I may have quit the two job game, but it won't quit me. He wants to retain me as a contractor to deal with certain things now and again. I said I could only do this in a very limited capacity but I could get to most things on the weekend or whatever.

We were looking at my coworkers and it is pretty apparent that none of them can take my place so he has to immediately look for another hire. Of our stateside employees one is good at coding but nothing else, the other is not really that good at coding but more extroverted so he's willing to deal with stakeholders. But neither is proactive which is where I was significantly outshining them. I was constantly evaluating issues, identifying improvements to make, fixes to do in various places, things to update in the code in general. Along with introducing new technologies and making roadmaps for the C-Suites dumbass AI inititatives. Then I was creating tickets for everything and grooming them with project managers. I did this all the time. I was the only one taking this upon myself the other two are just not interested and just wait for tickets to come their way and do them. Neither of them are naturally curious about stuff either they don't care about anything until you tell them to.

This makes me feel a little bad but they'll be all right. I can only leave as much documentation as I can put together.

I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask this question. I'm looking for a UML + ERD diagramming tool that integrates with Visual Studios and SSMS. Do you guys have any recommendations? I need it for designing new software and describing existing ones. Everything I look at is either too bloated or not enough. What do you all use?

Deathwing said:

Just curious, how are you not too busy with planned work to be that proactive?

Click to expand...

I hate boasting and I am shit at self advocacy in general. But to answer your question I am extremely proficient at all things backend engineering. Especially when it comes to distributed architecture and systems of systems that have no direct connection to each other. When it comes to data processing, aggregation, and so on anyway.

Whenever I get any planned work I can always identify several enhancement that will improve it. I find gaps in design and just immediately start taking steps to fix them. This has led me to simply be far ahead of the curve. I was able to excel at two different jobs as a senior engineer for nearly 5 years doing this and did so well I was promoted at both places.

I don't think of this as anything special per se just this has been the professional focus of my autism for many years now, and I eventually became quite good at it. Now my knowledge on how to leverage systems of systems is simply quite vast and this is very valuable for employment purposes. Hence my new job.

Quevy said:

I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask this question. I'm looking for a UML + ERD diagramming tool that integrates with Visual Studios and SSMS. Do you guys have any recommendations? I need it for designing new software and describing existing ones. Everything I look at is either too bloated or not enough. What do you all use?

Click to expand...

Mermaid. It natively renders in Github which is a big plus, I recently upgraded our docs/erd flow using it because I can just have it in a source controlled code base rather than gay ass confluence and now I have it all automatically pushing to Confluence once merged to my docs repo.

Works really well and makes docs much less gay than usual.

TJT said:

Mermaid. It natively renders in Github which is a big plus, I recently upgraded our docs/erd flow using it because I can just have it in a source controlled code base rather than gay ass confluence and now I have it all automatically pushing to Confluence once merged to my docs repo.

Works really well and makes docs much less gay than usual.

Mermaid

Create diagrams and visualizations using text and code.

mermaid.ai

Click to expand...

Thanks TJT ! That helps a lot. I'm looking into it.

Dumbass security team ran some DNS scanning shit across our entire AWS infrastructure. Normally I would not care about this but they ran up ~$8k in our AWS account on Route 53 (Gay AWS Feature ) for the past 3 months. I am pretty dialed on on our services in AWS which run in total about $5k a month. Which I think is pretty good overall and my team's overall spend per month is like ~$35k/month on various services.

I don't really know what they're doing but they apparently have been running similar costs per month in EVERY SINGLE ONE of our 50-60 AWS accounts. A lot more for the ones that support the commercial product. But they are being super faggots about cost attribution which is my primary concern. The bean counters are pretty sensitive to huge increases in team spend, at least my team's, and now security wont accept that any of these should be attributed to their team despite them being the ones doing it.

I imagine the bean counters are going to get on their case pretty bad when they realize InfoSec is running up at minimum $400k a month "scanning." It's all fallen into the various teams that own the AWS accounts because none of them actually belong to InfoSec so they inadvertently shielded themselves from scrutiny.

TomServo said:

Scanning for what? Why are they not just dns query logging

Click to expand...

You tell me dude. Whatever they were doing did populate DNS logs, it just requires Route 53 within the account to do it. No idea why.

Kirun said:

"Unlimited PTO" policies are rarely as generous as companies make them appear. In many cases, they exist primarily so companies no longer have to formally track accrued vacation time, which conveniently means there is nothing to pay out to employees when they leave the organization. I've also noticed that these policies are especially common in companies with high turnover or constant hiring cycles. By framing time off as "unlimited," the company can avoid the financial obligation of paying out unused PTO from the constant turnover while maintaining the "appearance" of offering some sort of progressive benefit.

Click to expand...

For my current job and my new job sales, service, and non tech staff get typical accruement and after 3 years move to unlimited pto. Tech staff get it from the start though.