thesmokingman

joined 1 year ago
[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 25 points 8 months ago (7 children)

Wait what

virtualization is a legacy technology

AWS, GCP, and Azure run on virtualization. Do you think all these cloud providers are providing everyone bare metal? This doesn’t include containerization which is a subset of virtualization. Your average shop might not run virtualization directly unless of course your team touches VirtualBox or Vagrant or qemu or (probably shouldn’t) HyperV.

Either your understanding of virtualization is very lacking or you didn’t explain your point very well. I am really curious what you meant.

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 2 points 8 months ago

If you want convenience, Google Books is pretty solid. Just make sure you have all of your books and are only uploading to Google. If you buy from Google, you’ll run into the same problem. I organize via Calibre and use it to push to both Google and a Kobo.

I personally have all my ebooks and use Google Books to read on all my devices. It’s more convenient than trying to self host stuff. When Google eventually drops Google Books I will have to figure out what to use.

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 5 points 8 months ago

This picture is kinda wimpy. Zaslav had led the company through a total stock drop of almost $16 per share yet his comp has gone up almost 100% based on the figures I’ve been able to find. Granted he’s not getting the lucrative options he started with but that doesn’t seem to stop the other comp from going up.

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 1 points 8 months ago

NIST also pushed DES after it was known to have been broken. Granted NIST-800 does actually match industry standards but that’s only because the NSA can’t weaken it without raising eyebrows.

Since you bring up Sandworm, that’s a great example of proving my point. Not the US.

You can’t call Colonial “cherry-picking” and then say that critical infrastructure is a known vulnerability no one can defend. It’s a great example of, once again, my point because Russia has already taken out grids multiple times and we still have no response. If you say the feds got Volt Typhoon I’ll point to plenty of other attacks on US companies they didn’t foil.

Show me the equivalent US attacks on Chinese, North Korean, or Russian targets. Show me the constant prevention of not attacks on government targets but private targets. Show me the diversion of academic resources and constant publication pulled from universities because of its classified nature. Show me a government that pays more than private sector with its pick of the top. Show me a private sector known around the world for its cyber capabilities.

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 9 points 8 months ago

This I can wave my hands at and say “Lawyers.” Their recent Rust move, not so much.

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 0 points 8 months ago (2 children)

That’s okay! The literature and the international cybersecurity community explicitly disagree with your naive assessment that “billions means we have capabilities” and the total lack of defense for critical infrastructure highlights how all of that is spent poorly. I don’t need to go out of my way to try and convince someone on a government contract doing nothing because neat attacks like the Colonial Pipeline and Pegasus prove my point!

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

For junior IT roles, you’re screening for passion more than anything else. The best candidates are usually people that play with computers and are looking for growth. There’s a mix of “I have been taking computers apart since I was a kid” and “I’m getting an associates in IT.” Totally hit or miss. Sometimes the person with nothing pans out and the degree seeker won’t. Sometimes it’s the other way around. The deciding factor here is how the candidate meshes with the team.

For junior dev roles, someone with a college degree is usually looking for more than a junior salary but has nothing I would hire at higher levels. Someone without a degree might have been coding in their spare time or done a boot camp. A good portfolio might give you a leg up. I consider a portfolio to be evidence of growth, not a bunch of perfect code. I love seeing GitHub profiles that show really shitty code that matures into really solid code (or at least the signs someone is trying). That being said, what matters is the tech screen and a quick code test. If you can do what I validate in an interview and the team likes you, rad.

For someone with no experience, I tell them to figure out something they want to learn and put it on GitHub. Then repeat a fuck ton. Always expand the things you challenge yourself with and move on when your learning or passion has ceased. Sometimes that means you build yet another todo list. Other times that means you try to figure out how to build that cool Discord bot and fail utterly but learn a bunch of shit along the way.

Honestly at the end of the day it’s all fucking luck. If you get a hiring manager like me that’s slightly biased toward self-trained over degree, you have an easier chance on skills stuff. But that’s a crapshoot. I was lucky when I started and people took chances on me. In return I take chances on people I think could have great potential. That’s just dumb luck both from me and for the people I’m able to help grow.

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 8 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Code has been skills-based for as long as I’ve been working. The few places I’ve seen that really have a hard degree requirement are not places I’d work. Most CS degrees are also mostly worthless for most app jobs because the theory is not the practice. There are degree programs that focus on shipping applications. In my own hiring, I’m looking for experience over degree and potential over buzzword bingo.

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

The DoD’s initiatives are coming way too late. Private industry is much more lucrative and without a pipeline like, say, Unit 8200, there’s no hook to pull people in. Thirty years ago when the NSA controlled the entire stack, math to hardware to code, it was a different story. In undergrad I regularly attended lectures by mathematicians who were finally able to talk about combinatorics problems that had been classified for 20+ yr. The genie is out of the bottle.

I’m in cybersecurity and voraciously consume everything related to it. I’d be really curious to know what you’re reading that says the US is capable of anything beyond social engineering.

Edit: really good example is the rampant infiltration of malware into critical infrastructure in the US, something that would have been unheard of until the late 90s/early 00s. Hell, the Silk Road was only taken down via social engineering and gross misconduct was completely missed.

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 11 points 9 months ago

This is the primary reason I do it, although more for my battery life than the cell towers.

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 12 points 9 months ago (7 children)

The United States is woefully behind in almost every area of cybersecurity both defensive and offensive. While the FBI is quoted here, the international cybersecurity community would most likely agree. China has more bodies than Russia and is able to field a larger presence. The NSA is a shell of what it once was and the ability of the US to pull of something like Stuxnet again would only be possible through allies like Israel.

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 28 points 9 months ago (9 children)

Your second paragraph tells you who you’re trying to find in your third paragraph: FAANG. Hiring 500 engineers and bragging about it something you can do when you’re just interested in shareholder value not customer experience.

I wouldn’t hire the guy in the article because I haven’t seen strong candidates come from FAANG and I’ve been very happy to lose the people I did to FAANG because they weren’t good engineers, they just knew how to leetcode and tunnel vision trivia.

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