Five Ways Users Self-sabotage When Reporting Problems

In desktop support and in software development, there runs a common thread - responding to requests for help from users. And this remains some of the greatest tests of patience known to man. Not because the problems are tricky, though sometimes they can be. Not because the users are rude, though on occasion, a couple would greatly benefit from some goddamn manners. No, because sometimes, the way users report problems, just does not help themselves.

Let's go through a few ways that users' requests for help inspires intense rage could be improved.

1. "It doesn't work."

This is probably one of the most exasperating things a techie can hear. Because that phrase, and its numerous variations, basically tells you there's a problem, perhaps a general area, and that's all. It doesn't tell you anything else. No, the user informs you that there's a problem, and expects you to figure everything else from that mysterious statement.

Printer is on fire.

For example, telling us "help, I can't print" is a statement about as useful as a can of diesel to Elon Musk. "I can't print" could mean anything.

- the printer printed blank sheets of paper
- the printout was garbled.
- the print button on the screen did not respond to clicks.
- the print button could be clicked but nothing happened.
- the print button flashed, beeped, triggered the Fire Alarm and rebooted your life.

For extra aggravation points, the user might even write an email with a few paragraphs while including no information as to what the problem is, beyond "we're unable to print", ending with "we would appreciate your help as soon as possible". That in no way sounds like they want our help as soon as possible. In fact, it feels distinctively like they'd rather we take our own sweet time to decipher what the problem actually is, before we do a damn thing.

How To Do Better: Users should actually describe the damn problem beyond "it doesn't work". Because if it did work, there wouldn't be a need for this conversation.

2. What are we looking at?

The user tells you what they see on screen. Sometimes they even send you a screenshot. Neither of which is helpful, because what you see isn't an error message. It's something that looks perfectly innocuous on screen, and only the user knows why it's wrong.

Except the user has neglected to tell you exactly what is wrong. No, apparently having a tech degree means that you can somehow infer what the problem is, in the absence of any other indicators. Which leads me to think that the problem is not that systems have bugs. It's that system users think tech is actually witchcraft.

Not witchcraft.

So if you see a series of numbers in a column, you're supposed to magically know one of those numbers is supposed to be negative instead of positive. If you're sent a screenshot of a message that says "Record Saved", you're supposed to instinctively know that the problem was that the record was, in fact, not saved. Or perhaps the problem was that the record was saved when it shouldn't have been. Or perhaps the problem was that it was spelled in English, when the user's settings were in some other language. Who can tell?

What is with all this vagueness? Do users realize that if techies were capable of reading minds, we wouldn't be working here?

How To Do Better: Users should tell us exactly what they expected would happen but didn't. Without that information, it's hard to tell whether anything is wrong in the first place.

3. How did they get there?

This is when the user tells you what went wrong, and maybe even why it's wrong, but neglects to explain how it came about. Which is kind of like Hansel and Gretel wandering around in some dark forest and neglecting to leave breadcrumbs.

Leave us a trail!

In order to properly diagnose the source of the problem, we need to trace exactly the steps that the user took that led to the problem. In certain cases, this can actually be a case of the user using the system in ways it was not meant to be used. For example, trying to log in to a system and being unable to... and failing to mention that the URL they're using is the UAT site's rather than Production's.

Some users want to avoid looking stupid and leave out that information, perhaps hoping that the air of mystery will help. If I need to point out the irony here, you haven't been at this job long enough.

How To Do Better: The user was doing something that led to this. Whatever the user was doing, needs to be properly articulated because it is probably relevant.

4. Screenshots

For some unfathomable reason, when there's relevant information in a string that needs to be passed to the software developer - such as an id, URL or IP Address - users seem to prefer sending them as screenshots.

Exasperating as all hell when there's info in there that you now have to type out character by character, and probably make a few typos in the process. Now with modern tools such as LLMs that can analyze the image, this has become only slightly less exasperating.

Don't send pictures
of text, please!

Why is this completely stupid? Well, when you're being asked for help, generally, you'd expect those asking for help to at least try to make it easier for you to help them.

Also, copying and pasting text is significantly easier than manually reproducing text from a screenshot. But copying and pasting text takes about the same amount of effort as pasting a screenshot. Now, I could understand if the users were inconveniencing me in order to make their own lives easier... I wouldn't like it, but I would at least understand it. However, at this juncture, they're inconveniencing me without actually making things easier for themselves, so this entire exercise of pasting screenshots remains a damn mystery. It has zero practical value.

The truly horrifying thing is that this isn't confined to laypersons - other techies do it as well. Yes, this brand of insanity isn't confined to people who aren't actually expected to know better.

Bonus points for writing stuff down in handwriting that would make a doctor proud and sending a photo of it, instead of typing it like a normal person.

How To Do Better: Unless the information is wholly visual - colors, layout, etc - and does not include text of any kind that needs to be used by the support - ids, ip addresses, dates, etc - screenshots should not be used as a primary means of communicating the problem.

5. Jumping to Conclusions

This is when the user self-diagnoses and ends up sending you on a wild-goose chase. To be fair, even techies are capable of jumping to wrong conclusions with alarming frequency... except that in the case of techies, their wrong conclusions tend to be directionally correct. In the same ballpark, even.

Laypersons, as mentioned, tend to treat tech like witchcraft, so their wrong conclusions can be comically inaccurate. I remember one fascinating incident where the user reported that the changes to the database were not persisting. The next point of escalation was to the database team, because naturally, support had no direct access to the data. After days of barking up the wrong tree, it turned out that the fault was in the front-end code - it cached the previous result even though the data had been updated, thus misleading the user into thinking that it was a database problem.

What users should do, in these cases, is stick to the facts. The user should have just reported the simple fact that her display was showing previous data even though she had already updated it. This would have set support further back on the path, but at least they would not have been miles ahead on the wrong path.

Barking up the
wrong tree.

In this instance, though, I blame the techies for taking the complaint at face value in the first place. When are we going to learn to stop giving users so much credit? If you consulted a doctor and proceeded to diagnose yourself while asking for medication, could you expect to be taken seriously?

How To Do Better: Skip the diagnosis. Lay out the issue properly. Nobody's interested in your opinion - in fact, it tends to muddy the waters. Stick to facts.

Don't make yourselves un-rescuable

If users want help from techies, they should try making it easy for techies to help them. Or, at least, stop making it so devilishly hard. When you report a problem, just try to put yourselves in the shoes of the ones receiving your report, and see if it makes any damn sense.

Whats your problem?
T___T

A Software Developer's Vacation in... Singapore (Part 1/3)

In recent years, I've been writing about my vacations in different parts of Malaysia to meet up with friends I made online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, I didn't leave Singapore at all. Instead, I still cleared my Annual Leave - but in Singapore. This was more than just me being a cheap bastard - I mean, I am a cheap bastard, but there's more at play here.

You see, back in 2019, one of my several uncles, David, died. He hadn't even turned sixty. I saw my Aunt Serene at the wake, in a wheelchair. For reasons we won't get into, Aunt Serene was only ten months older than me and we played together a lot as kids. This would be the last time I would see her alive, for she succumbed to a brain aneurysm just a year later. Then two years ago, the twin brother of one of my friends passed on from a heart attack. He was only a couple years older than me.

Rest well, guys.

Now, granted, I would consider myself a significantly healthier and fitter specimen than any of the ones who've died, rest their souls. This, however, taught me not to take anything for granted. Around my age, anything can happen. I am going to celebrate the fact that I am alive and able to walk... by being alive and walking.

The past five years of working from home meant that I hadn't really needed to leave the neighborhood very often. I hadn't really seen how Singapore had changed post-pandemic. 

Initially, I went through the places I hung out as a kid, but eventually, inevitably, this turned to revisiting old workplaces because my career took up so much of my life. And I've always had a soft spot for old malls compared to some of the more modern cookie-cutter fare out there. It's not that the old stuff is objectively better; there's just a certain charm about the old-fashioned double rectangular layouts that speaks to me.

Today, I want to go through some of the sights I saw in my wanderings as I revisited the places I used to work through my long and storied career. Bear in mind that I did not visit these places chronologically, but I will be recounting them in a certain order, for clarity.

Early to mid 2000s

My career began after graduating from University, amid an economic downturn around 2002. After months of temp work and putting myself out there, I landed a job as Desktop Support at a legal firm. The pay wasn't great, and the prospects sucked ass... but it was better than what I had currently, which was pretty much nothing.

North Bridge Road

Peninsular Plaza

The office was in Peninsula Plaza along North Bridge Road, a place mostly visited by the Burmese and Indians. Upon my visit during my vacation, the building seemed to now be inhabited by small Thai businesses from the collapse of Golden Mile Complex. It really seemed to be a case of seeing how many grocery shops and hair salons one could squeeze into four floors of an old-fashioned rectangular layout.

Aside from that, Peninsula Plaza didn't seem to have changed too much from twenty years ago.

Funan

Across the street was Funan, one of the places that my then-Manager often sent me to, to purchase tech supplies. The last time I ventured there was in 2018 (more on that later), and it had completely changed from the Funan I knew as a teenager, or even as a young adult. It had become all kinds of fancy. There was a hotel, and a rock-climbing wall. Upscale restaurants. The works. I don't begrudge evolution, but honestly I didn't want to rub my own face in it either. I had places that held memories that I could actually revisit.

Peninsular Shopping Complex

The basement.

Next door to Funan was Peninsula Shopping Complex (not to be confused with Peninsula Plaza) and Excelsior Shopping Center, which, if I'm being honest, are so old and decrepit and joined at the hip they might as well be one unit. The basement held all the stuff that enthralled me as a kid - I remember blowing much of my earliest paycheck on a belt and some rocker t-shirts. They still have this cool stuff down there, and it doesn't look like it's let up in the past three decades. If anyone's got a hankering to cosplay as some stereotypical badass biker, you could do worse than start here. Just for old times sake, I dropped a bunch of cash on some Iron Maiden t-shirts. Probably got ripped off, but whatevs, it's just money.

Excelsior
Shopping Center

This was creepy.

A little bit of exploration in Excelsior Shopping Center made me realize just how ghetto this place was. I'm all for it, but there were times it got a little creepy. Like this little stairway, for instance. Total horror movie vibes.

The dodgy-looking ladies at the upper floors rapping on the glass windows as I passed, certainly did nothing to make this experience less creepy.

The Adelphi

The colorful building known as The Adelphi was another stop. They still sold vinyl records and CDs, imagine that. There was even a shop that dealt in vintage action figures. That took me way back. Now I've never ventured to The Adelphi much even when I was working nearby, but on this occasion I'm glad I stepped in.

Mid to end 2000s

After three years, the firm relocated to Beach Road. This was the more upscale end of Beach Road near to the Esplanade.

Beach Road

The Gateway was an acutely-shaped building where I spent another three years of my career.  The shelter between the towers, pictured below, wasn't there during my time.

The Gateway

The area in between the two glass towers was where I took my smoke breaks. I'd forgotten how beautiful the surroundings are.

The Gateway's gardens

Back in the day, I spent time around Shaw House along Beach Road. This is what Shaw House looks like now, being reconstructed, but back then it was my goto for horror movies. I distinctly remember watching Ringu here.

Shaw House

The surrounding areas have also evolved. Tan Quee Lan Street and Liang Seah Street appear to have undergone the most changes, with regards to the shops and businesses open. These days it's a lot of Chinese restaurants.

Golden Landmark
Shopping Complex

Another stop I made was at junction of Victoria Street and Ophir Road, where the decaying sight of Golden Landmark Shopping Complex stood. I can't believe that dump is still around; I used to go in to get my hair cut.

2008

In 2008, I ended my Desktop Support career and moved into web development. This was at a little company inside Bylands Building along Middle Road, just a couple streets away from my previous company. Now, if there's ever a timeless spot, it's the entire area around Middle Road. 

Middle Road

Bylands Building

On the other side of Middle Road was the Four-face Buddha and Fu Lu Shou Complex. This remains a classic. It looked like this almost twenty years ago, and looks the same now when I visited it last month. Really took me back to the evenings spent wandering this area while I ruminated on why my code was failing.

Four-face Buddha and temples

Fu Lu Shou
Complex

Just a bit further pas this was Bugis Night Market, and to my everlasting joy, it was going strong! There's a certain charm about it that rivals Kuala Lumpur's Petaling. that since this is Singapore where space is a premium, things were a lot more claustrophobic.

Bugis Night Market

Parklane Shopping Mall

At the ass-end of Middle Road, I took a few minutes to go through Parklane Shopping Mall. Back in the day, as teenagers, my buddies and I came here for pool and gaming. It was still going during my professional years, but that day when I visited, it was like a morgue - cold, lifeless and dull. Damn, this is sad.

Next

Revisiting offices I worked in 2009 to 2012.

Finding Your Purpose Professionally

For years now, I've been reading that young people (which, to me, means Gen Z) are unemployable because they want to find purpose in work. By that, they mean that the company they eventually join, should have values that align with their own. They want to impact the world in meaningful ways.

This, of course, may not be compatible with the values that employers traditionally value - hard work and discipline.

Now, I've often stated my opinion that the value of hard work is often overrated. And people who fixate on that at the exclusion of all else, are doomed to fail. That doesn't mean I think that fixating on purpose in work is necessarily an improvement.

Heal the world; make it a
better place...

On the face of it, these are noble goals. Who doesn't want to make the world a better place?

On the other hand, what's "better"? There are some who would say the world would be better if everyone was unable to say hurtful things, and some might say the world would be better if certain kinds of people simply did not exist. Who gets to decide? I think most of us would have enough of a sense of self-preservation not to trust some wet-behind-the-years kid straight out from University, high on purist ideals, to make that decision. Not that I would necessarily depend on some Bible-thumper Churchgoer for those decisions either, if we're being honest.

In all fairness, however, career choices are highly personal. Still, let's examine the issue of wanting to find purpose in work. Some like to claim that it's all hubris and entitlement.

Is it really entitlement, though?

One might say this comes across as a little selfish. After all, every day one remains without a job is another day that financial slack is taken up by someone else. So holding out for a job with purpose does suggest a disproportionate amount of privilege.

But entitlement?

To be honest, this does come across as awfully entitled if they want the success from the start, without paying their dues or starting small like the rest of us. The people who have changed the world as we know it, were extraordinary people with extraordinary talent, some of whom endured extraordinary hardship. I'm by no means saying that people should not aim to be extraordinary - ambition is a grand thing to have, after all - but the fact is, not everyone can be extraordinary. That's literally what the word means. If everyone can be special, then no one is special.

Everyone should have the right to aim high. Not everyone, however, should expect to be given an easy ride. Chances are, the first several companies won't be a great fit in terms of purpose and values. The pay and hours may (probably will) suck. And expecting not to have to deal with any of that shit because you're special or something, does smack of entitlement. I mean, you better be pretty damn special, sweetheart.

Be willing to start small.

All I'm saying is, as long as one's willing to start small and compromise without expecting instant success, it's not entitlement. It's just a goal like any other.

Now, I could spend this entire blogpost ranting endlessly about how kids these days don't understand the value of hard work and paying your dues, loyalty and all other Boomer values that employers tend to like perpetuating (wink wink, nudge nudge). Or I could unpack my own experiences when I had what the older generation called "unrealistic expectations".

And trust me, there's plenty to unpack.

Back in 2010...

I was in between jobs. Things were looking bleak. I was patiently holding out for a proper software dev job. My dad recommended me a tech support job at some medical company. I declined repeatedly. If anyone's at all familiar with my backstory, they would know how much I absolutely despise the role that I spent the first six years of my career in, and how hard I worked to never have to do another day of tech support in my life, ever again.

Dad didn't agree. To him, a job was just a job. To him, I was this spoilt brat who wasn't even giving it a fair chance.

I didn't understand why my dad, who sometimes couldn't tell a laptop from a lap dance, was presuming to give me any kind of career advice, let alone tech career advice. The truth was that he wasn't. He was just trying to get me to see reason; that any job was better than no job at all.

From a survival standpoint, he was absolutely right. However, from the standpoint of a career in software development, it would have been one hell of a stupid choice.

I didn't want just any job. I wanted a career. And the job I chose needed to at least be a positive step towards that goal, no matter how small. Dad didn't understand the concept of a career. He didn't have much of an education. His work experience consisted of selling used cars, selling insurance, basically selling. He might even have tried to run a garment factory once. As far as he was concerned, he was lucky to have any kind of job, let alone one that just required him to drive around and talk to people. To this day, I simultaneously resent and admire him for his ability to just suck it up.

I have an
education, dammit!

Because I was different. I had an education, and with it, the ability to be choosy. Honestly, if I just wanted to do any job, why waste all those years on tech qualifications?

Thus, I like to think that I had a practical reason to be choosy, as opposed to doing it for "purpose". (Like these young punks. Heh heh.)

It's now 2026!

I won't pretend I know how kids these days think. I know what they think, or at least, what the news reports say they think. But I don't know how they arrive at those conclusions, or how it even makes sense to them.

Purpose? Every job has a purpose. Perhaps not the high-minded noble purpose these young ones pontificate about constantly, but purpose nonetheless.

Hey, some people find purpose in not starving. And if you think that's not a purpose, shut your privileged piehole.

Some people find purpose in a job that enables them to take care of the people who matter. What the job actually entails isn't the issue. What effect it has on the world isn't the issue. The issue is that they have mouths to feed, and by God they are going to feed those mouths.

Still think all that isn't purpose? It might be more actual purpose than these youngsters have ever dealt with. Remember, before you try to save the world, take some time to help Mommy with the dishes.

Too good to do the dishes?

I don't mean to sound condescending (even though I probably do). After all, I've struggled with career choices myself. And the conclusions I came to as a result, some might uncharitably say was due to me not being successful in changing the world.

Newsflash: don't worry too much about changing the world. Leave it alone and it'll sort itself out most of the time, with or without you. Thinking that your input is required, is nothing short of vanity... though it can be argued that said hubris is exactly one of the ingredients required to change the world.

But I can say all that. I have the benefit of hindsight, after all. And perhaps young people need that exact same benefit.

Or it could be that they're right, and my ways are outdated, the same way my father's ways were outdated back in 2010.

My advice (not that anyone asked for it)

There's nothing wrong at all with starting small, or imperfect beginnings. So what if the company you land in doesn't align with your life goals, or at all? You're fresh out of University; you have zero leverage with which to change the world. And expecting to be able to do it right away is mere fantasy.

Clock your experience points. Pay your dues. Do all that, and you'll have a leg to stand on when you eventually pursue those lofty noble goals. Without practical experience, all you have are good intentions. And we all know what the road to hell is paved by.

This blogpost was written on purpose,
T___T

Five Tech Support Horror Stories

The early years of my career were in tech support. As with any other job, there were good days and there were bad days. After the third year at the job, the bad days started to outnumber the good. It all seems hilarious in hindsight now, but there were some days where things in this list caused me to question my career choices.

Until one day it all came to a head and I decided I'd had enough, and started over in web development.

Sometimes I get together with some friends who are still in tech support, and we trade horror stories of the users we have to help. These are some of the stories that get 'em, every time.

1. Plugging in

This is actually a fairly common one, but let's start small. You get called to a user's desk because the desktop computer refused to turn on no matter how many times they pressed the On/Off button. And they even checked if the main switch was on. And judging from the light, it was.

Not plugged in.

However, upon closer examination, it turned out that the cord wasn't plugged in. Yes, you read that right - the power was on but the plug was just halfway into the socket and needed to penetrate another two inches before the computer could actually benefit from that power source.

Sound stupid? Welcome to my life at that time, buddy.

2. Opening Excel

Another alarmingly commonplace occurence was getting called into the office of some hotshot executive who was encountering an issue opening a MS PowerPoint file in his (or sometimes, her) MS Excel application.

Now, if you're still scratching your head and wondering why that's a problem, reread the preceding sentence. MS PowerPoint file. MS Excel application.

Just a bad fit.

I dunno, that was the early 2000s, and attempting stuff like that smacked of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It was amusing the first couple times, and then it got old real fast.

3. Infinite scroll

This was was so cartoonish it was almost amusing. I got a panicked call to a user's desk because her MS Excel spreadsheet was scrolling endlessly downwards on her screen and she couldn't understand why. It conjured up images of getting hacked, a malfunctioning monitor and whatnot.

The truth was even funnier.

Held down the ENTER key.

I got there, and the first thing I did was remove the heavy binder from her keyboard, which had been pressing down on the ENTER key and causing MS Excel to react as though some user was holding down that key.

4. Email Signature

This particular incident did not happen during my years of Desktop Support, but rather during my fledgling years as a web developer. However, the incident in question made me more determined than ever to never get back to Desktop Support.

A user had asked me to help set up her email signature because she had no clue how to use MS Outlook. I obliged, because I know sometimes Microsoft software functionality can be hidden in the darnedest places. But then after I got into the interface, input the standard company email signature template, I asked her to type in her name into the box and click the SAVE button.

Yay! We're now
qualified to type
our own names!

Guess what she told me?

"You should do it. You have an IT Degree."

That level of entitlement was staggering. What was she implying now, that she needed an IT Degree to type in her own goddamn name? What foolishness was this? This wasn't a competence issue. This was an attitude issue. And the less of this I see in the workplace, the better. There's no place for this nonsense in any work environment. Hopefully this woman has since retired. At the very least, she's someone else's problem.

5. Emails

This is also a fairly common complaint among grunts, not just tech grunts - people feeling like they're entitled to your time outside of office hours.

I remember having a dinner appointment with someone, and Human Resources asking me to stay back because they needed me to, wait for it, retrieve some emails from the email server backups between three of the staff. Staff they were planning to terminate, thus they needed evidence of wrongdoing as leverage.

A whole bunch of
DVD backups.

Basically, nothing was on fire. They just needed me to help cover their asses. Hours later, as I was retrieving yet another batch (back then, it was the era where stuff like that was stored on DVDs), when HR asked me: "I'm sorry, did you have something on tonight?"

Seriously, lady, if the answer was "yes" would it have made a difference? If not, how about just shutting the fuck up? You know what's worse than people who don't care? People who don't care and try to act (badly) like they do.

Phew!

I wouldn't say any one incident turned me off of Desktop Support. Even on its own, it can be a repetitive grind that wears on the soul. But these were the war stories that I shared with the guys. And their reactions suggested that these occurrences weren't at all unheard of. Some of their stories were even more unbelievable than mine.

No, you don't need an IT Degree to read this,
T___T

Fare Thee Well, Skype!

It was with a fair bit of wistfulness when I read the news that Skype would be officially decommissioned by Microsoft on the 5th of May, right next month. Hard to believe that just a few short years ago, I was between jobs and on Skype speaking to interviewers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Skype is dead soon.

Skype first appeared in 2003 as a telecommunications software application, when I was still at my Desktop Support job. Back then, my Indian boss amusingly referred to it as "Sky Pee". The setup was smooth and easy, and with this software we could talk to people all over the world instead of paying some hideously expensive phone charges. The user experience just seemed to be one of the smoothest around. The installation process was simple, a joy to embark on. I remember thinking that even just the chat feature was a lot more pleasant to use than Microsoft Messenger's.

Somewhere along the way, in 2011, Skype was acquired by Microsoft. Fourteen years later, Microsoft has decided that it is no longer tenable to continue maintaining Skype.

Why did Skype fail?

Most people have heard of the Microsoft BSOD - the Blue Screen of Death. Well, it appears what we have here is the Microsoft Kiss of Death. It may seem a little unfair to Microsoft. After all, all they really did was acquire Skype. And yes, perhaps they tinkered with Skype's inner workings just a little. And... you know what, you're right, this is all on Microsoft.

I think COVID-19 provided an even greater environment for Skype to shine. In those dark days, due to the need to avoid close physical proximity, video calls became a necessity. However, COVID-19 ironically was also one of the factors hastening Skype's downfall, because it provided that very same environment for Skype's competitors to shine.

Left behind in the race.

And shine they did.

Google Hangouts, Oracle Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams. WhatsApp. Instagram. Even TikTok. All of them provided video conference features (Instagram and TikTok to a limited degree) and it was clear that Skype was being quickly outpaced. And since Microsoft was understandably more concerned with supporting Teams, Slack had become an afterthought. 

And like most afterthoughts, Skype eventually faded into obscurity. Software has to be relevant in order to survive. And in order to be relevant, software has to evolve. Under Microsoft, Skype was dead in the water. 

Goodbye, Skype!

We had great memories together. Countless memorable conversations were had in your pale blue-and-white interface. There should be a special placed reserved for Skype in the annals of software history - arguably the first of its kind.

The Skype's the limit,
T___T

Why people should (and shouldn't) hire older software developers

Seven years ago, I wrote this post on my 40th birthday. Today, as I turn 47 in a few days, here are some more thoughts.

On my website, I described myself as "an aging software developer". Some people have told me that this could reflect negatively on me. They're mistaken, but I forgive them - they aren't from the tech sector and don't know better. You see, when I say the word "aging", this is not me being humble. This is me flexing the fuck out.

Just showin' off.

But please, hear me out. I swear, I'm not going to pull out lazy clichés like "older programmers are more experienced, more mature, have more gravitas, etc" not just because they're lazy clichés, but also because they're not true. And if I have to explain why they're not true, perhaps this is not a conversation you're ready for.

And because I enjoy being contrary even against myself, I will follow that up by explaining why older devs aren't necessarily the best choice. In the same spirit, I will avoid the stereotypes of being inflexible, slow and outdated. Again, those are lazy clichés and we should rise above them.

Why older devs are nothing to sniff at

You see, software technology is an industry which demands constant reinvention. As a result, past a certain number of years in the business, older devs tend to go "fuck this constant re-learning. I'm gonna go drive a cab or something".

In short, it's an industry where you find few old folks. And you know what they say about being wary of old men in a trade where men die young. Well, programmers aren't dying per se, but they're certainly quitting once they hit a certain age, because, if one was just doing it for the money to begin with, at that point it's just not rewarding anymore.

And because software technology is an industry which demands constant reinvention, it almost goes without saying that anyone who's had to stick around for that long, has gone through quite a bit of that. Me personally, I went from desktop support to web portals, to commercial websites, to web and mobile applications, to having to shoulder the duties of an entire infocomm department all by my lonesome. Sure, one could say people who have survived that long in the industry are merely lucky, but very few people are that lucky.

Adaptability is key.

So, if you needed someone highly adaptable that could adapt to the constant change that defines this industry, who would you choose?

An enthusiastic youth with lots of potential to learn and grow and evolve and theoretically should be able to adapt? Or an older programmer who's actually evolved over and over through the years and survived to tell the tale?

The conventional wisdom, of course, is to go for the proven product rather than the one that has potential -in theory. Yes, some of us older folks can be rigid and stuck in our ways, but the nature of this industry weeds such people out fairly quickly. You're left with the people who are adaptable enough to survive this industry (because we have!), and in this day and age, that's no small thing.

Again, no argument would be complete without presenting the other side. And there are plenty of compelling reasons why the modern employer might not want an older developer.

Why you should avoid older devs

Older software developers, unless they totally mismanaged their wealth, tend to have money. The industry pays well, and even a mediocre dev like myself might be earning more than Middle Management at an SME. As such, you're not going to get one for cheap. We more than likely don't need the peanuts you're reserving for code monkeys.

Peanuts, anyone?

Manipulation. No matter how noble a person an employer thinks they are, this is an organization and as such, there's always something of that sort going on, to one degree or another. Against manipulation, many older devs have developed, if not outright immunity, at least a discomforting degree of resistance to it.

Past a certain age, most older devs already have whatever we ever wanted out of life. We're there. We're comfortable. We're not hungry and desperate as the younger ones probably are. We're not going to kill ourselves for "exposure". Or submit to opportunistic lowballing (c'mon, we all know it happens) just to add to our resume. And that is an absolute negative because cold as it may sound, it makes us less open to manipulation.

Older devs do come with experience, and part of that experience is security. We're generally zen about the fact that we'll probably die and be forgotten. We've come to terms with the realization that if we were really destined to do anything truly exceptional, statistically we would have done it decades ago. Most of us are too tired, or probably done too much, to feel that we need to prove a damn thing. And if you're the sort of employer who likes to make your staff jump through flaming hoops to prove themselves, again, that kind of security and self-assuredness makes us untenable as employees.

All in all, older developers aren't cheap, and we're not desperate or hungry enough to run through walls at your command. And I can't in good conscience paint that as a positive for employers.

In a nutshell

For the right kind of employer, older software developers are an exceptional resource.

Also, consider this - with the news that Artificial Intelligence is going to make programmers obsolete, whether it's true or not, this is going to impact the number of young developers available on the market. Because if younger programmers think that this career path is no longer viable, they're just going to leave, and who could blame them?

Us older programmers? We're dug in, and we have little to lose. Chew on that!

Old but gold,
T___T

The day Microsoft stood still for CrowdStrike

It's unclear exactly when the term "BSOD" entered the public consciousness. More than a decade ago when I was working as desktop support, I knew the term to mean "Blue Screen Of Death", alluding to Microsoft's infamous default screen which warns users of a system crash. Thus, it was a little strange to see the term "BSOD" being bandied around the last couple week.

Suffice to say, the term "BSOD" has found its way into several conversations over the course of the past few weeks as Microsoft systems around the world crashed in a cacophony of azure-colored screens. The outage was caused by cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike, as a consequence of their security program Falcon pushing a faulty update to the Microsoft branch. Once the update was downloaded and installed by roughly 8 million machines worldwide, it resulted in those systems crashing.

The fix, according to CrowdStrike, was to reboot the machines in Safe Mode, remove the file, and then reboot the machines in Normal Mode. Nothing fancy if you've ever worked in desktop support, but perhaps a little out of the grasp of the average end-user. The desktop support personnel of these affected companies would have been on high alert especially during the initial weekend. 

Damage

It's all very well to say "8 million machines crashed", but it would be far more illuminating to know ˆ those machines were doing and ˆ they were deployed. For the most part, home users who had no compelling reason to install CrowdStrike's Falcon program, were spared the outage. It should also be noted that China, having long moved on from the days where a significant portion of the country was using Windows, was unaffected (to my knowledge thus far) by this outage.

For significantly larger corporations in USA and Canada, large swathes of Europe, and India; however, this was a different story.  Airline queues were jam-packed as systems went down. Healthcare and emergency services were similarly impacted as hospital IT systems using Microsoft 365 crashed. And banks - easily the biggest item on the list. Minutes of lost service could translate to millions of dollars in transactions gone, potentially, and in terms of these outages, we're talking days. 

This was seen a lot.

The irony here, of course, is that CrowdStrike was employed by these companies for the express purpose of guarding against malicious attacks much like this outage. Though this is one case where we should attribute the cause to incompetence rather than malice.

CrowdStrike's error was a null pointer exception, if the Internet is to be believed. These are fairly common; not really high-level stuff. From testing procedures, deployment practices and just good old due diligence, the number of potential shortfalls in any of these areas could have resulted in the faulty update being pushed.

Silly comments

Social Media has been rife with glee from Apple fans gloating that we should all stop using Microsoft products because this was the greatest outage in history, and that Apple has never been affected to this scale. That's ridiculous when you consider that the conditions that led to these outages - cybersecurity threats, third-party cybersecurity vendors, faulty software updates - would be present in all modern operating systems regardless.

Use Apple products
instead!

Covert to MacOS to avoid outages? Absurd.

Such deranged comments are ultimately the province of mere fanboys allowing emotion rather than logic to guide the words that come out of their mouths. I'm inclined to be forgiving here; I'd be less understanding if those words came from actual tech professionals.

Finally...

It's early days yet. The fallout is still being felt around the world, though much of the initial damage has been, hopefully, resolved. Still, this is not something we'll all be forgetting anytime soon.

Over and outage,
T___T

Five Funny Tech Webcomic Strips

Like many geeks, I read comics. I'm a fan of that visual media. And when comics feature software technology, not only do I get the jokes, I relate.

Here are some of the wittiest tech-related comics I've had the good fortune to follow over the years.

1. XKCD by Randall Munroe

This comic strip with the unpronounceable name, is an obvious choice. It's been around since 2005, and is full of tech wisdom and witty (and very cynical) observations about the tech industry.

The art is nothing groundbreaking; it's literally stick figures talking to each other. But somehow the lack of faces on these stick figures add rather than detract from the content. It actually makes the dialogue feel very deadpan, which is absolutely appropriate for the subject matter. The humor is very dry.

Take the above example. It features a typical programmer problem - the tendency to over-engineer things. "It'll save time in the long run!" What a punchline, and how apt.

For tech humor where you need a bit of professional experience to really relate to the content, I can't recommend XKCD enough.

2. Dilbert by Scott Adams

The next item on this list needs almost no introduction. Dilbert has been around since 1989, and its content has been the mainstay of many office workers.

Dilbert does not just deal with tech foibles; in the larger picture, it takes the Mickey out of corporate nonsense. Something that a wider audience can relate to.

The strip above is just one such example. In it, the titular character Dilbert mocks his clueless corporate boss, who in turn is a caricature of the stereotypical corporate stooge driven only by profit and buzzwords.

Its creator Scott Adams has in recent years come under fire for remarks made on YouTube. Which is also why there is no link I can provide to his work. But alas, do you hear that silence? It's the sound of me not giving a rat's ass. His shit is funny AF, and in the spirit of separating the artist from the art, that's all that matters.

3. Help Desk by Christopher B Wright

We follow up with another example of extremely simplistic art. There's nothing elegant about Help Desk - though in all fairness the art is way more detailed than that of XKCD. The facial expressions are still minimal, and as with XKCD, this serves to accentuate the deadpan-ness of the humor. 

I've been following this comic since my days in desktop support, and it goes all the way back to 1996. It was huge for me back then. I related so much. Even the character that appears - Binky the Paper Clip, featured below - is an example of something that had relevance back in the day but probably less so now. Still, this does not change the fact that Wright is one hell of a webcomic artist.

Help Desk is actually only one section out of his entire body of work. There are other comics that he draws, of course. The main complaint I have is that the dialogue tends to be a bit wordy, but when it's good, it's good.

4. Toggl by Mart Virkus

Toggl is a tech company with a product, Toggl Track. It's a project productivity tool which - you know what, I'll let them speak for themselves. Go follow that link. I'm just here to talk about their comics. Toggl has a blog that features a lot more than just comic strips, but damn, their comic strips are good.

The comics that are drawn by Mart Virkus, in particular. Virkus has his own site, but its the stuff that appears on the Toggl blog that I like the best. Toggl also has other comics contributors and I'm sure they have their own following, but it's Virkus I want to focus on here.

His stuff mostly focus on the differences between programming languages, software development methodologies and the like.

One of my favorites is the one above, and it's also fairly representative of his content on the Toggl blog in general. The art is cute, and brings the message across quite effectively.

5. Monstika by Monstika/Cheezup/Arseniic 

This last one is more of a blog that I found in recent years. I don't know anything about Monstika, whether they're male, female, or how long they've been doing this. Or their real names - the artist goes by mostly by Monstika, but also Cheezup or Arseniic on different platforms. And guess what, I don't need to know. Their shit is side-splitting.

There are no lengthy dialogs. Mostly memes, and visual puns. And if there's anything I'm crazy about, it's puns. Tech puns. Especially the really bad ones. The programmer dad jokes.

Take this one above. It's so bad, it's good.

The puns are mostly tame enough that even non-techies can (mostly) grasp them. The art's pretty good too!

Hilarious!

Humor - especially the visual kind - is a great way to get through the day. And when you can relate to said humor, all the better.

programmer.chuckle(),
T___T