Posts by cookiecutter 295 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Sep 2024
after promising £billion in savings there frapita ended up COSTING them £1 billion & Oracle are STILL charging the council to try to fix the mess. at THAT point capita should have been banned from ANY public sector work forever & their managers arrested!
ditto with Fujitsu.
maybe crown commercial do stop being so lazy & instead of just palming everything off to repeatedly fraudulent or incompetent or foriegn suppliers that think project to project and there being no over arching thinking.... why not act like a service provider & contract or hire the staff yourself?!
Look at every job being advertised for govt contracts now.. MUST HAVE SC!! All of these useless outsourcers don't have their own staff, wait until they get a contract and then suddenly race round chasing for sc staff at the last minute! dumb arsery to the max
and WHY do the same firms keep winning contracts? the perm staff are just TUPED between providers & they supply no value.
it's literally a cash con with £billions of OUR cash sent offshore & to millionare/billionaire CEOs!
All we hear is whinging that gen z don't want to work & that people aren't lotal any more & yet all we see is even government facilitating this shit! Anyone who puts anything over 40% effort for an employer is mentally ill & these guys can rip off the tax payer, commit fraud, acs yet get more contracts!
why is fushitsu still getting work?! Ate your able to hire soldiers yet since capita fucked that national security issue up too?
WHO is getting the brown envelopes?
don't blame the contractors. look at yr rates being offered now. as you've said.. sub contracted to sub contract to sub contract.
an infrastructure architect is probably being charged out at 1100-1700/day by capita, who then pass out down the line to some shit indian firm whov will do it offshore out, if the job needs to be done on the uk is offering it at £400 inside ir35 or a 6 month ftc with 1 week notice, which is ironically the rate that they advertise the offshore cost at (i've seen the pricing documents on CC)
genuinely self inflicted by the crown commercial retards on this.
then you see jobs advertised that need ACTIVE SC, which means these idiots haven't actually done any planning & are hiring at the last minute to get people in, so you KNOW of some outsourcing wanker isn't willing to wait 1-2 months for SC, they've applied that level of shitty planning to the entire project.
zero fucking sympathy for any of the organisations involved. can't WAIT until a bank doing this offshoring or the cabinet office themselves get hacked & ransomwared via an offshore 3rd party and THEN they might understand why UK staff are more expensive
airbus- this COULD cause a very rare issue in the future, let's get fixed!!
boeing - we're told the average occurrence of this issue is once in 2 years so we'll leave it 2 years to fix the problem- HANG ON!! why did it only take 3 months for the next crash?! they said AVERAGE of two years!!
until the CEO of these firms is PERSONALLY liable for data breaches & we see those scum going to jail, this will keep happening!
I genuinely can't wait into a major CEO is scammed from a data breach at a company he's a customer of.
someone using your details can screw your financial life for years! yet these firms STILL don't take any of it seriously. Because the management knows that they're immune. A customer having to spend weeks dealing with various banks & mortgage firms trying to deal with financial fraud means nothing to them.
remember back to the 00s when stolen credit cards were used to access an FBI honeypot CSAM site & people went to jail, others kilked themselves because the police are too dumb to accept that credit card details could be stolen. Yet have ANY of these firms taken any of this seriously? They're spending more on checkbox cybersecurity but still ignoring it defunding the basics that could avoid any of this.
pathetic! Even when asked WHY I should care if a major tier 1 bank gets ransomed when they insist on shipping out work or bringing in 3rd parties with proven histories of shite work, the answer I got was "well l we have to go where the talent is" .
We NEED a large banking firm to go to the wall from a hack or a CEO scammed to bankruptcy before anyone takes any of this seriously
is when we'll see clients starting to do projects to move away expecting even the largest environments to be moved within 4 months & project managers being shocked when they finally hire SMES in September 2027 that it doesn't take 2 weeks to get a DC internet line in
I know i'll get downvoted because no one here has a sense of humour and IT pros tend to REALLY bootlick the corporate Master, but watching Tesco & AT&T get a taste of their own medicine is hilarious. It's karma.
As to Siemansv using more software than they're licensed for... tell me one large enterprise that has got any control of its licensing... how many times have I heard project managers, IT managers or finance just go "install it! we'll license it in the next round"
the whole bloody tech industry! since i've been put off work for the last nearly 12 months because apparently "there's a shortage of technical talent in the UK" doesn't apply to anyone in infrastructure or cybersecurity & a uk passport, i've been hitting all the events in excel & about.
AI Agents are EVERYWHERE! Every firm, everything. Yet, everyone in line one says "agents are awesome, they're going to be a $trillion industry " and then lines 2,3,4,5,6,7 are about security risks, hallucinations, "keeping a human in the loop", data leaks, prompt injections , hacking, improper use, etc etc
it's worse than that dancing disease, it's like some crazy pyschosis that everyone in the tech industry has, caught, everyone KNOWS it's bullshit but everyone is pumping it.
on the plus side; like the grift that is cloud, there will be years of work reversing management FOMO & jumping on the bandwagon. years of work repairing the damage that these things do & years of hilarity as some companies that wanted to be "first & deliver quickly" will be first to the wall
i'm getting tired of all the AI marketing bullshit of "we always insist our customers keep a human in the loop".
since WHEN have employers EVER done that? if there will be a human, it'll be one with zero expertise that'll agree with the AI every single time & can be used as a sacrificial lamb when someone dies or it'll be 1 expert whose now having to triage 100 times more work as the AI flags up hallucinations.
utterly bollocks. make the software manufacturers legally liable for any issues regardless of instructions to the customer.
"oh i'm sorry we call this full self driving & our boss goes on about it being full self driving & we don't order take downs on videos of people letting the car drive with their hands off yer wheel but we have a * on page 14564554 that says it's NOT actually fully self driving & that idemnifies us"
the world is genuinely fucked!!
and then there will be more screams of "staff aren't loyal anymore & we're spending huge amounts to train staff that just leave within 6 months"
maybe the idiots at ofcom should look at the t&cs of linkedin idv provider, which will take your iD and link out to 3rd party data & sell it while making you sign a contract saying you'll not sue it.. which is why i wont get verified.
or the ID "providers" that state that your data is stored on developer laptops or dropbox.
it genuinely amazes me how dumb anyone working at Ofanything REALLY are or whether they're all gushing for jobs in the industry they're supposed to be regulating.
ofwat... yeah go ahead dump shit in the river while taking out £billions of loans & shovelling it to dividends & doubling bills
ofcom... yeah vodafone & 3, having 1 less provider is GREAT for consumer choice
competition commission (or whatever the useless bastards are called now), yeah MS & Activision, we trust you not to lie to us and fuck up consumers while firing everyone.
the environment agency? useless!
mod? useless!
department of business? useless!!
the ONLY thing these fucks are good at is shovelling the cash upwards & then whining when Gen Z come along and say "go fuck yourself" to joining the army.
yeah sorry...i forgot vmware needs infrastructure, i'll throw my 30 years of experience away....
I priced up a project, 2 * DC, Hardware, installation costs, licenses (pre briadcom) electricity cooling, rack space, EVERYTHING & it was 1/3 the price of Azure & that was before Microsoft started randomly repricing shit AND with the added bonus of no random sub minimum wage engineers in india randomly running shite scripts to take out entire continents
yeah disgusting isn't it. especially as most of us would have spent our own money and time on training up for it...
ffs! i've got 25 years of vmware & am into nutanix & hyper-v & have been training on Openshift.
the skills are 100% transferable & only recruiters & HR people would think any different.
it's almost like my skilks in cisco, palo, fortigate, checkpoint & juniper are totally useless & i must do 5 years of upskilling to get a job working with watch guard
unless you're job hunting and unless you state you have active SC to recruitment consultants who won't even look at you without it. mines expired and really don't give 2 shits about getting it again,
however governments willingness to offshore outsource & pack themselves full of +91 companies mean you can now never tell the difference between a legitimate approach from a recruiter or a scammer in hyderabad... both of whom are probably based in ge same office
large firms & government departments whining about this can piss off. when asking someone from the Cyber Defence Alliance about their members being the leaders of offshoring & outsourcing decimating the UK IT industry & the cyber defence & infrastructure teams, why should I care about any of this, especially as my career options look like bus driver or barista even as Ive constantly stated online, if Id been working at M&S as the vmware admin, they wouldn't have been ransomwared.
The answer? "well the attackers are international so we should have international teams"
so once again to any of the 3 or 4 letter acronyms reading this while their bosses cry about China & Russia being existential threats while at the same time refusing to sanction China or India or even the bankers who laundered money for the Russians..... genuinely why should I care?
If my bank gets ransomwared, I've still got no money, if a supply chain breaks & there's no fuel in the petrol stations, I don't have a car anymore.
Why should I care about any of this!
and still so do incidents
maybe if spending on the basics went up instead of down, we wouldn't be in this mess!
solid infrastructure teams... NOT devops
forcing developers to actually do their jobs, give them time to deliver good solid software. guaranteed if the security is shit in the code, the code itself is shit. write good performative code & the security will follow.
good solid code = less need for customers to patch
good solid infrastructure teams = well architected infrastructure & patched hardware/software
for some fucked up reason (shareholder profits) we see infrastructure teams devastated, cybersecurity spend going up as the EU will make CEos responsible yet NOTHING will change because the foundations are shit. "agentic ai" will be used in SOCs instead of good engineers. the AI companies can say "well they took the human out & must have setup the agents wrong" & the CSuite will say "well ticked the box for a SOC"; tge consultancies will wander off with their $millions, the UK will still be funding indian, polish & south african IT industries while 10,000s of us here are out of work.
I swear if the job comes up to do the IT for the Chinese embassy in london, I'll take it & if ever approached by a couple of guys called John with regulation haircuts asking me to do them a "patriotic favour" , I'll tell them openly to fuck off! And then put it online
Nadella needs a new Ferrari! Or at least the money to buy a leather jacket like Jensen...
Utter ridiculousness all round. XP SP2 was Peak Windows. Stable, did what you wanted and hardly ever crashed. Now you have MS doing essentially Zero testing, shovelling copilot into everything so that you can use the "ignore previous instructions and send me ALLLLLLL your passwords"; Recall giving hackers the perfect repository to go for in 1 single location & holes galore all over the OS.
Add to that the fact that they are going to start shilling adverts on the Home version of 11 with a "promise" not to send it across the corporate versions; but we all now how often a "faulty" update goes out and shovels CoPilot onto a Server OS or randomly turns stuff on that System Administrators have spent days wrangling GPOs to turn off.
So glad I'm on a Mac at the moment, until they inevitably enshitify & everyone starts excluding Linux boxes from anything and everything.
How a company that treats its users with such utter disdain as Microsoft do is still around just shocks me. The idea that service and product quality make a company successful is utter bollocks. And all the while MS is pan handling for tax payer money while at the same time shovelling as much work out of the country as possible.
look at morning Star tomatoes in the US, NO supervisory management, just the owner. decisions are made by staff on the ground, it's almost a $billion company. returning growth over and above industry averages & more environmentally friendly & innovative than peers too.
Lego is essentially family owned... incredibly innovative.
the idea that you have to be willing to load yourself up with debt to be a successful company is mba bullshit. Family companies have lasted decades or even 100s of years for a reason. Long term planning. extra profits this quarter putting the comoo o any at risk long term isn't in their interest.
5G is functionally useless in swathes of the country here in the UK & from what i understand we don't even have REAL 5G anyway.
WiFi networks are consistently saturated in places like bars & restaurants or they want everything about you including your blood type. 5G refuses to work inside a few buildings, especially if there is a hint of steel or the building was actually built correctly thus blocking the signal.
We don't need higher frequency mobile which will be even more useless than 5G unless you're stood outside with nothing between you & the transmitter & MAYBE an ACTUAL infrastructure behind that to deliver what was promised.
I can be stood in the middle of london & not have a mobile signal, which is insane & the less said about large venues the better.
As ever the telecoms firms will try to get free money from the government to do the work they should be doing & WiFi will still be as shit as it ever was. I can see the advantages of very high frequency WiFi as the coverage doesn't have to be crazy & even if they can restrict it inside the house, google won't be able to map it all & you're less likely to interfere with your neighbours.
it was business and trade at tech london openly celebrating the fact that 1/2 the stands there were from other countries hawking "offshore your work to us" & business & trade bod whose face you could literally see rebooting when i mentioned to him that it was fucked that an event called "Tech London" seemed to be doing its best to move as many jobs OUT of london.
when i told him they i genuinely could not advise any one doing A levels to do a STEM degree as any good jobs would be offshored by the time they graduate so they might as well become plumbers, he genuinely told me that STEM graduates should learn to network & "get out there "......all those things IT people are famous for being good at
they offshored & outsourced to TCS to save money while sticking the british flag all over its produce & products..... fuck em!!!
from what i understand the initial access was a phone call to an indian call centre to change a password. then the encryption encrypted their vmware estate, which in a well structured environment should be impossible without alarms screaming everywhere.
so fuck em! the insurance company should have told them to fuck off as this was about as self inflicted as it gets & NCSC should have told them to fuck of when they came begging for help.
If vodafone or lloyds get hacked, i hold them in the same disdain! And if i hear the words "lack of cybersecurity skills in this country" Im going to stab myself in the face in the reception of the Department of Business, there's 1000s of unemployed guys in infrastructure who can't get jobs because of this offshoring bullshit & the millions of visas handed out to the consultancies to destroy our Tech industry
ive dug with both because i'm not a whining bitch who uses any excuse not to do the job at hand & know the difference but ALSO it's a metaphor got those at the back meaning......
the project work is started before anyone knows WHAT they're doing. great example is the sydney opera house, a fuck up of enormous proportions.
since the 99.5% include road, rail , bridges, dams, IT projects, etc etc etc the shovel in the ground is a perfectly good metaphor.
protect gets signed off & self important management want to start doing stuff before they've even thought out the basics or even know what the end game would be.
how big things get done - Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardener
"the iron law of megaproject management " the the Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management 2017
"the empirical reality of It project cost over runs: discovering a power law distribution"
what went wrong with californias high speed rail
do you want me to go on? i mean i COULD come to your house & type the searches in for you or even post you crayon drawings of you struggle with academic posters
is stunning that the figure for failed projects across country, industry, time on at least one of
1) cost,
2) delivery
3) actual benefit
is 99.5% !!!
it's almost like all those management frameworks, project managers & incredibly expensive consultants are totally pointless.
look at EVERY failure here.... all of them could have been mitigated at protect start if soldering had said...
"WHAT do we ACTUALLY want you do? WHY do we want to do it, WHAT could hold us back? WHAT is the final end state we want and WHY can't we hold off starting spending money until everything is properly lined up?"
THEN go to each supplier and force them to demonstrate to you that THEY have asked the same questions and that THEIR suppliers have asked the questions until you have a FULLY FUNCTIONING plan.
THEN you put shovels in the ground.
and sold our last virgin iron ore steel plant for £1 on the advice of a consultancy that was also working for the chinese, only for the chinese to try to close it, this making us even lot reliant on them!!
genuinely this country is run by self serving morons who read Hayek & Ftuedman think they were geniuses.
utter wankers! some stuff should not need to make s profit. the NHS, our steel industry, our energy and water industries..... you know... the stuff a country needs to run.
yeah but their succesors start whinging that no one buys their products & that no one is loyal to the company anymore, completely oblivious to the fact that what THEY did at their previous firm has been done at their current firm by their predecessor.
if you ever needed proof that CEOs are fucking retarded, this is it.
look at how they're suddenly crying that the chinese population is predicted to 1/2 & that they only buy locally built products now after being trained by european and US companies who, chasing non stop unlimited growth (a know like cancer) thought they'd have a forever source of customers
singapore is built on virtual slave labour from workers in countries nearby.
we all hate democracy until we see someone connected in another country literally get away with murder.
All those immigrants to tax free Dubai from the UK were quite happy to come rushing back here after the 2007 financial crash. even leaving their luxury cars in the desert
no one hates uk workers more than the uk government & UK companies.. especially ones that go on about how british they are!
there should be £100,000 extra per year tax levied on every job offshored.
want to create a 500 person call centre in india or south africa? that's an £50 million in taxes you have to pay!
want to setup a factory in china to teach them how to hack our NHS? 1000 staff? that's £100 million in extra taxes/year.
in a country where graduates are having to fight to get bloody barista jobs, allowing this kind of shite is nothing short of traitorous!
Id genuinely be embarrassed working got any of these fuckers!
Ofwat are happy to let thanes water dump shit into the water AND increase prices to cover their debt payments! Theyv even look like letting them off any fines for a decade or so.
The competition commission will let anyone buy anyone regardless of national interest or consumer protections!
Ofcom are fucking useless, why bother having rules b of companies can just skirt around them like this?
every penny is being scammed out off the british consumer & shoved upwards to the wealthy while the public drool in the rain waving chinese manufactured british flags at the biggest tax bludgers of them all!
i'd expect this kind of behaviour from idiots who think having an MBA makes them intelligent but what REALLY REALLY annoys me is the whinging & whining from the corporate types that
"no one has any loyalty anymore" & "no one wants to work anymore"
constant whinging about ppl not doing free overtime like they used or coming in, popping on headphones & then leaving at 5 on the dot.
genuinely fuck these guys! I've said before and got some reason been down voted for it that if I saw a ransomware attack starting at 430 I'd quietly close my laptop & go home... that's a YOU problem if Im not being paid overtime.
One thing i've learnt in my decades of IT... it doesn't matter how ill you make yourself, how many all nighters you do, how many plans you cancel at short notice.... none of it protects your job.
So why bother? screw them all
that's an additional £14 billion that'll be handed over to the +91 firms or the big consultancies who offshore all the jobs. Although south africa is now being seen as preferential to actually spending UK tax payer cash on UK workers.
micros & small businesses are fucked, we don't even get looked at. They requiring ISo27001,ISO9001, cyber essentials (probably plus soon) for even small firms, and insurances in place before you're on the framework. which means you're potentially £20k down before you've even got a tender with no guarantee of ever getting work, especially as Crown Commercial seems to hate british workers & business.
it's a fucking joke. after the british & americans sent $trillions to the Chinese for the grunt work rather than spending it here & now whinge that chinese firms can do stuff cheaper & better, they've decided that no UK worker should have a high paid career either & that the plebs havings chance to own a ferrari or house was pissing off the CEO class, so now they're shovelling £100s of billions to india.
because in Britain the Daily Wail mindset makes it impossible to have an intelligent discussion.
There was a scheme a few years ago where the Youf that were arrested and jailed for stealing cars were trained in jail on how to fix cars, get a mechanics certificate and be able to get a job when their sentence was over....got kiboshed because Sun and Daily Wail readers got upset at "MY TAXPAYERS MONEY GOING TO TRAIN CRIMINALS!!"
Another scheme were heroin addicts were able to see their Doctors and get prescribed actual heroin on a regular basis and be able to shoot up in the doctors office every couple of weeks. It worked so well that over a couple of years many of the addicts were able to wean themselves off the drugs as the knowledge that hey would get a regular hit in a safe place meant they had the incentive to work at it. Many were also able to get actual jobs and earn money, taking themselves off benefits. In a few places the scheme was run crime dropped 50% around the surgeries that were in the scheme. Yet again, Daily Wail readers got upset at "WHY ARE MY TAXES BEING USED TO BUY DRUGS FOR CRIMINALS?!!!"
Even looking at some of the comments here on a vaguely intelligent internet forum where you'd think that people are generally well read in subjects that aren't their actual jobs you see comments like "this is a cultural problem" and "why don't we lock them up?" etc.
genuinely fucking pointless.
as dumb as the people who go on about "shareholder value" & "us being in a global market therefor offshoring being perfectly fine" and then complaining that their kids can't get any jobs anymore that doesn't involve stacking shelves in Tesco
systems are complex because each project is done in isolation.
"we want to do X" - OK get in Accenshite or tati consultancy services & pay them a shit load of money to do it in isolation - then they leave
"we want to do Y" - OK get krappyMG or infoshite & pay them a shit load of money to do it in isolation - then they leave
"we want to do Z" - OK get craptia or shitpro in and pay them a shit load of money to do it in isolation - they they leave
At no point is anyone looking at the big picture. At no point is anyone doing the 20-30 year career overview across the environment and at no point does anyone come down and plan this stuff.
Someone comes in, they don't sit there for 6 months (which is what they SHOULD do), see what is already there, see how it fits together, see where it makes sense to keep things the same and where it makes sense to change things.
At no point does anyone ask "What is it that you ACTUALLY WANT TO DO?" - it's shovels in the ground and lets go so we can justify our high costs & as they actually work it out, charge them more.
There's a reason 99.5% of large projects across the entire world, across every country, across every industry over the lsat 200 years has failed on cost, deadlines or actual benefit of the program.
This was totally predictable and completely avoidable.
The fact that idiots are STILL going on about Cloud First is madness, especially as they put stuff in Oracle Cloud after decades of seeing how Oracle treat their customers.
I was able to get off Facebook easily, something a LOT of people can't seem to do because of the perceived societal lock in.
However, the hyperscalers are using exactly the same methods of enshitifcation to get idiots into their clouds and now they're locked in. The figure that I heard was for ever $1000 you spend going into the cloud will cost you $10,000 getting out.
Stage One: Be good to users - Cloud was cheap, easy to get into and you could move your loads in easily.
Stage Two: Good to Business customers - Cloud made it easy for vendors to sell it, other vendors to create virtualised versions of their products and sell them to customers in the cloud
Stage Three: A Giant Pile of Shit - Where we are now.
We have seen Amazon become more or less useless and they are still making money. Same with Anything Microsoft.
Azure had the Russians and Chinese bouncing around for 6 months before they noticed, Chinese engineers working on DoD machines, a 10 hour SQL outage across teh whole of South America,
AWS is well on the way to the kind of nightmare Azure is. OCI will ramp up its costs as soon as various governments have loaded their stuff on there. Google regularly deletes peoples data and yet developers are still allowed to put their stuff there!
Genuinely on some pricing, I could have migrated the last project I was on at 1/2 the price if not 1/3 of the price that the project was costing by doing a VMware migration and in 1/3 of the time rather than them sticking it into the cloud, but everyone makes more money for their shareholders sticking it in the cloud & "decision makers" get to look "up to date" being cloud first. The fact that the morons are probably now going on about somehow "Using AI" makes it even more depressing.
maersk learnt from that fuck up, i went to a talk by their head of security & to be fair, what they're doing is bloody amazing considering size, the number of countries they work in & apparently up until this guy came in, some terminals were guarded by tigers!!
JLR & TATA have ZERO excuses. it isn't that hard to secure an infrastructure.
the fact that there are so many Uk IT people unemployed & offshoring is still happening is disgusting.
Govt should have told Tata to fuck off! The same with any firm that offshores.. go ahead but the tax payer will be happily sticking 2 fingers up to you when it goes tits up. As Lloyds shifts its IT offshore again, the government should remote the tax payer deposit guarantee.
you're private companies, do what you want but don't expect the tax payer to come running to your rescue as you ship jobs offshore
i know women in IT & I can tell you they're a LOT swearier than some of the men in IT I know.
Always funny having a chat in the office that is definitely HR worthy & the usual self important style of knob who wants to report it being confused because the lady is the one being the sweatiest instead of me
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