Posts by Dominic, Writer of this aritcle

£42k for a top-class software engineer? It's no wonder uni research teams can't recruit

Irt's worse than that Jim

Applies across all of the public sector and it's not just money. You see ITpros doing jobs where the downside is people dying and/or really bad things happening working for pitiful pay and that affects quality and staff turnover, which is especially important because government does things no one else does so when the leaned skills walk out the door, you simply cannot hire them from the market.

But that's not the worse of it.

Ben Goladacre is a smart science grad whose work I admire enough that I've bought his books for my kids.

The idea of someone like him being senior in the Civil Service is less likely than a Director level being a Klingon and they fucking despise us techies.

Also IT is too ethnically diverse for the tastes of senior civil servants who to get to their position have learned to say woke things, but choose to promote among themselves in a way that makes UKIP look like a bunch of Nigerians.

Renting IT hardware on a subscription basis is bad for customers

I wrote the article

YEs, but the more vendors you are dependent upon the more risk you bear.

Re: Subscription vs lease?

I wrote this and the di8fference is that a lease in longer term and usually has little flexibility, also the tax treatment can be different.

Confessions of a ransomware negotiator: Well, somebody's got to talk to the criminals holding data hostage

Re: "CEOs and senior managers be badly affected by the emotional pressures"

It's even worse than that. Often the IT guys lose hope that any resources will be allocated so don't even ask and so get blamed.

Re: more on prevention

I've written an article on the basics how to deal with attacks, will be on the site in a week or so.

Before then, check your backups.

One of the oddest parts of my so-called "education" was having McDonalds excellent management practices explained to me.

Re: "instinctive blunt circumspection"

If you have spoken much with police officers, then I believe that pair of words is perfect.

Re: Pointing the finger of blame

You've hit the nail on the head of "managing by numbers". Which in the age of big data is increasing. This is both good and bad.

Re: A must listen to is the BBC File on 4 Podcast - Held to Ransom

For whatever reason my articles get a lot of hits, so more comments.

Re: Shah and his team get very little intelligence from the police

I am interested in why you see Russia as part of the EU ?

Re: Pointing the finger of blame

You want to blame everyone ?

Re: Shah and his team get very little intelligence from the police

The UK police can't do much to criminals based in Russia.

Re: "CEOs and senior managers be badly affected by the emotional pressures"

Harsh.

When the bits hit the fan: What to do when ransomware strikes

Re: Opportunity

Yes, but more important still is how they are managed.

I comment to you the report on the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster and in particular the dissident appendix by Richard Feynman.

The short version is that the "physical" engineers were given the job of showing that their parts worked.

It never even occurred to the computer engineers that their parts worked.

So one engineer who pointed out the flaw that caused the Shuttle to exploded was told to "stop thinking like an engineer and start thinking like a manager". That's a quote and the rest is horrible history. People who found problems were trouble makers.

The IBM guys took the opposite approach, someone who found a bug or bizarre improbable state was seen as doing what Gus Grissom would have called "good work"

The difference is stark.

The computers of the Challenger kept on working after the explosion, then falling from near orbit, then for a while after it hit the water . Some of what they reported is apparently still classified.

Earlier incidents include a massive over voltage melting one of the circuit boards with the result of small lumps of solder floating in microgravity causing a constant stream of random short circuits.

Yeah, that didn't bring the system down either.

ITpros who bring up problems aren't rewarded, often denigrated which is why in my survery 22% of them have been affect by a ransomware attack.

Re: Did Mr Connor ask the finance director

Absolutely.

Re: Opportunity

Yes, that is the gold standard for resilience, different applications written in different languages running on different platforms on different hardware.

Not cheap.

Re: Opportunity

You have had a better life than me. You seem to think it insane to do a migration in the midst of a crisis, well

a) as a CTO in the midst of them it has been demanded of me

b) one *VERY* important database got ported from Oracle to SQL Server during the crisis because it was the only way I could fix it quickly. It was a bit of a SciFi moment for me.

I "knew" like Spock or McCoy or House MD that a certain "brave" tech decision would make things better, but knowing and doing are quite different. So I pressed OK and went and had a coffee whilst my laptop which was about to become the server had a good hard think. This was because I both needed caffeine and also to project absolute confidence that the ugly fix would work.

Which it did. First time.

You and I both know that whereas this happens in the last scene of SciFi quite a lot, but the reality is a lot more messy and success more equivocal.

There was two consequences. A polite but difficult conversation since it was my personal laptop, hence it had extra tooling not to be found on most corporate PCs and also a shed load of money for a permanent fix.

Re: Opportunity

Windows is more vulnerable than Linux, but it is naive to believe Linux makes you safe.

Re: Excellent argument, but only part of the picture

Security and resilience costs Capex and running costs, though the mix can be varied to optimise share price and bonuses.

Re: Did Mr Connor ask the finance director

Good point, but FDs are lamentably poor at grasping cyber risk.

What is your greatest weakness? The definitive list of the many kinds of interviewer you will meet in Hell

Re: The Faddist

Very good stuff, or at least awful stuff in a good way.

Re: Working for free

A few years back I was acting as an expert witness at a bank They had to come collect me from reception ever day and I asked for an entry card.

However I was being paid by lawyers, not the bank and the system simply could not give a card to someone they weren't paying.

Free interns are why people in the media are so overwhelmingly smug middle class white people, That's why they are so hostile to "yuppies" or anyone else aspiring to have a better life than their parents. I recall one conversation with some BBC types about neoptism in banking, (yes, the BBC where it is a rule not an exception) and I asked the interchangeable Emmas whose father had had a manual job. One of them brightly answered her dad was a builder, like mine.

Apparently being finance director of McAlpine counts as being a building labourer.

I appreciate it was a struggle for you, and I admire your support for your kid but my parents would have stared blankly at the idea of supporting me for that long at that cost. We were actually poor.

Re: What was the greatest challenge you faced in your career?

Was this Commerzbank, U think we were on he same project ?

Same here, it's now on the A level CompSci.

Actually *some* people are desperate for a job. They may be trapped in the "no experience -> no job -> no experience" loop or want to work in media (for whatever reason) and may be prepared to work for nothing.

Re: I hold no brief for SOAS graduates, but …

I do it freelance now, my rates are very reasonable.

Re: Missing type

Ther is not enough naming and shaming.

Re: I hold no brief for SOAS graduates, but …

I think it start with exactly my point. They start with SOAS grads who are important because their mum shagged somenoe important and when we look more closely, less impressive than town cryer of a small Dorse village.

Then they go go to a war criminal, coomplicit in a genocide.Aung San Suu Kyi, who I guess is important but not in a good way.

Re: Oh yeah…

As someone who advises on careers, I both see your point and radically disagree with it.

Finding out what the max you can possibly get is hard, but in the case of horror projects it is worth asking for far far more than you would normally get.

Either you get enough to compensate you for the crap, or you walk away at no cost

Re: That Meme

Harsh.

Re: Dignity

Yes, but what is interesting is that some firms that pay *very* well do this also.

Want to keep working in shorts and flipflops way after this is all over? It could be time to rethink your career moves

Sadly the people dying was a real case from my tame legal expert.

I do hope he has not had children with this person, since she is piss in the gene pool.

Embedded s/w is one of the area where I can see serious limitations in WFH if the h/w is also being worked on or the sort of gear you don't really work on at home.

In my pimping experience the lower level developers are among the strongest in really hating the idea of working in London..

A good pimp would be finding a good compromise. I was writing this as advice to ground troops not managers, but would at least float the idea of pricing days in the office differently to those at home. It wold sweeten the idea of travel and the developer would know that it wasn't just for facetime since a cost means you get people to come in for a reason.

Re: A very interesting and useful article...

Thanks, I trust our glorious and wise editor is reading this.

Re: 'You could argue that "anything you can Google and understand" is part of your skill set...'

Of course *I* have never googled any technical matter at all, even once. No. Perish the thought.

A few years back a rather important client decided I was too expensive for the "mundane" part of my work and got someone via a Recruitment Process Outsourcer.

He decided he knew better than me how the security worked and made changes which seemed to work. The results where entirely consistent, since no data was returned to my calculation routines they performed as they should and came to the conclusion that the *important* values were all zero.

As it happens it was my wife's birthday so I turned up in the important place in a bow tie and full penguin costume. The RPIO drone was still at the "I can fix this" stage" in the way of a natural health practitioner thinks a bit of organic honey can cure your cough which is actually throat cancer.

Curiously not one person at the client batted an eyelid at my profound overdress.

The common factor in all your failed job applications: Your CV

Re: Blast from the past

I do a bit of tech politics and was looking at quite why each cheque the government cuts (yes it still does that) costs over ten quid each in IT costs.

*long* ago I used ICL VME and recognised some of the tech terms they used and that door creaked open in the dungeons of my memory and the horror came flooding back and I started talking in that jargon.

They offered me a job, but like all government tech work vastly below what anyone competent to do it cold earn elsewhere.

Re: Unfortunately, very true

That's harsh, but fair.

also know that when Einstein applied to be a teacher they turned him down flat.

Re: Blast from the past

Actually I was taught Bubblesort in 1982, after we'd done QuickSort so that our young minds were exposed to beauty before bullshit.

Re: Tech CVs might not be understood

I wish it were true what you say, but sadly often is it not

Re: Recruiting is also a ball ache from the recruiter's perspective

If you've a slot for a student over the summer who's fluent in C++, Bash, all the networking stuff you mention, though not ace at AWK and regards Python as a bit simple, plus both Windows and assorted Linuxes,I am easily found...

Re: Unfortunately, very true

$5 seconds is if anything longer.

Re: CV's top tips

Yes it is hard and this article is the flat text variant of my occasional CV surgeries, or the "Dominic Connor, Live and Uncut" career standup.

HRs vary *a lot*. some are very good, but I understand why you see them all like that as many have an attitude problem to IT people. More than one has expressed view about techies so harsh that if they were about women, Muslims, LGBTQ, people of colour or even the French, would not just have got them fired, but liable to arrest for hate crimes.

This happens when they don't realise I have a CompSci degree and have done a bunch of stuff because I'm wearing my Yves St. Laurent suit, Thomas Pink shirt, hand shone shoes (never trust anyone who doesn't shine their own), and am out of context for tem to imagine I'm a geek.

Re: The ones that really bother me. . ..

It goes both ways. When I mention my background in both doing things and shouting at people until they do it, some decide to try and engage in pissing contests.

One candidate did this and asked why we were asking about why she'd done things a certain way and got quite intense. My colleague opened her PhD to the refences page and pointed out three to papers he'd written.

Was glorius.

I've had to deal with gaps like that, most firms will take a statement from your accountant.

Re: You also have to start not giving a shit if you don't get the role

Yes, not looking desperate is important, will try to remember to put it in my next piece.

Had a guy do that for me. *bad* things had happened at a firm where I was Head of IT, I was far far away and I instructed the head of operations to meet him with a complete set of password, despite no one in the bank having even met him before.

That's a very short list of people.

*Many* years ago, MSFT took me out to dinner in Nice and the head honcho went round the table introducing the people as I buttered a bread role.

He then pointed to a bloke saying he'd done AFC, wheels whirred in my head and I said MFC ? with *perhaps* just a little too much emphasis and my hands stopped moving as I looked at him.

"Put the knife down Dominic" was the next thing said.

Be clear that I did not want a fellow C++ developer stabbed, honest, but I take satisfaction in the small moment when he felt fear.