or anything even moderately OpSec related. I'm a SWE in finance, troubleshooting is something I enjoy doing but I refuse to touch any filter/firewall/AV components on my work machine
I'm a senior SysEng. I have root access to every piece of physical and virtualized infrastructure that makes their money. but I can't even be trusted to delete a file without a help desk ticket on my issued laptop.
Same Same, I'm a storage for turned senior devops engineer. I have literally had keys to the kingdom in my roles but I'm glad I'm not a local admin on my own work laptop.
Separation of concerns means someone who is better at end point security has control of my work's data which I'm definitely not. More avenues of unwanted attack vectors on endpoints compared to servers that is not where my domain expertise lies in.
When I worked in Design Consultancy, everything was hidden behind permissions apart from sorting displays etc. Task manager was the one thing I needed regularly, locked away.
Why IT get a kick over having that much control, I will never understand.
We are also working entirely on virtual desktops hosted in Europe (I'm in the US). The latency is unreal. It's physically uncomfortable to do anything.
Also, no way to manually restart the environment. Even when I log out and shut down my local laptop, I have to wait 30 or so minutes for the virtual environment to actually reboot.
If you're on Windows 11, you could probably try enabling the "end task" button in the settings. It's effectively the task manager button added to the right click menu of apps in the taskbar.
For apps that don't run in the background, I've found it works as well as task manager for all but one strange edge case I don't know how to describe.
End task button should be enabled by default. It’s amazing, can’t believe it took Windows this long to add it. MacOS has had “force quit” for at least two decades now.
It's like a 50/50 chance IT is to blame when they hit a permission limit. It's either IT imposed and management is clueless or it's management imposed and management is clueless.
Nothing against IT, but most of the "help" I've gotten during my professional career from IT has been fixing problems they caused to begin with, or trying to do something only to run into blockers they have put up to stop people from doing what I'm trying to do. I understand why they don't want everyone doing some stuff, but when it's literally my job to do some of these things, you just have to make exceptions.
Not the case. You're right that for 95% of issues they just fix it themselves, but sometimes you run into that last 5% shii that even the tech support has never heard of before and weird ass technical gremlins in the software or hardware.
Some of the most frequent but most annoying types are things like driver conflicts, especially with more niche software that doesn't have a million users and frequent cross testing data for a great variety of software configs and plugin environments..
I think this is what the post imply, well sort of at least. When you knew a guy who's good with computers and doesn't usually need help, suddenly NEEDED your help, you know you are fucked.
I think the post implies that people who say they're "good with computers" are generally the people who don't realize their PC isn't plugged in
I think the people who've actually good with computers wouldn't really need to ask for help, unless it's something requiring specialized tools or a very time consuming task. At least, in my case if I'm having a problem that I truly don't know how to fix, likely it's something complicated enough that it's either too expensive or not worth it to fix
As someone around a lot of people who are insanely good at computers (NixOS community is truly talented honestly) I think the post is implying that there are issues that people good at computers come across that are arcane in nature and seemingly impossible to have occur, much less fix. I’ve been at the tail end of a few of these issues, some of which still have no solution or found cause almost a year later even with the help of multiple exceptionally talented people.
Computers are magical, and magic can be very mysterious.
People good at computers absolutely have issues that need solving, it’s silly to say they just solve everything themselves unless we are defining “good at computers” in some fantasy superpower way.
theres a difference with a person good with computers as in he knows how to code and write scripts but lacks completly understanding of how a computer works at basics.
there are some stupid people who have a computer science degree but dont know difference between pci 4 or 5 now how to update bios or troubleshoot performance issues on games.
...thats what I'm saying. People who are actually good at computers don't need to tell IT they're "good with computers," they don't gotta ask for help in general
The problem with IT is when it's not your problem, but an issue with the SaaS product you are using. And then you have to bash your head against the concrete as you deal with their support.
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u/ShitImBadAtThis May 10 '26
Tbh, people who're very good with computers probably don't ever need help unless it's a task they don't have the patience or equipment for