u/Due_Vast_8002

Come join us in mainframe, enterprise platform administration. It's a simple life, pays well, and you'll never get laid off. It's boring, necessary work. Unless there's a literal fire at the datacenter, you won't even need to be on-call for incidents since the systems are bulletproof.

As a corporate worker, I can amend that to:

"I get paid."

Most employees work with it through Bluezone, which is a CLI based interface.

or replaced before.

Lol, no. We've tried. It cost an actual fortune and still fails.

I worked on the backend and I can say thay their systems are terrible. Like all of their actual banking software is literally MSDOS command prompts from 40 years ago.

Look, I fully agree that they're terrible. But it's not MSDOS. It's UNIX on a (probably) fully up to date mainframe. All banks operate on mainframes because they are bullet proof, fast, and have a literal human lifetime of track record. I work at a larger mid-sized US bank and all of our core services run on HP-UX mainframes. The day to day stuff is done in modern AWS/ Snowflake/ IBM tools, but the actual transactions are on mainframe RACF applications. This is not a bad thing.

Are you sure about your parents? I never thought of my family as rich growing up-- upper middle class, sure, but not rich. Talking to my dad a few years ago, he mentioned he made $250k/ year. In the 90's. Even then we were obviously well off, but that is not the lifestyle I would've ascribed to that level of wealth. Having said that, he's still totally disconnected with what things cost today.

Honestly, anything less than $500k/ year precludes you from living responsibly AND flaunting money with no cares. I'd say you can be pretty solidly financially secure w/ $150k+, but you're still going to have to budget to be able to be a functioning adult with a funded retirement, emergency fund, etc. Shit's hard, yo.

Unless you live in a HCOL area, making $100k+ is still special. The MEDIAN household income of my mid-sized midwest city is $68k. Not single earner, household so usually 2+ income streams. Less than 1 in 5 people in the US working population earn more than $100k.

Social media has wildly warped peoples' expectations of a normal income. Couple that with people posting about making stacks of passive income (spoiler: they're actually not), taking multiple international vacations per year, and driving luxury cars, and expectations are totally disconnected from reality.

You can save, own a home, start a family, go on vacation, but you can only pick 3 at any given time. This is normal. Having said that, recent inflation trends in the US has made even this tough.

When the dementia sets in, you can pay it back in kind.

No

It's because margins are extremely thin with negotiated fees, so to maximize profit from national health insurance, they space it out over multiple visits.

There are private hospitals that will do it in one go, but they're as expensive as US dentists and don't take NHS.

In medical/ human sciences, the distinction is very important.

E.g. Most school shooters play video games. Video games do not cause people to become school shooters.

Having had dental work done in Japan, I dunno about that. I once had 2 cavities that required 4 visits. One to find them, another to fill one, another to fill the second, and a follow up appointment. Unless you live there already, your hotel bill will be pretty steep.

If you haven't learned that being in power means you can literally ignore the law, you really haven't been paying attention. It's time to start playing the same game and escalate. If they want an authoritarian state, make them fucking choke on it.

Then what did he mean?

That advice translates to any large corporation. If you want to stick around long term, don't get noticed. Fail to meet expectations, get canned. Exceed expectations, get piled on with more, higher visibility work, and still get canned.

You're right, some people don't deserve jobs unless they're actively hands on keyboard.

You clown.

There is a lot of corruption, make no mistake. It's the most public it's ever been, but I don't know if it's worse than the corruption throughout the country's past, though.

Robber barons straight up got the feds to send in the national guard to kill US citizens by the dozens. It made the ICE crap look like peanuts.

We overthrew governments because a FRUIT company wanted us to.

We killed millions of natives because we wanted their land.

Corruption is like the one thread that runs through this nation's soul through every political party, era, and institution. Now people are starting to see that we are, in fact, the bad guys. Unfortunately, there are no good nation states. If the people don't hold the elite to account, they'll take everything they can.

It is extremely easy to be a bad scrum master. The industrialization of Scrum w/ SaFe and its ilk has made Scrum/ Kanban go the way of Lean Six Sigma. Both are extremely valuable if applied correctly. Unfortunately, most people don't because you have to actually understand the process and work. That doesn't easily package into a weekend conference/ class.

Executives would rather pay a million bucks for a system and look at one or two metrics and then wonder why nothing changes year over year.

If you understand the job in the corporate space is mediating the team level stuff w/ executive big picture stuff, you'll be fine. It is and has always been a bureaucratic job. I liken it to being a diplomat at this point. There's a lot of overlap w/ foreign service jobs.

It is extremely easy to be a bad scrum master. If you're focused on metrics and story boards, you'll be automated away very quickly.

I will say that I don't know how you can be successful at this job if you don't have a decade of corporate experience and at least some background in IT in a corporate environment. It's one of those jobs where you're getting paid for what you know more than how much you do and you can't learn most of this stuff from a textbook.

I just upgraded from my starter house with street parking to a big house in the suburbs. All the houses have 2 car garages, and none but mine have cars in them because:

1. The people have WAY too much shit that it's literally spilling out of their houses.

2. They all have pickup trucks that are actually too big to fit in their garages. One house has 3 (!) huge pickup trucks and it's two retired people with no kids in the house. Mine has my car, my wife's car, and my Vespa with room to spare.

that we have already paid into

I hear you, but that's not how SSI works. Current workers pay for current retirees. Just because you pay into the system doesn't guarantee you'll get paid yourself in the future.

Having said that, fuck Elong and the shitty car he rode in on.

Oh no, not the reddit smackdown. My stars and garters!

Break out the guillotine.

There is one scenario where it ends well.

Nobody deserves anything. There are things you can and can't do. Both have consequences. Just because you CAN buy something, doesn't mean you should. The consequences of having an 80 month car note at 7%+ are profound.

Who said you aren't hiring any juniors?

You, uh, never had to go through a corporate budgeting cycle, huh? You don't get to add to the budget for a cost center. In what company will you find a CIO & CFO to OK doubling your IT budget unless everything is literally on fire? Get real, dude.