A little venting here....
There's only a couple of things that I'm really good at. Computers, guitar, and maybe Software Defined Radio with an emphasis on "software". I'm one of those people with hyper competence in a few areas and admittedly high levels of ineptitude in everything else.
I used to enjoy talking with other technical people. But not so much anymore. Over the last 10 years I've noticed that some people believe they have an expertise which they really do not have, cannot demonstrate, but steadfastly defend as fact.
This becomes frustrating.
Recently I took a contract at an international manufacturer with office and plants all over the world. My boss is my best friend. He previously was my employee, so things have come full circle. And he's a damned good network infrastructure guy- and a good manager.
But we have this windows admin, he's got something like 15 technical certifications. And this dude cannot tell you what the transit path for e-mail is through the servers he is responsible for administering. He has no idea. The guy makes close to 6 figures a year for sitting on his ass and adding/removing domain accounts.
Two months ago he was given instructions to document the mail pathing in the company. Two months later I'm doing it. He should know this stuff cold- no thinking involved.
This boggles my mind.
On another front, several tech websites I've posted on over the years seem to have gone into the toilet. Once inhabited by computer experimenters doing interesting things like LN cooling, board modifications, BIOS customization, firmware hacking... they are now inhabited by a less capable set of enthusiasts.
One recent example is the release of the new AMD Zen processor and the upcoming Naples server processor. Both interesting topics to me. Especially since these parts are very inexpensive for an 8 core processor.
But the websites that have been reviewing these have only benchmarked media creation and games. Not that I'm against either media creation or games- I do both. But game benchmarks are such a bad way to figure out how much power a processor has. There's too much high level inefficient code used by game developers. But because these people apparently only play games- that's where the benchmarks are.
Never mind MIPS per core... virtualization... performance with 20 or 30 applications running. No let's argue about frame rate.
So... it pisses me off. Not sure I feel better... but at least I said it.