Are Jobs becoming harder to Find in Technology sector?

Paul7 Replies
Jobs by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free

Job’s and you!

Recently I’ve begun to look for a new job because of being let go / laid off by my previous employer.   It seems that it is harder to find a job right now in my current city and I am wondering if this is just in the Technology sector or if it is world wide.  I know that technology jobs are being cut and people are being laid off even now. I know currently I see a lot of remote jobs for the people to apply for but I wonder how many are real jobs and how many are just place holders jobs where they are taking applications but not really looking to fill the position.   This seems also likely for the jobs that are required to go into the office.   I am sure there are companies who want to have a list of people who they can turn to when they finally need to fill the position or just to keep the current employees happy by saying there are looking for the people and be able to show them that job ad.

The Job Market?

The jobs that are being posted seem far and few from what I am seeing and I am not sure if that is due to it being the first of the year or if companies are hesitant to hire people for jobs that they need to fill.  I can’t say that I blame them for not wanting to hire people for jobs that might be harder to fill or to hire people because they have to worry about money and how to pay them.   I don’t even know if that is the reason why but I do know I’ve been looking for over a week now and it looks bad.  We may never know what is going on but it looks like I will continue to being looking for a job for a while and hopefully it will become better over time.

Are you looking for a Job?

I am curious if you are looking for a job also.  Have you had any success or did you find a new job or is the job market just as bad for you as it is for me.   I doubt this is just me but I am curious as to what others are thinking and what it could be looking like for you.   Do you think it will get better for you or does it look like it will be like this for several months down the line?   These are the questions that I am asking myself and others because I am quite curious as to what will happen next?  Do you think it will be this way or is it something that will eventually stop and companies will start hiring again?   Let me know in the comments and tell me your story.   I’d love to hear it and others what others have experienced in the past few weeks.

I’ve been exploring this even more, Why not check out my other blog post about this subject and other economic issues I’ve seen the past few weeks.

These are just a few that I’ve talked about after making this blog post and thought you might be interested in diving deeper into why you can’t find a job.   Don’t forget to subscribe to get even more content from my blog

How The Last of Us – will win the silicon lottery!

Paul
Last Of Us Pt 1
My Screen of the Game

Understanding the Silicon Lottery

Whether you like it or not, that CPU or GPU you bought might not last the entire time you have it.   After all, You could have a slighly below average CPU from what others who have the same CPU are experiences.   There is a great Youtube Video on this that you should go check out.   Let me be clear that I think most of the people who are having issues with games such as this are those who have faulty CPU’s or GPU’s.   So a break down of what I have found out, most users who are using a K series Intel isn’t have much issues with the game.   Why’s that well the video tells you what I have always suspected those cpu’s are higher end and probably aren’t likely to fail as much due to the high demand of quality they are wanting out of the series.  Even in th discussions there are several post about who can run this game without issues.   I will admit I had to turn on V-Sync, DSS, and make a limit of 9 FPS to get my GPU not to be used at 100%.  This is something you should do too.   I also did notice some cutsceens (Cineramics) For the game did drop me back into Windows 10.   So I do not like that idea but it did   Even though people will probably blame the game for their GPU’s dying, but in truthfullness you should already be limiting just how much the system uses your GPU.

Gameplay for my Systems

I found this to be very rough to start up with since there was at least an hour that the system was using 100% both CPU and GPU.   It doesn’t help that you have to build the shaders and I honestly would like to know how much space those are taking up in bouth my Steam Deck and PC but I couldn’t find any information, I have found people asking the same question but I have yet to find a way to see just how much shaders are being stored on my systems.  That would be something I would like to know at a glance on my Steam deck.   I have 42gb on my 256gb NVME drive on my steam deck that just say other.  So why can’t Steam fix this for us.

System Specs:

  • I9-10859k on a Asus Prime Z590-P Motherboard  (240 Watercooled Rad)
  • 3050 Geoforce RTX GPU
  • 32 gb DDR4 4,300 ghz ram
  • NVME Hard drive

As you can see this isn’t beginner PC, I built this for my enoyment and thus I know a thing a two about keeping the system cool.   It was constantly getting hot while building the Shaders which took an Hour at the least and I don’t know why they would need to build the shaders in the first place.

The Game

Other than the problems I had, I really didn’t have to much else problems on my computer so far.  I’ve been playing the game on and off for the past few days and I’ve not seen anything else to cause me trouble.   Is that because I won the silicon lottery, that would be a good guess and I’ll probably say yes.  I’m not sure why others are having more issues, but I would be willing to bet it is because they are letting the game take over their Frame rates and cause more issues than they need to.

SteamDeck Play

I even tried it on my SteamDeck and it only could do 20 or 30 FPS on it and it was very intuitive playing it because there was always those times you just couldn’t keep up with the game play due to it stuttering and don’t remind me of the hour long shaders building for it.  Again that needs to be fixed, we shouldn’t have to wait an hour just to play the game, which I did just to not have any stuttering in the beginning game.   I still don’t get the idea of why this is necessary, I thought our systems could build shaders as we go or maybe build the shaders for the next part of the game and so on.   I am hopeful that they at least make the game a little more playable on the Steam Deck because it was something I would like to do more often.   I play Spiderman on it without much issue but The Last of Us just seams to be a little more harder for me to play on the Steam Deck.

Top 3 Useful Windows Commands for Desktop Support technicians

Paul

Windows 10 21H1

The Command Line

Most user don’t understand just how powerful the command line can be.  In tech, and also in my job I have to diagnose and troubleshoot several different types of issues.   I’m going to show you my top 3 commands that I use in Windows and why.  Not everything is straight forward but It will help  you understand why.   We’ll talk about these and why they are so useful and powerful.  Use these as you see feet but you will need to run the command line as Admin.   How to do that is simple, for most.

WINDOWS Key + S and type cmd but don’t hit enter.

Click on Run As administrator

Once you do that you will see the usual Command line windows appear.   We won’t go into detail about that but if you want to learn more about it.  There are several YouTube videos about it.  I’m not going to talk about those because other’s have but I will talk about the commands I use most often in my work.

Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM)

For any businesses that use their own images for windows or has a need to deploy Windows a certain this can be a handy little tool for when the image might need to be repair, or something might need to be added.    You can add and remove drivers to an offline image or you can do many different things to it.   However I will be talking about the repairing of the image because most of the time we have Hard drives that are mechanical and that can cause problems for the OS when the system get’s corrupt files or hard drive has bad sectors.   Each one of these scenarios can make it even harder for applications to work properly and that is why I use this with systems that have those types of hard drives.   My go to is always going to be this when I suspect the hard drive might be the cause of the issue.

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

You can run this command and see the progress but this isn’t the only command that helps with troublesome Hard drives.

System File Checker (SFC)

This is another good tool for those who might have issues with the system hard drive or even when you suspect something is corrupt.   I use this from time to time just like DISM for when there is something that isn’t right about the hard drive.   If you use this also with DISM you will see a noticeable improvement of your system response.   You will see that it will be quite handy for those times when you have to get data off the drive before it dies completely.

SFC /scannow

If you run this in command line and wait you will see if it finds bad files or it will tell you what it found.  It won’t be a very informative but it will help.

Check Disk Utility

The Windows Check Utility is the last one of the three that I most often. It helps to check sectors and to check the health of the system and also fixes most of the problematic issues of mechanical hard drives.  So when I says this it can be used on SSD and even NVME but it does his best job on hard drives that have spinning parts.   Most users don’t understand about the volatility of the mechanical hard drive.   So it is very useful to check the disk and make sure there are not bad sectors or fix bad area’s of the hard drive.  This one will need to be rebooted to allow it to be used to its fullest but it is a handy little command when you want to make double sure that you will be able to keep Windows running.

chkdsk [DRIVE] /f

You can tell it multiple drives or just the main drive which would be C: but be warned the bigger the HDD the longer it will take to scan it.  You will also need to reboot to have it do it’s job because it needs to un-mount the drive, if you choice to do the C: drive.   It has in the past helped me out in many different situations and that is why I use these three commands a lot for my job.

What are your favorite commands to use in command line or in Windows General.  I’d like to hear them and find out more useful commands that might help me in my job.   Why not leave a comment and let everyone know.

 

Microsoft Defender Borks up the Start menu icons

Paul

microsoft, update, software, developer, automatic, icon, laptop, device, wireless, network, it, logo, ms, business, windows, operating system, os, computer, color, line, font, area, technology, product, angle, wing, graphics, mat, Free Images In PxHere

Photo by mohamed_hassan from PxHere

Microsoft Creates issues

This all started on Friday the 13th, 2023. We all started getting tickets galore for this issue, when we first saw this issue we thought it mgiht be something to do with company’s policies being changed and someone didn’t do their job testing it. Being that I am doing my job and trying to solve the issues that are at hand, I didn’t think twice that it was more globally than just our little corner of the company. As we get back into the office Monday we get even more of these tickets where the icons have disappeared and the little work around we sent out friday night still hasn’t solve some of the issues. Icons from all sorts of places have disappeared including stuff I didn’t even think would happen.

Well there it is, it seems Microsoft released an update that caused all the icons to disappear or not to function at all. I’ve been dealing with this issue for the past 5 days as our company scrambles to get the issue resolved for their employees. We’ve learned a few things and I will be glad to share it with you.

Icon restoration

There are several ways I’ve found that works to help restore the icons in the Start Menu.   One of the easiest way is to go to “Add and remove programs” and modify the app that isn’t showing up and Repair or reinstall if that is the option.  This is what we had to do at our location but that isn’t all we are having to do.  We are also having to do this for like Adobe and even Office 2016 but I am sure this affects all versions of Office.

Other ways you can restore icon is to registry edit the default icons and make them get repopulated with the right Icons.  I even go into default apps and reset that to help push the apps back into place.

Another way people have found tofix this issue at least with Office apps is to run it siliently and let it repair it selve in the background:

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\ClientX64\OfficeClickToRun.exe” scenario=Repair platform=x86 culture=en-us DisplayLevel=False

Microsoft Defender

According to Microsoft it was a the Microsoft Defender ASR rules that caused all this in the first place.   I don’t Know how many IT Admins are happy right now, I am sure not because of all this that happened but It really makes you wonder how this got past the pre-test phase and how anyone would push out an update like this that caused so much trouble.

Many people are wondering how this happened but My real question is will it happened again.  This isn’t going to be a big post but a short one to help those fix the issue at hand and hopefully we get it solved as quickly as possible and everyone get’s back to a normal routine.

The Prevailing winds of the Lastpass Breach — How it affects you!

Paul

hacking, cyber, security, hacker, technology, web, coding, internet, face, mask, identity, hack, virus, danger, protection, anonymous, code, crime, criminal, firewall, illegal, password, spy, stealing, thief, illustration, font, graphic design, art, graphics, clip art, Free Images In PxHere

Photo by mohamed_hassan from PxHere

Understanding the Lastpass Breach

Let us be clear about this, people really don’t truly understand what is going on with this breach.   It however will not stop the threat actors from taking control of your data if they get a chance.   This means they will go after the websites you will visit or maybe impersonate you in some way to get the access they are seeking.   Either way it isn’t like we can just sit back and do nothing.

“It is possible to crack those passwords,” Melissa Bischoping, director of endpoint security research at Tanium, said via email. “Instead of running the math to determine how complex your password would be to crack with modern equipment, it’s best to go ahead and do some credential hygiene.” — CyberSecurity Dive

Credential hygiene is necessary in our day to day routines because it helps stops theft of our accounts and our personal information.  However that doesn’t that the Meta data associated with your vault was encrypted, in fact it wasn’t and can be used to exploit this issue.   So even if they don’t brute force yoru password vaults, they can do fishing or means to get the access they are seeking so they can get even more information about you to use against you.

The Lingering effects of Password Managers

Password managers are a necessity in today’s time because of the all too common breaches.  Even if Lastpass wasn’t breached, some other site or sites would of breached and you’d still have to change your password or add multi-authenticator access to prevent any authorized access.  This goes without saying, we will see other breaches and it will not just be Lastpass.   Sooner or later some other Password manager will be a target and we will see this again but that shouldn’t deter you from using a Password manager it is the one tool we will always need to create even better Passwords than we could by our selves.    Although Many in the Security field are advicing users to go to another Password Manager.  I too have not like the taste of what Last Pass has done.  They way they made it sound less important that it truly is but that just might be because they’re lawyers got involved.   Either way I will suggest three things to better help you even if you keep Last pass.

  1.  Check your interations and make sure you have them high.   I think the minium we should have is over 500,000 interations to make sure they can’t be hacked the next time as easily.   Also if they are low, now is a good time to bump them up even though it makes you more of a target right now.  This will help in the future, in case there is another breach.
  2. Change all your imporant sites passwords, don’t just wait to get hacked might as well go through and see which sites you are truly using right now and go ahead and change your password and if you can add an authentication method to help protect you incase there is another hack down the road.
  3. Create a new masterpassword which isn’t anywhere close to what you have now.  If you can create your own acronym with a minium of 12 digits that would help. (What is an acronym?)  I suggest not using the most common acronyms but creating one that you can only remember and use that.   It may take some time but it could be something you have to say everytime you type in on your computer, just don’t let everyone else hear it.

Those Password Managers

Finally, let’s talk about your choices in this matter. Even though I talked about this in the previous post, we should at least look at the ones that might want to go another service.  Here are a few of them that I saw around the internet:

  • Bitwarden  — This is the one I perfer to go to because it is so opened sourced and you have several options to choice from.   It is where a lot of people are going right now after the LastPass Breach, I am sure of it.
  • 1Password —  This one I only know about through what i’ve heard.  I’ve heard good things about this but there are not many options to those who are wanting free.   This is good because they’ve been in this for quite sometimes.  I’ve heard of this company for MANY years and still has some great value to give to their users.
  • Dashlane — I’ve never heard of this product but it comes highly recommended by other because of how security focused they are.  You will have to pay a yearly subscription fee and there is only a demo version that means you do not have a free version.
  • Roboform — I’ve talked about Roboform way in the past and still it was a very useful password manager when I was using them 10 or so years ago.  So they must ast least be doing something right to still be in the business.   I haven’t explored them lately but I might just do that again to see how they are doing.

As you can see you have several choices to choose from if you decide you want to get away from Lastpass but ultimately you will have to decide what you want to do.  I am still going to possibly go to Bitwarden because of the open source or I might go back th Roboform if I can find my license that i had with them in the past.  I haven’t really decided I think Bitwarden would be my best choice because I know people can look at their code and help keep my passwords secure.   Are you planning on changing or staying with Lastpass?  Who will you be going to if you are going to change Password Managers?  Why not leave a comment and tell me your options.  I’d love to hear them and find out exactly what you are thinking about this LastPass breach.