You are right. I think other countries should sanction US travelers for our governments bad actions, yes. It would wake people the eff up.

I feel bad for the average Joe in Ukraine, and I dont feel any need to pity Russia or Russians at all.

But it begs the question, why do we care what a minority of people think in Russia? No one here owes any Russian anything. Not Nvidia drivers, not… anything. I say we firewall the whole Russian state off from the internet and call it a day. Tired of their cheating in every sporting event, killing citizens of other countries, blowing up pipelines, and generally behaving like shitty little gangster hooligans. Is there a small number of good people there? Sure. But thats not any of our problem-- thats their problem.

I feel that many Russians are against Putler’s regime

Well thats not what any polls anywhere say. Where did you get that from? Reminds me of this saying: “Wish into one hand and shit into the other and see which one gets full first.”

Russia has said they are going to do asymetrical warfare with the west. So why should we not prepare for what they claim they will do? Russians arent owed anything by us. Not a seat at the table, not a chance to contribute to open source software, not to be listened to. Not rights beyond their borders. It doesnt matter if they are nice. Its not our job and not realistic to expend time and resources to take each individual russian’s personal measure and apply sanctions onesey twosey on the bad ones. If they dont like it they should take it up with their motherland and get it sorted. I think we should immediately shut down all visas of any kind with Russia. The fact that the US is still allowing them to vacation here is absurd.

Well, I imagine theres a continuum of experiences and definition differences across the industry. Similar to how “product manager” is different at each place. What I saw back in the early 2000s or so was that the SRE and the word “engineer” in general used to be handed out sparingly. An “SRE” was a sysad/devops who had the ability to commit code to fix a product instead of just opening a bug and waking an engineer. An “engineer” committed compiled code, not short scripts. But then eveyone and their cousin became “sre” whether they deserved it or not, and everyone got an “engineer” title. I’ve seen manual QA folks who were unironically called “engineers”. QA is dead now and QE is barely hanging on, and SRE seems to be dying too. Not sure whats next, maybe just overpriced cloud gui tools and thats the end of it. And SRE can go be high school comp sci teachers. And SWE can wake up and fix their own bugs and hate their lives.

Seen a lot of that too. Execs who thinks all the devs are idiots and would be lost without their genius guidance, phoned in from a luxury remote location while all of us have to return to the office full time. Then stuff fails and we “pivot” to the next badly thought out fiasco. I guess it pays the bills.

I keep seeing a pattern of sre/devops/sysadmin tasks being given back to developers and canning the SREs. Hard to understand why. Then some of the SWE get stuck basically focussing on infra SRE stuff and become unwilling SRE more or less. Circle of life? Do the old devops folks get made into glue or something?

Nice. You can put that on your resume so you can get more of those kinds of jobs.
(/s. I like excel to a point but i really feel your pain too-- and fuck vba)

Every job lately seems to have been infected by Meta/google “data driven” leadership. Its so painful and wasteful sometimes.