r/ITdept

My fiancée got a trade school degree in electrical about 4 years ago. Since then, he’s been to interviews for electrical unions and the MTA and we’ve applied for several entry level jobs but still nothing. We’re getting married in 4 months and want to start a family in about 3 years but we can’t do that unless he has a stable career.

He’s really into video games and problem solving so the idea came up about going into IT. He will be starting the Information and Internet Technology 2 year program to get his Associates at Queens Community College starting in January. Will this degree along with certs provide him a better path into the field? I’m seeing on this subreddit that the job market is terrible right now. Would having both is degree and certs make him more marketable?

We’re in the NYC area if that matters.

How can I get a list of entire applications landscape in a company?

Recently joined a company, all the applications being used are not recorded anywhere. Would like to gather a list of all the applications which all the employees use.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

Hello, I’m Jade.

We are a group of undergraduate Information Technology students from the PUP currently completing our capstone project, a semi-intelligent mobile health (mHealth) application designed to provide accessible breastfeeding support for Filipino mothers.

We are reaching out to professionals in IT, healthcare, and related fields to gather expert critique, technical feedback, and practical suggestions that could meaningfully improve our system before development and evaluation.

What the App Does

The app integrates three core features:

1. AI-Powered Breastfeeding Assistant - A generative AI chatbot that provides timely, conversational responses to breastfeeding concerns 24/7, powered via API integration with a Django backend.

2. Verified Knowledge and Community Page - A section featuring organization-verified breastfeeding articles and a moderated peer support community for mothers to share experiences.

3. Milk Bank Booking and Monitoring System - A smart allocation and scheduling system that connects donor and recipient mothers to accredited human milk bank facilities, with a structured notification workflow tracking the full process from screening to milk donation/acquisition confirmation.

The application is built using React Native (mobile), Django (backend), and PostgreSQL (database).

What We Are Looking For

We welcome feedback from professionals in the following areas:

- IT / Software Engineering - Are the proposed features technically feasible? Are there architectural, security, or scalability concerns we should address?
- Healthcare / Lactation - Are the features clinically appropriate? Are there risks, gaps, or best practices we are overlooking?
- UX / Product Design - Are the user flows logical and accessible, particularly for mothers with varying levels of digital literacy?
- General critique - What are the weaknesses in our concept? What would you improve, remove, or add?

We are particularly interested in honest, critical feedback - not validation. If something about our approach is flawed or naive, we want to know.

We are happy to share more details about specific features, technical architecture, or our research framework if needed. Any input, however brief, is genuinely appreciated.

Thank you for your time.

"I'll just give them admin for a sec." What happened: that "sec" is now eighteen months and a promotion long. They are admin on a system that was decommissioned in 2023. The system still exists because they have admin on it. Better: time-bound elevation. If your IAM tool supports JIT access, use it. If not, write a 24-hour expiry script and call it a feature.

"It's a one-off, no need to document." What happened: it is now 2026. The one-off has been performed quarterly by three different people. Two have left. The institutional knowledge consists of a single Slack message that reads "you know the thing we do." Better: three-sentence README. Future-you will weep with gratitude. Past-you will be forgiven nothing.

"I'll hardcode it temporarily." What happened: the value is now in seven scripts and a Lambda. The original engineer has left. The value has changed. Production has feelings. Better: env var or secrets manager. Four extra minutes upfront. Take the four minutes.

"They're leaving on good terms, no rush on offboarding." What happened: not bad terms, just neutral ones. They are also still in Slack, GitHub, and the AWS console six weeks later. The "good terms" is mutual because they have not yet noticed they still have access. Better: same SLA for every offboarding regardless of vibe. Vibe-based access policies are how incident reports get written.

"I'll just open a port real quick to test." What happened: the port is still open. The test was successful. So is everyone else's test. Better: temporary security group rule with an actual expiry. Or a tunnel. Anything but "I'll close it later."

"I'll fix it after the demo." What happened: the demo went well. The fix did not. The fix will not. The fix is now a load-bearing feature of the architecture and is referenced in the docs. Better: open the ticket before the demo ends. Put it on the sprint. Shame is the deadline.

What's yours? I'm collecting these so I can pretend I am not alone.

So whenever someone leaves the company we go through the usual offboarding, revoke Okta, GSuite, Slack and all the connected stuff that's tied to SSO. The problem is every quarter we still find these random SaaS subscriptions nobody knew about, usually some tool an employee signed up for directly and expensed on their corp card.

Then finance comes asking why we're still paying for some random tool months after the person left and we honestly don't have a good answer. We can audit and clean it up but that's reactive, we're always finding this stuff after the bleeding has already happened for months.

I'm wondering if anyone here has a real workflow for catching the shadow signups before they become a finance problem.

Our HR runs everything through workday and on our side we use okta plus JSM to provision email, slack, jira and github.

Right now we wait til the start date which means new hires sit there doing nothing on day 1 while we scramble to spin up their accounts. Bad first impression and kinda embarrassing when managers are pinging us asking why their new report cant log into anything.

So we tried flipping it and provisioning the moment the offer got accepted. Worked great until one candidate ghosted us and we had a half built account sitting there with access for weeks before anyone noticed.

Not sure which is the lesser evil. Day 1 dead time makes us look slow but ghost accounts feel way riskier from a security angle. How are you guys timing this without ending up with either problem?