I'm perfectly willing to do it for others, whether they know how to or not. Someone reading Slashdot comments PROBABLY has the know how to implement the fixes I suggest as well, even if they'd rather just hang out and troll.

Microsoft wants to idiot-proof their OS, but I've run across absolutely tragedies that wouldn't have happened if a user had just not switched to Windows 11, like a retired college professor who can no longer access his life's work because it's on an encrypted PC where he no longer has access to any established authentication due to the effects of early-onset dementia.

7zip is another program that might be at risk.

Think about an offer you can't refuse.

I start by using an autounattend.xml that explicitly creates a local-only account and uses relevant ADMX files to set group policies to prevent using Onedrive as a default save location. I run a script on first user login that enables GPOs for Windows Home SKUs if necessary. My default Windows install does not install OneDrive, Recall, Copilot or Outlook by default, although each product can be installed and used by positive user action if they so desire. I also disable automatic Bitlocker encryption on primary drives in Windows 11, which is another massive headache for systems that aren't going on a domain. I know they mean well but it just makes life harder for no good reason. People don't even know what their microsoft account is and then they rapidly become confused about the difference between the account password and the PIN they set up and it's just awful all around. Just fucking say no.

OneDrive / Microsoft 365 is absolutely invasive and if you don't buy the value add of Office in the first place, Onedrive just brings nothing to the table. I have yet to see the combination of misfortunes that would make Onedrive valuable but I've definitely run across people locked out of their own files because they can't get back to a particular wifi network and told microsoft their phone number was an un-textable land line.

Neither, really. They didn't eliminate jobs so much as make new rules that mostly eliminated the "Tech Lead / Manager" (TLM) role.

There used to be a lot of software engineers (people on the software engineer job ladder, as opposed to the engineering manager job ladder) who had 2-3 people reporting to them and were considered TLMs. These people divided their time between engineering work and management. Google made a new rule that every manager has to have at least 5 direct reports. This rule has flattened the hierarchy by mostly eliminating TLMs, who all had to decide whether to lose the "TL" part and be a pure manager or lose the "M" part and be a pure SWE. Well, "pure" is too strong. Some SWE managers still keep their hands in the code but they generally don't have time for significant projects.

Is this an improvement? Dunno. There are pros and cons. The TLM role has some significant benefits to a company. It enables the existence of small, close-knit teams where the team's manager is also the pre-eminent expert in the area. Being managed by the expert has a lot of advantages for the reports, especially when it comes time for the manager to defend the team's performance ratings or promotions, because the manager deeply understands their work. It has advantages for the company, too, because in a small team led by the project expert it's impossible for low-performing employees to hide their low performance or blame it on others.

On the other hand, TLMs can end up overwhelmed by the administrative overhead. This can cause them to be less effective as managers because they don't navigate the system on behalf of their employees as effectively. Some of them may not be very good at defending their reports' ratings and promotions because they don't have the skills to do that, even though they deeply understand the team's contributions. It can also definitely make them less effective as SWEs, and these people were generally top-performing ICs (individual contributors) before taking a manager role. Some might argue that any time they spend on management rather than engineering is a waste of their talents.

Pure engineering managers can be and often are better managers. Better at helping their reports develop important non-technical skills and knowledge and better at working the system for their reports. And some top-performing SWEs are such excellent managers that even as good as they are at building stuff, their positive impact as managers is larger yet.

From the upper management perspective, there's another advantage: Fewer managers to train and manage. Managing managers is harder in many ways than managing engineers, because the output of managers is harder to measure and evaluate. Also, managers are officers of the company which attaches greater legal and PR risk to their actions. Having fewer of them to manage is beneficial.

(Saving money isn't really a benefit, at least not the way Google does it. SWEs who also manage people don't get paid any more than SWEs who don't, holding all else constant.)

On balance, I don't think either approach is ideal, and the best strategy is probably a dynamic balance between them that mostly favors managers being managers (though with the rule that all managers must have been highly competent SWEs) and SWEs being SWEs, but with plenty of scope for exceptions where a project needs a small team of 3-4 people and there's a clear leader with deep technical ability and good people skills.

Anyway, Google has pushed the pendulum away from TLMs and as a result there are many fewer managers, and each manager tends to have a larger team.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google. I used to be a TLM but opted to switch back to an IC role years ago, before the rule change.)

Words are actions. That's why for most crimes, the abetment of the crime is a judicable offense.

It isn't just buzzwords, it's jargon with specific meaning... but your comment highlights the problem, because you didn't understand it.

One part you didn't understand was "bandwidth", which in the management context means "available work capacity". This means it's a discussion about resource staffing and constraints. Also, "align" means there's going to be some two-way negotiation, in this case to figure out whose employees are going to take on what part of the work based on their availability. (Well, probably. "Align" could have been used out of politeness, implying a fictional intention to negotiate when in reality the speaker does plan to dictate.) In addition, the use of "workflow" implies that the plan to be developed isn't just for one project, but for an ongoing effort.

Try translating all of that nuance to standard English, and you'll convert a ten-word sentence into a paragraph or two. Like all jargon, its purpose is to increase communication by compressing a lot of detailed information into a few words that have context-specific meaning that goes beyond their normal English definitions.

Of course, the downside of the jargon is that it prevents those who don't understand the contextual definitions from understanding, causing them to come away with interpretations like "Let's meet after this and make sure you understand how I want that to work."

In fairness to you, I have to point out that often the users of business jargon don't know what it means either, and are just using it to make themselves sound "businessy". That's less a jargon problem than evidence that the company isn't hiring the best people.

The problem with Google/Apple/Meta/Microsoft going on about Wind and Solar-generated power is that these sources are invariably part of a larger mixed portfolio of power-generating facilities owned by the large utilities. So when one of these companies goes to the utility and contracts to buy a gigawatt of solar power, that just means that the rest of the customers will be "using" more of their fossil-fuel-generated power.

In a grid, there is no meaningful way to identify the source of power used for any specific customer. Claiming that their data centers are carbon-neutral is a shell-game. And it doesn't make sense for these companies to create their own private grid. Our electricity supply system works as well as it does because the reliability and adaptability improves as the size of the grid increases. Just ask Texas. There is a very good reason why Canada and the USA have cross-border ties. Same for Europe.

Trying to be rabulistic?

If I require a function, it is a functional requirement.

If I require something without function, it's a non functional requirement.

Those requirements have no function in solving the problem at hand. The vehicles of the fire brigade being red is a non functional requirement. The fire brigade would be as effective with blue or green vehicles. This renders "red" a non functional requirement, because legislation still demands the vehicles to be red.

No. Jargon (which is a French word probably trying to mimic either gibberish or bird sounds) means a non-standardized variety of language specific to a small group, may it be professional, regional or social.

Yes, that means that words have a very specific meaning within that group, which is usually not understood outside of that group. And that is also true for "bandwidth", which in this context does not mean the actual width of a ribbon, but the collective manpower of the team addressed in this speech. Yes. The example is pure jargon.

Still, it's the French who should wonder, why the English language uses the French word "digital" instead of the English "fingerwise" to describe computer communication.

"Let's touch base offline to align our bandwidth on this workflow." isn't jargon, it's buzzwords. It just translates to "Let's meet after this and make sure you understand how I want that to work.". Just use the ordinary English instead of the buzzwords. A lot of the "confusion" is probably the employees thinking "Just speak English, dumbass.".

Jargon has specific meanings that can't be quickly expressed in plain English. "hack" vs. "kludge" for example. Both have implications beyond the basic "solution to a problem" that take several sentences in English to state clearly but represent things you need to identify often enough that you can't readily spell it out in full every single time. Others, like "mis-bug" (as in "This is a mis-bug, clarify the code and docs so someone doesn't accidentally fix it.") are jargon but the plain English terms are simple enough you ought to use them most of the time.

Replying to myself to add context: "digitus" is Latin for finger, and "digital" simply means "with the fingers". In a metaphorical sense, it means "counting with the fingers" or, to make it sound more sophisticated, "based on discrete numbers".

"digital" is a Latin word. The French, a Romance language, took it directly, and then English borrowed it from French.

My ticket covers about 5000 square miles of territory. No, this is not a large place with slightly less than 800,000 inhabitants, but it works for me.