dandersh's comments

I'm leaving my current role due in part to them not hiring other devs efficiently, resulting in a long-term unsustainable workload and everything that it entails.

The final straw was during a meeting when it was brought up that they were using take home projects to evaluate candidates. We're drowning in work and you're delaying us adding resources AND wasting bandwidth on take home projects? Not to mention wasting that candidates time and contributing to the "all hours" mentality that made the job miserable for me to work in.

Looking seriously for the first time in a few years and it's shocking how much worse the process has gotten.

I did a technical, live coding screen for 45 minutes. It went well enough that they were interested in moving forward. 4, one hour long technical interviews and another hour with management, all spread out over the course of a day. I'm already working full time with a family and I'm expected to burn through an entire day of PTO? And to add to it there was no response as to what would be covered during these 4 separate technical interviews.

What's really maddening is that it's our fellow software engineers that are doing this to us. We're the ones that think it's okay to do "take home assignments" and essentially work for free. We know how awkward and stressful live coding exercises are but yet we do them. We value our time and work/life balance but yet think it's okay for every candidate to go through 3+ hours of interviews.

The one thing that's helped keep me sane through all of this was having watched Jem Young's Frontendmasters course "Interviewing for Front-End Engineers".

I was in the same boat as you. Definitely talk to someone, see someone, take something, etc. I didn't and it spiraled out of control.

The most productive (and probably happiest) was when I was able to work fewer hours. I was the only one on my team at this location so I would roll in a bit before 7am, eat lunch 10:30-11am, and leave around 1-2 when my brain told me it was done coding for the day.

Once in awhile I'd get a eureka moment on the commute home and write a little bit more code otherwise I'd just let my mind wander and get home refreshed.

"No, I'd say power hunger is one thing, but what you face now is unique to this poisonous "Soviet Culture." A very special, aggressive brand of social nihilism at the apex of civil society, characteristic of one party/social class governments"

What you're describing is late stage capitalism.

""Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes," Keith McCoy, the Exxon (XOM) lobbyist, said during a covertly filmed job interview recorded by Greenpeace's UK investigative platform.

"Did we join some shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that's true," McCoy said in the video, which was published Wednesday by the UK's Channel 4. "But there's nothing illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments. we were looking out for our shareholders."

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/01/business/exxon-tape-video-kei...

The reframing of a company's purpose to "generate shareholder's wealth" is a relatively recent development (1970's) that came on the heels of right wing economic ideas gaining widespread adoption in American universities (Chicago School, etc). This is one of the reasons companies use to justify destruction of society and the planet in the pursuit of more, wealth, power, status, etc.

There is nothing "Soviet Culture" about this or myriad other examples such as the tobacco industry or pharmaceutical companies and the opioid epidemic.

God I wished I worked there. Even without Covid this past year would have been tremendously hard on me. When I've talked to my manager about what I've been going through and explaining how it's impacted my performance I get the "Yea it's been a rough year for everyone" bit.

Finally we reach a point where both the pandemic and everything else has settled down and I'm too burnt out and depressed to enjoy it.

Multiple examples of a publication's analysis being found lacking and a reaction of no longer consuming it as a result is not "pretty petty". I'm reading them for their non-US coverage, and if I find their US coverage to be lacking(which it was despite your attempts at gaslighting otherwise) than it is reasonable to question their non-US reporting and not waste time on it.

No, they were proven to have been wrong. I provided a specific example of their analysis being wrong, one which you did not address. The ACA passed along party lines after almost a year of deliberation. The GOP spent the subsequent decade running on "repeal and replace" only to get seriously close once. There are multiple other examples (McConnell declaring the goal of making Obama a one term president, refusing to conduct hearings to confirm Garland to the SC after recommending him, etc.) of where the GOP was acting in bad faith, which is also what you are doing here.

There are some benefits to the Economist, such as the ones you mentioned but I don't know that I could recommend it, at least without a secondary source for what you're reading there.

I stopped reading it about 10 years ago for a few reasons. During the housing crisis the coverage wasn't as deep as it should have been and I would read articles that were nothing more than "nationalizing banks is bad" without explaining why.

Their coverage of US politics was also laughably bad. During the push to pass the ACA they overstated the GOP's position and willingness to deal. I used to get it from a library a few towns over so I would be 3-4 weeks behind. One time I was reading an article where Charles Grassley was being made out to be principled and respected and I'm laughing because he had recently endorsed the death panel nonsense.

I really, really wish I could recommend the WSJ, however they declined pretty heavily after Murdoch bought them. The number of long form articles declined and I was seeing less journalism and more ideological fluff in the non-editorial sections.

"They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. This is the most common form of bias I've come across."

I've noticed this as well. Going from WaPo to Breitbart (or vice versa) is like going to an alternate world. When they are talking about the same thing often they are doing so in a belittling manner (https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2016/11/13/safety-pin-ant...). I feel like the tone taken by MSM outlets like WaPo and the NYT has become harsher and more condescending, but it could just be me paying closer attention to it.

Bias by exclusion doesn't get talked about as much as it should. One way you can tell when a media establishment doesn't like something is that they do what they can to ignore it. During the Dem primaries it had become a meme in some left wing communities the length the MSM was going to ignore Bernie and his popularity. Another popular example is how Noam Chomsky is largely shunned by the MSM.

Happened to my wife. All the messages were obviously fake as they would say the exact same thing with a word here or there changed.

While I remember it being a big deal in tech news I don't recall it gaining a lot of traction in the establishment press.

Had this happen to me as well, only my background is JavaScript. I've had more than one conversation with a recruiter where they didn't understand the difference between Java and JavaScript, so I'm unsure whether this was done due to malice or incompetence.

+1 to the PDF resume, if for no other reason than you don't have to deal with format issues on windows/mac.

I definitely fell in this camp. To be fair I was fairly junior and was used to JS.

It wasn't until I started using Haskell that I saw the benefits of knowing exactly what I was working with. It also helped me be more deliberate and thoughtful as you had to define everything up front.

The Dixie Chicks.

Country stations stopped playing their songs because listeners would call in to complain, threaten boycotts, etc.

While I'm struggling to remember exact successes, I know the Parents Television Council would use petitions to cancel programming that they deemed inappropriate.

Coworkers of a family friend and my uncle died from it, even though their jobs could be done remotely (my uncle's a sysadmin ffs)

Our oldest daughter's friend didn't get it despite it putting her 3 siblings and 2 parents on their ass for over a month.

My wife and I suspect it played a role in her father's death. This occurred soon after nursing home shutdowns in the state and he had been dead of "heart failure" far longer than they had said in the initial phone call. They were fairly evasive when asked follow up questions about what had occurred and my wife and mother in law had gotten influenza (and hospitalized from it in my mil's case) from the same nursing home. He was in there recovering from a physical injury but had been dealing with health issues for a few months already, so who knows. The important thing was that my wife had her first viewing of her dead father completely alone, followed up by a "funeral" of immediate family members. Oh yea, and this all happened soon after his birthday that she wasn't able to celebrate with him due to the lockdown.

I feel like focusing on total deaths, death rate, etc. sometimes misses the point and allows those who rebel against any measures taken a rhetorical out. I don't like being sick, I don't like my family being sick. We've had our entire family wiped out from things like the flu and gastroenteritis. It sucked and it was an absolutely miserable experience. So even if I was fully guaranteed that no one would die (which is unlikely given what happened previously with my mother in law who is currently living with us) I would do what I could to avoid coming down with it.

I've lost count the amount of Rolling Stones "farewell tour" concerts I've been too.

I'm guessing you're referring to DJ Ashba? One thing about GnR is they always had talented guitarists.

Yea Axl's voice definitely isn't what it once was. Corey Glover (Living Colour) is another singer from that time period whose voice isn't the same.

I took it that social media was the primary way under 40 white males were being told they were racist or were seeing others being called racist.

Specifically I recall the many posts I've come across to the effect of "I used to be X but the community of Y caused me to become Anti-X".

I'm an under 40 white male who doesn't feel doomed to an existence of being a racist so I'm not sure where I'm supposed to be seeing this?

The N word is a well known example of racist speech/action and social media is often where these uses are drug up and litigated.

But I don't use my identity as a white male to paint myself a victim, so maybe I'm off base? Are there other avenues where these previously non-racists were bullied into becoming racists?

Which is why I was floored when my friend told me that not only did they get less than expected for theirs, but the person bought it to scrap it.

This was in MN and using an online auction too.

They don't mention it because it's not true and an obvious rationalization for already existing behavior.

Sorry but throwing the N word around and casual racism existed before social media.

The "I'm not the racist you are" is childish and unfortunately par for the course in online discourse now.