Here’s an idea: a catalogue of companies who pulled this shit during the bubble, so we know who not to buy from when it bursts.

Probably, poor and uneducated

I’ve known a lot of poor and uneducated people in my time, and last I checked, none of them did that to a kid.

No, though they did see if they could bend the process for me. Turns out not.

Keeping doors open is important. I once had a great contracting gig as an exec EM with an org that had more or less fired me (declined to renew my contract while keeping the rest of the team) some years ago. Second time around they wanted my approach, first time I stepped on toes.

Unless the reason is something truly egregious, don’t burn bridges on your way out, even if you’ve had a bad time. Organisations change as their management changes, and you never know where you’ll be in a decade’s time.

I experienced a similar thing a few years ago, applying for a management position with a nonprofit. (A nonprofit!)

My reply …

Hi $PERSON,

Your application was strong and we’re really pleased to advise you that you’ve progressed to the next stage.

Great! Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.

We’d like you to answer a few quick questions using our online video platform, SparkHire. This will help us get to know more about you and what skills and experience you can bring to the role, the team and $NONPROFIT.

…

A set of questions will appear on the screen (some filmed, others just text) and you’ll have the opportunity to create video recordings of your answers, within a specified time limit. You can review and re-record your answers as many times as you need.

I’d love to catch up either face to face, in a video chat, or even a phone call to discuss how I could use my skills and experience to help out the $NONPROFIT team. To be honest though I’m not at all keen on recording a one-way video interview.

I do have several concerns with SparkHire (no data retention policy that I could find; and enhanced privacy protection for EU customers only; email instructions years old that referenced Flash).

But my main concern is that the idea of one-sided video interview feels … well, one-sided and dehumanising. To be honest it’s quite the opposite of what I’d have expected from the employee experience of an organisation like $NONPROFIT.

Even if I were placed in the role, I’d be reluctant to refer friends if they were also required to participate in a one-sided video interview.

Please drop me an email at $EMAIL or give me a call on $PHONE if you’d like to chat further, either virtually or in person.

What if the intent is to filter out people who won’t put up with this sort of shit? It might be working very well indeed from the perspective of the hiring managers.

The hiring company failed the interview. It happens, and IMO you’ve exercised good judgement here.

My personal suspicion is that this sort of inhumane, inhuman, hiring process filters for people who are either desperate for work, or who don’t see anything wrong with this sort of thing.

You’d want a stronger girder than they used.

Ohhhhhhh damn. Have I been wrongly hating on tape capguns for 40-odd years?

The experience I had was that the hammer wasn’t consistently firing the caps. Perhaps I just had a couple of bad guns? Either way, nothing like those reliability issues with ring caps.

I know what they are, spent pocket money on them, and loathe them. Ring caps are far more reliable (albeit more expensive; always a topic of debate when said pocket money was $3 / month).

… was second to none. Looking at almost illegible black text labels on a black Sony TV enclosure.

Mattermost user here, I self-host an instance for friends and family (and their children).

To upgrade and discover I’d lost access to the message history on my own instance was infuriating. I’m investigating alternatives right now.

So far Zulip seems reasonable - although Google and especially Apple being shits about push notifications means you can’t self-host push notification servers 🙄 So I’m considering forgoing push notifications altogether and leaning on email notifications instead.

Not for self-hosted installations, where Zulip aren’t paying for the storage themselves.

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. I have several of his print books and still enjoy reading them; ditto his old cartoons. They really spoke to me years ago, as a cubicle-coder.

Instability in my WIndows NT 4 development machine. I’d been using Linux as a hobbyist for several years, but switched to it at work so I had a machine that didn’t crash every few hours.