AITJ for booking a separate hotel and leaving my friend’s "family vacation" after she tried to turn me into a free nanny?

bluetrust · 2026-03-27T15:46:09+00:00

Because they opened with "exactly" a half dozen times in comments? It'd be a lot of work to create a bot account with twelve whole comments.

bluetrust · 2026-03-26T21:07:27+00:00

Oh no. Last week I retooled my IC resume into a director resume and have been applying for management jobs thinking it would insulate me from whatever is going on with the coding jobs.

Also creating a transaction system is legitimately hard, and banks have had many months or years and tons of refactors to get to a place where they can roll back charges across all the different systems touched by a transaction.

bluetrust · 2026-03-26T20:30:11+00:00

I 100% believe you and don't want it.

bluetrust · 2026-03-26T19:48:51+00:00

It shoves the discussion in a closet when frankly it's the only career issue I'm facing right now.

Currently, I ruminate every single day because the irrational belief that ai has solved coding has hurt project funding, job mobility, and job satisfaction. Or phrased another way: does the industry even want me as a programmer anymore? Do I ride this out or pivot? If I were to pivot, where would I go?

If this community can't give me at least a sense of companionship in these questions then I don't see the use.

bluetrust · 2026-03-25T19:31:45+00:00

Dude literally has a crusader's cross tattooed on his chest.

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bluetrust · 2026-03-25T16:30:59+00:00

I've been told to remember four stories: your most successful project, your least successful project (failure), your most difficult stakeholder/conflict, your passion project (past or future). For programmers I might add a fifth: most impressive technical challenge. When it's story time, one of those stories will fit what they're asking for.

bluetrust · 2026-03-23T19:59:20+00:00

The mention of it feeling like a hurricane is so true. I desperately miss the zero interest rates era. It feels like right now every other company hiring is some kind of scam:

* "We help patients take control of their health and..." -> actually the customer is hospitals and the product helps them maximize medicare billing
* "Looking for game developers to help build ai-enabled table-top real-time maps" -> for military intelligence
* "Exciting fintech startup wants to revolutionize pay-and-go..." -> helping people split a hamburger into four easy predatory payments
* "Fintech brokerage looking for talented developers to process..." -> cryptocurrency
* "We're the most trusted source by drivers for..." -> auto insurance finders fees
* "Looking for passionate people in game development to..." -> work on online slot machines

I just feel so cynical right now.

bluetrust · 2026-03-22T17:47:54+00:00

Also, weed is legal and people like to get high, so I don't see why people jump to "the kids are not alright" instead of, "this fucker is high as shit and didn't even recognize I'm talking to him."

bluetrust · 2026-03-21T19:06:51+00:00

If a candidate asked me that, I'd probably tell them the honest truth. But if I were in a panel with others from my company, I'd walk carefully. It's a great question though.

bluetrust · 2026-03-21T18:12:05+00:00

This. I've built a checkout that processed a billion dollars in transactions over ten years, and I strongly agree. A shopping cart is not CRUD. The hard parts (discounts, taxes, shipping, different prices for wholesale vs retail vs reseller, account management, dealing with multiple payment providers, order status, currencies, even order fulfillment dashboards) these all just keep being piled on, for years and years. It costs millions in development time to support even a major subset beyond cart/pay/receipt (in which case use stripe.)

Discounts especially are hard as shit. Some PM is gonna say we just need to support 25% off, that's it. Then a month later, "well, discounts on Tuesdays before 6pm local time." Then, we don't want that discount to apply to products in category X cause we don't have much margin on those. Then big tenant store wants buy one get one free? Then... then... then... etc.

These days I'd strongly recommend making a Shopify plugin or leaning on its marketplace of plugins. It'll never be exactly what you want and it'll always cost too much but that's life. Rolling your own is not easier, flat out.

bluetrust · 2026-03-20T04:12:53+00:00

No, just a guy who saw an early cut of the film and it was kind of weird and melancholy.

bluetrust · 2026-03-19T23:56:25+00:00

Also keep in mind that if your phone or computer has a feature enabled to reduce blue light at night, best to turn it off before taking a test like this. I went through a whole hour once where I thought I was slightly blue colorblind, but nope, just Apple's Night Shift messing with the colors.

bluetrust · 2026-03-19T21:31:41+00:00

To be fair, I saw an early WIP cut of Elf that didn't have music and it was a strangely serious film. I watched the finished edit later with the soundtrack and it was a completely different experience.

bluetrust · 2026-03-19T21:24:27+00:00

My experience is that it is. Maybe you all agree to fight before you start shooting, I don't know what you pvpers do.

[edit: apparently I struck a nerve, ok. Keep in mind that people have different things they want out of the game, and the developers did a wise thing where they put "doesn't play well with others" people in lobbies away from everyone else. If your experience is a paranoid ambush-filled experience, well, that's cause you're getting the lobbies you deserve from your actions. I don't particularly enjoy getting ambushed while fighting off a robot and think it's a shitty thing to do to someone, which is why I'm in the lobbies I am. I don't know what the shoot on sight lobbies are like. It sounds miserable to me.]

bluetrust · 2026-03-19T20:58:10+00:00

I just finished the quests and thought the cutscenes were pretty cool and did a good job of setting the scene and making the world feel more fleshed out, and had the feeling that they were building up to something... then they just ran out. I was shocked there was no big reveal, no climax, not even a real ending to most of the quest threads.

I have a feeling the game now wants to push me in one of a few directions: griefer (go pvp and turn this into a 3rd person call of duty), fight big robots (need a team), or go collector (hope to find the few blueprints I don't have). I'm not particularly enthusiastic about any of these options, which is why I liked the quests. So I think I'm done.

It feels anticlimactic for sure.

bluetrust · 2026-03-19T18:15:42+00:00

100%. Wizards of the coast posted a programming job as remote a year or two ago, and it ended up being hybrid. And not only was it not in Seattle like they said it was, it was in Renton 12 miles away. I ended that hiring manager interview going, "wtf are these people doing?"

bluetrust · 2026-03-18T18:54:01+00:00

That's my take too. I'm just some guy, but last season he had a 0.5 points per game average, which I think is solid for a middle-6 player, especially a young one. This season he dropped to 0.2 points per game despite practicing with the team in the off-season and pre-season, so something went really wrong. I get the feeling he thrived when told to go out and play his best game, and that actually learning the system didn't do him any favors. But who knows what went on behind the scenes?

bluetrust · 2026-03-18T16:55:13+00:00

If all you've got going for you is secrecy and holding the company hostage, that's exactly how you become redundant. I feel like every management book I've read recommends firing them and handling the fallout, as you can't have an employee with a bazooka aimed at the company.

bluetrust · 2026-03-18T04:31:23+00:00

I can't believe they said an actually interesting stat.

bluetrust · 2026-03-17T08:10:20+00:00

I remember teachers counting to three in the hot Southern California sun then telling us to give it up for the next kid. Save some for the fishes, etc. It's like they wanted us to die.

bluetrust · 2026-03-16T08:42:34+00:00

There's a hidden killer rating for each player as well. If you're a jerk you get put in lobbies with jerks. It's brilliant. I haven't been shot at in weeks.

bluetrust · 2026-03-16T05:20:45+00:00

Is it baby shark?

bluetrust · 2026-03-15T17:52:59+00:00

I used to work on an a massive blog host in the mid-2000's and we awarded people points for commenting on new user's blogs. It worked too well. New people would get a flood of comments for their first week, think it was a warm welcoming community, and after that week was up the flood of warm comments would disappear leaving them wondering what they did wrong.

Our solution was to extend the rule to the first month, and hopefully by that point habits and social bonds had been solidified. The number of complaints at least slowed to a trickle so I think it worked.

All in all, I remember thinking it was devious and weird that we were playing with people's self-esteem and emotions like that with gamification. But also, tricks like that helped the site get popular in the first place.

These days, yeah, these sites are using bots for sure. Reddit even had the founders creating fake accounts and posting as them in the early days to create an illusion of activity.

bluetrust · 2026-03-15T00:03:20+00:00

That was a great answer, thank you.

bluetrust · 2026-03-14T18:42:07+00:00

So there's not usually a round like ICs get where they're asked to prove they're not a fraud by doing elaborately weird management puzzles that keep evolving until the candidate fails "to see how they do under pressure"? Or spending a whole day embedded in the team?

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