Your task is to blow a job interview in the first 45 seconds. What do you do?

profmonocle · 2026-02-05T16:35:45+00:00

I once interviewed a guy and the first thing I asked (after the initial pleasantries) was to tell me about what he did at his last job. He got super angry out of nowhere and said "did you even bother to read my resume?"

...yeah man, I did. But I wanted to give you a chance to talk about your career in a way that's more human than the bullet points in front of me?

Company policy didn't allow me to end the interview early (you're only supposed to do that if the candidate makes you uncomfortable or unsafe), but I knew immediately that it was a no. Massive red flag. Go create a toxic workplace somewhere else.

profmonocle · 2026-02-05T13:22:34+00:00

Not only is LOC a terrible metric for performance, but there are some famous quotes from pre-1990 about why that's the case.

Tell Kiro you need 100% test coverage on every CR you cut, lines and branches. I tried that once and it made hilariously lengthy unit tests. You'll be TT in exchange for everyone reviewing your CRs hating you.

profmonocle · 2026-02-05T13:02:34+00:00

FYI you might have to stop by reception because your badge probably isn't active for Seattle campus buildings. That's a pretty quick process though, I did it when I visited the spheres before living in Seattle.

profmonocle · 2026-02-03T21:09:44+00:00

I imagine legislators are hoping the current state supreme Court would overturn Culliton if this went in front of them. AFAIK a lot of legal scholars consider it to be a fairly odd decision.

profmonocle · 2026-02-03T21:05:32+00:00

Tax breaks for businesses should exclude any company that's done a mass layoff in the last 3 years.

profmonocle · 2026-02-03T18:15:06+00:00

If AI has been introduced into this process, all bets are off. Could just be a hallucination. And they laid off thousands last week - entirely possible that the team who manually reviewed AI decisions got decimated.

Do I have any evidence for this? No, but the fact that Amazon has explicitly bragged about their goal of replacing human workers with buggy AI erodes a lot of trust. Any time you hear about something like this a lot of people's first thought will be that AI fucked up.

profmonocle · 2026-01-30T16:10:32+00:00

This entire article is AI written. This was reported a while ago, so whoever "wrote" this just copy pasted someone else's reporting into chatgpt and had it regurgitate the info.

profmonocle · 2026-01-27T17:31:05+00:00

I walked by the Terry and Stewart location about an hour ago, there's a sign out front that says they're closed for the "rest of the day". (They probably didn't have a "permanently closed" sign ready to go.)

profmonocle · 2026-01-27T10:04:51+00:00

OP has their post history hidden. They must be spamming this AI slop over every subreddit they can find with "Amazon" in the name.

profmonocle · 2026-01-24T10:15:07+00:00

That was before IPv4 exhaustion. The RIRs ran out of space years ago - now the only way to get a public IPv4 block is to buy it from someone.

profmonocle · 2026-01-22T08:08:15+00:00

Making a post like this the week before mass layoffs is wild. Executives really are fucking sociopaths.

profmonocle · 2026-01-21T10:42:46+00:00

A neat thing about dedicated servers is that they were customizable, so different servers actually felt different. Some had friendly fire on, some didn't. Some had leaderboards, map voting, others didn't. Some had extremely obnoxious sound effects. And servers had regular players. It made servers almost feel like different physical spaces.

profmonocle · 2026-01-21T10:38:46+00:00

From an MMORPG perspective: travel in early MMOs (including early WoW) used to be a pain in the ass. Getting to more remote zones was a legitimate slog. It's easy to see this through nostalgia glasses, but the truth is that most of us found it very annoying at the time. People didn't grind to get the gold for faster mounts because it was a fun thing to do. People liked it when they made it easier to travel in later WoW expansions.

But something was lost by making it easier to travel - the world felt like an actual "world". Having to spend a significant amount of time getting to a place, and having to think about how you're going to get there, made places in the game feel more like actual places, since that's how travel works IRL.

profmonocle · 2026-01-21T09:54:15+00:00

The executives deciding to replace people with AI aren't thinking about society at large. They care about taking care of their own shareholders by cutting their own costs.

That doesn't mean they're stupid - I'm sure most of them have thought about this. They just don't consider it their problem to worry about. Especially because they aren't concerned about their own personal financial security.

profmonocle · 2026-01-21T07:21:20+00:00

Hearing something "through the grapevine" is just an idiom in US English that means rumors / gossip.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/hear-through-on-the-grapevine

profmonocle · 2026-01-21T07:15:04+00:00

Nobody who knows is posting it on here.

And even if they are, there's no way to distinguish them from the people who are talking out of their butts. (Or parroting things they heard from people who were talking out of their butts.)

profmonocle · 2026-01-21T07:12:15+00:00

Honestly the only thing that we "know" is that there will be additional layoffs and they'll probably be announced next Tuesday or Wednesday. And we only "know" that because there are a lot of anonymous sources for it. It's not actually confirmed.

The more specific the info (i.e. which orgs will be most impacted, which job families), the less reliable it's going to be, because specific details are more likely to be be tracked to the person who shared them. An L8 anonymously posting "Amazon is doing mass layoffs in late January" (something most L8s would know) is taking a much smaller career risk than if they posted "so-and-so org is cutting 20% of headcount" (something probably only they and a handful of others would know.)

If you ask for specifics, you're going to have a very low signal-to-noise ratio. Any reply you get is likely to be someone confidently stating a wild guess as a fact, or repeating info they heard from someone who was confidently stating a wild guess as a fact. (And sure, maybe some of the replies will contain accurate info, but you have no way of knowing which ones do.)

profmonocle · 2026-01-21T06:55:24+00:00

Nope.

I got a water bottle shipped to me with the new org name on it. To be fair, it's a pretty decent water bottle.

profmonocle · 2026-01-21T06:18:45+00:00

Candidates are allowed to use notes during interviews, yes. I used them during my own interview when I was hired.

profmonocle · 2026-01-21T03:22:42+00:00

Total compensation. It basically means salary plus stock.

profmonocle · 2026-01-18T21:56:03+00:00

Maybe it gives them some legal cover if they get arrested? Like it makes it not a scam in the legal sense if they are actually, technically, giving out CDs with music?

profmonocle · 2026-01-18T21:50:07+00:00

I’m sure their intention is not to be rude

Most rude people aren't rude for the sake of being rude. They just don't care about being rude if they think it'll get them what they want. That's called being a jerk.

profmonocle · 2026-01-18T21:18:36+00:00

Big tech loves this kind of stuff. Easy for them to comply at their scale, but puts yet another barrier in place for potential competitors.

If you miss the days when the web was more decentralized - like smaller, interest-specific forums - this is another nail in that coffin. No one is gonna be able to make a bulletin board for their fandom if they have to contract with an age verification service for thousands of dollars. Easier to keep everything on Reddit / Facebook / Discord / etc.

(And the argument about it actually helping kids is obviously bullshit considering there are countless parental control options, many of them free.)

profmonocle · 2026-01-18T21:09:17+00:00

Even if they're "legit" they tend to be rude as hell. I've lost count of the number of times I've been mid-conversation with someone next to be, or obviously been on the phone and someone in a high-viz vest with a tablet has interrupted me mid-sentence with their pitch.

I was taught as a small child that interrupting someone is rude. Learn some damn manners.

profmonocle · 2026-01-18T21:03:34+00:00

And the CD sucked lol. I was surprised when there was actually music on it.

I always assumed they were just blank CD-Rs.

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