dandersh

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.

Oh I'm definitely going to check that out. I've always been a fan of his writing and think he does a great job of making linguistics accessible to the general public. If I had been exposed to his writing in high school I definitely could see myself going into the field.

By chance have you ever listened to the Conlangery podcast? It's primarily about constructed languages but there's a lot of info and cool factoids about natural languages contained within.

McWhorter is a great writer and linguist. Incredibly entertaining and enjoyable to read.

Which is why I find his political takes such as this one...so disappointing. Generally my biggest criticism is that he's not nearly as far left as he positions himself and often makes himself a useful idiot deployed against those who actually are.

"Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me wanted to teach his son that America is set against him; I want to teach my kids the reality of their lives in the 21st rather than early-to-mid-20th century. Lord forbid my daughters internalize a pathetic—yes, absolutely pathetic in all of the resonances of that word—sense that what makes them interesting is what other people think of them, or don’t."

This reeks of "racism is dead or nearly so" which is laughable given the protests of the past year especially when juxtaposed against the police response compared to the state capitol protests that culminated in the insurrection in D.C.

"Third Wave Antiracism is losing innocent people jobs. It is coloring, detouring and sometimes strangling academic inquiry."

The first sentence falls under outrage obsessed social media more broadly and is lacking any sort of evidence.

The second is remarkably ignorant of the suppression/ignoring of ideas and views that have recently been forced into broader conversation. Combined with the previous comment on race that I highlighted it points to a "Let's go back in time" mentality that is the complete antithesis of progressive political thought.

This post is misleading and outright false in some respects. From the first article posted:

"By Claire Kirch | May 31, 2020

The civil unrest in the Twin Cities continues to take its toll on Minnesota's literary community—sometimes in unexpected ways. Thursday evening, the night before protesters set fire to two adjoining Minneapolis indie bookstores and destroying them both, the reaction to a St. Paul–based literary agent’s tweet ended up gutting the boutique agency she owns.

Three agents affiliated with Red Sofa Literary tweeted this past weekend that they have resigned in response to owner Dawn Frederick’s tweet, leaving one subsidiary rights executive besides Frederick still employed there. Frederick's official Red Sofa account on Twitter has been removed."

"Frederick, who founded Red Sofa in 2008, is a well-known fixture in Minnesota’s vibrant literary community, serving on the board of directors of the Loft Literary Center and having launched the MN Publishing Tweet Up social group. She also supervises the team of volunteers working in the galley room during the Heartland Fall Forum regional booksellers trade show each year."

So no, this was not during the BLM protests in St. Louis as the date of the article precedes when those began. Furthermore she is a "well-known fixture in Minnesota's vibrant literary community", and has been since 2008, which is something I would have expected someone who "worked in publishing for years" to be aware of.

Throwing her name combined with BLM into search engines like google only returns results after this event, so your assertion of her advocacy is unfounded and not to be believed by the above and what follows.

"Minneapolis attorney Marshall Tanick of the Meyer, Njus, Tanick law firm emailed cease-and-desist letters on Monday to two literary agents and an author on behalf of his client, Dawn Frederick of Red Sofa Literary. The two agents are Beth Phelan of Gallt and Zacker (the email was cc’ed to that agency’s two principals) and Kelly Van Sant, who until two weeks ago worked for Red Sofa. The author is Isabel Sterling, who writes YA novels. SFF author Foz Meadows also received an email, she tweeted, but it contained multiple factual errors and was recalled by its sender."

"UPDATE: On Thursday afternoon, Laura Zats, a principal of Headwater Literary Management in Minneapolis announced that she received a letter from Frederick's lawyer, threatening legal action against the agent for re-tweeting tweets by others alleging that Frederick is racist. Zats is a former employee of Red Sofa Literary, who left it last year ago to found her own agency. She has joined Phelan, Van Sant, and Sterling in their GoFundMe campaign soliciting funds in case of a lawsuit. The campaign has raised almost $15,000 to date.

Several authors have announced that they are severing their relationships with Red Sofa Literary, including Margot Atwell, the head of publishing for Kickstarter. She tweeted Thursday afternoon that she has terminated her relationship with Frederick "due to the choice she made to call the police during the protests against George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, and her subsequent decision to threaten legal action against her critics."

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...

So Frederick decides to start suing people, which results in agents/authors not targeted in lawsuits to cut ties with her in part due to her legal efforts.

Had she stuck with the apology she released a few days after the tweet, instead of doubling down and even throwing lawsuits around, things would have likely been far better for her. Or even not publicly announcing she was calling the police during protests against police behavior.

In other words she's not the blameless martyr you make her out to be.

And finally cancelling is just a propaganda term on the political right to escape the negative consequences of their actions. This is evidenced by it not being applied when, say the (Dixie) Chicks criticized President Bush and had their careers largely ended. It's also not applied when the 'cancelling' is apolitical, such as a restaurateur who alienates their customers/community (think Cafe Hon from Kitchen Nightmares).

EDIT: Less than 2 minutes after this was posted it was down voted and flagged.

When our youngest was born the nurses (incorrectly) thought his blood sugar was low and had him transferred to a different hospital via ambulance. We were able to fight and get the $2000 bill waived on account of the fact that it was a needless trip. Unfortunately my wife spent the night alone as I was with our son.

On a somewhat related note in the span of 10 years the cost to us to deliver our kids doubled. Same hospital too.

"White can start by moving his King's pawn 2 spaces, i.e. playing "e4". This move has many strengths - it immediately works on controlling the center, and it frees two pieces (the Queen and a Bishop). This is a popular first move, leaving Black with two options"

I don't remember much from my chess obsessed youth, but going e4 and moving the bishop/queen into position for a 4 move checkmate will always remain. When I subbed middle school years ago it was my go to whenever playing students. Oh man the reactions I'd get when it worked, lol.

I've been meaning to get back into chess more seriously, this looks like a helpful guide.

I think your comment on intermediate skills is an important one. Personally it seems like there is often a dearth of intermediate resources to better understand and utilize the language. Maybe it's more complex use cases, patterns and best practices, advanced syntax (looking at you, Haskell), etc.

For Python I think you're lucky in how versatile and ubiquitous it is. I've found the best way for applying Python is "I want to learn x" and oftentimes 'x' is suitable or desired with Python.

In your case I can see search (as mentioned by someone else) as being useful. Also being able to make API requests for cases/documents that you may want to search or maybe save to a local db for later indexing. Speaking of indexing, maybe you may start looking into a bit of NLP.

My biggest piece of advice would be that if you really want to use Python, use it in a situation where it makes sense but could be accomplished a different way. Maybe that document request form that you were going to fill out via the UI can be done via an API endpoint you can write in Python. Instead of searching via 'Ctrl-F' write a small script that you pass document(s) to search and term(s) to search for.

No, Biden had never won a single primary (while Bernie had multiple during this campaign alone) until SC, when most every other candidate dropped out while endorsing Biden in a span of a week or so in a (successful) attempt to deny Bernie the nomination.

And then there are things like the Iowa caucus where Mayor Pete decided to crown himself winner before one was officially declared (gee, sound familiar?) because the Iowa Dem party crapped the bed.

The algorithm makes sense in certain cases, such as music or tv shows, but it's not a one size fits all solution.

Another issue is the use of autoplay (which is enabled by default in chrome on my phone), where they keep shoveling more content at you even if you didn't intend to watch more.

Very interesting, thanks!

Only one I didn't recognize is Bongino.

I would be very curious in the age demographics of FB users. My understanding is that initially the user base was young and now it's older, specifically boomer age range. I could be completely wrong, I've never had an account and am just going off the people I know personally and what I've noticed being online.

Yep.

Also it can be (not saying that's the case here) used as a way to exclude undesirable politics while keeping desirable politics in place.

For example the "don't bring politics into sports" that was bandied about during the kneeling controversy in the NFL a few years ago. The National Anthem is political. All of the "support the troops" events during games (paid for by the taxpayers!) is political.