Christopher Masto

Some Christmas traditions involve a red suit, others involve a bell, and some have…

https://youtu.be/hPfg20k5TE8

That’s just called being scammed. There’s no 43% sales tax anywhere in the US.

I switched to Chrome about 10 years ago because Safari was buggy and lost all my tabs one time too many. Also it made it easier to move between platforms. Still using it now. The main thing I wish it had is a visual tab overview like Safari does.

The tech market is shrinking rapidly and permanently. Sounds like you’re still pretty young, so if you have the time to change careers, I think you should.

I spent some time contemplating my life choices and I realized that if I had it to do over again, I’d like to have stuck with computers as a hobby, not a profession.

Exactly the same here.

Plus, some people are really sensitive to tastes and textures. When we’re not them, we call them picky eaters. When I was a child, I couldn’t stand the taste of water, and there were other foods I found repulsive. Even a different brand of ingredient from the one I was used to made me gag.

Somehow, I completely grew out of that and I’m now very adventurous when it comes to food. But it did leave me with empathy when I encounter someone who has a limited palate, which is pretty common among my nerd-spectrum peer group.

When you think about it, eating the wrong thing is a quick path to sickness or death, so it makes sense that food can trigger extreme reactions of disgust. If you ever ate something and got sick afterward, even if the two were unrelated, it’s very hard to un-make that connection.

This plays in my head every time I hear the phrase “weed whacker”. It’s called a whacker, for weeds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMghq58gvFo&t=106

Putting the food in the John McCain memorial hot box.

Sorry I took forever to answer this.

None of my previous jobs (including Google) checked references at all. They may have done a criminal background check, I don’t remember.

This latest one outsources their background check to a company that I’m sure charges them tons of money to do very little. I was disappointed to see from their web site that they are selling their use of AI to screen people. So that’s great.

But anyway, yes, what happened was that I had to fill out a form on the third party web site and give them a bunch of information - driver’s license, SSN, but also education, previous employers, job titles, manager’s names, etc. Then a few days later I got an email from the HR person at my new job telling me the third party company was unable to verify any of the information, so could I please send them a copy of my diploma, a letter from my former employer, etc. Basically I had to do all the legwork that they paid for, apart from checking a few databases to confirm I’m not a felon.

I just started a new job and I had to dig up a copy of my high school diploma as part of the background check. Ridiculous? Yes. But also, they just outsource to a third party company to verify everything. And that company doesn’t seem to actually do what they’re paid for and they just kicked back all of the work to me.

In any case, I agree with the comments that you shouldn’t need a degree. I’ve been a manager in tech for a long time, including 10 years at Google, and have a lot of experience hiring. I don’t have a college degree. And once someone had work experience, I never paid any attention to their education. Lying about it is only going to risk getting caught.

I think you missed the point.

Why is that safer/better? That binary can do anything a shell script can, and it’s a lot harder to inspect.

I worked at Google for over a decade. The issue isn’t that the engineers are unaware or unable. Time and time and time again there would be some new product or feature released for internal testing, it would be a complete disaster, bugs would be filed with tens of thousands of votes begging not to release it, and Memegen would go nuts. And all the feedback would be ignored and it would ship anyway.

Upper management just doesn’t care. Reputational damage isn’t something they understand. The company is run by professional management consultants whose main expertise is gaslighting. And the layers and layers of people in the middle who don’t actually contribute any value have to constantly generate something to go into the constant cycle of performance reviews and promotion attempts, so they mess with everything, re-org, cancel projects, move teams around, duplicate work, compete with each other, and generally make life hell for everyone under them. It’s surprising anything gets done at all, but what does moves at a snail’s pace compared to the outside world. Not for lack of effort, the whole system is designed so you have to work 100 times harder than necessary and it feels like an accomplishment when you’ve spent a year adding a single checkbox to a UI.

I may have gone on a slight tangent there.