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.

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.

Bonus points for hitting all categories in a single sentence.

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.

Your suffering is not a KPI

Some days I doubt that.

Can confirm! Chickens, dogs, and children - all noisy as hell in their own way, and all make our garden sound great :)

Neighbours had a rooster for a while, until someone complained to the Council and the “rooster police” made them get rid of it.

But I loved it! Waking up early in the AM for meetings with folks in the US, and hearing a rooster, just started long days the right way.

Australian here - we have this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_of_the_Year

Sincerely hope he’s awarded the next one.

I mean … if he’s using Cisco gear, he’d better be praying.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cisco-botches-fix-for-rv320-rv325-routers-just-blocks-curl-user-agent/

Cisco’s mitigation consisted of making the router firmware blacklist the user agent name for the ‘curl’ command-line tool …