> A simple question to ask an employer during an interview is whether the company is profitable or not. If so, for how long?
This is great advice.
For instance, I was once in an interview where they were grilling me. I was reluctant to do the interview in the first place, because they'd gone bankrupt TWICE in the past five years.
At the end of the interview, it seemed fairly clear that my odds of getting the job were about 50/50. The interviewers were smart and they were asking hard questions.
But when I asked them to comment on their two recent bankruptcies, it changed the mood entirely. At that point, the entire "vibe" of the interview shifted. It became CLEAR that they'd been losing employees at a furious pace, because of their financial struggles.
Once we talked about "the elephant in the room," the entire interview tone changed, and they made me an offer in less than twelve hours.
My "hunch" is that they'd been grilling interviewees (because they were smart folks) but had been scaring interviewees off because they were in such terrible financial shape.
Basically, potential hires were ghosting them because of their financial problems, while they were simultaneously discussing technical issues when the real issue was financial.
I accepted the offer, and the company is still around. I had a similar interview experience at FTD in San Diego (the florist), and they are kaput:
> “Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making $40k” really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people doesn’t.
One time I was tasked with auditing what my team spent, at a tech startup. During my audit, I found that we'd spent a million dollars to make a single phone call.
Basically:
* We were spending money like it was going out of style
* We were getting the highest level of support contracts on EVERY piece of hardware and software that we bought. This mean that we would routinely purchase hardware, stick it in the corner of our data center, and it would have an expensive support contract, before it had even been installed in a rack and plugged in. In some cases, we bought stuff that never got installed.
* The software support contract from one of our vendors was a million dollars a year. The software was quite reliable. In a single year, we'd made a single support call.
This is why I recommend to everyone, both in and out of tech, that you need to try and get as much money out of your initial negotiation and down the line as possible from your prospective employer; if you don't get it, it'll be fucked away on like one single meal or evaporate some other way.
> Who on earth could've thought it was a good idea to get an AI to pretend to be a black queer mother of two?
I would think that the obvious use of AI Facebook profiles would be to train them on someone who actually existed in the real world. Take someone like Jimmy Carter, train an LLM on everything he's ever said, and then let people interact with that.
But I imagine there are legal reasons they can't do this?
That makes a lot of sense. My Facebook feed is almost 100% hobby stuff now. Sometimes my wife will say "hey did you see this thing that [family member] posted" and I haven't. And I assume the reason I haven't, is because the content from my hobbies is crowding out the original purpose of Facebook (connect with friends and family.)
Worst of all, is that Facebook is a terrible platform for hobby stuff. Plain ol' PHP forums are much better for that; they're much easier to navigate, easier to search, easier to host pictures on, etc.
I frequently find myself posting something on one of the Facebook hobby forums, then realizing that:
* the signal to noise ratio isn't great, because there's a ton of people spamming those forums with products and other social media that they're trying to promote, YT in particular.
> There's something essentially wrong with Meta and Google where they can do tech but not products anymore.
I'm listening to "Masters of Doom" on Audible. It's about the creation of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, etc. Great book.
Something that's interesting about it, is that Id Software seemed to largely reject the idea of having a game where the players 'connected' to the characters or the story. They were laser focused on:
* Carmack creating a game engine that was the best in the world
* Romero and crew making the gameplay as fun as possible
But it sounded like they had folks on the team who wanted to make a story where the players could 'connect' with the protagonist. He was fired.
Some dude named "Tom."
Facebook, weirdly enough, seems to have the issue. Which is particularly odd considering that's their product!
I haven't played games in ages, but when I saw "Half Life" for the first time, it felt nearly as "revolutionary" to me as Wolfenstein 3D was.
I feel like the way Romero and Carmack wanted to make the player "connect" with the game was different than what Tom had in mind (from reading the book).
Tom wanted elaborate lore and story-telling, while the rest wanted to make the game experience what the player connected to. The instant reaction to your input, seeing your bad-ass character (and by extension yourself) inflict awesome damage on the world.
This to me is more of a conflict of _what_ the player should connect to, as opposed to not wanting the player to connect at all.
It's kinda surprising that nobody has made a product for that, because it COULD be done with a plain ol' loudspeaker playing out of phase.
Basically:
1) put a mic above one person's head, in the headboard or somewhere near there
2) record the room
3) play the room back from the same location, but out of phase
voila! Snoring cancellation.
One unfortunate side effect is that it might be quite loud for other people in the home! Because the cancellation will only work well at a single point in space; get a few feet away and it will sound like TWO people snoring. (The snorer, and the loudspeaker.)
This is great advice.
For instance, I was once in an interview where they were grilling me. I was reluctant to do the interview in the first place, because they'd gone bankrupt TWICE in the past five years.
At the end of the interview, it seemed fairly clear that my odds of getting the job were about 50/50. The interviewers were smart and they were asking hard questions.
But when I asked them to comment on their two recent bankruptcies, it changed the mood entirely. At that point, the entire "vibe" of the interview shifted. It became CLEAR that they'd been losing employees at a furious pace, because of their financial struggles.
Once we talked about "the elephant in the room," the entire interview tone changed, and they made me an offer in less than twelve hours.
My "hunch" is that they'd been grilling interviewees (because they were smart folks) but had been scaring interviewees off because they were in such terrible financial shape.
Basically, potential hires were ghosting them because of their financial problems, while they were simultaneously discussing technical issues when the real issue was financial.
I accepted the offer, and the company is still around. I had a similar interview experience at FTD in San Diego (the florist), and they are kaput:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/03/flower-delivery-company-ftd-...
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