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How did you swing that transition? Did you study for PMP before applying around, leverage network to get in the door then backfill skills, or what?


Yeah, I got my PMP before applying around, combined with some luck I suppose. My IT role was basically a solo sysadmin before where I basically was the technical PM + engineer in one, and I did that for about 8 years so I had a ton of experience I could spin on my resume.


I was having this discussion with my 9 year old yesterday. He mentioned that a friend had Rocket League on their Switch 2 and "it didn't even need a game card". I told him that anything without a physical card can be taken away, the company that made it can decide to take it back or to stop letting it work. Compared that to my old DS which he found along with game cards for Lego Star Wars and Scribblenauts that still work ~20 years later.

I think he "got" it. He was certainly annoyed at the idea that something purchased could just be taken back. Maybe it'll stick and he'll be better able to understand why I'll push back on a new PlayStation or any digital only games.


What is frustrating is that even when you buy physical games, often what you get is a buggy beta release of the software that isn't playable without GBs of day-one patches. I have little confidence that 20 years from now I will be able to play console games I bought today, without resorting to "pirating" and console mods or emulators. I'm pretty sure that the Switch will be my last console because of this.

At least with PC I have the actual files for the game I am playing, and can backup and mod them as I wish.


I've thought it would be cool to have a console where later updates are installed on the game cartridge directly.


Be aware that many (most) new games with physical disks can also be taken away (see Concord).


We must simply raise kids to understand the pitfalls of live service games and how they should never be trusted or given money.


Concord is explicitly an online-only FPS. I don't think that's representative of most games.


As with everything it depends what you class. If you went on raw number of games you only really count Mobile/Steam slop. If you correct for most played games then Roblox, Candy Crush, Minecraft, PUBG, LoL, Fortnite these are all games that owning the disc doesn't guarantee anything. If you count AA/AAA releases on PS5 it seems unlikely that most discs will ever be unplayable (though I think that is always at Sony's and the publisher's whim)


Your point stands, but Rocket League specifically is free (this wasn't always true, but is now...)


I mean Rocket League is game focused on matchmaking through an online platform. Its main game types will stop working when that platform goes away. That's just the kind of game it is, its not like playing Lego Star Wars at all.

I see playing a game like Rocket League more in lines of having a membership to club to play a certain game rather than owning a copy of the game to play alone, forever. The club will eventually go away, that's just the nature of such things.

I do agree its a good lesson to teach your kids about the limits and issues of digital "ownership" though.


We used to play RA on my friend's home network, which was thin net running IPX. The house rule was that if we'd collectively built enough units that the game started slowing down you had to attack. It was good times.


When it worked, IPX LAN was maybe the peak UX in multiplayer gaming.

Moving everything to TCP/IP came with a lot of improvements, but we also lost important things. Reminds me of the move from Flash to HTML5.


I was using ipx over hamachi for multiplayer c&c as recently as 15 years ago!


Hamachi is what I always bring up when explaining tailscale :P


I missed the word "Treat" in the title initially and I was incensed. All dogs are the best dog TYVM.


I've found that Gemini with Google maps integration does this pretty well.


My company instituted a monthly "best use of AI" award to encourage people to share how they're using it. I suggested we should also have a "most wrong AI output" award to remind everyone they can't just trust it blindly but that hasn't happened yet for some reason ...


0xf00fc7c8


Shouldn't that be 0xc8c70ff0, since we're talking about a little-endian CPU? (according to this[1] the bytes in memory are F0 0F C7 C8).

On the other hand, I probably wouldn't have recognized the F00F bug mention if you had actually written 0xc8c70ff0.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug


It was a popular meme in computer security focused groups for a while after it was discovered since it was an unprivileged DoS. I only remember seeing it talked about with the f00f representation: some people even called it "getting f00f'd" if you managed to trick someone into executing the instructions.


One of my favorite interview questions: "Here are some SSH credentials. What does this system do?"

Sometimes there aren't any docs. Sometimes the docs are wrong. It's important to be able to establish what the actual running situation is.


When I was interviewing people on behalf of a client, I was surprised at the number of people who didn't even know what SSH was. This was for a mid-level software developer and not a junior and they all came with glowing resumes.

They all insisted that it was essential to have a CI/CD process but didn't even know what the "CD" part even did. Apparently you just "git push" and the code magically gets on the server. There are many ways to do deployments and a CI/CD process isn't always suitable and can have many forms, in my opinion, but I was happy to discuss any and all. But it's difficult to do that without the basics. As you said, before I was commissioned the platform had no documentation, was crumbling under tech debt and failing constantly so something like getting on the server to at least figure out what's going on was essential.


You’ve listed a whole gamut of reasons why having the process is essential, so they weren’t wrong ;)


I went for a senior sysadmin interview role and they asked me to debug a website in the browser that was only visible on localhost, ssh was available.

They asked me to double check that part because they assumed I just hadn't done that part, because apparently I was the first person who didn't need help with an SSH tunnel.


There’s a lot of that going around, lately. I recently had an interviewer admit I was not in the first round of candidates sent for in-person finals, but they had all bombed out on very basic SSO questions despite having a decade managing Entra; I was a “second choice” candidate and the first one to correctly answer the broad strokes of setting up an SSO app, despite not having touched Entra since it was called Azure AD.

I suspect this is AI’s doing, but cannot be sure. It’s really critical that technical interviewers weed out the over-inflaters though, now more than ever.


This predates AI. I've been interviewing candidates(SRE/DevOps) since 2018, so many candidates that claim to have extensive experience with things completely fall apart when you put them in front of a terminal.


Gathering and mapping unfamiliar systems is part of that skillset. I’m also looking at being able to think laterally, being able descend abstraction layers, and understanding architectural characteristics and constraints (Roy Fielding’s Dissertation), which will recur at each level of abstraction.


  # ip a
  # ss -tulpn
  # ps aux
  # df -h
  # apt install lnav
  # journalctl -f | lnav
I'd probably ask you what would you like it to do (risking pissing you off) and then get on with trying to work out what is going on in the box.

Mind you, my job title is MD, so I get that luxury.


I'm hiring at a small company and it's a nightmare. 1,000+ applicants for a software engineering position and we have essentially no help from recruiting. I'm filtering based on keywords, giving each resume a max of 90 seconds, and anything that even slightly seems off gets rejected.

I only have the bandwidth to talk to a couple 10s of candidates since I have the entire rest of my job to do, so I can see the appeal of an AI interviewer. I'd never use one due to the issues brought up here though.


just thinking about this, if you had the latitude to explain it more or less exactly as you have here, in human language, and frame it as a screen stage of the application and not an interview, and add: 'hey, I know this is really far from ideal but if you're legitimately interested this probably works in your favour', good people might not mind it.

I think most of the issue with this kind of thing, practical stuff aside like extra time invested and potential unpleasantness of actual experience, is what it implies about the culture and your relationship. If you level with people a lot of that gets addressed, and you're left with 'only' the practical inconvenience.


That works only for a minute. Then every company having an AI interview stage will "level with you".


You're right, but this is always true in recruitment. Anything that gives you an edge won't last long as it will be copied if it works well.


I used a simple “tell me what you had for breakfast” line to filter out people who don’t read. It required no work from the applicant but filtered out some of the spam. I wonder if an AI-resistant version could be made.


>I used a simple “tell me what you had for breakfast” line to filter out people who don’t read.

Seems like a good screening. Atleast it's better than - "what are your accomplishments.?"


Asking for personal information or other stuff that isn't required for the application is weird and somewhat illegal, so maybe I would have ignored it even if I noticed it while reading.


What you had for breakfast is not personal information, and of course nowhere near illegal. The worst employees are those who start out with an attitude that the employer is their enemy like this.


Requiring to disclose your breakfast habits for a job application has not anything to do with your merit to the company, and gives grounds to the possibility of choosing people on sympathy to their answers to that question. It became frowned to include a picture into a CV, because this feeds implicit biases, why should that be any different with alimentary behaviour?

Honestly for dealing with job application spam, this sounds like a neat way to handle this, but without that context, it is just weird. Also it seems to be obsolete against people using LLMs for these applications, I expect them to be able to just invent an answer for that question just fine.


Just the fact that you're ready to go all-in arguing about a detail of small talk and start talking about legality and such, is employability poison. And that's something interviewers are looking for. I agree that it's a weird question, but one that the person being interviewed can easily just pass without it being a big deal.

The other poster said it's just a question to easily filter out applicants who aren't paying attention, and it seems as good a method as any. Say "just a cup of coffee" and move on. If the interviewer continues to talk about breakfast or other irrelevant stuff, then I'd just end the conversation. But they can have one for free.

But on the subject, I have no idea how companies manage to screw up their hiring process this much. I used to sometimes interview and hire people and found it to be the easiest thing ever, and I never had the need to do these weird games or more than a phone interview to find great employees. How hard is it to just focus on the exact task of the job and find a candidate who understands it and has a good attitude?


As I said I would have just ignored that request in an application, because it sounds inappropriate. I would just give the context that not all people not writing an answer failed to read that request.

> And that's something interviewers are looking for.

I understood this answer to be part of the written application, in an interview I would just classify this as pointless small talk and just answer something.

> Just the fact that you're ready to go all-in arguing about a detail

This is HN, sir. Going all-in on detail is part of the culture.


Well said!


You can just lie. There is literally no wrong answer here.


Any data in an application affects the likelyhood to be employed, that is irrelevant whether that is actually true.


In many countries (certainly the EU and UK), religion is certainly considered personal information, and this sort of question skirts fairly close to that if asked during eg. Lent or Ramadan.

And even outside those periods, it's completely unrelated to the job or the applicant's suitability for it. It might be fine as small talk when setting a candidate at ease or as an icebreaker, but it's unreasonable to expect to form a judgement based on their answer.

Besides, it's the sort of thing that an LLM-based system should easily be able to handle. I'm not sure it would ever give you any sort of useful signal.


I think that someone getting hung up on something so irrelevant would probably not be a good culture fit.


I agree. If I see "unfortunately we receive hundreds of applications from people who don't read the job description, please include the word banana in your application" I will be sympathetic. If I "see interview with our ai bot first" I will nope out.


At this point just save yourself the 90s per resume and just throw out 50% or more of the resumes. At least then you might get more time to assess how good the remaining resumes are.


Not the parent but that was not at all clear to me. I immediately thought of taking multiple successive instantaneous screenshots and then stacking them. I'm not sure I would have thought of using a camera within a few minutes to an hour, it's not a tool I would ever reach for normally.


Oh, so your screenshot utility has "long exposure" and an "ND" filter and "shutter speed" controls, just like a phone's camera? What kind of screenshot utility simulates optical camera effects? What purpose does that serve? Care to share a link to it?

>Obviously harder to expose a bright screen without some ND since the shutter speed is the phone's main exposure control

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral-density_filter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutter_speed


I just did this with 50% transparency. It works


Also not the parent but how the hell did you not understand what "long exposure" means ffs


Because the context is about screenshots and context matters

"ffs".


You mean like all of the context I used describing something not a screenshot. Being able to pick up on context clues from the reading is a crucial skill one should have in life. It also makes one look less clueless in conversation when the topics shift quickly and one can keep up.


None of this warrants the type of response they got, nor your attitude.


Periods go inside of quotes, even mealy mouthed shock quotes because an internet abbreviation made you upset.


Nah it's your attitude that brings nothing worthwhile.


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