shaggyfrog

Louis Rossmann is a well-known figure in the maker/hacker spaces. He has been making top-notch instructional videos for a long time.

Amazon is one of the largest tech companies in the world.

Amazon's hostile relationship to their users and abuse of their monopoly position are important, frequent topics of conversation (especially on HN). That such an abusive action happened to someone like Rossmann means it can happen to anyone.

Summarizing what happened "eceleb drama" is not just inaccurate, but totally bad faith.

I hear that 2023 is going to be the Year of Linux on the Desktop!

> The system is designed so that most of the staffing budget goes to new hires, not to reward existing employees.

Organizations undervalue their employees, encouraging brain drain, and then wonder why retention is such a hard problem. It's almost comical.

It also doesn't help that salary sharing is still so taboo (in the US/Canada at least). Stinginess is hard to do when people know what they're worth and know what you're paying everyone else.

> Now that I see it from the manager perspective, I pledge to stay sharp and become a job hopper ... as soon as I find the time to start interviewing. :^)

It's true that interviewing takes up a lot of time, but you can accomplish a lot just by doing low-stakes networking. Connecting with someone new over coffee at a cafe (and/or virtually) is a 15-30 minutes, every once-and-a-while kind of thing. Even better if you interact with them before/after on social media.

"Because I paid for the game, and despite the fact I was happy to pay for it and I enjoy playing it, I think everyone else should need to pay for it, too. Otherwise all that enjoyment I had will be undone."

c.f.: sunk cost fallacy

What would happen if the Colorado state legislature passed a law that said you can't sell goods or services to people in Colorado if you refuse employment to people in Colorado?

Don't use the Zoom app. Load meetings in an incognito/private/whatever browser window, and cancel the automatic download it prompts you with, then click Join In Browser.

Nothing about this company's attitude towards privacy has changed in years.

Based on my personal experience of automated testing in AAA games, even if you "only" count the overlap with the actions humans take, it's a huge overlap in practice. And while there are edge cases only humans find, automated testing finds bugs humans don't.

The point of that section is that the earlier you find bugs, the quicker you fix them, and you end up with less overall pain for the length of the project.

Asking for money from candidates as a pay-to-get-hired scheme is evil for the same idea that unpaid internships are evil. Taking it to the next level, it's offering jobs to people with wealth who have networks with wealth. Hyper-discriminatory.

There used to be a time when companies saw employees as long-term assets, to be invested in, educated and trained, given space to grow and learn. Here, they're seen as such liabilities that they need to mitigate the financial risk a company could possibly take, but still ultimately be as disposable as ever.

It's the most crass, base form of rent-seeking I've seen from a YC company.

No wonder they got funded...

> (I wouldn’t hire again but they did a fine job)

This alone makes no sense to me. It's a contradiction.

So I assume the website/author thinks they're a kind of mega-hustler 1000x developer or something.

Facebook is a massively evil company, a true net-negative to life on earth, a destroyer of personal privacy, responsible for facilitating genocides, constantly lying to its users, the most egregious example of how corruptive a monopolistic corporation can be on a society at a global level.

If this recruiter is to believed -- and I wouldn't believe a goddamn word of any of it -- there are all these poor, principled people who really truly want to "make Facebook better" but dangnabit they just don't have critical mass yet.

Bullshit. All of it.

This is a carefully calculated response, like all of Facebook's responses (PR or otherwise), to make you drop your guard and stop using your critical thinking faculties. It's a siren song, with promises of six figures and early retirement.

Listen... if you're at Facebook, you've personally made a decision that you'd rather collect your paycheque than stop contributing to the beast that surrounds you. You're fine with the pervasive corruption and rampant disinformation and hypocrisy because you're making bank. Don't be shy. Own it. Say it with a full chest. At least it would be genuine.

But don't lie to yourself, or your coworkers, or anyone outside the company, and say you're trying to "make Facebook better". It can't be made "better" in its current form. It will never be better. It needs to be dismantled. It needs to be put on trial. It needs to be bled dry.

Create a firewall between your personal and professional time. Another name for this is “setting healthy boundaries”.

Always create new accounts for anything work related -- GitHub, Apple ID, whatever.

Don’t install work apps on your personal phone. Don’t enrol your personal phone in corporate MDM. If they want you to use a device for work, ask them to give you one.

Don’t do personal stuff on your work devices. Don’t do side project work on your work devices. Only do work for your employer on your work devices. Turn it off when you’re done work and leave it off until you start work the next day.

Be very clear on all your contractual obligations related to this before you start a new job. Ask to see ahead of time all the paperwork they will ask you to sign, so there are no last-minute surprises (“oh, you want to own anything I create outside of working hours?”).

Firewall yourself to protect yourself.

Edit: One more: don’t use corporate WiFi with your personal devices

> looks like someone with the same name as the author? that seems kind of unlikely

Unlikely, yes, but not impossible.

> I mean at that point you’re advocating for the author to not have any identity

I am not advocating that at all. Please don't put words in my mouth.