tacostakohashi

I've periodically struggled with an HTML resume that can be converted to a PDF using chrome headless / puppeteer wkhtmltopdf, and looks good both on screen and PDF/printed.

Admittedly I'm not an HTML/css guru, but I know a bit... and it really feels like it shouldn't be this hard / require so many tricks to get it working even half ok.

The biggest issue is that the pages kind of fight against the DOM structure of the HTML. Like lets say I have big:

<div> <h2>Experience<h2>

  <div> <h3> Job A </h3> <p>Description</p>

  <div> <h3> Job B </h3> <p>Description</p>

  <div> <h3> Job C </h3> <p>Description</p>

  <div> <h3> Job D </h3> <p>Description</p>

</div>

There isn't really a good way to say...

* Keep "Experience" and "Job A" on the same page.

* Don't break after Job X / before Description.

* Don't try to keep the whole toplevel div on one page by breaking before, just break within it, sensibly.

Whatever tweaks/hints/hacks one applies to achieve that tend to be pretty brittle across browsers/page sizes/etc.

It's very tempting to just give up and go back to... something actually page-centric like word, pagemaker or whatever, instead of HTML and then having print as a second class citizen.

Totally... I've been through this cycle more times than I'd care to count:

"What would be a good day next week to block off time to review this?"

"We don't need a meeting for this, I can get to it <whenever>"

"That's an excellent point, and I tend to agree. Nevertheless, this has been hanging out there for several weeks now. We can schedule the meeting now, and if it ends up getting done before then, it can be canceled.".

I am sympathetic to the "different communication style" line of reasoning, but I don't really buy it in the example I used / people I work with at present.

As far as I'm concerned, responding to some well-prepared prose with "lets discuss this", is just a non-response, and a refusal to engage. If one wanted to have a useful discussion, but preferred something verbal, actually picking up the phone, or responding with something like "I'm curuous about X/Y/Z. Let's discuss this at 2pm, I'll send you an invitation", or "please find some time in my calendar for us to look at this."

That would keep the matter progressing, and provide the opportunity to prepare for a useful discussion. "lets discuss this" is just saying "I need you to spoon-feed this to me, but I'm not going to make arrangements for that, so you'll need to figure out how to deal with that.".

They're annoying companies to work at, yes. They're also highly profitable, so it's difficult to make the case that they're poorly run.

One reason is that there are a lot of people that refuse to do anything unless there is a meeting.

I work with people that...

* When faced with some well-written, succinct email/text explaining both a problem and supposed solution, will "respond" with "let's discuss this" instead of an intelligent response, taking action as proposed, or even mentioning any particular concerns to be discussed / researched ahead of the meeting. They just need it to be spoon fed to them, and need to be "heard", before anything can happen.

* Will ignore requests to review PRs, or look into problems, for weeks on end. When I ask "what would be a good day next week to block off time to review this?", they'll suddenly spring into action, or say that a meeting is not necessary, but prove that in fact it is by refusing to do anything before the prospect of a meeting is raised.

The municipality that collects property taxes, utilities, contractors/mechanics liens, etc. have had the ability to foreclose everywhere since time immemorial, so it's not too crazy really...

Reminds me of the "boss mode" / "boss key" in old games, like MS-DOS days, which would switch the screen to some spreadsheet mockup or suchlike, updated for the current century.

Sounds a lot like the incentives for making a software change / PR or whatever at BigCo...

Publish a PR that has the word "fix" in the description, get it approved, release it to prod... you are the hero, took action, will get promoted, etc.

When it turns out that the "fix" makes everything worse... well, that's everyone _else's_ problem, like whichever users run into that change blowing up, whoever is on support that day, whoever has to undo it.

The old... "concentrated benefits and diffuse costs" problem.

Private property is theft!

Disallow eyeglasses. Abolish money.

Any other good ideas?

[flagged]

I guess that means that VMWare are very skilled in calculating exactly how much they can hike the price / squeeze. Same with oracle, and all the other vendors that play this game.

It kind of makes sense, if you're using VMWare, your choice is to pay a ridiculous but fixed/certain sum, or embark on a risky migration project that probably involves hiring a bunch of people, could take longer than expected, might fail, etc.

Yep... back then, the internet was a way people would discuss and organize their real world interests and activities, like clubs and usergroups would organize their next meeting... and then meet, off the internet.

Now, it's all just online drivel that never turns into anything else.

It depends what kind of business... there are all sorts of weird and wonderful accounting / financial calendar inventions like the 4-4-5 calendar, fiscal years ending in June, bond day count conventions like 30/360, etc.

I do take your point though. I've always found it quite surprising just how universal various arbitrary/western things are like, as you say, the western gregorian calendar, seconds/minutes/hours, SI units for measurement. In a world with so many unintelligible languages and disagreements, you'd think there would be more folks out there doing, I dunno, a 10 day week, or some non-hour/minute system, etc.

Not 100% boss-specific, but...

* regularly generating AI-slop code changes that nearly work, and then trying to hand over to someone else for "completion". this is often a pretty terrible experience, and more work than just having a single person take ownershiop of the _outcome_ - i.e. understand the need, write the code, test it, deliver, make sure it works... generally the coding was never the hard part, and its harder to start with broken code than just from scratch.

* sporadically sharing AI analysis of bugs/problems/crashes/troubleshooting type stuff. again, often nearly correct... but sometimes more work finding the incorrect aspect than starting from scratch.

* lots of AI flavored text and presentations. you know the kind, text where every bullet point is a different emoticon, and AI-generated graphics instead of random, but real photos stolen from the internet.

* lots of AI for code review, either of changes (PRs), or just wholesale analysis of code bases to find problems and automatically create tickets for people to "fix". often , the analysis is not "wrong", and potentially very good... the problem is that it finds "problems" in utilities that don't run in production, historical code just stored for archival purposes, anything and everything... it has no concept of "this is live internet-facing code" vs "this is an ad-hoc utility that does not need to be bulletproof". the volume of work created by AI in this space is truly impressive.

* lots of AI "recipes" for things that could have/should have been check lists / processes / shell scripts / python utilities / actual software. instead of something actually fast, deterministic, and re-usable, the "recipe" now mostly works, but takes several minutes and does slightly different things each time that cannot really be predicted or reasoned about.

If you get your own plane, you won't have a problem finding a terminal without TSA.

Going through TSA is not a condition of using a government airport, it's just what happens if you use an airline.

In any case, being "government property" doesn't mean "completely free of regulation".