winternett

I've found a lot of the traffic may be originating from resume sites..

The minute I unpublished my phone number from job recruiting sites, my spam calls declined by 60-70%. Apparently these career sites don't make enough money of job connections alone.

I now just ask for an email as a first point of contact from potential recruiters.

Meh, I'll just roll PROD back to our 4.7 image, then head down to the pub for a pint until this all blows over... Only 3 years of data will be missing... No biggie! LOL :P

The surveillance factor of LinkedIn is exactly what keeps me entirely off of it... I don't think I've ever gotten a job by using it, it's more like a spare online copy of my resume more than anything else...

It also keeps trying to create a new account automatically off of my gmail account that I can't close... Pretty much a waste of productivity for me to try to use it.

At one point earlier in my career (during the early 2000s), they flew me to Chicago, picked me up in a limo and gave me a tour of the office... I knew I didn't want to relocate (from the East Coast) and remote work wasn't an option back then, so I had nothing to lose... They asked me the question of "4 lightbulbs in a room down the hallway, with 3 light switches in the room I'm in" to tell which switch belonged to which bulb...

I went in totally unprepared for logical tests, and flubbed the perfect answer partially, but it was funny because I asked the guy if I was "doing an interview to be an electrician or a software developer?".

Since then I've been just fine, and to this day, I've never had to answer that question nor use that type of logic on any job... I reverse engineer & migrate major software apps all the time as a Solutions Architect & Development Director.

I've always found interviews that involve behavioral and cognitive tests to never be good for me as long-term jobs... Now I interview & hire people regularly without asking those types of questions at all because the questions can too easily be studied & rehearsed prior to interviews.

The same things are happening on Android too, no coincidence.

The jargon is getting more & more obtuse every year...

Also, a major feature of "vibe coding" now is the rough edges on UI design that don't make sense at all... It's pretty obvious that code bases aren't evolving because these systems can't handle complex prompts while retaining features from prior releases, and it seems like functional testing for releases has now become the kid who can't speak that fell down a well... Oh well.

McDonalds and Taco Bell tried to get rid of their "soft skills" (AKA customer service} and look how they're doing right now... Endless stores that all look & feel the same -- uncomfortable seats, no happy families around for longer than 10 minutes, longer drive-thru lines, and impersonal & impatient staff that avoids customers like the plague.

Evangelists will preach Ai because it's good for corporations that don't care about customer needs, but in the same sense, it may well be the catalyst for many to move out of cities to more human areas as it grows.

Businesses dictate the spread of Ai, and then foist it on customers because they think monopolies are sustainable, but the foundational rules always ring true -- Customer service & commitment are essential to the survival of a business. This tone deaf approach will eventually alienate many from companies that adopt it, and there aren't enough tech-inclined introverts to sustain profit in a world where Ai takes everyone's jobs. We don't ALWAYS want to talk to vending machines, human interaction is a need for many that Ai evangelists seem to think will simply go away.

I hope there are still some reasonable minded business leaders out there to swoop in and fix things after the ashes this era leaves along with all the VC carnage & political damage rendered on our economy.

Ai is great for math though... Maybe that should be the less-destructive focus.

If you read into Web.Com, yes, they are quickly becoming a monopoly on host companies. They do not disclose many of the hosting companies they now own.

If you can find a company that allows clients to install Let's Encrypt Certs on shared hosting, please let me know.

I'd be happy to hear about a traditional hosting company that allows clients to install lets Encrypt certs if you can name any...

Most of my clients don't have budgets big enough for cloud hosting.

Twitter has been toast for quite some time now, well before the Elon effect...

I think pretty much every social platform has transitioned into the same "edgelordy-ness" we dealt with on smaller community forums & IRC back in the day...

Nobody talks about it on platforms out of a fear of retribution, but a handful of people are not meant to have this much control over massive groups of people...

It always devolves into a scheme that only serves the top & only profit at the top.

Twitter was a very useful real-time information tool, that slowly degraded into a payola promo haven, just like FaceBook, Instagram, and now even TikTok...

The time for useful tools of that kind has surpassed us, as most people on these platforms lie about their botted & payola boosted audiences & views.

Social media simply got too big, there aren't even categorized topics one can subscribe to anymore without it all being blended into a random timeline of everyone's posts... That's the final trumpet call for it, something totally different will need to come along and take over until it too becomes overran monopolized as an emotional manipulation tool.

A far better way to promote skills & business is to paint your info on the side of your car now... Far more people will see it than your social account, without needing to pay a membership or for to boost each post. shrug