I’ve read many horror stories from Indian developers about how they’re treated. They can’t escape it since almost every company in India will treat them the same. Their only escape is a remote job or to relocate.

I believe we’ll see this play out in a global scale. Once every employer paying a good salary does this, we won’t be able to pick and choose, without forfeiting a huge chunk of income. At that point I’d rather become a baker.

Small companies are an obvious 3rd place to escape to and there should be a good number of them given all the big companies behave as you indicate.. unless it really hard to start a new business in India. Do you know if this is the case or why else wouldn't you consider small businesses as a alternative?

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.?"

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.

I hate this so much that I strongly considered creating a family Apple ID. Nowadays I’m just considering leaving Apple ecosystem altogether. Hopefully soon.

This is the only logical conclusion.

If a company is hostile against its users, then walk away and don't look back.

Jitsi has audio rooms like discord?

Jitsi supports audio, video, or both, in addition to screen sharing.

One use case Jitsi doesn't support that Discord does is "push to talk"; that's something I haven't seen a good alternative for, other than Mumble, which seems much less usable for other purposes. But for other purposes, Jitsi works very well; I've had thousands of hours of calls on it at this point.

In an ideal world, I'd love to see a web standard for a web app to request access to a single (user-determined) key, to allow web apps to do push-to-talk while staying in their sandbox.

Well, even if Jitsi doesn't have Push-to-Talk, you can still easily get it by using a hotkey to mute/unmute the mic system-wide.

For exampple, if you're on PC, MicMute [1] can be used for free, or if you want more customization, I would humbly present my side project, AutoPTT [2].

[1] https://github.com/SaifAqqad/AHK_MicMute/

[2] https://autoptt.com/

YMMV, but I was too horny to actually make use of my superior fluid intelligence in my 20s, so I’m content with the tradeoff here.

I guess it depends on your definition of "fluid" intelligence, though I was bad with both of them in my 20s.

Those of us that grew up stupid have the advantage here - our coping mechanisms never stop working! Everyone else has to relearn how to make it work.

Both of you take your well-deserved upvotes and scram.

You listed “corporate backing” as a good thing and “no adoption outside Apple ecosystem” as a pain point. Why would it get adopted outside Apple ecosystem if Apple decides what happens to it?

Swift being maintained by the open source community is an illusion. The community was very against function builders. Apple went ahead and did it anyway because they needed it for SwiftUI. The open source community just provides discussion, and Apple gets its way either way.

> The community was very against function builders.

Scanning the multiple review threads, that doesn't appear to be the case. According to the acceptance post, the community was overall positive about the feature but expressed concerns over the attribute naming, which was renamed in response.

Read the thread reviewing the proposal.

Just like Go's dependency and package management, Google also bullied the community into their own solution.

Being a well respected dev and being active on Twitter are contradictory

Like it or not, it's where most people are

Most whom? If we're talking about any kind of people, then no, there are far bigger Social networks than eX-Twitter. And if we are just talking about tech-people, it's disputable, but at least we could talk about the quality discussions there.

Mastodon has a lot of tech people but very much a hard on for hating anything with AI, especially with AI coding. The rest of the social networks don’t really get a meaningful amount of tech discussions.

X is the only place to learn about the latest developments on AI coding. And yes, you do have to sift through a lot of idiots on there and a lot of scams and bots, but the point remains.

What are you even talking about? Reddit, YouTube, even TikTok has more serious tech-content than X these days. X is now hard infested with scammers and bots, who want to sell you their snake oil and other low-quality-trash. High-quality-content is the exception. Sure, there are still high-profile-people, but outside of posting relevant news, usually leading to other platforms, even those are more busy with trash-talking and dreaming around.

YouTube is consumption only, you don't really have a lot of discussions, also it's stale, because it takes quite a bit to reflect the latest.

As a Reddit user - Reddit's tech talk quality is quite lower than X. Don't know about TikTok, haven't used it, I imagine it's the same as Youtube.

X is a dumpster fire for sure, but there's still quality people on there that push the latest on what's happening. It's where the tech companies first announce things and it's where the discussion around those gets picked up.

I mean, the grifter, scam, hype vendor & crypto adjacents definitely are

Not a good analogy. Once you build a bridge, it’s done. Software nowadays is never “done”, and requirements constantly change. It’s more akin to building a rope bridge and trying to upgrade it to accommodate cars while it’s in active use.

Sounds like you don't have a good process for handling scope changes. I should know, the place I'm at now it's lacklustre and it makes the job a lot harder.

Usually management backs off if they have a good understanding of the impact a change will make. I can only give a good estimate of impact if I have a solid grip on the current scope of work and deadlines. I've found management to be super reasonable when they actually understand the cost of a feature change.

When there's clear communication and management decides a change is important to the product then great, we have a clear timeline of scope drift and we can review if our team's ever pulled up on delays.

I feel like some people in this thread are talking about estimates and some are talking about deadlines. Of course we should be able to give estimates. No, they're probably not very accurate. In many industries it makes sense to do whatever necessary to meet the estimate which has become a deadline. While we could do that in software, there often isn't any ramifications of going a bit overtime and producing much more value. Obviously this doesn't apply to all software. Like gamedev, especially before digital distribution.

I think it's obvious that all software teams do some kind of estimates, because it's needed for prioritization. Giving out exact dates as estimates/deadlines is often completely unecessary.

OK, so that sounds fine. Software delivers value to customers when it's better than nothing some of the time. Even if it barely functions then they're probably happier with having it than not, and may be willing to fund improvements.

When customers ask when feature X will be ready, they sure have an idea of done in their mind.

Sure, so extract the customer's definition of done as part of requirements analysis process and write it down. Get them to agree in writing, including the explicit exclusion of other things that aren't part of their idea of done.

I’m using native mail app of iOS/macos and search bar works for me. However, iOS has a persistent issue of not fetching new mails, even from iCloud, which has support for push updates. I inadvertently build a habit of opening mail app and refreshing.

I find it often won't even refresh when you click the little envelope "get mail" icon. That thing is like the "push button to walk" at crosswalks. A button connected to nothing, to make you feel like you have agency.

None of the examples you provided were being sold as “intelligence”