You dropped this: /s

I get what you’re saying but the forgetful customer is explicitly what they said they want, which is dumb any way you look at it. Many times you’re forced into signing up for subscription, or coerced under the guise of a free trial. Now this wouldn’t be as bad if they came back and were like, “hey we see you haven’t used our service in a while, do you still need it?” rather than just leeching money from the user. The system is designed to purposely allow the user to make these errors and that’s wrong any way you want to shape it.

“If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.”

I heard this before and it is becoming more true each day.

I worked at Amazon and the head of Ring said their best customers were people who bought a subscription and then put the camera in a drawer and forgot about it. They don’t even want to provide you a service. They want you to absentmindedly give them money every month because you forgot to cancel.

You should. The next time you want to use it, it’ll probably do some bullshit. Better to be rid of it now than be coerced into giving HP money in the future. If you need a printer, replace it with whatever Brother laser printer is on sale at the moment.

Fucking PHONES had more RAM. It was so fucking stupid. And despite their arguments, it was proven time and time again 8GB was not enough.

I think you’re confusing Thunderbolt with the lightning cable. Hell, even basic USB-C is faster than lightning cable.

False. I was issued that mouse at a previous workplace and it pissed me off so much I brought in my own mouse. And my experience was that when the mouse was fully dead it needed to charge a long time to be usable again.

If it just simply let you use it while it was plugged in there’d be absolutely no issue. It’s a dumb design.

The candidate said they were going to use Java. I asked them if perhaps they weren’t coding in Python instead? They insisted it was Java. I forget the details but they proceeded to “fix” their code by doing some stuff that made absolutely no sense no matter what language they were using.

It’s so fucking stupid. If you can sign up with a click, you should be able to cancel with a click. There’s no justifiable argument against that other than corporate greed.

I do remember one of my most satisfying cancelation calls though. I just kept saying, “No.” Just “no”. No added explanation. No added reasoning. It frustrated the retention employee so much. They were like “but WHY?” They couldn’t try to convince me not to quit since I didn’t give them any reasons for why I didn’t want it, just that I didn’t want it.

At the time it was like watching a train wreck. This was much earlier in my career and I was like, “there’s just no way, right?”

I did get lunch out of it.

lol. I kid you not, someone did that. Then completely imploded when I pointed out that it’d just print the object reference and not the list contents.

Can you start next Monday? :p

Dude, so much of your experience resonates with me! I was applying to a small start-up and they were like “oh, our new CEO is former Amazon so you’ll be doing a half-dozen hour-long interviews over the course of a couple days.” Wut? Other times the company would claim they don’t care that most of my experience is in Java and then after final interviews they’ll turn me down because most of my experience is in Java and they think it’s not possible for someone to use a different programming language or something. And people who reach out to ME then ghost me.

Sadly I’m still trying to find a new role.

As the interviewee?

I show up at their office for a round of interviews. IIRC it was 4 interviews of about an hour each. Every single interviewer comes in 5-10 minutes late. They all look completely exhausted. Unprompted, they all commented that “yeah, this is a start-up so we’re expected to work 80 hour weeks. That’s just how it is.” I did not take that job.

Another place wanted to do a coding “pre-screening” thing. You know, where you go to a website and there’s a coding question and you code it and submit your answer. THIS place wanted you to install an extension that took full control of your browser, your webcam, your mic, etc. So it could record you doing the coding challenge. No, thank you.

As the interviewer? omg, the stories I can tell.

We had a guy come in for an hour interview. We start asking him the normal interview questions. Literally everything he says is straight up wrong or he says, “I don’t know” and then just gives up and doesn’t try to work out a solution or anything. But we have a whole hour with this guy and as interviewers we’ve been instructed to use the full hour otherwise candidates complain that they weren’t given a fair chance even when it’s TOTALLY obvious it’s going to be a “no-hire.” So we start asking this guy easier and easier questions… just giving him basic softball questions… and HE STILL GETS THEM ALL WRONG. We ask him what type of variable would you use to store a number? He says, “String.” WHAT?! I’m totally flabbergasted at this point. So finally I get a brilliant idea: I’ll ask him an OPINION question! There’s no way he can get that wrong, right? Looking at his resume, it has something like “Java Expert” on there. So I say to him, “It says on your resume you’re a Java Expert. What’s your favorite thing about Java?” His response? “Oh, I actually don’t know anything about Java. I just put that on my resume because I know they used that at a previous company.” So now on top of this guy getting every question wrong, we’ve established he has also lied on his resume, so basically just red flags EVERYWHERE. Finally, after a grueling 45 minutes we decide to give up asking questions and just end with the whole, “So we like to reserve the last bit of time so you can ask us questions. Do you have anything you’d like to ask?” Without missing a beat, this guy goes, “When do I start? I feel like I NAILED that interview!”

At another company I worked at, we would do online interviews that took only an hour. The coding portion of the interview had a single question: “Given a list of strings, print the contents of the list to the screen.” That was it. Sure, we could make the coding question harder if they totally aced it, but the basic question was nothing more complicated than that. The candidate could even choose which programming language they wanted to use for the task. That single question eliminated half the candidates who applied for the job. Some straight up said they couldn’t do it. One person hung up on me and then when I tried to call back they said the fire alarm went off at their place and they would reschedule. They never did. Many people forgot that I could see their screens reflected in their glasses and I could see them frantically Googling. There was one candidate that did so insanely poorly during the interview that we believe it must have been a completely different person that had gone through the initial phone screen, so basically they were trying to bait-and-switch.

I have a bunch of other stories but this post is already getting quite long.

Oh shit… core memory unlocked. I forgot I used to do this. I forgot there was a time you would do this otherwise everything just had the same icon.

Ah you speak the truth. Fixed.

Tesla engineers managers treating it like software. “Ship it and we can patch it in production.”

I remember a while back Microsoft did an market research thing and found that of their brands, “Xbox” had positive consumer feedback while many of their other product names weren’t nearly as favorable.

So what did they do? Did they try to understand what Xbox did differently to leverage that strategy elsewhere? Did they promote the Xbox marketing team to give them a wider purview?

No. They just renamed Zune Music to Xbox Music and Games for Windows to Xbox for Windows. THAT’LL FIX IT!

Yeah, you make some good points. But I’m also wondering if it isn’t the advertising companies themselves who are perpetuating the idea that all this super aggressive advertising works to sell more advertising. After all, they tout targeted ads as some new must-have evolution but as far as I am aware targeted ads haven’t been shown to be any more effective than contextual ads. And maybe not everyone has the luxury to actively avoid purchasing products that annoy them with ads. But I definitely agree that it’s never worth the sacrifice.

I can see it working when you otherwise have NO brand recognition whatsoever, but seeing ads for, say, TikTok on YouTube every 30 seconds isn’t going to convince me to get a TikTok. I’m never going to be “gee I wonder what short form video content provider I should subscribe to” and even if that somehow miraculously DID happen, I’m going to research my decision and not just arbitrarily make a decision based on a notion I might have heard about a product one time months/years ago. Maybe if I didn’t have a computer in my pocket at all times where I could get unbiased reviews on demand that would work but definitely not in modern times. But apparently I’m in the minority.