So fucking true. I’ve was in an interview, 2nd round, where the recruiter joined the call mid coding exercise to explain that a different recruiter had just given the position to someone else without waiting for feedback on anyone else and therefore they had to stop all in process interviews. She was pissed and apologized. The guy giving the interview just gave me this look like “they do this shit all the time” and ended the call.

Tech recruiters really can be this dumb. I’ve been on both ends several times.

I remember hiring for a test dev, writing the description for the recruiter, I included all the things I’d like to see. Python, test automation experience, open source contributions etc (this was for a public facing repo).

I get back a question a day later asking if they need Java or not. That felt really out of place so I walked over and had a conversation. Turns out they were filtering out anyone who had more than requested. Python AND Java experience? No thank you.

On the upside once we ironed that out I ended up hiring two people I’ve been friends with for a decade+. Sometimes the recruiters just need help.

Now the other side of things…I’ve definitely had recruiters screw up and lose very good candidates, but it was always for stupid shit like they forgot to send the offer letter for a week or they accidentally put them in the “no” pile.

Heh, this one time we got a recruiter ping our team out of the blue saying they had a candidate. No one knew what the hell the position was for. Turns out the recruiters had forgot about a bunch of openings we had closed like a year before, they just never took down the postings. We asked him how he found the job, and the candidate said he manual went through the thousands of open positions until he found one that fit him. He hired him after the first round and he turned out to be awesome.

That’s just built in with extra steps.

Python is an interpreted language that doesn’t need a main function explicitly. You can define any package entry points you want at the package config level. (setup.py, etc)

example: What I meant was I prefer language that treat developers like adults. If I want ptrhon’s “ux” to hide some functions or objects I can do that with underscores, but nothing is private, a developer using my library can do whatever they want with it, access whatever internals they want (at their own risk of course)

Python doesn’t need the name main check to function at all. that’s just a convenience feature that lets developers also include arbitrary entry points into modules that are part of a library and expected to be used as such. If you’re writing a script, a file with a single line in it reading print("hello world") will work fine when run: python thescript.py

Letting the developer decide what the code should do.

Do they think the copper is consumed? Like, renewable resources burn copper?!

I had an Irish Catholic nun, with the headdress and nun robes on and everything, tell my class we’d go blind and grow hair on our hands. She was making scarry eyes and jazz hands while she said it. It was a sex ed course and her #1 message to all of us jr high boys was wearing deodorant and scrub your ass in the shower. In retrospect, I think she said that in such a cartoonish manner because she knew it was ridiculous, and really she just didn’t want to gag from the stench after phys ed.

That same nun told me her favorite band was "those good Irish boys with the rap music, I just wish they’d pick a more respectful name than ‘beasty boys’ "

We were all sneaking looks at each other’s hands for at least a month after that though.

No thank you, I’ll take a drone cab over this any day.

He leaves out that the “box of scraps” was essentially a complete selection of all the parts used by his company to make their weapons. He was basically given a couple each of every Lego set ever (already assembled !) and then tore them apart to make one big thing. It’s impressive, but it’s not like he reinvented modern technology from scratch. I’d call that “vibe engineering” at worst.

They hate to hear it.

I call everything a script. Makes the Java devs real mad. Makes the PM’s super confused.

Work memory unlocked:

I once was tasked with a metaphorical trip to the basement to fix Cthulhu knows what in the Old Code. Thing was built on top of an ancient CLI tool that consumed and returned SOAP XML. It was terrible.

I spent a month untangling that mess and even pushed a fix to the tool. About a month later I get a phone call from someone asking me if “I was the guy who fixed the tool”. I said yes and was immediately offered a job to take over as lead dev on that team. Sensing a trap I politely declined. Dude sighed and basically said not to worry, it would have been miracle to find someone the day before he quits.

Felt like this: