kosherbeefcake

I remember reading a conspiracy that the iPhone 4 was left at that bar, because Samsung was about to announce the latest Galaxy phone. Apple did this to take the wind out of their sails.

It was what it sounds like; I was interviewing for a project manager role at a IT security company. The lead PM in the middle of her interview questions said "Drop down and give me five push-ups." I didn't think it was that strange, so I did it, but everyone I told about that experience thought it was incredibly strange. Her reasoning was that it showed that I was willing to follow orders, or something.

This is probably me just screaming into the void, but I'll provide my experience anyway.

I've found the entire "finding a new job" / interviewing process to be an incredibly alienating process. It truly brings me despair.

I've been working in IT for my entire professional career. I've worked as an analyst, project manager, and I'm currently a developer. I'll be the first to admit, I'm not a phenomenal developer, but I think my "Jack of all Trades" experience provides me with interesting insight. I'm more than the sum of my parts, I have a college degree in something completely unrelated to computers, I've started my own business, I love electronics and 3D printing. I'm attempting to leave my current company of 5+ years, and whether it's the "We only hire the best and brightest" mantra or something else, this experience has been miserable.

I've been asked to do push-ups in an interview, I've been ghosted multiple times, in a variety of places in the interview process. I've gotten berated on the phone by interviewers.

After the last volley of rejections, I've been looking inward whether IT is even really for me. Apparently the economy is doing great, and hiring is up, but that has simply not been my experience.

I have only had good experiences with eBay over the last 10 years. I’ve sold thousands of things over the years, and I’ve never had any run-ins with scammers. Then again, I’m not selling items that generally attract scammers. I have been trying to use eBay more, in place of amazon, when I don’t need it immediately.

While I'm not discounting the current geo-political climate, but every so often you'll see reports that some calamitous event will occur. When it invariably doesn't occur, no one follows up and says "why did you say that, nothing happened". If it does happen though, they can say "See, I told you so!"

I switched from Windows to OSX about 7 years ago. I recently gave my MacBook Pro to my partner, I was interested in a new laptop, and looked at the market offerings. I was very impressed with what had been released in the Windows ecosystem; so much that I bought a Surface 4. Windows 10 is significantly more polished than the windows that I left. The Ubuntu subsystem also satisfies my requirements for Bash. All-in-all, I am impressed with how much Microsoft has improved.

$10. I used to have a coloed server, where I would run multiple virtuals with KVM, but found myself hardly using the instances. I migrated my core services to Vultr, and haven't had any issues.

Complete speculation, but it probably has to do with how Americans look at the use of their tax dollars. To Americans, setting up prisons where prisoners are in suites, and can leave on weekends, it sounds nicer than the lives of some free people! All of this on the American tax dollar also. Why reward prisoners for breaking the law, so make prison terrible.

After the Arduino had come out, and amateur projects were coming out from that, I visited a small hobby electronics store, looking to gather some information, buy some starter gear, and get into the hobby.

I chatted with the sales clerk, who was on the younger side, that I should go back to school for electrical engineering, because that's the only way I'd learn the hobby. I bought an Arduino afterwards, but never used it. That encounter effectively killed it for me.

My greatest deterrent is the OS upgrade. I've been mulling over whether to just buy a Mac, or to build a Hackintosh. I would like the upgrade ability, but I would also prefer to not have to worry about accidentally upgrading my OS and having a few hour downtime every so often.

How easy is it to move or at least move a business over to Amsterdam, from the US?