this post has been making the rounds on Mastodon, for good reason. it’s nominally a post about the governance and community around C++, but (without spoiling too much) it’s written as a journey packed with cathartic sneers at a number of topics and people we’ve covered here before. as a quick preview, tell me this isn’t relatable:
This is not a feel good post, and to even call it a rant would be dismissive of the absolute unending fury I am currently living through as 8+ years of absolute fucking horseshit in the C++ space comes to fruition, and if I don’t write this all as one entire post, I’m going to physically fucking explode.
fucking masterful
an important moderator note for anyone who comes here looking to tone police in the spirit of the Tech Industry Blog Social Compact: lol
another absolutely fucked thing about the gotcha interview is, they never stop at just one. if you somehow read the interviewer’s mind and asspull the expected (not “correct”, mind you) answer, they’ll just go “huh” and instantly pivot to a different instant-fail gotcha. the point of the gotcha interview isn’t candidate selection; the point is that the asshole interviewer has power over the candidate, and can easily use gotchas to fabricate technical-sounding reasons for rejecting suitable candidates they personally just don’t like.
shit like this is one reason our industry is full of fucking assholes; they select for their own by any practical means. it’s reminiscent of those rigged, impossible “literacy tests” they used to give voters in the south (that is, the southern US), where almost every question was a gotcha designed so that a poll worker could exclude Black voters at effectively their own discretion, complete with a bullshit paper trail in case anyone questioned the process.
(also, how many of these assholes send candidates down a rabbit hole wasting time answering questions unrelated to the position when they don’t get the gotcha right? I swear that’s happened to me more than once, and I can only imagine it’s so nobody asks why most of the interviews are so short)