Not a suggestion. Probably wouldn't get them right anyway.

More a statement of surprise that there's a tool that exists that doesn't completely suck a long pauses, cause that's a pretty common problem I think.

I've been trying out the new version of Gemini in live conversation mode to help with brainstorming and it is surprisingly good at slightly longer than normal pauses and it'll let you interrupt it to finish your thought if it starts talking before you're actually finished.

Hey Pete! 👋

I'm Jeremy and I've been working in tech as a developer, manager, PM, or consultant for over 20 years.

I'm building a new kind of technical recruiting agency to meet the needs of software teams hiring in the AI age.

I always need more roles to be filled or candidates that need jobs.

Would you and @leaht.codes mind sharing privately with me which companies these are?

I genuinely wonder if this produces anything even remotely worthwhile for the frustration or if this is purely a tactic to annoy people into giving up to weed out the "unserious" applicants.

The "norm" is already plenty bad enough without adding more ridiculous hoops and tests.

I'm already operating off the assumption that tech hiring is fundamentally broken, but this is something else.

You're taking these as part of applying to a software dev role?

Before the cartoon, there was a card game. A rather excellent card game, highly recommend.

Out of curiosity, what about your average project makes it less suitable for fixed pricing and more suitable for hourly?

Or when you start getting into the realm of micro or "productized" services, template works that you can reproduce in a consistent timeframe, ideally for a fixed price. Both of these give you the ability to charge multiple orders of magnitude over your peak possible hourly rate.

Contrast that with doing real consultative selling to determine what the value of a positive outcome on the project is and setting a fixed price based on that: You can literally charge anything as long as it's reasonably less than the likely result and the budget exists to pay you.

Hourly rates tend to have an artificial ceiling connected to your prospect's internalized idea of how much things should cost. It's more difficult to anchor your price to the value of the work you're providing, because they just feel the sticker shock of your rate once it gets well above average.

Generally agreeing with you, in case it's not clear. A lot of contrarian behavior I've seen on social media is what you said, plus people who just can't fathom another perspective besides their own.

Combining so much of the world into a shared space should've ideally been one of the single biggest leaps forward for empathy in humanity. In a (what feels like a shrinking) portion of people it has, but instead it seems like it somehow become an empathy *inhibitor* to quite a lot of others.

Probably those dang pineapple pizza terrorists.

I put off buying into VR because I just couldn't see myself using it regularly. I used a couple friends' various headsets over the years and had a very "that's kinda neat" feeling about them and had literally no desire to explore further.

It's just not a great medium for fun OR productivity.

I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say we could easily triple our income this year with a more well-defined strategy. So, I'm setting a goal to at least 2x yearly revenue and find a way to shave off at least 25-30% of our expenses.

Looking forward to planning sessions in the coming days.