Jessa L'Rynn

If they say things like "cleaning, restocking" etc, that's a green flag. Normal busywork that's unavoidable and reasonable to expect during downtime.

If they say "we don't have down time" that's a yellow flag. That means they want you to look busy all the time, even when there's nothing to do. This will drive me insane as I dust the same shelf for the fourth time in a week

If they say "there's always something to do" but don't SPECIFY, that's a red flag hard stop. They're understaffed on fucking purpose and you are about to have your soul sucked from your body by this company. do not walk, RUN for the exit. Every time I get this answer, I've ended up with the "watch you like a hawk" type manager that annoys the hell outta me.

Which is kinda crazy to me tbh!! Job interviews aren't just for interviewers to get to know you, it's also your opportunity to get to know the company. The interviewer is acting as a representative of the company and they are absolutely there to answer questions for you. You should always have a few questions in a job interview, even if they're basically just asked to make you look good.

Always remember: an interview is like a product presentation. You are trying to sell yourself to that interviewer like a product. You should say here are my features, my strengths, the things I am good for. Asking questions proves that you have these features: thoughtful, curious, capable of learning, interested, etc.

Here's an incomplete list of things to find out in no particular order:

What is expected of you? What is required to excel in this position? What is the dress code? What is the pay? Benefits? Bonuses? What are the opportunities for growth? What does the interviewer like about the company? Why do they stay? Why is the position empty? What is the company's growth like? The culture?

Often interviewers will answer these things in the process of the interview, so hopefully you know most of that by the end. But it will never hurt to write those questions down and check them off as you go, or use the note as a reference for questions at the end.

I always bring with me to interviews a copy of my resume (for them to keep), and a small notepad and pen. You wouldn't even believe how much difference giving them a copy of my resume makes. They like the forethought, but also I've had interviewers use it to take notes before!

And btw if you have fewer than 15 years work experience, your resume should ONLY be one page. Once you have enough jobs under your belt you can start to exclude older ones like what you had as a teen maybe, or jobs that aren't relevant to the positions you're applying for. Do not put a picture of yourself on the resume. DO make it easy to read and feel free to personalize a little bit.

for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.

I want them to have beads and bows and jewels and rings and bells and-

Eheheheeh here is my redesign for the Padawan braid!

Oh and the bells aren’t actual bells, they make no sound, they are called bells due to an old tradition no longer in use

a bunch of archives of incredibly important government datasets like maternal mortality statistics are about to be deleted forever. in a regime where they're known to fudge numbers, we can't trust a lot of the data coming from them to not be altered. open source backups like those found on data.world are vital to being able to verify that the data coming from our government is still intact and not altered. and they're about to delete all of it.

i don't know if we need to start a petition or what. nobody seems to fucking care. there are millions of users on data.world and yet nobody is raising the alarm bells and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. somebody needs to do something. i don't know what to do. it feels like more and more of this world is being destroyed and dismantled. it's not only US centric data, either! it's all sorts of countries from around the world! and they're about to fucking delete everything.

the only things that won't be deleted are private companies who happen to use the paid version of their platform (which isn't accessible data to the open source community; some people have just been using their service to host their own data on privately)

and the kicker? this announcement was made... via an AI generated blog post. so not even any sort of human touch. just a generic, soulless announcement made by a soulless human about to take a wrecking ball to one of the more important websites that exists on the internet.

an example of some of the things that will be deleted on July 11th:

https://www.re3data.org

There are over 3500 respectable data repositories on one respectable global registry; to a researcher there’s no point in data existing if not findable; if you’re trying to find a new home for your dataset, start there

If someone were, as a random example, say hospitalized for over two weeks with no explanation, I think that should automatically trigger a special election to replace them.

If you're still able to do your job, then prove it. And if you're not, then you're actively obstructing democracy by not stepping down.

Which is to say, that if a public official were to pass away or into a coma, and their handlers choose to obfuscate that fact, this should be seen as intentionally obstructing democracy.

‘Ruby Tears’

Rachel @supersapphical commissioned a scene of Billie and Amara from her fic. If you haven’t read it yet, you really should because it’s so so good.