Twitter isn’t a top company any more.

My mind won’t be the only thing going down the gutter now.

It has essentially killed Harvest Moon as the established farm simulator for relaxed gaming.

If you know someone that loves games, but hates fighting or quick skill-based stuff, they will lose hundreds of hours to this game.

I didn’t mind TMNT.

What still gives me PTSD is Shadow Of The Beast 2. I was utterly clueless on how to beat that game as a child, and as an adult I can literally watch someone beat it, know what to do, and still fuck it up.

Honest question. At what point will Tesla execs look at Musk and decide that keeping him at the helm is not in the company’s best interests?

I remember reading something ages ago that camsites are actually huge contributors to Russia, with many of the girls there being Russians pretending to be Ukrainian.

I always use famous people, just in case someone is checking the data and assumes that Tom Cruise or Sydney Sweeney decided to stop in Cambridge for a quick bite to eat in Nandos before staying in the Travelodge.

To be honest, a 50% attendance record sounds pretty good. I’m really sorry to hear about this though, the spread looks great, and anyone that puts a watch party on for All In is going to put on a good time.

What time was it on for you guys? I went the first year and had an amazing time, but sadly had work this year. Perhaps you should make the pilgrimage over next year for Forbidden Door?

Anything to give the boomers and flag-shaggers something to cling on to.

Next they’ll be whining about Opal Fruits, Jim Davidson, and the return of Four Star Petrol.

It’s absolutely mad to me that Sonic Team have done nothing with this since SA2: Battle.

I hate to say it, but it’s literally built for mobile devices! Have a Chao Garden game on consoles/PC, have them be downloadable onto your mobile device, and basically turn it into a Pokémon Go type thing where you can get kids and weebs to exercise and explore the outdoors.

The Ribbon is much better, and has been a part of the Office suite for over a decade, easily.

Poor examples aside, designers and engineers are rarely given a seat at the table in big tech companies. Most tech CEO’s were either tech managers or sales people at some point, and are so far removed from IC work or valuing specific crafts for their user value that someone on the UX side probably doesn’t get a say in how this shit is built.

Some UX designers either work to very specific business constraints, or work on stuff that has zero benefit to the end-user. Some engineers work on stuff that solely provides metrics for shareholders and leadership.

I’m tempted to set up a blog just to post about this subject, because it’s everywhere, but big tech is now so top-heavy that for years many huge decisions have been made on a whim by execs. Tech has grown so large and powerful that tech execs (and those clinging to their coat-tails) put themselves outside of the echelons of what an IC can reach, and far above the user. Years of MBA double-speak and worshipping the altar of guys like Gates, Bezos, and Jobs means that it’s “good” to be opinionated and ignore fact over your own judgement. This results in senior management deciding “let’s put AI here” or “the colour scheme should be mostly white”, despite reluctantly paying hundreds of people many thousands of dollars a year to KNOW about this stuff.

That, in essence, is why everything feels shitter nowadays. It’s because some fifty-something MBA cunt believes that you need AI, or a good UI needs more buttons - stuff we’ve known for decades is fucking stupid. That’s irrelevant though, because by being “General Manager of UI at MegaCorp” and having an assistant to arrange their Outlook calendar, they know more than you, pleb.

They do for smaller companies. In one of my old employers (around 200 people) Blind wouldn’t recognise my work email as being from an actual company.

Sadly, those are also the sort of companies that’ll scrub bad reviews.

Let people like what they like, whether it’s looking at girls online, cosplay, sports, or being an insufferable cunt on social media.

Or, just affordability?

Things just cost a lot more nowadays, and if you’re young it’s unlikely you’re earning much. Hell, it’s also possible that their parents missed the boat on salaries rivalling house prices.

People that work on-call do this, especially in tech or security.

I’m considering making the switch because my paging calls are from a random set of phone numbers, so I cannot attach a specific ringtone to them. After a few horrible pages, you start to associate your phone going off as a world-ending experience, when it’s just your wife calling to ask if you want her to pick something up for you from the shop. A separate device that disassociates my phone from pain would be nice.

It is, but given that I’m about to pay £20k a year to travel to the office, less so.

It escalates to your manager, then skip, and upwards.

They pre-empted this when we complained, and went straight to the director to say that the VP wants their org to complete something for a demo on Monday (they were told Friday). Since we were downstream, their feature would break our service contact, and would mean the E2E test wouldn’t work, so our director asked kindly for us to help where we can and to prioritise the main work on Monday. By that time your weekend is already ruined, but under that manager in particular they’ve been working every weekend for about a year…

Eh, that part is known, but lately there are teams that have “officially” opened weekends as fair game. My org recently sent out an email stating that weekends would count as in-office days to entice people to work at the office to bump their RTO figures up.

Oh, 1000%. I could write a book on how monumentally stupid the whole process is (and most Amazonians agree), but the fundamental points are:

• The people that stay are of a certain mindset, where you don’t pick up “hard” tasks, and you are quick to establish blame/ownership elsewhere.
• Data is king, but you can lie a lot with data.
• Employees are customers also, and when you piss off employees you piss off customers and their families.
• You spend a huge sum of money on hiring and training talent, only to send them to your competitors.
• You spend money to give severance to active employees. That is still, to be, the dumbest thing ever. SO many people don’t resign, they just down tools or do a bad job to get the extra pay. PIP is called Paid Interview Prep for a reason.
• Amazon’s Focus/Pivot has such a bad reputation that being fired used to mean that other big companies would happily tell you “if you have any trouble at Amazon, let me know and we’ll start an interview loop”.

Most fundamentally of all…very few companies do this. It died with Jack Welch/GM and Gates/Microsoft, after they saw the same downfalls. Amazon is yet to learn their lesson, and it shows in how poorly the “Amazon Management School” under Bezos are performing. The other big tech companies also now do this, although less severe, and surprise surprise, they’re all going downhill - making awful decisions, delivering nothing of value, and ignoring customers over leadership.

I hate to break it to you, but plenty of Amazon employees work weekends too, especially when big launch dates are coming up.

Source: Work in an org at Amazon where people have paged us regarding feature work on the weekend.