Pet of the month from the 1980s… lost track of her in the 90s, pretty sure she looks different now.

Any time I have tried using my middle name as the name printed on my credit card, the banks 100% consistently refuse to do it.

Your trolls were lightweight. Trolls in my schools would have doubled, or tripled down on Willy - knowing that it bothered him.

Both of my grandfathers went I.O. initials only, including when they were drafted for WWII. One would use his first name about half the time, but only reveal what the middle initial stood for maybe twice in my lifetime. The other: I.O. all the way, to his grave nobody I know ever heard what those initials stood for.

Our IT intake asks “is there another name you prefer to be known by” - and I have gone by my middle name since I was 12, so I told them, and they cheerfully complied… on half the things in their system, the other half use my first name - things like the name under my picture during Teams calls. But, my e-mail address uses the middle name, so that’s nice.

Background checks are big into “A.K.A.” listings.

Joe, Joey, Joseph, Jar-Man…

Not always… I knew a girl once…

Can you use any of them on a credit card?

I was recruited as an R&D engineer by a company that was sales focused. It was pretty funny being recruited like a new sales hire: limo from the airport, etc. Limo driver didn’t work direct for the company but she did a lot of work for them, it was an hour drive both ways to/from the “big” airport they used. She said most of the sales recruits she drove in were clueless kids, no idea how the world worked yet at all - gunning for a big commission job where 9/10 hires wash out within a year. At least after I arrived on-site I spent the day with my prospective new department, that was a pretty decent process. The one guy I didn’t interview well with turned out to be the guy who had applied to the spot I was taking and had been passed over. As I was walking in on my first day he was just finishing moving his stuff out of the window-office desk he was giving up for me, into a cube. I can understand why he was a little prickly.

Yeah, I was an EE in college so I took the Smith’s chart class, did the exercises, then promptly started using newer tools when such things were called for… mostly I worked in software after school so all those exercises were… academic.

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Rare is a matter of popular practice, not difficulty.

It’s rare to walk around with an actual tinfoil hat, but not difficult or expensive to do.

they are all anarchist and Silicon Valley bosses are all thieves.

Nothing is ever absolute, but Silicon Valley has been going in a consistently bad direction for 20+ years now.

If she floats, she’s a witch and we’ll burn her at the stake.

That tracks with expectations. Many larger companies don’t use external recruiters at all, I’d guess the threshold is probably around 10,000 employees - more or less - above that they’ll have it vertically integrated in-house.

I’ve worked with a 100,000 employee company where HR will pre-screen candidates at job fair type interviews, just to file them away against potential future openings. They won’t usually task actual staff with doing interviews for openings that aren’t funded, though sometimes it feels like they are doing that - sending so many bad-fit candidates that it takes us 8-10 to find one that might possibly be a net-positive asset to the team.

Suspension of disbelief, or belief in suspension tech?

Start with land speeders… what holds them up? If you’re in a universe where it’s simple to make anti-gravity devices, why not use them to “fly” your big space ships too?

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, they knew things we still do not, and apparently they did not know many things that we do.

now I know a fair amount about EE

But, did you ever use a Smith’s chart to assist in antenna design / analysis?

I applied to a place that asked “experience in SquirrelScript” - that seemed like a personality test, I told the truth: 0. Surprisingly, when I got hired there, they were indeed one of the three places in the world using SquirrelScript at the time. Manager said that over half of applicants professed deep experience with SquirrelScript, but none ever had it for real. It wasn’t hard to learn.

Our entry test should have been dead simple for anyone applying to the position. Position: C++ computer graphics programmer, 1-2 years experience implementing technical graphics displays in C++ language. All resumes submitted, of course, claimed this and more. All interviewees, of course, professed great confidence in their abilities. 9/10 candidates, when presented with “the test” failed spectacularly. The ones who passed, generally, did it in less than 10 minutes - with a couple of interesting quirks which revealed their attention to and/or willingness to follow directions. The failures ranged from rage-quit and stomping out without a word, to hours of pleading for more time to work on it - which, in principle, we granted freely, but after 30 minutes if they didn’t have it they never got it.

I think 4 years experience gets the “Senior” title in our company now. I can understand having 3 years experience and being frustrated when you can see how much better you are at your job than your “more senior” middle managers, but… there are plenty of things that you continue to learn in your first 10-20 years of experience, and having diversity of experience brings even more value that’s rarely acknowledged in any ranking scales - actually the ranking scales usually reward stay-put loyalty over diverse in depth experience, and that’s just backwards in my experience. Although, I have also known plenty of “job hoppers” who got around from place to place every year or two and it was clear after working with them that was because they didn’t really contribute adequate value anywhere they went.