The cultural fit in particular I like to use. This is often thrown around as a catch-all term by companies when they don’t want to hire you for a bunch of bullshit reasons they don’t want to disclose to you. It’s only fair you weaponise too.

Had to use it recently to reject an offer and to avoid saying: “the person who would be my manager seemed like a gigantic dickhead and I barely made it the hour without slamming my monitor against the wall”. Although part of me wish I had said that.

I mean, having done a bit of science research, and now being in tech, I’d say I routinely learn from good points and insights from some of my colleagues in their domains of expertise whilst they are otherwise selfish assholes, so… Yeah…

Teams is hot garbage. Just having it open in the background sucks the performance right out of your laptop. And I find the fact that MS tries to force it to be their portal to the rest of their atrocious apps to be infuriating.

But what do you expect from a company that codes their start menu with react native.

At work: without a hint of hesitation, Microsoft Teams and Visual Studio.

Do I really need to explain the issues with Teams? As for Visual Studio: extremely slow startup time, idiotic msvc compiler, yappy copilot who won’t shut up, needlessly opaque “solution” format, moronic intellisense false positives, anything useful being hidden between layers of sloppy menus, and more… I have my own build scripts, compile with clang, and edit with whatever. I only use that piece of shit to debug and when it’s time to commit, to make sure it’ll work on my colleagues’ environments, as I don’t want to be the annoying contrarian, but it really bums me out.

On my personal machines: gnome. I have a love hate relationship with Gnome, because on the one hand, I agree with most design decisions and appreciate not having to spend any time configuring a lot of stuff, so it suits me very well, and on the other hand I get angry on the odd occurrence where I disagree with the philosophy and I have to install an extension which I know will break at every update.

The “optimist” in me wants to believe that the idiots who have all the power and money will never be satisfied and thus will keep crushing us to the point where the conditions for forcibly removing them from power will be met: enough of us will feel there is nothing else to do and nothing to lose.

As for what comes after that… Lots of instability and misery for a while, with the hope that whatever emerges is better and fairer than what we have now.