I appreciate the sentiment. Thank you. We need all the support we can get.

I also want to take advantage of this post to share a bit about what's going through my mind right now, being a trans person in tech who has been out of work for a long time.

When large companies hide all of their diversity, equity and inclusion advocacy, this is sending a message to their employees. I don't have the privilege of passing for cis. When I interview with a hiring manager the fact that I'm trans is as visible as the nose on my face. And when it comes to making a hiring decision, that manager is forced to account for my trans-ness in their decision-making.

Hiring a transgender person can be perceived as stepping into a minefield of new problems that this manager may have never dealt with before. What if they slip-up and misgender me? Will I cry, or freak out, or rat them out to HR or the media? What if fellow teammates or coworkers aren't socially accepting? Or a customer? How will these problems that I face reflect on them as a manager? Business leaders at the highest levels have made a point to memory-hole their LGBTQ+ advocacy, so not only is my presence on their team no longer a boon to my manager for embodying diversity values, they can almost certainly no longer count on any air support from leadership if I were to run into any interpersonal problems. That manager would be on their own.

That's a lot. Then consider that all of that risk and uncertainty could be avoided if the manager just picked somebody else to hire.

That's the world I've been living in, and it's only gotten worse.

This problem isn't unique to folks like me, either. Swap out "trans" for any of the other marginalized groups that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives sough to protect: disabled people, English-second-language speakers, black and brown folks, single parents. This is going to be a reality for all of them, too.

So thank you for your support, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to put these feelings into words that can live outside my brain for a change. They tend to echo with every "we've selected another candidate" email I get.

Pronouns belong on intake forms, right next to patient name. Mine are in my medical file, so any doctor I see with access to my data in Epic who gets it wrong is showing up unprepared.

The only ones who get a pass are EMS folks overwhelmed by the work of keeping people alive. I'm sympathetic to someone taking a wild guess at my pronouns while they're holding my guts in with their thumb.

Storyboards for the episode featuring the transgender character Kai were posted to Archive.org last December.

The video moves through each image too quickly, unfortunately. Slowing down each frame to correspond to the expected timing for each shot would have been ideal. I hope the script finds its way to the public as well someday.

Transgender people face more harassment in bathrooms that match their sex assigned at birth

That's not an accident; that's the point. :/

Get ready to be nostalgic for the Roger Moore era.

I got to experience this for the first time a few weeks ago, from HireVue, when interviewing for a technical program management role at Lumen.

It was a combination of 5-7 painfully common interview questions that I've been asked during basically every TPM interview: describe a complex program you worked on, describe a time when you had to overcome adversity, describe a time when you needed to problem solve your way out a situation, etc. After being presented with the question, you get 60 seconds to prepare before the video recording begins. If you mess up on your first video, you are provided the option to re-record your answer a second time, but no more. It wasn't clear whether both videos were being saved and assessed, or if you were deducted assessment points for using the re-record feature.

Next, I was given a series of three timed "games" to play. The first was a collection of numbers that you needed to select in order to complete a series of math equations: like "? + ? = ?" with a collection of numbers that you could pick from to fill in the blanks. ( I managed to mess up here, not realizing that we needed to be selecting the appropriate numbers in a specific order when the order of operations mattered; the instructions only said "select the appropriate numbers" and didn't explicitly say they needed to be chosen in-order. I only realized this after getting an answer wrong a few times, which certainly tanked my score. )

The second game was one of those "connect the pipes" puzzles where you slide tiles around a grid to create a contiguous line from a start point to an end point. There was a third game as well that I don't remember.

35 minutes after the process was over, I received an automated response:

As a thank you, we have automatically analyzed your responses to share insight into your unique profile of competencies.

The "insights" were a bulleted list of LLM slop based on my interview responses, the complete contents of which are below:

Your Insights Thank you for your interest in Lumen and the time you took to complete your responses for Program Manager. We worked with a team of IO Psychologists to develop the interview questions and games you just completed to discover the unique competencies you possess. Scroll through to see your individual results.

"Working with People" describes how you approach building relationships and interacting with others in a work context.

• You communicate in a clear and convincing manner and are able to tailor your message to different audiences.
  • Keep in mind that others may get bogged down if you provide too much information at once—be sure to check for understanding!
• You understand how to organize and manage the time, resources, and efforts of yourself and others within the context of broader tasks, projects or situations.
  • Be sure to break down this information for others so they can also see the bigger picture and their role in it.
• You successfully build and maintain mutually beneficial relationships with others to strengthen your knowledge and effectiveness.
  • Continue to build on your relationships and proactively identify opportunities to connect with others.

"Work Style and Personality" describes the ways in which you prefer to interact with people and information to meet the demands of a work role.

• You tend to remain calm even in times of pressure and can cope well when others are upset.
  • Try to help others remain calm, and be sure to empathize where necessary. You are able to deliver on what is asked of you with high work standards.
  • Try to be open to situations that may not require you to be as thorough to balance your persistence with efficiency when necessary.
• You tend to be open to learning new information and finding ways to apply what you learn.
  • Try not to get too caught up in learning everything—sometimes following your intuition is best.

"Working with information" describes how you approach new problems, make sense of the world around you, and adapt to new challenges.

• You tend to isolate problem areas and use effective techniques to solve them.
  • Try not to get too caught up with details if time does not permit it.
• You are able to quickly switch between tasks.
  • Make use of your ability to adapt to changing demands and environments by engaging in diverse projects.
• You easily process and manipulate numerical information.
  • This is particularly useful when quickly making data-driven decisions. When communicating with others, include storytelling and visualization to explain numerical concepts.
• You are quickly able to problem solve your way through most situations.
• You may enjoy taking on new challenges and giving yourself a chance to shine!
• You have the capacity to readily process complex relationships in your mind.
  • Others may struggle to keep up, so make sure you take the time to explain and draw out your ideas for them.

Where did these results come from? Our team of experts develops scientifically validated assessments that evaluate skills needed for the job and help reduce bias. We generated text from the audio in your interview and evaluated it. This, in combination with the games you played, were used to discover your unique qualifications. Read through your report to see insights and results for each skill that would lead to success in this role.

Two days later I received another automated email saying "we’ve decided to pursue other candidates whose qualifications better align with the role."

I'm not unsympathetic to the interests of hiring teams. I've been involved in many hiring decisions over the years. It truly is a laborious, time-consuming process for HR, hiring managers and teams performing interviews. I'm deeply aware of the need to devise innovative ways to make this process less painful for employers, and recorded video interviews do make a ton of sense! Rather than scheduling 30-60 minutes for each candidate, why not let me look at a bunch of people (video-dating style) and let me pick who I'd like to hear more from.

But, that being said, I found the entire experience as a candidate profoundly dehumanizing. I know these responses and game scores are not being assessed by human beings first -- speech-to-text is turning my answers into LLM-consumable data, and my scores/rankings in the games portion was being included in the ranking as well. This embodies all the humanity of a slave having their teeth examined to assess value. The laughable "carrot" at the end of this stick is a series of LLM "insights"; platitudes of which I was already aware and, if the employer gave any credence to them, would have probably invited me in for an interview.

The vibes are absolute poison, and no employer who cares about their hiring candidate experience should use it.

I have ideas about how HireVue can make the process less miserable, but I'm not about to tell them for free.

I'm doing the vast majority of the posting in !trailers@lemmy.blahaj.zone. Maintaining post integrity is tough when you open it to a crowd.

Marvel is getting a narrative pass from me for a little while as they had to make a massive corse correction after Jonathan Majors, who they were planning on hanging the next 5-7 years of movies on as their big-bad, turned out to be a dude that beats up women. The entire planned arc needed to be bent to accommodate Dr Doom instead, including reshoots on this and the rest of what’s coming out this year.

I think next year’s Marvel movie-products will be the ones that will benefit from not needing after-the-fact fixing.

This is the way.

Also, by taking a cart from the corral and bringing it in with you, you’re actively modeling a virtuous behavior you hope people emulate, which does more to correct the problem than whining online about it.

But it does make me wonder about us sometimes. How did we get this way? How did “Fuck everybody else; got mine” become the default way Americans think? Am I the weird one for being raised to be thoughtful about these kinds of choices?

I don’t claim to be perfect. I’ve had bad days when I take advantage that permissiveness-inconsiderateness that I see around me all the time, but I always know that it’s wrong, and that I’m doing an inconsiderate thing, but that my frustration affords me the grace to be selfish about this one thing.

One of the Academy Award nominated short films this year is Instruments of a Beating Heart, about a class of Japanese first-grade students preparing to perform Ode to Joy for the new first year students that will take their places. It’s primarily about the struggle of one girl, but set against the backdrop of Japanese grade school life, student responsibility and expectation-setting for young humans experiencing their first non-familial social environments. It made me think “Well, at least these kids are going to be alright.”

Old. :)

The address here is for a Sonic restaurant in a Boone's Crossing box store mall in Chesterfield.

This doesn't seem legit.

That sounds like a terrific resource! My library doesn’t have it, but I’ll ask them what they can do to get me access to the digital copy through Cambridge University Press.

That said, I need to finish the books on my plate first though. :)

If anyone reading this has access and can help, let me know!