Mediocre Tech Jobs [Necropost, NOT current]
9I might be the first Mediocre Laboratories employee that’s thought about promoting job openings on the meh.com forums. So… F1RST!
We’ve got job openings for Node.js developers, DevOps, QA/Test posted here: https://meh.com/jobs
If you’re in the Dallas area, come help us work on meh.com plus future ecommerce experiments using technologies like Node.js, MongoDB, Redis, InfluxDB, Windows Azure.
- 22 comments, 51 replies
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I can't do any of that. Sigh.
I don't even know what it means.
Damn, wish you guys were in the Philly area. I'll be needing new employment in the near future.
email me your resume. f g a r r i e l a t g m a i l d o t c o m
That is stuff I can do.
Can I commute from Las Vegas?
@spacezorro Your in Vegas, Which Area? you can email me at a i s s o u l at g m a i l dot c o m
@Foxborn I sent you an email... and it bounced. I was going to send you an email at your marrakech medispa or one of the other french sites.. but they are broken also.
@spacezorro that's cause I can't keep my emails straight, it's A O L (don't hate me for using them it goes back to dial up days!)
@ceagee gNome.js is like a Troll Doll with better hair
Mango is a tasty fruit
Redis is what the cool kids call Redbull Vodka
InfluxDB you get from too many Redis
Windows Azure is like a window into your soul disguised as a cloud in the sky.
Hope that helps.
You should probably apply or better yet, just show up for work
We have our new lead developer, folks.
I love purple
I'm in the Dallas area but I'm just a social-media/receptionist/cashier/spokesperson/marketeer/brand-memorizing/fan-girl of all the companies I've worked for. I can and do comp-y things but I mostly stick to the socializing community side of it all. If you need someone that fits that EXACT criteria I'd be more than happy to send my resume via carrier pigeon ASAP!
Let me know know when you need a good benefits manager and I'm in.
I don't have any experience with the exact things mentioned, but I know a guy named Dallas if that helps.
I've seen a billboard for the remake of the show Dallas.
Bryce Dallas Howard is an actress.
I was in a band with a guy from Ft. Worth.
How about some jobs for writers? I have a decent reference from a site that competed with shirt.woot.
I don't know what any of those things are, I'm not near Dallas, and I tend to avoid going to Texas as much as possible. That being said, wait... what were we talking about?
I used to be like you, I moved here from SoCal about a year ago. I promise it's not as bad as you think.
It's worse.
It's not even Texas so much for me as it is leaving my current area. We moved here to be close to family and raise children in a place...
...similar to the one in which we were raised. Texas is geographically, demographically, and public-educationally too different for me to..
...even consider as long as I am employed / haven't lost hope of finding work locally.
Also, possibly giving myself too much credit assuming you'd find a spot for me to be productive
Part of me wants to work for you guys since I'm a web programmer who knows a bit of design and database maintenance, but I'm in Upstate NY... Boo.
Doesn't help that I'm pretty happy at my current job, either.
I feel you. Liking your current job is the worst.
Aside from not having the slightest of those skills and being happily retired, I can't imagine anything that would induce me to live in the same state as Rick Perry.
Doesn't he have a daughter named Katy? That may be a reason.
@magic_cave You say that as if a politician by any other name is a bit better.
I have a friend who does QA and would love to be able to lower his standards...
Nice! #JOBS
If I get the job, is one of the benefits advanced notification when a FUKU is going to be offered?
@cengland0 Being employed by Meh probably precludes you from even being able to buy one. Better to not work there so that you may fully reap the fuku benefits.
@jsh139 Employees can certainly buy everything else, I suspect that @Snapster lets them buy Fukus too. In the tech industry, it is called "Eating your own dog food". Employees get the same customer experience as everyone else, so they can tell when things need improvement. There were nearly 1 thousand Fukus this time, so if 10 Meh employees also partook, it would only be a 1% hit. But those 10 employees would know more of the customer experience.
@hamjudo buying the Fukubukuro as an employee is frowned upon. we want to reserve all of them for our customers. we don't allow special employee only purchases because we want to "eat our own dog food" as you pointed out. oh, but here's one mediocre employee benefit: free VMP.
@shawn "here's one mediocre employee benefit: free VMP" It's very thoughtful of @snapster to not charge you five bucks to let you walk into the warehouse and grab your box.
@SSteve when you put it that way it sounds kinda lame, which is why you don't see us hyping that up in our job postings. but honestly, we try to avoid just grabbing crap out of the warehouse so we can experience the same shipping process as everyone else.
@shawn Sorry if I came across as a dick–it was not my intention. Just a lame attempt at humor. It's really based in jealousy. I'd love to work with you.
I hope whatever it is people do with that incomprehensible to me set of skills needed that it includes fixing server crashes and increasing server capacity so it doesn't crash to begin with… just saying...
@Kidsandliz Wouldn't it be funny if they had a large server farm but they used AOL as the ISP and that was where the bottleneck was?
@cengland0 wait, is AOL bad? WHY DIDN'T ANYBODY TELL US!!??
@cengland0 Or maybe they buy server space from Amazon. Then occasionally someone notices that meh's item for the day is in competition with something at Woot, so: "Hey, someone, unplug meh's server for an hour or two. If they call, tell them we're working on it and it should be up in a few minutes."
@rockblossom Azure is Microsoft's competition to Amazon's cloud offerings. Its primary advantage over Amazon is that it is not run by Amazon. They also have a less than stellar reputation, so the sales critters sometime offer very good prices.
@Kidsandliz That would make all future Fukus sell out in 2 seconds. Leaving the whiners to complain for the next 86,398 seconds about why Meh didn't make a million Fukus available. As others have said before, the fun is in the chase. I suspect there is a reason this was never completely fixed even way back from the Woot days of old, and I'm happy to see it continue that way. It adds more of a random chance event to getting a fuku rather than just a fastest to the draw situation.
@hamjudo @heli0s I love purple.
It's fun to ramp up the number of simulated users until a test cluster falls over. Then fix where it broke and try again. Repeat until it can handle the load.
It feels like Meh could use someone to create synthetic customer loads and run capacity tests. Imagine being able to do capacity testing during the workday, rather than at 11PM.
Alas, I am in Ypsilanti Michigan. A bit too far to commute. My experience is all Linux based, but I'm flexible.
One tip: the cloudy servers cache the pieces of the databases needed to service the customers. Until all of that stuff gets into cache, performance is pretty bad. Since Meh usage starts suddenly at midnight eastern time, all of the caches start out cold. Make the next day's servers and web pages accessible to a private network with synthetic users. Have the synthetic users ramp up the load for 15 minutes before midnight, so that at midnight when you make the pages available to the public, the caches will be warm.
@hamjudo mmm... warm cache...
@hamjudo That last Fuku experience almost created a synthetic customer load in my pants.
@hamjudo On rereading the caching bit, I see I didn't clarify the huge amount of work required to get the caches warm. It requires a big chunk of parallel infrastructure. Also, I'm sure the coders involved have noticed the impact of cold caches. It shows up every time you run a benchmark twice in a row.
@hamjudo I imagine it's pretty hard to design a site that can (gracefully) scale to handle 1500% of normal traffic a.k.a DDOS-levels without being able to drop/reject any of the traffic like you would for an actual DDOS
@Kleineleh Hmm I wonder if warm caches would be even better with melting butter and blackberry jam
@Kidsandliz I've never had blackberry jam, but right now anything warm sounds good to me!
Dang... My brother Lives in the Dallas area, and I'm pretty sure he could do at least some of those things, but alas he is trying to relocate back up here to NW Buckeyland to be closer to family...
Does mediocre have any non tech jobs that could be Telecommute? Maybe??????????? I could um ....... or well ......... Oh just give me a job already!!!
Yeah, give him a job already, but send me the paycheck!
@kuoh wow, that's the third time in 24 hours that someone's called me a dude. Wow. I blame @cengland0
@Foxborn Force of habit from the BBS days when it was assumed 99% of online users were dudes and unless their handle implied a dudette, they were considered to be dudes or ridiculed for having a poorly chosen handle. Also the dudettes, except for the crazy ones, commonly chose dude like names to avoid harassment from the other 99%.
@kuoh All's forgiven, the other two times though, that was something special, a supervisor with FedEx (it's a long painful story that starts with a woot shirt order) twice called me Sir the second time was after I called him out on it too. amazing. and dumbfounding
@dashcloud Of course it is possible to make a site scale gracefully to handle a %1500 increase in traffic. All it takes is money and time.
It takes time to partition the work so it can efficiently be spread across multiple servers. Once that is accomplished, you use the money to buy more servers.
More seriously, one of the keys to graceful degradation is to figure out the minimal feature set for use during server overload.
At 12:01 Eastern each day, I want in order of priority:
1. to know what's for sale
2. a link to the full description
3. a functional "meh" button
4. that day's "meh" face, assuming I pressed the "meh" button
5. a link to the day's video
6. The usual links, orders, forum, account, etc...
7. all of the stats
8. the calendar of faces
9. the quiz
10. a functional "Buy It" button
The reason to have the "Buy It" come up last, is to avoid selling out all of the fukus in the first 2 seconds.
This would require significant architectural changes. The current version of the meh.com page is nice in that all of the dynamic stuff is in one file. Just one transaction for me. They can do all of the database lookups in one fell swoop, and everything is internally consistent. The downside, is that I can't see that page until all of database lookups have completed.
If instead everybody got the same sale of the day page, with a bunch of rectangles that filled in later, it would be more web server transactions, but we would be able read about the deal of the day, without waiting for some server to finish adding up survey results.
The rectangles needn't start out empty, they could start with cute filler images. For example, in the calendar section, Glen could be reciting "30 days hath September, april, ...". The first 3 forum threads are constant through out the day, (sale of the day, video of the day, and survey of the day), but the next 3 change through out the day. So where those 3 appear could be a picture of Irk looking at threads, or something actually clever.
I have discovered that I can go directly to meh.com/forum to figure out what the sale of the day is. If the sale of the day thread title doesn't sound interesting, I can go to sleep instead of repeatedly hitting reload.
TL;DR hit meh.com/forum when the site is painfully slow. The thread titles give important information, even when the rest of the site is useless.
@hamjudo when the site is slow you usually can't load the forums either...but just between us two, check their Twitter feed if all you want to know is the item.
I want to work as a long distance forum moderator. For free. Because I crave power. Delicious power.
@ABitterWoman I don't have any power to share at the moment, sorry. But in all seriousness it's very likely that we'll have volunteer mods at some point in the future.
@JonT I'll be a volunteer mod if you pay me enough.
@SSteve @jont maybe pay them by letting them have first crack at the fuku's...
@JonT Nice. I'd definitely throw my name in the hat.
@ABitterWoman I think they throw the hat AT you, more than you ask.
@Thumperchick Well if that's true, I'd just do what I always do- say I'm going to lunch and never come back. That excuse works for everything.
I'm sorry Shawn, but I think Derek beat you to it. Team Korea was posted on forum xD.
But on more serious note, where do you learn those stuff?
This is a really old post. Like pre-covid old. With that said I recently cancelled my subscription due to losing my job. Inside the cancellation form I explained why and referenced coworkers being upset I heated up fish in the break room. How mediocre is that! Anywho, looks like remote is something mediocre employees are entertaining there these days. If per chance there is a need for mediocre Scrum Master I’d be slightly motivated to hear more about it. I mean think about it, wouldn’t that be a great meet-cute, I cancel my subscription only to fall in love with a new job. I should probably start writing the screen play for this romcom.
@mwhite1 There is a saying in Los Angeles that everyone thinks they’re a screen writer, and even the cabbies will offer to show you their script. (Maybe particularly the cabbies, since driving a cab is one of the stereotypical jobs taken by actors and other seldom-working-at-their-craft people in the motion picture industry.)
May yours be the one that makes the cut.