These aren't persuasion methods but techniques to exploit common cognitive biases. One thing I learned by reading Cialdini's "Influence" book is to call out such tricks when exposed to them. Hopefully, none of this is required when working in an organization which hires for cultural fit and shared vision.

> which hires for cultural fit and shared vision.

I suppose Facebook hires for cultural fit and shared vision, and I suppose that working there must require lots of manipulation.

As a former freelance graphic designer I also had to think about Cialdini, but his book "Presuation".

You don't want to manipulate anybody, but man are customers stupid sometimes (cue "clients from hell"). E.g. a pattern I noticed was that especially self-important customers always wanted to change "something" if presented with one draft — not because that change made sense, but because they felt the need to be in control. And if you know that is going to happen irrespectively you might as well just control the context within which it happens.

This is why I switched to presenting multiple drafts after each other with the first one being the "lightening rod draft". This way all the self-importance could be channeled there and they would (empirically) be far less likely to make destructive proposals on the later drafts which they then also liked more.

That is certainly manipulation. But manipulation done with the intent of saving customers from making stupid choices that fall back on me after a while, because of in the heat of moment paychological needs. If I was someones customer I'd like them to do the same for me.

If someone really didn't like all drafts I'd recalibrate and figure out what they want, I can be wrong and my ideas are not holy. But if you hired me, it was very likely that I know more about the craft than you did.

> customers always wanted to change "something" ...

> multiple drafts after each other with the first one being the "lightening rod draft".

This reminds me of something I learned in a developmental psychology class (many) years ago. It reflects the "terrible twos" when the toddler learns they can disagree with their parent and answer almost any question "No!" in order to exercise their newfound power.

The suggestion in the class was to phrase questions in a manner to give the toddler a choice between two reasonable options rather than a yes/no query. For example "Do you want to play inside or go outside?" rather than "Do you want to go outside?" [1]

It seems that the choice could be manipulative or could offer reasonable options depending on how it is cast. (Of course there is a continuum between the two.)

[1] Our two boys never wanted to go outside and play but once outside, didn't want to come back in, claiming "Do we have to? We're just starting to have fun."

The first one, Nemawashi, is not cognitive bias. It is very useful to discuss and to listen to feedback in an informal and safe setting (which fosters trust and honest discussion) to get buy-in in advance of formal presentation. This is change management, and not a sign of a disfunctional organisation but, on the contrary, of good, effective leaders, including on the purely technical side.

The cognitive bias here is in the mind of each person you meet with, who has different values that you can more easily address individually and/or who is more approachable in a small, informal setting.

This is not what "cognitive bias" means, though.

There are no native Czech speakers in their management. It's a similar story as the Yandex guys going off to Nebius Group in the Netherlands after the invasion.

Sure, but they're not a Russian legal entity and as far as I can see never have been (unlike Yandex). So, to the point that their being a Russian entity might be a problem for investors, it's moot, as they are not one.

Do you know how many founders in Silicon Valley are not native English speakers? What are you even talking about?

You are still not testing if they can code. But whether under the scrutiny of another person, they can code. Maybe this is important to you, maybe peer programming is important to you for example. I remember a young dev who couldn’t pass such tests, as he would get too nervous, yet he had written the core tech for many shipped products. The type of guy you would just stick in dark room. With age this type of stuff settles down.

“Scrutiny of another” who’s a peer or even a client is super different from an interview.

The latter has more in common with an open mic night, the prospect of which the vast majority of people are terrified and would break down if they attempted it.

My first attempts at public speaking were a frozen horror. But I kept doing it, and it kept getting easier and easier.

I recommend that when there's an opportunity to get up in front of a mike, take it, and get comfortable with it. It's a skill that will serve you well.

I agree with both you and the parent to some degree. I have experienced interviews that went badly because they were in an IDE I wasn't familiar with, or in Leetcode (never used it). So I'm distracted by how to use the tool rather than how to code the solution. But I can also see how stuff like finding a substring is easy - most languages have a function for it. But at that point, you're testing different things - problem-solving vs rote memorization of a provided function.

I feel like a good middle is to allow Google for documentation searches, not solution searches. Without searching (or IDE with radix completion), I'd probably fail the test for not knowing the syntax off the top of my head.

> rote memorization of a provided function.

I never mesmerized strstr(). But using it frequently makes it stick in my mind.

Not everyone uses it (or their language equivalent) frequently depending on the needs of their project. If I'm really using it frequently, then I would probably be looking at higher accuracy/resiliency options like parsing the input and comparing to a map, or regexes.

See food packaging laws. Natural versus artificial flavorings :)

Have you checked out what qualifies for 'organic' according to laws. The laws aren't a good standard.

Exactly, I remember the game for not being technically impressive upon release. 2D games were looked down upon in 1998.

I worked at another game studio at the time of release and all our titles under production were 3D.

We played the hell out of it at LAN parties but felt that technically it already was dated.

I would not say it looked dated.

The low polygon count 3D games of 1998 were still not aesthetically superior to 2D games.

Even if you had a GPU back than (better known at the time as "graphics accelerator"), the graphics were not that good.

This was my opinion at the time as well. First generation 3D games looked inferior to the previous 2D pixel art and 2.5D shooters of the time. The polygon counts were just to low. They could handle perspectives better and had more complex lighting and by the second generation they were already the way forward, but they had a crude first effort feel and required additional hardware to really shine against their predecessors graphically.

I still feel a lot of games (particularly strategy games) lose something going 3D but maybe that is just nostalgia talking. I never could quite getting to 3D RTS games.

Future Crew working on a 3d accelerator? To demosceners at the time, it was obvious this would become the winning offering in the video card world :))

I’ve been ghosted a few times over the years. It stung at first but now that I have grey hair, I no longer take it personally. I actually started ghosting job offers and invitation to continue to the next phase of the interview process. If they’re really interested, they’ll find an alternate way to contact me.

I sincerey hope nobody reads this and thinks "I should start ghosting too". We want less ghosting in this process, not more.

Operating with integrity in a domain where nobody else is is a shortcut to getting fucked.

Responding with “Yeah, nah.” or a more formal equivalent is hardly going out of your way to operate with integrity in a manner that will get you massively fucked.

Yes, ghost those who don't take “sorry, but no” (or more succinctly just “no”) for an answer, especially those who have done so repeatedly (those are a time sink and deserve ghosting), but I wouldn't take it as my default position. Try not to become what you hate.

OK, so I tell a bit of a lie: ignorance is my default and only response wrt LinkedIn these days. I see the “you have messages/requests / people are looking at you” alerts regularly by mail, but I've not logged into the site in half a decade or more which anyone looking at my profile (rather than just being a gattling-gun invite spammer or similar) could probably tell with ease (the fact they bother contacting me is a good indication that they aren't a useful lead!).

My experience is that operating with integrity in a domain where nobody else is gives you a tremendous advantage over "the competition" and can be self-protective.

Interpersonal enshittification's cause in a nutshell.

First job. Joined a large multinational in the late 90s. Every new hire was given about $20k of in the money options right away. Option buy price at $20, share price at around $40.

Within a year the SEC was investigating the top bosses. Stock price collapsed more than half. Options worth nothing. New management decided to restrike the price of the options for of many of my coworkers, erasing most of their loses. But mine were outside the magic period of time ://