• 5 posts
  • 19 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
  • There are no words:

    It’s a particularly dismal time for a job hunt, especially in the layoff-ridden tech industry, and one San Francisco startup is getting flak online for a controversial hiring stunt meant to find committed talent.

    LemonLime, a Y Combinator-backed artificial intelligence startup for small businesses, offered company tattoos in exchange for an “instant interview” at a YC Startup School afterparty on Saturday, according to a now-deleted LinkedIn post from its co-founder Jordan Zietz. The post showed a woman sitting in front of a tattoo artist, appearing to prep for getting inked on her right forearm.

    Thankfully, the common person’s voice is heard:

    The post garnered plenty of attention on LinkedIn, with some people quick to criticize LemonLime’s antics.

    “Give people dignity and let them interview on the spot,” the most-like comment on the post read. “We are not your dance monkey who have to prove anything to you to be worth your time.”

    Others cited it as an example of how bad California’s job market is, and called the company’s move an exploitation of people’s desperation to get their foot in the door.

    “Influencing someone who is trying to find work to get your company’s logo tattooed is so evil spirited,” another comment said. “This isn’t edgy or innovative, it’s a disturbing abuse of power.”

    This is incredibly disturbing.

Note, this post is from 10 days ago and it consists of an opinion piece in a newspaper concerning a familiar event from recent days - though before someone was arrested for clapping.

The article is very revealing:

The sales pitch for what could be the state’s largest data center is built on a hyperscale whopper.

In sworn testimony from a federal bankruptcy proceeding, Gary Pinkston, the businessman touted as the developer of the proposed “Flint Hills Digital Campus” at Emporia, said he wasn’t familiar with the project.

Come again?

“I have no interest at all in that project,” Pinkston said under oath last month in reply to a question about the Emporia data center.

Pinkston has been the folksy plaid-shirt-and-jeans ambassador for the hyperscale project since shortly after its announcement last month. The scheme aims to transform 1,000 mostly rural acres on the west edge of Emporia into a data center complex that might eventually attract billions of dollars in investment. Mentally stress “might” in that sentence, because not enough information in the project has been released to judge its chances of success.

In other Lemmy posts, you likely already heard about the Emporia High School physics teacher, Lux Claridge, who was arrested for clapping in support of comments made by critics of the data center project at a city meeting.