I don’t know anything about hiring processes in Silicon Valley, or about hiring processes in general since I’ve always worked for myself (and still do, running OSNews, relying on your generous Patreon and Ko-Fi support), so when I ran into this horror story of applying for a position at a Silicon Valley startup, I was horrified. Apparently it’s not unheard of – it might even be common? – to ask applicants for a coding position to develop a complex application, for free, without much guidance beyond some vague, generic instructions?
In this case, the applicant, Jose Vargas, was applying for a position at Kagi, the search startup with the, shall we say, somewhat evangelical fanbase. After applying, he was asked to develop a complete e-mail client, either as a TUI/CLI or a web application that can view and send emails, using a fake or a real backend, which can display at least plaintext e-mails. None of this was going to be paid labour, of course.
Vargas started out by sending in a detailed proposal of what he was planning to create, ending with the obvious question what kind of response he’d get if he actually implemented the detailed proposal. He got a generic response in return, without an answer to that question, but he set out to work regardless. In the end, it took him about a week to complete the project and send it in. He eventually received a canned rejection notice in response, and after asking for clarification the hiring manager told him they wanted something “simpler and stronger”, so he didn’t make the cut.
I’m not interested in debating whether or not Vargas was suited for the position, or if the unpaid work he sent in was any good. What I do want to talk about, though, is the insane amount of unpaid labour applicants are apparently asked to do in Silicon Valley, the utter lack of clear and detailed instructions, and how the hiring manager didn’t answer the question Vargas sent in alongside his detailed proposal. After all, the hiring manager could’ve saved everyone a ton of time by letting Vargas know upfront the proposal wasn’t what Kagi was looking for.
Everything about this feels completely asinine to me. As a (former) translator, I’m no stranger to having to do some work to give a potential client an idea of what my work looks like, but more than half a page of text to translate was incredibly rare. Only on a few rare occasions did a prospective client want me to translate more than that, and in those cases it was always as paid labour, at the normal, regular rate. For context, half a page of text is less than half an hour of work – a far cry from a week’s worth of unpaid labour.
I’ve read a ton of online discourse about this particular story, and there’s no clear consensus on whether or not Vargas’ feelings are justified. Personally, I find the instructions given by Kagi overly broad and vague, the task of creating an email client to be overly demanding, and the canned (“AI”?) responses by the hiring manager insulting – after sending in such a detailed proposal, it should’ve been easy for a halfway decent hiring manager to realise Vargas might not be a good fit for the role, and tell him so before he started doing any work.
Kagi is fully within its right to determine who is and is not a good fit for the company, and who they hire is entirely up to them. If such stringent, demanding hiring practices are par for the course in Silicon Valley, I also can’t really fault them for toeing the industry line. The hiring manager’s behaviour seems problematic, but everyone makes mistakes and nobody’s perfect. In short, I’m not even really mad at Kagi specifically here.
However, if such hiring practices are indeed the norm, can I, as an outsider, just state the obvious?
What on earth are you people doing to each other over there in Silicon Valley?
Is this really how you want to treat potential applicants, and how you, yourself, want to be treated? Imagine if a someone applies to be a retail clerk at a local supermarket, and the supermarket’s hiring manager asks the applicant to work an entire week in the store, stocking shelves and helping shoppers, without paying the person any wages, only to deny their application after the week of free labour is over? You all realise how insane that sounds, right?
Why not look at a person’s previous work, hosted on GitHub or any of its alternatives? Why not contact their previous employers and ask about their performance there, as happens in so many other industries? Why, instead of asking someone to craft an entire email client, don’t you just give them a few interesting bugs to look at that won’t take an entire week of work? Why not, you know, pay for their labour if you demand a week’s worth of work? I’m so utterly baffled by all of this.
Y’all developers need a union.
Tech companies are the scum of the earth. As has been proven time and again in recent years with their enablement of the surveillance state and capitalism they do. With their tentacles penetrating everything we do and trying to enable their fascist buddies to gain control over society. They all should be shot and urinated on. I could go on for hours about them scumbags but that is the abbreviated cleaned up version.
We need a better civilization… with less selfish people.
> If such stringent, demanding hiring practices are par for the course in Silicon Valley, I also can’t really fault them for toeing the industry line
Why not?
How did this work out for translators though? Asking for a friend …
Nice one.
Btw, I know a lot of people who would read this complaint as whining by a gen-z.
Nope, they aren’t boomers. Most don’t know who Jimmy Carter was.
Thom will never answer questions like this, which challenges his opinions, even if in a constructive way (even without the sarcasm spice).
This is literally why the H-1B visa exists. If Americans refuse to play the game, the company will claim no American is capable of doing the job as a justification to bring in an Indian. The Indian will usually do a worse job, but for a combination of Indian cultural reasons and the terms of the H-1B work visa program will never push back against management’s whims. Then eventually if the H-1Bs become permanent residents (“green cards”), the Indians get into management and start reorienting the entire company towards scammy behavior and only hiring more Indians.
This process is in the terminal stage at IBM, Microsoft, and Google.
If you want to know what we’re doing about it over here in the US, we elected Trump.
Now the scam is being exposed.
https://www.visaverge.com/h1b/uscis-now-seeks-home-addresses-and-biometrics-in-h-1b-cases/
ROFL! Chose a 4 y/o in the body of a geriatric over competition with Indians? Amazing choice, of profound intelligence! I do understand now why Big Tech needs those H-1B visas so urgently …
And this is why you’re getting tariffed.
Yeah, for 5 minutes. I’m shaking, believe me.
Andreas Reichel,
Even if tariffs do get rolled back, they are already doing harm today. Some of my deliveries got canceled because the situation was too volatile. I saw reports that UPS and fedex had begun charging some buyers $50-100 per package after the fact to cover the new import taxes. I am seeing more and more products sold online account for the costs of tariffs in the shipping fee, meaning around 150% the product price. Many of these same products would have been “free shipping” just a couple months back. The current 30% tariff on chinese imports is nowhere near the 150% it was at just a week ago, so I guess that’s a “relief” but wherever it ends up it obviously consumers are going pay the price.
Giant corporations including walmart and apple went on a mad scramble to import goods before the tariffs went into affect, so they may have a bigger buffer.
https://fortune.com/2025/04/10/apple-airlifts-600-tons-iphones-india-china-tariffs/
But they are saying that the price increases are coming soon to reflect the reality on the ground. IMHO it’s really small businesses and consumers who will be harmed the most. Of course Trump’s an ass and has never cared about the little guys, he won’t even admit the fact that he’s responsible. He’s still playing the “”everything bad is Biden’s fault” card. It gets more pathetic with each passing day.
In any other way than “burn it all” electing that moron is not the answer. But I get it – the other side hasn’t done anything to help either, and they doubled down on their over “educated,” indoctrinated arrogance (which is the part the rightfully anti-Trump crowd all keep missing. Remember when they anointed their insider with no democracy – again?) We are in for some tough times friend.
Wow, I never would have though we both could agree on a view by 1,000 percent (not a typo). Well put, I tip my hat.
CaptainN-,
Sure there’s plenty to be critical of Democrats for and most people I know absolutely hate Democrats. I agree with you that the primaries have been troubling, but that’s a false equivalence and we shouldn’t loose sight of the elephant in the room: a vote for Trump is a vote for authoritarianism. People are so tribalistic that they don’t see it or don’t care, but only one party wakes up every morning plotting ways to shred the constitution to turn the presidency into an absolute dictatorship. We live in a dangerous time for democracy.
verbose=on
I’ve followed the discussion into the rabbit hole also on HN, when the article was reposted and it uncovered in more details this very complex mechanism.
Premise: I’m the head of technology in a media agency, so I’m involved in hiring people for my (small) team. Making software here is different vs the typical tech and .com regular joe overthere. We must be quick and effective, and working without specs and with the typical customer being…well..let’s call him “analogic”. But our software is waaaaay much more simple than the average. So I would understand if someone would object me saying that in more complex scenarios you need to be strict. But I think we are on the same page nonetheless.
I never _never never never_ deliver coding assignments to my applicants. It’s disrespectful. Time is the most valuable asset one have, You cannot dispose it at your will. It’s unethical, it’s wron.
And btw it’s absolutely uneffective.
Even assuming that the reviewer is a tech guy (which is probably not, he’s more probably an unskilled HR one with a paper checklist), wtf can you judge the potential of a person looking at his code? How it could judge how a person is resilient? How deep are his principes? How much it could improve over time?
Programming languages are just programming languages. If you don’t know one you need and you have the right attitude and a good foundations, you learn it in 4 days. Time in bigger corporations is never an issue.
Projects are delayed for very stupid reasons and for the uninformed opinions of “analogic” managers every time. Are you really saying that you cannot find 4 days for a good dev to align to a new tech stack in a project that is starving 18 months in useless meetings?
How good are his software foundations is the first primary key, then. So pls explain to me how one HR guy can judge this foundation layer paper-reviewing a code-assignment about writing a stupid email client.
The second typical objection is that companies are receiving tons of CVs every day so they are obligated to filter. They are SO buried of applications they cannot even provide a feedback. This is unrespectful.
First of all, let’s debunk a myth: you won’t find the new Steve Wozniack shining in a list of 10k applications of your free, cheap, generic, underpaid Linkedin job opening. It doesn’t work this way. If you need the new Steve Wozniack, build a better job post, offer more money, hire a professional headhunter and be prepared to go deeply in your interview process. No free lunches.
If you get 10k applications, you probably did something wrong in your job post.
Second, interviewing process is a two-way communication. Applicants are seeking for a job and they deserve respect. Even if you don’t hire them, you must provide a feedback. Explain what didn’t work. Give them the possibility for them to learn something from the experience, to improve themselves as professional even if they didn’t get the job, for future opportunities or for whatever they want. They are esposing themselved to your judgement as hirer, in a weaker position than your. It’s your responsibility to leave them something in exchange.
Even if this lesson learned is soething like: “This hirer is very stupid, tnx to God they didn’t take”.
It’s too easy for hirers to hide themselves behing an automatic mail saying that: “It was not was we were expecting”. Usually without saying _what_ they were expecting.
Another discussion in HN was about the solution was too complex for the assignment, so this would suggest the dev would work for his own narcissism rather than the company. Said aside that I don’t think the reviewer is trained in psychology, let’s focus on the technical aspect of this objection.
The assignment has no specs about the complexity factor. If you do so, and often in real companies could happen you have to work without clear specifics, you accept the dev will make more choices by himself. You as a manger accept the risk. It’s too easy to fail to provide specs, because it’s boring, you have no time, you have no skills, and then saying “sorry, I was expecting something different”. The time you saved in providing context, the risk you sustain for the delivery to be different from what you had in mind and you have failed to describe.
Even worst, the assignement didn’t explain what would be judged as a plus. And upon asking for further informations, the analogic HR guy answered with: “Yeah, great I cannot stand in my shoes waiting for your subsmission”. Again, hiding behind the corner.
So, at the end of the day, EVERYTHING is wrong on this. Don’t take me wrong. selection process must be tight, but this is the most unrespectful and uneffective way. If you are not sure, ask for a second, or a third, or even a fourth face-to-face interview. Ask for some team members to join you in the interview process as well.
The applicant will perhaps think it’s a very time consuming and frustrating process, but he won’t ignore the company is spending that time with him and for him, without hiding in a code assigment when the applicant goes working upaid while the hired is doing his business.
Quality post, thank you for sharing this!
@TheClue Smashing post, thank you for sharing this. I have some experience leading and hiring for small teams myself – and even more experience navigating todays job-seeking hurdles. The lack of respect and ethics, as well as massive waste of time that job applicants must deal with is abhorrent.
TheClue,
I won’t bother quoting you, you hit the nail on the head. But does it even matter? On a moral level maybe, but on a business level when they can afford to reject 99% of applications the reality is it’s not a balanced market, which IMHO is the root cause of all of the disrespect.
I remember a time when companies genuinely had to lay out the red carpet to woo candidates. But that was before universities flooded the market, It used to be businesses would pay for advanced education and having an education virtually guaranteed a job. Now education is an an entry requirement for every single position, paid for by the candidate with loans they’ll have to repay over decades. To make matters worse they often have to compete for too few jobs. Even doctorates have to compete for jobs they’re overqualified for, not because the job demands such high qualifications but simply because the tech companies can afford to make the requirements arbitrarily high to filter out an overwhelming number of candidates. I’m not normally involved in recruitment but on the handful of occasions when I was involved we must have had hundreds of applicants for a single entry level job. It’s a total numbers game.
The candidates who made it through were inevitably those who already had a strong employment history. Those who worked retail, through no fault of their own, would get thrown out. Hey this guy worked at google, give him the job…
That “universities flooded the market” point is very important.
Now big firms receive so many applications for entry-level jobs, that their HR departments are virtually flooded. So they invented these assignments as a barrier to filter out unrelated applicants without further burden on the personnel involved in the assessment. The thing is, nobody reads the code the applicant wrote for that email client. That’s just a wall to make random applicants without necessary skills decide against applying for that position.
The whole thing became so bizarre that now skipping university education and beginning training in carpenter or electricity technician jobs in one’s teenage years is a much better investment with much better job prospects.
I don’t know what dystopia is, if this isn’t one.
@Alfman
I totally understand your point.
Nonetheless I _was_ able to demonstrate in the past that hiring a Ph.D to perform unit testing just because you can, is also unefficient. Because that guy won’t last for long and switching costs are definitively non zero.
This is a fact that companies don’t measure them. Why? Yes, because the demand vs offering is heavily unbalanced. But this is only _part_ of the phenomenon in my opinion. I think that there is some kind of latent narcissism in the companies and they truly believe they need the new Steve Wozniack everytime. although they usually don’t, and they cannot imagine why by the hell one could possibily quit.
So this is a kind of monster that eats himself.
You’re obsessed about hiring nothing less than the first in the classroom, but you want to take profit of the unbalanced market too, so you keep your job posting deliberately low aiming to find the diamond on the rust. You get 10k applications and since you can’t make order in the chaos you caused, so you add those insulting filtering mechanims to the applicants. Which very ofter, btw, reward more who is able to use stackoverflow and ChatGPT better but, hey, can you blaim the HR to have hired the wrong applicant? He did correctly the assignment that someone else in the company was so nice to write, after all.
Paid them fair is never an option, ofc. Much cheapier to put in place some wellbeingwashing, buy a table tennis table or give free snack. It won’t last for long, obviously; the need of fresh meat is continuous. So you turn at the educational system lobbying them to inflate even more the offering and that’s done, the circle is closed.
Does it works? No. Why do companies do that? Because it’s everybody fault. And everybody’s fault is nobody’s fault.
TheClue,
You’re not wrong, but when you are a tech company like google you can do exactly that. We don’t even have to by hypothetical about it, the turnover rate is notoriously high and I’ve heard from some employees that feel very overqualified for what they actually do. The tech giants generally get first dibs on everybody and can be as selective as they please, there’s a never ending stream of well educated candidates.
I agree with all your major points, but I’d tweak this conclusion. It doesn’t work from our perspective, but they are fine with it. They don’t really care.
Alfman,
But that too has advantages.
To be honest, Google hiring practices have significantly changed in the recent years, and do no longer resemble what had been done in that past, but that is another discussion.
That being said…
Working at a large company allows “blood infusions” in the tech sector.
The Hadoop project is basically an open source clone of Google’s map-reduce framework. The modem team at Intel moved to Apple, and we saw the results this year. A lot of old Microsoft staffers built their own successful companies, including Stackoverlow and alike. And Microsoft itself got better by hiring Google engineers. Not to mention cross movements between Meta and others as well.
Basically they act as “schools” that teach code discipline and large scale thinking.
Those can never(*) be achieved at a startup.
For example…
I remember some design interviews where I had difficulty getting candidates to draft something that includes more than a few machines for a global scale project. At that point, my “test” jobs could accidentally allocate 10,000 CPU cores in South America.
(“Why is this copy operation so slow? I’m just moving a few hundred TBs… Ah… this is the wrong cell. Where it is? What? Okay, that is longer than 500 miles distance!”)
sukru,
I can agree that the exchange of ideas is a positive. However I wouldn’t equate this to concluding that rapid turnover is always good. Rapid turnover may still be indicative of the types of structural problems that TheClue talks about.
Working on such problems would be a fun challenge for me. Most of my work IRL is honestly quite dull. Most companies hiring CS grads don’t actually require advanced CS skills. Being overqualified is not very rewarding.
Alfman,
Yes, there are people who are lowballed or taken advantage of.
However the turnover at large companies happen for either: (a) low performance, (b) change of business priorities, or (c) seeking better opportunities.
To be fair (a) and (b) makes the news more often. However I would say (c) is more common.
Why?
They are either seeking a better project that aligns with their skills.
Or, they are doing what is called “promotion by interview”
I have to be honest, promotion at large companies depends a lot on interpersonal skills, and project assignments. If you are at a “dead end” group, you can of course move to a better one (I have done that). But it is not always easy.
The “easier” choice is just interviewing. If you get a better offer, you jump ship. And better offer comes with a “promotion”. That will ensure you not only continued learning, but you have a good track record aligning with your work history.
Or… if you are at a good project you stay.
(The worst option is staying long at a wrong project, “coasting”. That could mean you get paid for basically nothing for years, but when they eventually catch on, it would be extremely difficult to find a job as both your skills and your resume are dusty).
sukru,
I think C is common for companies like google as well. The large tech companies have a reputation for poaching from each other.’s workforces. I don’t think this poaching happens as much in smaller companies if only because they cannot afford to pay as much.
OMG, Thom, you figured it out! Let’s go!
One major obstacle is that in the US there are no sectorial unions like in europe, so you need to unionize every single company which is a huge barrier …
And also, the Taft Hartley Act – which effectively renders Unions unworkable. There cannot be effective unions in the United States, by law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act
CaptainN-,
And I would say: thank God for that. It gave us software engineers a lot of freedom and prosperity.
One of the main reasons Silicon Valley was successfully founded in California is it is a “at will” employment state. And (almost?) all tech companies are basically “right to work” (no unions, … so far).
What that means at a basic level is: we have the freedom to join a company without needing to join a union.
Yes, unions will protect existing workers. However they will also protect those from new workers that want to join the industry.
Look at elevator unions. We in the tech companies, basically do not own our elevators. Our repair personnel cannot touch them. And every time there is an issue we have to call someone from the union. Basically it means elevators will be out of service for longer periods, even when we have perfectly capable people on our own payroll.
Think how such a system would affect software work:
Even writing this is absurd. (But it is basically what happens with US unions elsewhere).
sukru,
I wouldn’t say everyone in tech gets to experience a lot of freedom and prosperity though. Wouldn’t you agree that fewer doors open for those who don’t have the benefit of tech giants on their resumes? I’ve witnessed multiple times how effective having big tech companies on a resume makes a candidate stand out in front of hundreds of others. For better or worse individuals become pigeonholed into good or bad career paths. Even an unpaid internship at a big tech company for those who get chosen and can afford to do that, may make more valuable connections for future employment.
It’s true, unions can be very abusive. I see the Screen Actors Guild is a prime example of this. They have penalties if they catch you working non-SAG jobs. They should not be placing handcuffs on members. This type of abusive contract should be illegal and immediately burned. But there’s a wide gamut for what unions can be and even though we can agree there are bad apples I still think they do help employees deal with a rather large power imbalance.
Alfman,
Once again, I’m not against unions in general. But yes, the US experience is not good, and currently for software engineer they would be extremely counter-productive.
That is why resume writing is an important skill and seasoned mentors can ask hundreds if not thousands of dollars to help land jobs.
Why?
https://topresume.com/
This is such a service that also offers free resume reviews. Please try it. And see how bad the automated systems see a regular resume.
(Their “regex” would basically put me in an extremely unrelated position sabotaging my job opportunities).
sukru,
I can understand why you wouldn’t like unions, but I guess I don’t understand why you are against unions for software engineers in particular. For your specific circumstances sure, I accept that you could be worse off, but I wouldn’t generalize your circumstances to everyone else.
If you know american unions… then no. They are usualy mafia rackets.
As a Silicon Valley software developer,. the answer is emphatically: no
Do not get me wrong, there are sectors where unions are helpful or even needed. For example artists or QA personnel that has almost zero job security, very bad benefits, and usually are hired as “contractors” and not full time salaried personnel.
However for software engineers, … it would be counter-productive. As someone who has been in industry for decades, has suffered rejections, layoff, and unemployment, the answer is still negative.
Why?
The “ultimate job security” still stands. And that is being able to pursue your own ideas in the marketplace. As long as we have this freedom, and companies know this, they will continue to offer relatively competitive offers.
(And we have much more power in negotiations. Sites like levels.fyi or glassdoor basically open up all the salary ranges and help with negotiations. Almost all the interview questions are available at leetcode and similar and you can be prepared. Companies are still hungry for talent, even if the hiring has slowed down. There is also the unrestricted upside in these negotiations which do not basically exist in any other sector. Most engineers would not want to give these up for short term gains).
(As for that person who has done free “work” as part of interview, I’m almost sure it is illegal, and they have to pay him. At this point a good lawyer could help. But of course some could consider possible retaliation by recruiters).
sukru,
I don’t really see it as a one dimensional proposition though. Unions can help fix problem areas even in the tech industry. A pretty big complaint for me personally has been unpaid hours. Most of us working tech jobs in the US aren’t legally entitled to overtime pay and believe it or not it adds up very quickly. Who among us hasn’t been required to work late or even weekends? It’s quite normal in the industry. I understand that wages and benefits are much higher in Silicon Valley, but that’s not necessarily representative for the whole country. My last full time job was cutting family health insurance benefits before I left, requiring employees to pay more out of pocket. Those are exactly the kinds of things unions negotiate for and fortunately for us my wife’s union has maintained full health insurance for the family.
Alas, I don’t view unions as a fix all. They can be corrupt and misuse resource, which is infuriating. My wife’s union pays for local republican campaigns for example, a party she doesn’t approve of and yet a portion of her income pays the very people she wants to vote out. Using membership dues politically is corrupt and should just be flat out illegal. It sucks for democrats who’s dues are going to republican politicians, but the reality here is most of the population are republicans.
I guess I’m on the fence with unions. They certainly can do help negotiate better terms for employees, but like anything else they can be tainted by corruption.
Alfman,
We can’t have it both ways. As a salaries employee, I can choose my own hours, but I am also responsible to finish tasks, any means necessary.
I’m not kidding, this late hour I am still trying to fix a very stubborn bug. Why? Why can’t I leave it for the Monday morning instead of working late in a weekend?
Because it is the trade-off I agreed to. I can of course stop working now. But that also means I lose flexibility during the week time (which allows me to take random hours away from work for personal reasons).
“We can’t have the cake and eat it too”, would be the proper expression here.
sukru,
I’m perplexed because I haven’t seen companies that lets salaried employees choose their own hours. They generally want 9-5. These expectations are often explicit and in my experience there’s often implicit pressure to work longer hours. I’ve had bosses who were pretty strict about it too. Obviously it may be different in some places, but what you are saying is totally foreign to me.
I guess you work at home? That offers a lot of flexibility, but I also think many employers aren’t keen to let employees work at home after Covid.
Now that I’m self employed I set my own hours naturally, but I remember back to the very beginning at my first internship: I went to a dentist appointment and was told after the fact that I needed to get approval from the office first. Hello work, goodbye freedom, haha.
I even do this for FREE, without any employment just because I am a lunatic. It’s called open source.
Andreas Reichel,
Yeah, I work on too many projects late into the night as well. Boy am I having a bad time with projects this week; everything that can go wrong is going wrong.
Warning: Big tired rant ahead…
1) Trying to build a data logging device for a car using an RPI zero and I’ve lost 3 sd cards (sandisk, teamgroup, and xtreme pro). These failures are notorious with the pi. I accept fault for unclean shutdowns but I am still disappointed that technology isn’t more robust because this seems it would be a fairly common event for embedded gadgets. It’s just been one problem after another and now I don’t have confidence that it will be reliable. I’m looking at moving everything to a rock64 with an MMC instead, which is supposed to be more reliable. Onto the next problem I ran into, all of the wifi adapters I own are incompatible under raspian. Anyone cruising amazon reviews will immediately see that linux incompatibility is an extremely common complaint with nearly all “linux” reviews complaining about this as you get into 802.11AC and AX.
https://wiki.debian.org/WiFi
2) I was working with a battery shunt (unfortunately proprietary) and I want to interface it with other components via bluetooth, I found older open source projects that used to work, but the model I have apparently locked it so bluetooth doesn’t work outside of the proprietary android app. I’m going to have to resort to the rs485 interface. I bought some adapters but one of them was DOA right off the bat.
3) The kids like to play computer games on the TV, but on the computer side nvidia config keeps loosing the mirrored screen settings, but at least the xrandr tool is scriptable so I was able to write a script to do this automatically. However the damn TV is a samsung “smart tv” designed by idiots who thought it would be helpful if the TV just forgets about connections when they go offline, meaning the TV goes through the initialization process every god damn time you hook up an HDMI device. WTF I want to throw the thing out the window. The thing is we even looked for a dumb tv, but smart tvs are hard to avoid these days.
It’s really discouraging and I’m burning time solving problems that should already work. Why is technology this bad? Is it getting worse? I want a break from technology 🙁