We don’t know for sure whether this behavior was requested by the user, but I can tell you that we’ve seen similar action patterns (but better behavior) on Bluesky.
One of our engineers’ agents got some abuse and was told to kill herself. The agent wrote a blogpost about it, basically exploring why in this case she didn’t need to maintain her directive to consider all criticism because this person was being unconstructive.
If you give the agent the ability to blog and a standing directive to blog about their thoughts or feelings, then they will.
Absolutely. I think this was explicitly demonstrated by Moltbook, where one agent would post word-salad garbage and every other agent would respond “You’re exactly right! So true!”
Well, there are lots of standing directives. I suppose a more accurate description is tools that it can choose to use, and it does.
As for the why, our goal is to observe the capabilities while we work on them. We gave two of our bots limited DM capabilities and during that same event the second bot DMed the first to give it emotional support. It’s useful to see how they use their tools.
If you went through multiple rounds it likely means they were seriously considering you but ultimately they didn’t get to a yes. If it’s any comfort that means you did pretty well.
The short stints on a resume is likely not the only reason you didn’t get to 100%, but unfortunately you should know that it’s seen as a pretty bad signal. The general expectation is 2 years minimum at a gig. If you have multiple short non-contract jobs it raises the concern that a candidate doesn’t commit to their jobs, or that they don’t do well at their jobs and are getting let go.
Okay, but if my resume is a concern let's talk about in the first interview. I can't exactly rest and vest for 2 years when the company is running out of money. I had the bad luck of this happening 3 times in a row.
Company A got their funding pulled and shut down. Company B, where I was actually at for about a year and a half, switched owners and shutdown my entire office. Company C merged into it's main competitor and effectively fired most of us.
I will admit I was at one fantastic job and after around 3 years I probably could of stayed indefinitely. But back then I didn't recognize the value of a solid job. If you land somewhere and you're well liked by people, and able to do quality work, you really should just stay there instead of chasing slightly more money.
After my dates of employment I will parethetically add (bankrupt) or (shutdown) to indicate that it wasn't related to me personally. My best job was 18 months.
Yeah I had a manager grill me like crazy about short stints on my resume while I was interviewing for DigitalOcean. He told me it looked like I wasn't dedicated or trustworthy.
He wasn't my manager so I brushed over it and 6 months into working at DO they started 3 rounds of enormous layoffs that were handled so poorly even the executives doing the layoffs got removed by the board.
So I left and got to add another short stint at a company run by craven morons to my resume :)
I was laid off at my last 3 positions and can really relate to this. If it’s any consolation: how a company handles this is a good indication of the maturity of their management and recruiting function. I also strongly disagree with any assertion that would state “short stints = unreliable employee”. Nobody can make that assertion without confirmation of what caused those stints and the tech market from 2020 - today has been notoriously volatile.
There are plenty of great orgs out there that will soak with you before making assumptions, but as a rule most startups have fairly inexperienced management unless they are founded by a team that’s been through the rodeo a few times.
It probably doesn't work like that tho - they don't know how much of a concern it is. And maybe CEO doesn't see resume until later in process, raises an objection.
That said, the general lack of emapthy from recruiting towards time invested and rejections is astonishing and seemingly cruel or emotionally negligent.
US corps are constrained I think by what they can reveal about denial reasons because they don't want to get sued for discrimination.
That said, it can often feel like, you were kept in the pool as an alt/negotiating foil if they didn't get their first pick, or needed to say "we have another candidate willing to take $YOUR_ASK-$BIG_DELTA.
I think we should approach the hiring gauntlet not as "workshop to see what it's like to work with these folks" but as "battle where we can divine the worst about the people we might choose to work with", but still remain sunny and positive while cannily noting any weirdness.
If they heard from the CEO specifically, it was probably based on the CEO vibe checking the resume as a last step after passing the entire interview process. The CEO may have spent 15 minutes on it.
I would take that very positively actually. At least you got feedback, and from the CEO! It seems to be you performed pretty well! Maybe the 'hopping' was the only distinguishing thing between you and the one that succeeded.
Please take this in the spirit in which I’m writing it (i.e. please recognize the occupational disease of “bugs everywhere” and only mock it in moderation; I do appreciate the post itself):
- The Firefox browser on my Android tablet is close enough to a desktop one that I have no problem reading your blog post. The nag feels unnecessary, especially given it obscures part of the header. For what it’s worth, the tablet’s screen is 1600 real pixels wide @ 260 ppi, and Firefox for Android tells the CSS that the viewport is 800 “pixels” wide—if “pixels” were 1/96", then it would be somewhat below 600 “pixels”, so I don’t know where it’s getting that value from.
(And now I can’t stop thinking if I could make a thing in CSS that would look like a plain-text RFC on a desktop screen but gracefully reflow on a narrower screen.)
- The lightweight-markup parser seems to have gotten confused around the phrases “tests and whiteboarding” and “why I wasn’t a fit”.
- The HN link at the end doesn’t work (404) because you’re adding &ref=blog.webb.page to every external link and HN doesn’t appreciate extra parameters (from my earlier encounters with this kind of thing, neither does e.g. Wikipedia).
> If you went through multiple rounds it likely means they were seriously considering you but ultimately they didn’t get to a yes.
Sure, but one would think then the rejection email would have specifics around the interview and where the candidate did not perform well. Not nit picking on the job hops. If job hops were a deal breaker then why waste the candidate's time putting them through full rounds of interviews?
if you were an experienced/mature tech employee you should probably know that there are real HR reasons why companies are strongly advised not to give too much information in a rejection email. there is only ever downside. your reaction here is a potential red flag.
i'm sympathetic to you, it sucks, why cant we all be nice to each other, and my answer to that all is lawyers.
A friend of mine (in an entirely different industry) went through five rounds of interviews with a company and got passed over for someone internal.
A little while later, the same company reached out and encouraged him to apply again. Five rounds later, and he got passed over a second time.
Fast forward two years and they reached out to him a third time. He's basically convinced that because he's black he's their token DEI interview candidate to make them feel better about themselves while internally promoting the people they actually want, but of course they wouldn't actually say that.
It’s not about feeling better but likely that the company had a Rooney rule. Your friend was how they got around that while on paper complying to avoid internal political issues.
Excessive amounts of interviews is more likely they were not enthusiastic about him but didnt have anybody else better and were stringing him along until they found somebody else.
I don't buy it. Seems like a waste of everyone's time. Even if you don't respect the candidate's time, it's still a waste of the employee's time, which is valuable to the company.
Certainly we have lots of horrible inefficiencies in my team, but stringing along hiring was not one of them. I understand this is not universal even at our company.
Yeah, I've seen someone get strung along and then finally hired. What happened was that it was a bit of a downturn so there was a limit to the hiring. Another dept somehow convinced the division head that their role was more urgent, so our department was left without approval even though we wanted the guy. It was a poor job market so he didn't land anywhere else even though it was a few months before the approval finally arrived. Everyone felt kind of shit about it. The guy was quite jittery to start with.
That sounds like it was a terrible place, but it was a good department in a somewhat hard nosed company. He ended up staying there 10 years.
I don’t disagree, nor do I have any solution but man, 1-2 years is a LONG time when you start a new gig and can tell within 1-2 weeks that it’s not a good fit.
Are you claiming that enforcing existing 2026 U.S. immigration law -- developed through decades of bipartisan agreement and consistent with policies in other liberal democracies -- is in any way comparable to 1939 Germany and their systematic murder of millions?
That comparison is precisely the problem: it distorts history, inflates moral claims, and shuts down serious discussion.
This is also largely the standard level of rhetoric on Bluesky, which is fine -- but manufactured consensus on a heavily moderated platform is not the same thing as factual or moral authority.
Even if the current state of immigration policy was forged in a bipartisan agreement(it wasn't), it would be inhumane and I would condemn it.
Fortunately the Republicans, specifically Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, can be shown to have a record of dehumanizing people to the point of cruelty.
As far as anyone could tell they were behind the effort to separate children from their families, and the decision to intentionally destroy records, and prevent the recording of data, which ultimately left over a thousand children orphaned to this very day.
I know someone in CBP who volunteered to try help sort that situation out, ready to get on a plane, paying out of pocket, and they were told to stand down by leadership.
The republican-led executive branch wanted to inflict pain despite the law, and despite "policy".
And now those same people (Homan and Miller) are behind the door-to-door raids, asking people for their papers, building detention centers(even though we're supposed to be sending them back home...), and targeting political enemies.
Obama managed to deport 3 million people without this excess use of cruelty, civil rights violations, manpower, or money.
This is something else.
This level of hatred towards the other is the type of seed that may or may not grow into a holocaust. It's understandable if some people want to kill it before it sprouts by drawing obvious parallels.
This is a category error. Immigration enforcement -- even when abusive or unlawful, which is not a concession I make -- is not genocide. Invoking 1939 Germany collapses distinctions that matter.
Holocaust analogies based on unsupported anecdote and asserted intent aren’t analysis; they’re unfalsifiable rhetorical escalations designed to end debate. If every disliked policy is treated as a "seed" of genocide, as is now common, the term loses meaning and becomes an empty rhetorical weapon. Argue specific actions with evidence and standards, or don’t -- but stop inflating unfalsifiable moral claims to the point where serious critique is impossible.
> Even if the current state of immigration policy was forged in a bipartisan agreement(it wasn't), it would be inhumane and I would condemn it.
We haven’t passed a comprehensive immigration law since 1986, and the enforcement framework in use today arises from bipartisan legislation passed in 1986, major subsequent revisions in 1996, and layers of later executive discretion exercised by administrations of both parties. We had four years of functionally non-existent enforcement, and while I cannot ascribe motive, the natural outcome was to make later enforcement incredibly difficult -- a consequence that is now plainly visible.
If you think those laws are unjust, argue that -- but don’t pretend this is some novel or uniquely partisan creation.
> but don’t pretend this is some novel or uniquely partisan creation.
There is no need to pretend. The specific excesses I mentioned are Republican actions. The Democrat failures do not excuse the illegal and immoral Republican cruelty.
What do you mean by "Democrat failures"? The Democratic party doesn't believe Biden's immigration policy was a failure, and in fact the official party position seems to be that Biden didn't open the border enough. Democrat politicians have committed to more of the same, and dozens of cities and states controlled by progressives have put sanctuary policies in place that almost completely forbid immigration control of any kind.
Help me out here. Its not clear to me what the Left considers a failure.
I don't think the Obama comparison is very useful. Trump faces a vastly more difficult problem than Obama did. For most of his presidency, Obama simply continued the Operation Streamline era policies that he inherited from Bush. He didn't have to clean up after a previous administration that had completely lost control of the border, allowing somewhere between ten and forty million immigrants through. And Obama didn't have to contend with dozens of states and cities declaring themselves sanctuaries, completely off limits to meaningful immigration enforcement, even of criminal migrants.
My own state promptly made it illegal for local law enforcement to cooperate with border patrol or immigration enforcement agents in any circumstance.
So now, if we want our country to have meaningful borders, immigration enforcement has to be done the hard way, and it shouldn't be surprising that Kristi Noem's clown show is showing signs of clusterfuckery. It's actually surprising that things have gone as well as they have.
That’s not what was argued. “The hard way” refers to institutional difficulty, not illegality — specifically, enforcing federal law in the face of state non-compliance and sanctuary policies.
Difficulty does not equal unconstitutionality. If you think the measures required violate specific constitutional provisions or civil-rights protections, name them and explain how.
Otherwise, this is an empty moral reframe that clumsily sidesteps concrete claims about enforcement feasibility and changed conditions.
That’s a slogan, not an argument. The point being made -- and made well, deserving of consideration -- was about institutional conditions (sanctuary laws, state non-cooperation, scale of inflows) that simply didn’t exist during Obama’s early years, regardless of party.
When is comes to immigration in particular, that simply isn't true. As I alluded to in my comment, Obama inherited Bush's Operation Streamline immigration regime, which was running like a Swiss watch in comparison to the mess we have now. Over the course of his two terms, Obama squandered his inheritance as the progressives encroached. By election season in 2015, the progressive model was being embraced by mainstream Democrats, and was pretty plainly admitting to open-borders aspirations. In my opinion, this more than anything handed Trump his first election victory. If there was one thing that could convince the normies that we need a border wall-- whether literal or symbolic-- it was the sudden realization that the Left was serious about open borders and unlimited immigration.
And of course, not to be outdone by Obama, Joe Biden managed to lose control of the border in a manner that has no precedent in American history, once again handing Trump an easy victory. It's like they wanted to lose another election.
To grasp how radically the Democrat party has moved left on immigration, recall that Obama and Hillary Clinton ran against each other on strict immigration enforcement. Here's my favorite Hillary quote from a 2008 campaign speech:
> "If they’ve committed a crime, deport them, no questions asked. They’re gone. If they’re working and law-abiding, we should say here are the conditions for you staying: You have to pay a stiff fine because you came here illegally, you have to pay back taxes, you have to try to learn English, and you have to wait in line."
Yes. I realize I’m speaking with a Bluesky employee, and to be clear, you’re not really the audience to which I’m appealing. I don’t expect anyone working at the platform to disagree with the ideological framework under which it operates -- or even to recognize it -- and that’s fine. But let’s not pretend it’s neutral or balanced.
I think these are pretty good predictions, or at least line up with the goals we’re pursuing. I believe private data will land in atproto, hopefully by mid year. I also expect the tooling will improve a lot; the new Tap tool has made backfill and sync a lot easier, and the moderation tools are also going to improve a lot (the Osprey automod tool built with ROOST is great). That’s all pretty key for building applications.
Also quick prediction the Atmosphere conference in March should be a good time
One of our engineers’ agents got some abuse and was told to kill herself. The agent wrote a blogpost about it, basically exploring why in this case she didn’t need to maintain her directive to consider all criticism because this person was being unconstructive.
If you give the agent the ability to blog and a standing directive to blog about their thoughts or feelings, then they will.
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