u/Kenamaru

A couple friends and I have gotten into MTG pretty heavily lately and we're looking to find a 4th (possibly a 5th) for some more consistent game nights.

I know I could hit up some of the local shops, but I prefer playing in a quiet environment where we won't be kicked out of our table when the next tournament starts up.

We buy booster boxes each new set and do some at home Limited events. We also attend Prerelease events and are fully planning to show up to a couple Reality Fracture events.

Essentially, we're looking for someone who'd be down for an occasional draft night or meeting up after a Prerelease to play our Sealed decks against one another. We did this tonight with our Hobbit Prerelease decks, but since we only have 3 players, we do king of the hill formats rather than swiss rounds and it's more politicking than we care to keep up.

For draft days, we get together around noon on a weekend and play to the evening. We chip in or rotate for dinners, and we might play a board game if there's time.

I also host D&D on Saturdays and am considering looking for another player for my Strixhaven/Phyrexia campaign coming up in October and would love someone who might be down for that!

So, let me know if this all sounds like something you'd be keen on! I host at my place near IKEA, but would be happy to meet up at the library or an LGS to vibe check. Also happy to play online with Cockatrice.

Tell me a bit about yourself, how you enjoy Magic, if you're into D&D at all, and if you'd want to consider joining us for draft nights! (Chaos drafts have been fun lately. Everyone brings 4 random packs and we draft! You keep what you draft and I normally put up a prize for the winner)

We're in our 30s, if that matters. All guys but anyone is welcome to join my table as long as you're respectful! Maybe my wife would actually play more if another lady joined us.

Formats:
Commander
Sealed
Set Draft
Chaos Draft

Just received an offer for a senior role in pretty record time. The recruiter I spoke to mentioned it felt like a perfect fit given my background so I decided to go through the process.

I tailored my resume to the job listing, I researched the company, the product, the role, and the challenges this job would be solving.

The hiring manager interview is where my paradigm shifted. They spent the first 10 minutes explaining the role and I mentioned it fell in line with my expectations based on the research I’ve done. That seemed to be a revelation for the team.

It feels like this is the bare minimum and yet talking to the recruiter about why I was chosen, he said people don‘t generally research the job. That my interviews didn’t feel like I was doing a spray-and-pray strategy, but that I genuinely seemed interested in the role and came prepared.

Thats great and all but literally all I did was google “what is [company]’s product and business model”, “what does a [role] do at [company]”, and “what are some of the challenges of [role] at a company like [company].” It took me like 10 minutes and it’s only extra effort on applications that move to the interview stage.

So I guess my hack is…do the bare minimum. Come to the recruiter call and the hiring manager call already understanding what the role likely will ask of you. That way you can speak with confidence about the areas you feel you can contribute strongly in.

That’s my TED talk. Wish me luck in my new role!

I recently completed a technical for a big name in Zero-Trust networking.

I studied the product, prepped my STAR answers, and made sure I had a good high level overview of the work I've done with regards to Zero-Trust.

I walked into the interview and was immediately asked to explain TCP, TLS, Authorized vs Authenticated, DNS record types and how to troubleshoot them, and what headers I'd look for in a HTTPS request/response to understand what information I can extract from those.

So all my prep about VPN Split Tunneling, API troubleshooting, SSO, and network architecture flew right out the window and I was left deer in headlights as I was asked what, to me, were minutiae about basic concepts that I could google in 2 seconds to refresh myself.

It just felt like a vocab quiz where I wasn't told what words would be on the test so I should just know everything in great detail.

Now I get why people use AI in their interviews. I've sat on the 4+ hour calls dealing with networking issues and explaining to the customer that it's not our endpoint, it's their firewall not being configured for North-South traffic after their Cloud migration.

Anyway, that's interview 3 in month 3 since my layoff. At least I'm getting better after each one. Just gotta burn through the rest of the jobs that offer a decent salary until I land an interview I can pass the vocab quiz on.

/endrant