04/29/2026
Apr. 29th, 2026 04:00 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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boss told me my dresses need to be longer, I wish my job would just fire me already, and more
Apr. 29th, 2026 04:03 amaskamanager_feedIt’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My boss told me my dresses need to be longer
My line manager told me yesterday that there had been “comments made” about how short / inappropriate my dresses are in the office, as a member of the team who is front-facing for clients. I was asked to not wear these outfits in the office any longer.
These comments have utterly humiliated me, and I spent about an hour crying on my way home. I have always dressed fairly modestly at work and am deeply uncomfortable with my body being perceived as being “on display.” My dresses are long-sleeved, with skirts that stop just above my knee. They are conventional office wear. I prefer dresses and skirts over trousers, as the medications I take have made my stomach quite bloated, and I find tight waistbands uncomfortable. But I was told they need to be longer as I’m greeting clients (as my work wear was just above the knee already, my presumption is that longer means to the knee or below).
It’s a very male heavy office, so what other women wear is split between trousers and skirts that are above the knee or to the knee. My line manager was wearing an above-the-knee dress the day after telling me my outfits were too short.
After looking at my work wardrobe, I estimate I’m going to have to get replace nearly 80% to get to these new standards — of dresses and skirts to the knee or lower — while also managing the other restrictions that are placed on women’s wear at our office. For instance, I’m not allowed to wear a sleeveless blouse because our male directors decided they are not professional for women. This is while the men in our office can meet with clients in hoodies or polo shirts.
I simply don’t understand why my clothing is an issue 16 months into working here.Am I being unreasonable or is this unfair? Is this something I should speak to my union about?
Yes, you should absolutely speak to your union. Something here doesn’t make sense — skirts and dresses to just above the knee aren’t unprofessional or inappropriate work wear, and that goes triple in an office where a bunch of other people are wearing them, including the manager who told you that you couldn’t. “You’re client-facing” doesn’t make sense as an explanation. Is there anything else that could explain why you’re getting this feedback and others aren’t? Sometimes this happens when you’re the only one in your office with a particular body shape (which doesn’t make it okay), and I wonder if that’s in play here.
Ideally you’d go back to your manager and ask for clarification — including explicitly asking if she is telling you that your skirts must be below the knee, and pointing out that all your skirts are currently the same length as the ones you see other women in your office wearing. But since you have a union, pull them in for advice too.
2. CEO sends a delusional AI-generated image of himself with every email
As a mere lower-level staffer, I am certain there is nothing I can do about this issue, but perhaps you have some ideas.
The CEO has begun to attach an AI-generated image of himself to every email he sends out. The images are universally more handsome than the real thing. No more receding hairline, or stomach fat. Plenty of bicep muscles. Not a wrinkle in sight.
This is cringe behaviour, and staff mock him for it behind his back. While I am not personally invested in helping him save face, I do want to stop being forced to look at these unprofessional, inaccurate portraits. Especially since the workplace is a public library, where one would hope to avoid misinformation.
No, this is amazing and you must not try to stop it!
And that’s fortunate, because there’s almost certainly nothing you can do about it anyway. If you were, say, a senior communications staffer or his right-hand person or otherwise a trusted confidant, you could attempt to diplomatically address it, but assuming you are none of those things and therefore have no real standing or obligation to take this on, the only correct response is to sit back and bask in the utter absurdity of it.
Is it a problem for his credibility? Yes! Is it your problem? No.
You can just enjoy the spectacle.
3. I wish my board would just fire me already
I am the chief executive of a small nonprofit and I report to a board, and I have been on a performance improvement plan (PIP) for the past four months. The PIP is full of things that are untrue and half true, along with some things that could legitimately be improved. The PIP was my first notice of any of those gripes that the board (or rather, a few members of the executive committee) had about me, my work, and, more pointedly, my personality.
The first PIP was supposed to be 60 days. They had no objective success measure in it and missed over half the weekly check-ins we had scheduled. They are having a lawyer handle everything for them, so I didn’t receive a determination about the PIP until a couple weeks ago when they gave me another PIP with a 60-day extension. This document, even more than the first one, has things in it explaining where I am failing to meet expectations that I was unaware of and were not part of the job previously.
At this point, it is clear that at least two of the board members just don’t like me and want to fire me, which is completely within their power to do. I have sincerely done what I can to meet their expectations, but I can’t and won’t change my personality or pretend to be someone I am not. And this job has turned into something different than what I was hired for.
I have been looking for a new job since the process started, but it is not easy at this level and I can’t afford to be without an income or I would have quit already. How do I have the conversation with them expressing my desire to leave along with my need to be eligible for unemployment benefits?
Frame it this way: “It’s clear to me that you’re unhappy with my work and I want to be realistic about my chances for success here and not drag out the process, so I’d like to propose a managed separation with a transition that will be as smooth as possible for both of us. I’d ask that you not contest my unemployment benefits since it sounds like I was likely to be let go at the end of this process anyway, but beyond that I’m flexible about what this could look like in terms of timing and messaging.” They are likely to hear this with relief.
You might also consider whether you have an argument to request severance, if they’re now defining success in the role differently than what you were brought on to do.
4. Requiring 15+ hours of outside reading per week
I am curious to your take on a job listing I recently came across. There is an indie bookshop in my city that is looking for booksellers — basically part-time retail work, $12/hour starting wage, nothing atypical for the area.
Amongst the qualifications and job duties listed, alongside needing 3+ years experience as a bookseller and “associates or better” degree, I noticed something that seemed super wild. “Booksellers are required to spend an additional 15+ hours a week reading recent releases and bestsellers to stay up to date on merchandise and better assist customers.”
(I am assuming the 15+ hours of reading homework is unpaid, but I could be wrong; this is a very hipster bookshop that I like to visit now and then but would never work at personally, so I haven’t inquired further or anything.)
Is this as bonkers as it sounds to me? Or does this sound more like “continuing education” and is pretty reasonable to expect?
As a general rule, if outside reading is required for non-exempt employees, they need to be paid for that time. There are exceptions for things like continuing education required to maintain a license, but booksellers aren’t licensed.
They’d be better off saying that they’re looking for employees who already maintain a deep knowledge of recent releases and bestsellers and who will maintain that knowledge going forward — and then screening for dedicated readers of recent releases (which is different from just being a voracious reader in general) in their interview process — instead of presenting it like a job duty with a specific number of hours attached.
5. I was fired from my last job, then didn’t work for several years — how do I explain it in interviews?
I was fired from my job several years ago. Due to a combination of burnout and undiagnosed depression, I effectively went AWOL and didn’t do anything about anything until it was too late, and I’m trying to re-enter the job market now. I have a resume gap of several years, my previous job loss was entirely my fault, and it’s been a very long time since I had to do any kind of job searching.
How do I write a resume to cover this particular ground? And, in the event of an interview, any advice on how to answer the inevitable question of what I was doing while unemployed? (The honest answer is nothing, while trying to claw my way out of a mental health hole.”)
You don’t address it on a resume at all; that’s the place to highlight your work history and accomplishments. In an interview, the language you want is: “I’ve been dealing with a health issue that is now resolved and I’m excited to return to work.” You don’t need to say more than that; they’re not supposed to ask for details, and it explains why you left the last job as well as what you’ve been doing since then.
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About Unsung: Thanks for your feedback!
Apr. 29th, 2026 02:39 amunsung_feed(This is one of the meta posts about this very blog. If that’s not interesting to you, skip to the next one!)
Thank you for all your feedback and bug reports in response to my call two weeks ago. Since then, I:
- revamped the image and video pipelines, which should make the blog load a lot faster and CPU/GPU struggle a lot less,
- improved inline video handling on the web, and in (some) RSS readers,
- made transparent videos work in Safari, and figured out how to make even better transparent videos,
- improved Friday newsletters so they have a link to a nice web view, and GIFs hinting at video content (alas, you cannot put videos straight in email),
- and generally made the site work better on older computers and phones.
If you see anything wrong or funny as a result of these changes – or any technical problem otherwise – please let me know (contact info is always in the footer). And, in general, please continue with your thoughts and feedback about content of the stuff I post, too! I’m enjoying hearing from you.
Book review: Shadow of the Colossus (Boss Fight Books)
Apr. 28th, 2026 11:00 pmunsung_feed★★★☆☆
Decades ago, I used to work for a videogame magazine, but those days are long gone, and any videogame I play is a rare and intentional event.
Shadow Of The Colossus, the 2005 title directed by Fumito Ueda, felt so important to get to know that I had to borrow a PlayStation in order to play it, instead of waiting for a conversion (which never came; the game remains a PlayStation exclusive even today).
If you are not familiar with the title, I’m going to say little – the approach taken by the game, as well – and just point you toward the trailer for its remastered edition:
Boss Fight Books has been publishing books about videogames since the early 2010s, and “Shadow of the Colossus” by Nick Suttner is a book number 10 out of 40+.
The rather small and short volume is divided into chapters talking about each level of the game, one by one. But don’t let this discourage you – after all, recaps can be a literary art form. Here, every chapter goes on a side quest to talk about a larger component of the game or its backstory.
Having said that, the writing didn’t fully connect with me. Some of the tangents do not flow well, and the author’s choice to put himself in the book yields mixed results. In good moments, it’s wonderful to see someone’s passion for the game, but at times we’re also subjected to tenuous anecdotes about, for example, author’s beard, or his walks in San Francisco.
But the game! The game is definitely worth knowing more. It’s widely considered a masterpiece, a testament to choosing only a few things and doing them exceedingly well, a celebration of minimalism and deliberation, with so much – from world design to nuances of haptics – intently focused on creating the right ambiance to tell a story.
This might be strange to say, but I have this belief the rules of world building and care about atmosphere apply even to boring enterprise apps with stock UI elements. You’re still creating a universe and its set of principles, figuring out how to walk the user through it all via certain narrative beats, and – ideally! – thinking about all the small design decisions that will contribute – ideally! – to a consistent overarching tone.
The book occasionally peeks under the curtain to reveal design choices and details that could be inspiring to more than game designers: the control scheme, the fluid camera movement, intentional repetition of themes just to have them subverted, or the fascinating concept of “futile interactivity” (giving the player control even if the outcome is predetermined). What is interesting in particular are paths not taken: the initial idea of 48 monsters pared down to 16, or the multiplayer roots abandoned to focus on a linear, single-player experience.
(In a particularly brilliant decision, the creators took some of the unfinished levels and still put them in the game… as ruins.)
Is it a perfect book? No. But I’m glad I read it, and that writing about videogames in this form still exists – for a while, this was called “new games journalism” – and one way or another, it’s good to get closer to this strange beast of an AAA game with an indie game’s soul.
Remembering Roberto Clemente’s 3000th Hit
Apr. 28th, 2026 10:30 pmkottke_org_feedThis story by Kevin Guilfoile about his aging father (who worked for the Pirates and the Baseball Hall of Fame) and the mystery of what happened to the bat that Roberto Clemente got his 3,000th hit with is one of my favorite things that I’ve read over the past few months.
[My father’s] personality is present, if his memories are a jumble. He is still funny, and surprisingly quick with one-liners to crack up the staff at the facility where he lives. He is exceedingly polite, same as he ever was. He is good at faking a casual conversation, especially on the phone. But if you sit and talk with him for a long time, he gets very anxious. He starts tapping his forehead with his fingers. “Shouldn’t we be going?” he’ll say. You tell him there’s no place we need to be, but 30 seconds later he’ll ask again, “Shouldn’t we be going?”
What happens to memories when they’re collapsed inside time like this? They don’t exactly disappear, they just become impossible to unpack. And so my father, who loved stories so much — who loved to tell them, who loved to hear them — can no longer comprehend them. The structure of any story, after all, is that this happened and then that happened, and he can’t make sense of any sequence.
That is the real hell of this disease. His own identity has become a puzzle he can’t solve.
Objects have stories, too. Puzzles that need to be solved. Like a pair of baseball bats, for instance, that each passed through Roberto Clemente’s hands before they passed through my father’s. One hung on my bedroom wall throughout my childhood. The other is in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
These objects never forget, but they never tell their stories, either.
Without a little bit of luck, we’d never hear them.
Or more than a little luck:
My father has lots of old baseball bats given to him by players he worked with over the years. He has Mickey Mantle bats from his years with the Yankees, and Willie Stargell and Dave Parker bats from his days with the Pirates. The one I always loved best was an Adirondack model with R CLEMENTE embossed in modest block letters, instead of the usual signature burned into the barrel. On the bottom of the knob, Roberto had written a tiny “37” in ballpoint pen, presumably to indicate its weight: 37 ounces. It also had a series of scrapes around the middle where someone had scratched off the trademark stripe that encircled all Adirondack bats. Former Pirates GM Joe Brown gave my dad this bat several years after Roberto died. For much of my childhood it hung on the wall of my bedroom, on a long rack with about a dozen other game-used bats.
My dad had been working at the Hall of Fame for more than a decade when, in 1993, his old friend Tony Bartirome, a one-time Pirates infielder who had become their longtime trainer, came to Cooperstown for a visit. Tony and his wife went to dinner with my folks and then came back to our house to chat. The only way to go to the first-floor washroom in that house was through my old bedroom, and on a trip there, Tony noticed that Adirondack of Clemente’s hanging on the wall.
Tony carried it into the living room. He said to Dad, “Where did you get this bat?” My dad told him that Joe Brown had given him the bat as a gift, sometime in the late ’70s. “Bill,” Tony said. “This is the bat Roberto used to get his 3,000th hit.”
My father was confused by this. “That’s impossible,” he told Tony. “The day he hit 3,000 I went down to the clubhouse, and Roberto himself handed me the bat he used. I sent it to the Hall of Fame. I walk by it every day.”
“Well,” Tony said. “I have a story to tell you.”
It’s a wonderful story, read the whole thing. Or get the book: the story is excerpted from Guilfoile’s A Drive into the Gap, available here or for the Kindle.
[This is a vintage post originally from Mar 2013.]
Tags: A Drive into the Gap · baseball · books · Kevin Guilfoile · Roberto Clemente · sports · timeless posts
This is interesting: Talkie is a vintage LLM , trained...
Apr. 28th, 2026 09:03 pmkottke_org_feedThis is interesting: Talkie is a vintage LLM, trained on “historical pre-1931 English text”. “The training data for the base model is entirely out of copyright (the USA copyright cutoff date is currently January 1, 1931).”
Pedometer++ 8.0
Apr. 28th, 2026 08:01 pm512pixels_feedToday, we shipped a huge update to Pedometer++. We have full details over on the Pedometer++ blog, and David has a post up as well:
Today I’m beyond delighted to announce the release of Pedometer++ version 8. I worked with legendary designer Rafa Conde to re-design the appearance and layout of the watchOS app to make it the most capable, yet intuitive, walking app on the App Store.
Pedometer++ has been on the Apple Watch from day one twelve years ago. Over that time I’ve built dozens of designs and features, today’s redesign learns from that journey and arrives at an incredible place.
The all-new step counter is both familiar and modern:
Expedition Mode is a new way to extend your Apple Watch’s battery life when on longer walks, hikes, or runs by disabling constant heart rate tracking and instead relying only on the basic heart rate tracking the Apple Watch provides. Based on our long-term testing, you can expect up to a 40 percent improvement in battery life with Expedition Mode. It’s wild.
The rest of the watchOS app has been overhauled as well. The workout screens have been redesigned, and the new maps are great. Here’s David again:
If you’re a premium subscriber when you start a workout you’ll be immediately brought to your new maps screen which shows your workout on a live updating map. This map will overlay your planned route, if selected.
This screen now features our completely custom dark mode map. I worked with a cartographer to design a map which looks perfectly at home on the Apple Watch, which is highly legible even at arms length and includes all the topographic and wayfinding information you need to keep you on track.
I mean… come on:
Over on MacStories, John Voorhees wrote:
Apple is due for an Apple Watch renaissance. It’s a great device, but my use of it hasn’t changed a lot over the years. I track workouts, check notifications and the weather, and, well, check the time.
What Pedometer++ shows is that there’s untapped potential there. Even before WWDC, there’s more room to experiment and delight Apple Watch users than most developers are taking advantage of. I wouldn’t be surprised if David senses an opportunity on the horizon, too.
David has been working on parts of this update for years, and it really shows. We couldn’t be prouder of how it turned out. Pedometer++ 8.0 is in the App Store now.
Some Cool Movie Explosions
Apr. 28th, 2026 08:03 pmkottke_org_feedListen, sometimes you just want to watch things blow up. But safely and without consequence (although Arnold Schwarzenegger did somehow become the governor of California). So, can I interest you in three minutes of movie explosions? The 80s and 90s were really a golden age for kick-ass movie explosions. (via @tvaziri.com)
“A half-century after it was published, The Soul...
Apr. 28th, 2026 07:18 pmkottke_org_feed“A half-century after it was published, The Soul of a New Machine does a better job challenging AI hype than most current criticism.” I thought something similarly (about the web) when I read Kidder’s book 25 years ago, during the aftermath of the dot com bust.
test post
Apr. 28th, 2026 06:49 pmaskamanager_feedtest – ignore!
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The Big Idea: Marie Vibbert
Apr. 28th, 2026 06:15 pmscalziwhatever_feed
Though humans have a strong desire to be an individual, slightly stronger is our innate need to not be alone. Humans are not solitary creatures, so why do we try so hard to act like we are all just individuals with no ties or connections to those around us? Author Marie Vibbert wonders if we wouldn’t all be better off as a hive mind in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Multitude.
MARIE VIBBERT:
Over 11,000 tons of discarded clothing lie in the Chilean desert. These are garments that never sold, from low and high brands, and almost entirely made of petroleum-based fabrics: rayon, polyester, acrylic. It’s a major environmental problem. The clothes catch fire, leak chemicals and microplastics, and just… keep coming.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, they are looking for new, industrial applications for wool because this renewable clothing resource that doesn’t spontaneously combust sits rotting in warehouses, unable to compete with the subsidized price of polyester.
Humanity has a problem. A communication problem that creates wasted effort and wasted resources. Food being thrown out while people starve. Diseases like cholera running rampant when their cures exist. I could go on and on with examples. Why can’t we put our efforts where they are needed? Why do our systems dictate so much cruel irony?
When you look at humanity as a whole, we are tearing ourselves apart, starving ourselves, killing ourselves. We don’t seem to understand that we are us?
These were my thoughts going into a project whose first note was: The Borg, but friendly?
I thought it would be a short story. Something quick. Get in and get out. A hive mind comes to Earth, tries to communicate with humans as a hive, fails, and sees what a mess we are. Nudge the reader toward empathy, toward seeing problems between “us” and “them” as an insufficient definition of “us.” I figured it’d hit about 2,000 words long. But the more I thought about it, the bigger the problem became. How to show the perspective? How to encompass humanity and then move the camera back to show us in perspective?
How do we look, to a hive mind? What would they expect?
Humans are, in many ways, a collective creature. A single human can no more build a skyscraper than a single ant can build a mound. Even writing a novel is a collective act, when you consider that this language that I am using is a vast collection of consensuses on symbols, meaning, and parsing. English, on a certain level, is a stack of inside jokes passed down and expanded every generation.
Beyond that, every work of fiction builds on and reacts to those that came before. I am writing in a genre, science fiction, defined by all the works labelled as such, and in turn defined by the pressures and uncertainties of our society that caused the first authors to write things not of this world, the first readers to like that and want to emulate it, and on, and on.
I was on a panel at WorldCon on Hive Minds in Science Fiction when it occurred to me that an assumption I hadn’t seen tackled yet was that collectivism automatically meant a repression of individuality. It seems an easy conclusion? If my family votes democratically on dinner, my individual desire to eat nothing but spaghetti every night is subordinated. Yet, the four of us are still individuals as we enjoy my spouse and child’s preferred chicken and rice.
Why wouldn’t a hive mind contain room for the individual? Does a Borg stop loving spaghetti once it absorbs the thoughts of thousands of chicken fans? Wouldn’t it be more of a conversation than a dictatorship? If it’s truly collective, why would there be dictators? And, come to think of it, don’t we, as large groups, change our opinions over time? Americans once ate more chipped beef on toast than chicken fingers. We thought the Edwardian S-bend corset and the mullet were a great ideas. We went from loving elephant leg jeans to skinny jeans. Collectively. Like an individual goes through phases of loving fly fishing or obsession with one particular series of books, societies go through a group fondness for orange or dark wood paneling.
At the risk of making this blog post nothing but rhetorical questions, why do we assume innovation is a characteristic of the individual? Why do we assign conformity to the collective alone?
I tried to imagine myself a hive-member. Many advantages came immediately to mind. I wouldn’t have had to gamble on picking a college major; I’d have access to the needs of the society around me to help find work that was needed. I wouldn’t be competing for the access to share my stories, I’d just tell them, and my hive would hear them and like them or not.
Competition is not just the “healthy” activity of small businesses or inventors, of students seeking academic awards. It’s also war. All around the world, humans are killing humans so that they can avoid sharing resources. Humans are defining others, drawing lines around some of their siblings and excluding others, to limit access to resources. Yet to a non-human observer, we are one species, one sprawling community, alike in our needs and wants and behaviors.
And humans can be so kind, too.
In 2023, I had to travel to New York City because I had to get a Visa to attend my first Hugo awards as a nominee, and as I sat in Central Park waiting for my appointment, admiring the unnatural warmth of the post-climate-change day, I saw a middle-aged man patiently leading a group of elderly people. He looked so happy. I dashed off four pages in my journal about him, imagining his life taking care of elders. I wondered why my science fiction stories weren’t as easy or as fun as simple character portraits. I enjoyed the flashes of lives I’d seen in short stories by Mary Grimm or Maureen McHugh, or the prose poems of Mary Biddinger.
I used to love to climb into a character’s head and walk around, show her worries and fears and daily chores, and then I’d show my work to science fiction writers and be told I had no plot, or perhaps I was “just” a poet. Because of this critique, I chose to wall off the desire to write the way that came most naturally, eschewing character-study and stream-of-consciousness in favor of sentences that “did something.” (My own term.) I began to focus on ideas, on technology, on concrete consequences and violent action.
Eventually, I got pretty good at it, good enough to feel its limitations. I opened up my old “plotless” stories and found them not so plotless, after all. Rather, they reflected my own sense of helplessness as a teen and early-twenties writer, and that point of view was uninteresting to the science fiction editor of the 90s and 2000s, who focused on competent characters moving the plot by choice.
At the young age of 47, I revised one of those 20-year-old “plotless” stories and sold it to a market paying the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association’s professional rate of eight cents a word. Not to brag. (Yes, to brag). In some ways, the genre itself has moved on from rigorously espousing action and certainty from its heroes, but also, I had learned how to structure a story through the mechanics of action, and this helped me see the similar structuring of non-action-based stories.
Part of the literary legacy my writing depends on is science fiction’s desire for logical, action-driven plots, but the origins of this project are the literary flash fiction piece, rooted in character and moment, and my desire to return to it, now that I have proven myself in the plot mines.
Which brings us back to the beginning: How better to show the individual in the collective of humanity than through a series of very short point of view pieces? The result is an introspective novella I wrote in thousand-word chunks around other projects. More than any other book I’ve written, I feel naked in its pages, exposing my deepest, most personal self. I felt free to do this because it was something I thought would never sell: too literary, too experimental.
Well, I sent it to Apex Books and they disagreed. I hope you enjoy, and be kind to my Space Cephalopods.
—-
Multitude: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop
Do I Belong in Tech Anymore? “Why am I here? Does...
Apr. 28th, 2026 06:30 pmkottke_org_feedDo I Belong in Tech Anymore? “Why am I here? Does any of this work actually matter? And if I stop caring about the quality of my work… will anyone notice?”
askamanager_feedTwo questions, similar answers. The first one:
I am hiring my first ever direct report, and I live in a salary transparency state. My HR department notified me that, legally, you have to post the entire salary range possible for the role and you cannot limit it to your preferred hiring range. This puts me, as the hiring manager, in a tough spot because candidates see a range of $75,000-110,000 and immediately believe one of two things:
1) They can start at $110,000 if they meet the basic requirements or
2) The role automatically starts at $75,000 and I’m a horrible hiring manager for pricing it so low (yes, I got that comment on the job posting)The reality is, the $75,000 is for someone who would barely meet the requirements and would need a lot of training/hand-holding, and $105,000 means you have many, many years of experience and are at the complete top of your game with no room for growth. I don’t even make the top of my salary range. Are there better ways to explain this on a job posting, or is it just what it is?
The second one:
I am 100% in favor of salary range transparency. I’m in Connecticut, which requires employers to share a salary range at some point during the hiring process, but we have made it our policy to do it from the start like many other states now require. In general, this has been good at making sure that we are spending our time on strong candidates who are comfortable with the stated range and has significantly reduced having a mismatch of expectations at the very end. But, I’m running into an unintended consequence that I’m not sure how to deal with.
In education, salaries are generally dictated by years of relevant experience and the degrees a teacher holds. Our school has some autonomy on salaries, so there are merit increases and teachers in hard-to-fill positions that make more, which means we do not have a set salary schedule to publish. So when we post a position, the actual range could be, for example, $50,000, for a brand new teacher with a bachelor’s degree and no previous experience, all the way to $120,000, for a veteran teacher with a master’s degree. If that is the range we publish, candidates assume they’ll be able to negotiate to the higher end. We’ve thought about publishing a tigher range like $70,000-100,000, but then that would be too high for new teachers and too low for veteran teachers who might opt not to apply at all.
How can we be authentic and still set clear expectations when we often have to just enter a numeric range and cannot offer more context or a public salary schedule?
In both cases, and in all cases like this, the way to handle this is to lean into the transparency that you’ve already started with and take it a step further by spelling out what you explained here.
For example:
“The salary range for this position is $75,000-110,000, with the low end of that range for candidates who match the low end of the listed experience range and where we would expect to invest significantly in your training and the high end for extremely experienced candidates (X years or more doing Y) who would be function at a senior level with significant autonomy. Most hires fall in the middle of that range.”
Or:
“We’re open to several different versions of this role — junior, mid-level, or senior. For the junior role, we’re seeking (list qualifications) with a salary range of $A-B. For the mid-level role, we’re seeking (list qualifications) with a salary range of $C-D. For the more senior version of the role, we’re seeking (list qualifications) with a salary range of $E-F. We encourage you to apply if you meet any of these profiles.”
Or:
“The salary range for this position varies heavily based on experience and education. A candidate with no previous teaching experience typically starts around $50,000; a veteran teacher with a master’s degree may earn $120,000.”
You can also address it openly when you have your first conversation with candidates, like in a phone screen: “For candidates with your level of experience in X, you’d be in the $X-Y part of our salary range.” Then they know and can decide if they want to continue or not. In fact, you could even include a line like this in your job posting after the suggested language above: “If you are unsure where you might fall in that range, please apply and we will discuss it early on in our hiring process.”
Regardless of how clear you are, you will always get people who are convinced they should come in at the top of your range without much basis for it, but by spelling it out like this — and especially by giving them tailored info about where they would fall in your range early on in a phone screen — you’ll mitigate a lot of it.
The post our jobs have wide salary ranges — how can we be up-front about that without every candidate expecting the top of the range? appeared first on Ask a Manager.
“British energy major BP on Tuesday reported that...
Apr. 28th, 2026 05:47 pmkottke_org_feed“British energy major BP on Tuesday reported that first-quarter profits more than doubled from a year ago, following a surge in oil and gas prices driven by the Middle East conflict.” Oh, surprise surprise.
May London meetup
Apr. 28th, 2026 04:16 pmcaptainawkward_feedAnnouncement: the audience for these has changed, so I’m going to do them once every three or four months instead of monthly. So please come to this May one if you’re interested, there won’t be another until probably August.
9th May, 1pm, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, SE1 8XX.
We will be on Level 5 blue side (the upper levels are no longer closed to non-ticket-holders), but I don’t know exactly where on the floor. It will depend on where we can find a table.
I have shoulder length brown hair, and will have my plush Chthulu which looks like this:
Please obey any rules posted in the venue.
The venue has lifts to all floors and accessible toilets. The accessibility map is here:
Click to access 21539-32_Access-Map_DIGI.pdf
The food market outside (side away from the river) is pretty good for all sorts of requirements, and you can also bring food from home, or there are lots of cafes on the riverfront.
Other things to bear in mind:
1. Please make sure you respect people’s personal space and their choices about distancing.
2. We have all had a terrible time for the last six years. Sharing your struggles is okay and is part of what the group is for, but we need to be careful not to overwhelm each other or have the conversation be entirely negative. Where I usually draw the line here is that personal struggles are fine to talk about but political rants are discouraged, but I may have to move this line on the day when I see how things go. Don’t worry, I will tell you!
3. Probably lots of us have forgotten how to be around people (most likely me as well), so here is permission to walk away if you need space. Also a reminder that we will all react differently, so be careful to give others space if they need.
Please RSVP if you’re coming so I know whether or not we have enough people. If there’s no uptake I will cancel a couple of days before.
kate DOT towner AT gmail DOT com
I Love Boosters
Apr. 28th, 2026 05:04 pmkottke_org_feedBoots Riley made his directorial debut with the totally weirdo (complimentary) movie Sorry to Bother You in 2018. He’s been quiet since then, but he’s back with a new comedy, I Love Boosters. This looks great. From a review on Letterboxd:
Maximalist social commentary delivered with anime action and colourful high strangeness. Did it kind of fall off the rails towards the end? Absolutely. Was it fun as fuck and creative right to the end? You best believe it. God bless the shoplifters. I got major Everything Everywhere All At Once vibes from this…
The film debuted at SXSW in March and is opening in theaters on May 22.
Tags: Boots Riley · I Love Boosters · movies · trailers · video
On the Propaganda of Early Nazism, and How We See it in...
Apr. 28th, 2026 04:18 pmkottke_org_feedOn the Propaganda of Early Nazism, and How We See it in America Today. “Unlike other political systems, fascism was not meant to be intellectualized or discussed; it was meant to be experienced.”