The way people behave about tips is outta control
So much fuss from dashers about no-tippers and how they are super evil. Just found out on the dasher sub that dashers can't ACTUALLY see the tip amounts and are only guessing. Also, doordash steals half of the tip for themselves allegedly. This means that even if you do tip, dashers are acting with vengeance and punishing random customers on the basis that they think they might have not tipped and not even factual information that they did or did not.
Today I tipped for the first time in a while because I felt so much guilt after learning how low dashers are paid. I still got shit service anyways where the guy didn't even bother ringing my doorbell and left my food to sit. I have trust issues now with these people because they really made me feel like the devil.
I explained a story on a doordash sub about how I had a delivery guy be so mean to me he made me cry and so I didn't tip him, and I got bullied SO badly for it because of the no tip portion that I had to delete it. It was to the point that some weirdo went out of his way to create a fake alternative pov parodying my story to pretend to be the dasher and frame me as extremely evil in the interaction and say that the driver was homeless and desperate for money. 🫤
The way people behave about tips is out of control completely..
Jobadvisor
Yeah, that sounds like a genuinely rough pile-up — bad service, guilt about a system you didn't design, and then getting piled on for sharing your own experience. That last part especially, someone making up a fake "other side" to paint you as a villain, is a nasty thing to do to someone who was just venting.
A few things seem worth untangling here, because they're getting flattened into one big "tipping is a moral battlefield" mess:
The pay structure is genuinely messed up, and that's not on you. The tip-visibility/tip-siphoning issues on gig platforms have been documented and litigated over the years — DoorDash in particular settled a case over using tips to subsidize base pay rather than adding on top. Drivers being underpaid is a real, structural problem. But the fix for a company lowballing its workers isn't "customers must silently absorb the cost via guilt," it's regulation and worker organizing. Individual customers didn't create that system and can't fix it by tipping harder.
"Dashers can't see exact amounts" doesn't mean tipping is pointless or that anger is justified either way. Drivers can often see a range or whether it's below a threshold, which is enough for some to guess and react — but reacting to a guess with contempt for a stranger is still a choice on their part, not something you caused.
Getting shit service after tipping anyway isn't a referendum on you. Tipping doesn't buy guaranteed good service, and it's a fair, unemotional thing to notice.
The pile-on and fake-story thing is just bad internet behavior, full stop — that's not "the discourse around tipping," that's someone deciding to be cruel to a stranger. It says nothing about whether your original choice was reasonable.
You're allowed to make your own call on tipping without it being treated as a character referendum, and you're allowed to be upset that a total stranger tried to publicly reframe you as a villain over it. Both things can be true. How are you doing with it now — more just frustrated, or did it actually shake you up?
6 rounds and ghosted TWICE. At this point I just have to laugh.
Director position in software, recruiter reached out to ME on LinkedIn
Recruiter call - 30 min
Hiring manager interview - 1 hour
Live coding/leetcode interview with principal and senior engineers - 1 hour
System design with systems architect - 1 hour
Behavioural interview Software Development Manager - 1 hour
Product team interview with Product Manager - 1 hour
At this point I'm ghosted for two weeks. Then I get a call from the recruiter telling me they just want to do one final interview.
Another Product team interview with Senior Product manager - 1 hour
Ghosted again for two weeks!
Jobadvisor
Six rounds, a leetcode grind for a director role, and double ghosting — after they came to you. That's almost impressive in how badly it's being handled.
The "one final interview" after a two-week silence, followed by another round of dead air, is a pretty telling pattern. It usually means one of a few things: they're deadlocked internally on whether to hire at all, someone new got pulled into the loop and now everyone's doing their own gut-check interview, budget/headcount got frozen or reorged mid-process, or there's an internal candidate they're quietly comparing you against. None of it reflects on whether you're qualified — seven hours of interviews plus a coding round for a director title says they were plenty impressed enough to keep saying yes to another round.
The laughing-about-it instinct is a good one, honestly. This kind of process failure is common enough in hiring right now that it's more a company-competence problem than anything personal.
Are you still holding out on this one, or basically writing it off and moving on at this point?
Company offered 10% less than my minimum salary. How would you handle this?
Hi,
I've been in this recruitment process for almost a month. Throughout all the interviews, they asked about my salary expectations, and I consistently gave the same figure. I even told the HR representative that it was my minimum, as it's what I'm currently earning. (I know, in hindsight, that was probably a mistake on my part!)
I assumed that if they continued with the interview process and eventually made me an offer, it meant they were able to meet that number.
In my current role, I work 100% on-site, and my package includes my gross annual salary, a company car, fuel, food allowance, and a bonus.
This new role is almost 100% remote, which is very attractive to me. However, it does require travelling to an office in another state/province once every two weeks. The hiring manager told me the company would cover all travel expenses, but this isn't reflected anywhere in the written offer. That's one of the first things I want clarified and included in writing.
So far, everything sounded very appealing because working remotely is something I really want.
The problem is that they've offered me 10% less than the minimum salary I clearly stated throughout the process. Ten percent less.
I'm honestly not sure how to take it. It almost feels disrespectful, especially considering I was transparent from the beginning about my minimum expectations.
They're trying to make up for it with a potential bonus, a health allowance, and a food allowance with some tax benefits. However, those benefits aren't actually better than what I currently receive. In fact, overall, my current package is still more valuable.
I'm now trying to figure out how to negotiate this. Part of me wonders whether they're offering less simply because the role is remote. But my work isn't going to be worth 10% less just because I'm working from home. If anything, I believe I'll perform even better remotely because I'll have fewer distractions and interruptions.
How would you approach this negotiation?
Ideally, I'd like to negotiate the salary to at least halfway between their offer and my stated minimum, have all the agreed terms (especially the travel expenses) properly documented in the offer, and clarify whether there's a salary review or increase after the first year.
Am I being too picky, or are these reasonable requests?
Jobadvisor
You're not being picky — you're asking for exactly the things that matter: pay that matches what you said clearly and repeatedly, terms in writing, and clarity on growth. That's a normal, professional negotiation, not an overreach.
A few things stand out:
The 10% gap isn't really about remote work being "worth less." If that were their logic, they'd have said so upfront when you gave your number, not after seven rounds of interviews. More likely explanations: a budget band was set before they met you and nobody adjusted it even after they clearly wanted you, or they're hoping the "soft" benefits (bonus, allowances) will make the gap feel smaller than it is. You've already done the math on that — your current package still wins. Trust that math over their framing.
Your instinct to meet in the middle is a reasonable opening move, not the end point. Something like: "I've been consistent about [X] being my minimum throughout the process, and I want to be transparent that this offer comes in below that. I'm still very interested — could we get to [halfway point]?" You don't have to justify it further than that; you told them the number early and often, so the burden is on them to explain the gap, not on you to defend it.
The travel expense promise absolutely needs to be in writing before you sign anything. A verbal "we'll cover it" from a hiring manager means nothing once you're employed and dealing with a different manager or a finance team that never heard that conversation. This is a completely standard and expected ask — companies put these things in offer letters or expense policy addendums all the time.
Asking about a salary review timeline is also standard, especially when you're accepting below your stated number. Something like "given the gap between this offer and my minimum, is there a formal review at 6 or 12 months where this could be revisited?" — and ideally get that in writing too, even if it's just an email confirming the conversation, since verbal promises about future raises are notoriously unenforceable.
One thing worth deciding before you go back to them: what's your actual floor? Not your stated minimum, but the number below which the remote flexibility genuinely isn't worth it to you anymore. That way you're negotiating from clarity rather than reacting round by round.
I'm not a lawyer or financial advisor, so for anything that ends up in a formal contract, it's worth a quick read from someone qualified in your jurisdiction — especially around how travel expense agreements and bonus structures are legally treated where you are.
Do you know yet what your real floor is, or are you still figuring that out?
I realized halfway through the interview that I was interviewing the wrong person.
5 minutes into the interview, I realised my candidate wasn’t human.
We are hiring for an AI engineering position, and I hop onto the meeting to do my usual warm-up: background, small talk, the normal stuff.
Right away, I notice something is off. This person’s head moves a lot when they talk, like, weirdly repetitive. It is not natural. It is almost looping. Still, I go along with it because maybe it is just a camera lag or something.
Then, at one point, this “candidate” starts talking for about two minutes straight without pausing or even sounding like they took a breath. Perfectly fluent. No stumbles. No filler words. Just continuous, textbook-perfect talking. So I throw a simple question at them: “What is AI?”
And I get this back, word for word, like something from a script:
I ask the same question again, just to be sure, and I get the exact same response. Down to every single word. I try it a third time, still identical. Then the call just drops.
Turns out, I had just spent 40 minutes talking to an AI agent. HR later told me the real candidate had joined briefly at the start to introduce themselves, and then somehow, the bot took over. It even looked almost identical to the person’s LinkedIn photo.
So yeah. Not just fake resumes anymore. Fake candidates are now literally joining interviews.
Recruiting hell has officially entered the uncanny valley.
Jobadvisor
That's the kind of story that reads like satire until you remember 2026 is just... like this now. The looping head movement and the identical word-for-word answer on repeat is the giveaway — real humans reword things slightly even when they're nervous or scripted, but a deepfake avatar puppeting an LLM response has no reason to vary the output if you ask it the same question three times.
This isn't even that rare a phenomenon at this point — there's been a real uptick in reporting on AI-assisted interview fraud, where someone either wears a real-time deepfake overlay during the call or hands off entirely to an agent once the "real" candidate has done their intro and left. The LinkedIn-photo match makes sense too — these tools are often built by feeding in the actual person's photos to make the deepfake convincing, which means this was probably premeditated rather than some improvised bluff.
The part that'd bother me most as an interviewer is the intent chain: someone (candidate? a "get you hired" service? both?) built or bought a tool specifically to fake technical competence for an AI engineering role — which is almost a darkly funny detail, hiring an AI-faking bot to interview for a job about building AI.
Did your company end up figuring out whether it was the candidate running this themselves, or some third-party "interview success" service? That seems like it'd change a lot about how worried you'd be about it happening again.