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I did this in late 2023 and got a response in two days.
This does remain an absolutely horrific business practice.
This. The 'black circle' in the tutorial is no good, maybe a dotted circle instead to make it clear you're supposed to be tapping empty space and not a black bubble.
Paul Graham's essay today: "We should have a conscious bias against defining new forms of heresy. Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something that we'd previously been able to say, our initial assumption should be that they're wrong. Only our initial assumption of course. If they can prove we should stop saying it, then we should. But the burden of proof is on them."
My side project was to remake the Commodore 64 game, ENCOUNTER from scratch in three.js, adapted for both mobile and desktop. I got pretty far.
Then in 2017 I interviewed for an Engineering Manager role at Facebook (now Meta). The role was with a web performance team.
I'd barely had time to prepare - at most a week - and my coding interview was not amazing.
In the final interview segment we were discussing web performance and I mentioned the ENCOUNTER project as running at 60fps. We pulled up the game on the interviewer's random Android phone and it worked well! It turned out the interviewer was a fellow C64 nerd and we bonded over shared memories.
I learned later that the project code was used as a tiebreaker to get signal on my coding ability.
I'm working at Meta to this day!