What one salesman told me is that they do have a system where they can enter allocation requests.

So they can enter into the system they want a '22 Tundra Crew Max with an exterior color of Lunar Rock and this/these packages.

Toyota won't specifically build that, but in theory if there is one built matching that requirement they should get it as an allocation. In reality, he said they never get their allocation requests.

Some dealerships (the 2 I mentioned in my research) tell people they're "ordering" when really they're just "requesting allocation."

Yeah, that's how I ended up getting one. Working from home and living 5 minutes from the dealership.

The sales manager told me while they finished prepping the truck, their system is so messed up right now they don't even really know when they're getting deliveries. Trucks loaded with cars just show up randomly on the lot and they work the phones to get them sold.

I ended up lucking into one at MSRP that pretty much checked every box in the 'need' category at a dealership 5 minutes from my house. They wouldn't take reservations or holds, just happened to be able to get there quickly whenever a truck rolled in with Tundras on it.

Another dealership offered me a TRD Pro Tundra, with a $16k dealer markup. I passed, but from what the salesman told me later the very next person (I was #1 on the list) he called bought it with that markup without hesitation.

I feel your pain. We have a WordPress network pushing 600 sites and I'm kind of concerned about the future of WordPress and think daily about migrating over to Drupal (or even exploring CascadeCMS or something along those lines).

When we picked WordPress back in ~2012 as our CMS it was because of how simple the editing of post/page content was compared to the alternatives. The majority of our content editors are student assistants, graduate assistants, least tenured faculty member, etc. People who aren't that technical and also have a dozen other things that are their actual job, unlike updating the departmental website which just got dumped on them.

We've done a ton of work with our theme and in-house plugins to keep WordPress super simple/basic for them, overwriting and undoing a lot of what core has added over the years. Most of the site editors find Gutenberg too complicated, so we're running the Classic Editor plugin in a ton of our sites. Our content editors just want to come to a CMS, have a text box where they can add content, add heading tags, links, images, use some of our shortcodes (from custom TinyMCE buttons) to add some styled components to their page. They don't want a full-site editor, they're not remotely qualified from a UI/accessibility perspective to be messing with anything really than just the base content of the page.

Yep - great summary of my current position. I also use the Classic Editor plugin but still let users toggle the setting if they choose too.

Your customers speak a different language than most of mine. The requests are more like "I need the green buttons to be yellow now!" It's easy to find bg-green on buttons and just find/replace with bg-yellow.

Also, using Tailwind/functional CSS for items that are repeated over and over on your site like buttons, you can easily extract them to a component. Switching from bg-green to bg-yellow would be as simple as opening your SASS/LESS file for components or button components and replacing it in that one spot.

> It's easy to find bg-green on buttons and just find/replace with bg-yellow.

Oh, that's because running sed over all your project files, all in a set of weak typed languages is easier than changing a definition in a single place. I totally get it.

I don't live there, visit frequently, but how the hell is Lexington, KY not on the list? I've been to Grand Rapids, Asheville, Ann Arbor, Denver, Fort Collins, etc and the breweries in Lexington stack up with any of the ones listed. Country Boy and West Sixth have a lot of fantastic beers, the newer breweries (MirrorTwin, Ethereal, Blue Stallion, etc) are really good as well.

What you say is true now ( I don't have first-hand experience), but 20 years ago Denver/Boulder/Ft. Collins was already a hot-bed for microbrews. Before the US as a whole got on board the microbrew-train, the situation was different. There is a reason the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) is in Denver, and the home brewers association is based in Boulder.

Yeah, that's a definite issue I've had in dealing with mine. Fortunately, they're easy to swap in/out and are mostly affordable to buy new ones ($11 for a two pack on amazon right now).

I have one I use for the chilis, bbq, ribs, etc I do. One for soups and such, etc. It's a slight pain I guess, but the ease of use of the Instant Pot in general outweighs swapping out the silicone seal occasionally.

> I also ask candidates to code on a realistic problem. It doesn't involve any "fancy" algorithms or "tricks". What I want to see are the coding style, attention to details, and of course, if the candidate is comfortable at coding.

Do you do that on the spot or is it a "take home" assignment? I've known many solid programmers (myself included) that could code anything you want, but if you put them in a room, sit there and watch them do it, they'd freeze up. On the other hand, if you give them a project, give them a timeframe to develop it, then have them walk you through what/why they did, they would absolutely excel. It's sitting there in front of someone(s) and the expectation, that would just cause them to freeze up.

On the spot. I fully understand that many good engineers could freeze up, myself included. That is the reason the coding question is about a realistic problem. No dynamic programming, graph theory, suffix tree, etc. Also, before the coding, I would talk to the candidates about technologies listed in their resumes. It is mostly like a talk between two engineers in a meetup or a conference, not a technical test. My intention is to build an environment that the candidates can feel like real work environment as much as possible. It also helps to bring up the candidates spirits. We are talking about something we like!

As long as the candidates get the logic flow on the solution, can write code down in well-formatted manner, pay attention to corner cases, it doesn't matter if the candidates actually complete the coding, if I think given enough time in a real work environment that the candidate has no problem in doing it.

There are some red flags I pay attention to. For example, readable code is very important to me since we work in a team and we spend more time reading code than actually writing it. Once we had a candidate. he got the coding right, but his code was very hard to read. It reminded me of some obscure C code in the past that one statement was trying to do many things so that it became very convoluted. For me, it is not "smart". It is bad engineering.

Yeah I do wonder what you are getting out of not doing this. If they were to somehow cheat (get someone else to do it) this would be picked up very quickly on the job and waste everyone's time including their own.

Yeah, I get that. My issue is with them/their system messing up, and them taking the time to email me and admit it was them/their system, "We take responsibility for this technical glitch," but expect me to pay for the billings that have passed between me canceling my service and now.

I am interested if they've done this to anyone else?

Finishing isn't always everything. I've learned A LOT more from projects I started and never finished. Those things I've learned helped me in the projects I actually did finish.

These days working in higher ed I complete a lot of projects at my day job, but I start a lot that I never finish on my own time. To me, personally, it is more rewarding when I learn something new, come up with something that I think is cool, whether the project gets finished or not.