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Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

Good.

Around a decade ago I briefly shared a house in San Mateo with some rando who was a tester for EA. Many of the conversations we had were surrounding his contract ending and employment uncertainty. Especially in an expensive region like the SF Bay Area, it just seemed like an unnecessarily abusive relationship. He was constantly under a cloud of doubt about having a job next quarter, despite working for a well established large employer.

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I'm sorry, but "some rando"?

> I'm sorry, but "some rando"?

Random person, someone I didn't otherwise know before sharing a house with them.

Is it that confusing or hard to believe?

I read that as a very disrespectful and/or dismissive way to refer to someone. My context is first learning it as a term used to refer to strangers popping up out of nowhere replying to twitter posts or similar, to whose contribution you ascribe no value.

If the term has been normalized to some more benign interpretation, perhaps I'm just getting old. Apologies if so.

For what it's worth, I first heard the term many years ago used to refer to either a one night stand ("picked up a rando") or a previously unfamiliar housemate ("rented a place with a rando from Craigslist"). It certainly is dismissive in the sense that it communicates "this person was of no special importance to me", but sometimes that's an appropriate thing to communicate.

It's not so much meant as disrespectful as used to communicate "a stranger to me". I literally couldn't tell you anything more significant about this person than the EA stuff, it's a rando from a CL house share situation. So maybe the anecdata should be taken with an especially large grain of salt.

I'm also not particularly concerned with being obsessively PC in everything I say or write.

EA needs this. Spent a decade there and have seen many QA testers treated like shit. Low pay and no future.

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