JFC, job references going the way of grad school applications.
Grad schools, employers, HR departments: a form like this is an invitation for me not to think carefully about my answers. Quantity over quality? Fine, ask and ye shall receive.
JFC, job references going the way of grad school applications.
Grad schools, employers, HR departments: a form like this is an invitation for me not to think carefully about my answers. Quantity over quality? Fine, ask and ye shall receive.
Honestly wonder what kind of data these people think they’re getting from a form like this.
@MisuseCase
Oh, I assume so, whether executed by machine or by human. Either way — garbage in, garbage out.
@inthehands It’s not for people it’s for some half-baked algorithm.
While the company isn’t getting good data, I sure am.
And the data I’m getting is “this company does not know how to run a hiring process, does not know how to gather or handle data, and does not understand human beings.”
@mmby
I mean, to be fair, I can’t blame them if they don’t think about normalization at all: the piss-poor data they’re going to get from people just clicking hastily to get through the damned thing is going to be so far beyond the help of any post-collection statistical treatment that it really doesn’t matter what they do.
@inthehands oh wow, "normalization, what's that?"
Oh no, it’s worse than I thought.
That stinking pile of Likertrrhea isn’t just some terrible pet project of the one company doing the hire in question. It’s a vendor called SkillSurvey actually •selling• this garbage as a product — and after filling out their survey as a reference, I got a marketing email trying to sell their services to me! The sheer gall.
“Pre-Hire 360® workflow.” Dear lord.
The “measure, measure, measure” message has gotten completely out of hand. Again. For years now.
Oh, poor dears: quantifying is not the same thing as measuring.
Two bitter truths:
1. You can’t manage what you don’t measure.
2. You can’t measure the thing you want to manage.
(Why 2? Because you’re never, ever measuring exactly what you think you’re measuring.)
In business, (1) the pressure for quantified measurement combined with (2) the intrinsic difficulty of measuring things •usefully•, and the high-demand skills involved in accomplishing that, are a perfect recipe for a “diet pills” marketing dynamic.
@JetlagJen
🔥🔥🔥
@inthehands ewww.
I wonder if they'd "accept feedback without becoming angry or defensive"?
@inthehands except 1 isn't a bitter truth. You absolutely can manage what you can't measure.
Even Deming knew this and he's the source of the (mis) quote we all know.
https://deming.org/myth-if-you-cant-measure-it-you-cant-manage-it/
@gdinwiddie [An open access link: https://web.archive.org/web/20100801083400/http://www2.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepage/2009/0709/rW_SO_Viewpoints.pdf]
Yes, that article gets more clearly at the same things I was gesturing at with my oblique little koan above. His core point is deep and incisive: it’s desire not for measurement but for •control• that’s at root of many software management problems.
@inthehands
As Tom DeMarco said, "Most things that really matter—honor, dignity, discipline, personality, grace under pressure, values, ethics, resourcefulness, loyalty, humor, kindness—aren’t measurable."
(in Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5076468)
@gdinwiddie The title itself is wrong in my view, and in an interesting way: what he describes in the second page •is• software engineering in my view. We software folks have built up a mythical version of what “engineering” is — Tom DeMarco’s original work was a prime culprit! — that doesn’t accurately capture what non-software engineering looks like. Hillel Wayne did a nice blog post on this: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/we-are-not-special/
@mzyk83
You are taking my OP too literally, and too piecemeal. It’s a koan, not a guidebook.
(Spelling it out for you: if you take “measurement” and “management” as MBAs are train to do, then they render each other mutually impossible.)
In the early 80s, I helped develop a custom LSI. We breadboarded with standard SSI, going through numerous design revisions along the way. The first silicon almost worked, but in addition to a couple missed connections, it couldn’t work over at the necessary speed at the required voltage. Then we had to check over temperature variations using software simulations to size the clock driver transistors.
Lots of iteration invisible to outsiders. 😊 3/3
@gdinwiddie Fair, you’re quite right that I’m unjust to pin too much blame on DeMarco. His famous quote is a major player in the drama, but as usual, the person doing the most reflecting isn’t the person who bears the real blame. Spitball retracted! The picture you paint of the defense contractors having conferences nails it.
@inthehands
Thanks for digging out the link.
I agree that other categories of functional design bear a lot of similarities that are not obvious to the casual observer. Everyone thinks someone else’s job is simple.
I wouldn’t blame it on DeMarco, though. Defense contractors were having big conferences to “make software more like engineering.” I think DeMarco was trying to communicate with them using the mental models they already had. (In L Pearce Williams bio of Faraday… 1/
@inthehands
…he mentions how Faraday used the Boscovich model of the atom to predict behavior he could experimentally test, but reported his results in terms of the “traditional” model because the European scientific community had rejected Boscovich’s ideas.)
2/?
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