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1. Embed this notice
   Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Apr-2024 08:19:29 JST Paul Cantrell

   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.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Apr-2024 08:22:10 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     Honestly wonder what kind of data these people think they’re getting from a form like this.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Apr-2024 08:27:11 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Misuse Case

     @MisuseCase
     Oh, I assume so, whether executed by machine or by human. Either way — garbage in, garbage out.

   • Embed this notice
     Misuse Case (misusecase@twit.social)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Apr-2024 08:27:12 JST Misuse Case

     in reply to

     @inthehands It’s not for people it’s for some half-baked algorithm.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Apr-2024 08:32:51 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     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.”

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 11-Apr-2024 00:20:37 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • mmby

     @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.

   • Embed this notice
     mmby (mmby@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 11-Apr-2024 00:20:38 JST mmby

     in reply to

     @inthehands oh wow, "normalization, what's that?"

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 11-Apr-2024 00:33:50 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     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.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 11-Apr-2024 00:47:34 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     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.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 11-Apr-2024 00:54:16 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     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.)

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 11-Apr-2024 01:08:29 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     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.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 11-Apr-2024 04:24:25 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Jen

     @JetlagJen
     🔥🔥🔥

   • Embed this notice
     Jen (jetlagjen@geekdom.social)'s status on Thursday, 11-Apr-2024 04:24:26 JST Jen

     in reply to

     @inthehands ewww.

     I wonder if they'd "accept feedback without becoming angry or defensive"?

   • Embed this notice
     Mark Mzyk (mzyk83@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 05-May-2024 03:38:19 JST Mark Mzyk

     in reply to

     @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/

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 05-May-2024 23:58:29 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • George Dinwiddie

     @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.

   • Embed this notice
     George Dinwiddie (gdinwiddie@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 05-May-2024 23:58:30 JST George Dinwiddie

     in reply to

     @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)

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 06-May-2024 00:02:26 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • George Dinwiddie

     @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/

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 06-May-2024 00:05:28 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Mark Mzyk

     @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.)

   • Embed this notice
     George Dinwiddie (gdinwiddie@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 06-May-2024 05:03:29 JST George Dinwiddie

     in reply to

     @inthehands

     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

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 06-May-2024 05:03:29 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • George Dinwiddie

     @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.

   • Embed this notice
     George Dinwiddie (gdinwiddie@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 06-May-2024 05:03:30 JST George Dinwiddie

     in reply to

     @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/

   • Embed this notice
     George Dinwiddie (gdinwiddie@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 06-May-2024 05:03:30 JST George Dinwiddie

     in reply to

     @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/?