Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

I think I see what you meant here, and thats about politics

I just saw the news.

I wont stir the fires of the debate here though

My two cents on this is that it's approaching the problem from the wrong direction. You absolutely should hire the best person for the job, because not doing so can result in disastrous outcomes, especially in fields where people's lives are literally on the line.

If there is some kind of race/gender/class/whatever disparity that needs correcting, you should correct it at the education level. Create more opportunities for underserved groups to develop real skills in these fields so that they have a shot at being the best candidates. That's how you properly close the gap.

Any job is rarely about skill or knowledge. We like to think it is, because that's fair. The only skill you really need is are you fluent in ***., and being a generally socially tolerable human.

(Almost) anyone can be shown how to do (almost) any job. You aren't going to get physicists etc, but everything else, yeah

The timeframe it takes for them to be able to learn [and eventually master] the job, on the other hand, will vary drastically between people of different IQs. It is not worth it to spend a year training someone when you could get someone else in 2 months, and there's no guarantee of loyalty or even commitment to finishing the training process from the longer trainee.

The same is true of jobs requiring heavy physical labor, you want to start with someone who's already in decent shape. Sure, if you hire someone who's got no muscle mass or endurance and eats like ***, and they stick to it for a few years, they'll probably be able to keep up. But, it's more likely they give up before reaching that point, and even if not.. you're paying them the entire time they get up to par.

This is not true at all.

The difference in qualified, vs capable.

You can "fairly" weed out "incapable" and of the pool of "capable" the winner does not have to be "qualified, or most qualified"

Youre not going to put the one legged man in the marathon. This goes without saying.

This only applies if the job is a binary pass/fail. Innovation and intelligence jobs, such as the coding job that spawned this argument, present situations without a routine solution. There might be 10 viable ways to solve a problem, but one ideal way. The most skilled person is going to have a greater chance of finding that ideal solution, and a better ability to evaluate which less than ideal solutions are most likely to be harmful.

Programmers that are far and away above the rest are often referred to as '10X engineers', because they are perceived to put out 10x as much output as the average engineer. There is debate as to whether they actually do or not, but there isn't any debate that many of the 'qualified' people will put out objectively less and lower quality work than the most qualified.

There are people here who would buy a 15 pound dog and expect to be a guard dog in the name of diversity.

Why arent clubs and bars hiring 110 pound twinks to be bouncers? They should, diversity baby!

As a business; cheaper is often the better answer, than the best solution.

Obviously excluding the top of the top, again, obviously.

Nick Castellanos with a drive to deep left field, did something happen today?

The reality is 1 out of 20 people is "the right person for the job" if its just a basic job.

Also, people just ride the clock unless you invest them in what you are doing. I can't imagine a 10X programmer out of our incoming workforce. Maybe 1 out of 100. People just want to check out on their cellphones.

Terminology.

Guard dog = doorbell dog. A 15lb yapper can easily be a guard dog.

Guardian dog = big enough to do serious damage and serious enough to do it. A 120lb golden retriever or a 200lb newfoundland are not guardians. A 70lb doberman can be a fine guardian.

We will not get into duck tolling retrievers ...

Aw, not gonna have anymore corn pop gaffes to laugh at anymore.

Use kg

If I'm someone who partakes in the B&E lifestyle and I see a house with a sign that says "beware of dog" and in the window is a Chihuahua yapping away, that dog is isnt intimidating me into rethinking my choices in life. One kick and that dog is scurrying.

Now, if theres a Mastiff or German Shepherd in that window growling and bearing its teeth at me, I'm moving onto the next house. I dont want that smoke.


But more importantly, thank you for confirming that diversity isnt a strength. Just like you cant put the "200 lb Newfoundland in a guard dog role", you cant put the gender studies graduate in software development and expect success.

Don't need a dog, just get an AR-15 with a bayonet for close quarters and a grenade launcher just because it'd be bad ***.

Chihuahua's are Satan's creation and God approves punting them.

Chihuahuas are annoying unless they are the Taco Bell ad dog.

Reminds me the video that i posted in Randoplais, Dog Racism.

Bring the meteor already

Once upon a time I heard that 80% of the jobs only needs "common knowledge" of the field and only 20% needs "professional knowledge".

There is a huge skill difference between programmers that only needs to copy codes on stack overflow and still gets the job done and programmers that build an entire system from scratch.

In other words, our job market never needs that many top 20% people that has "professional knowledge". Many jobs only needs basic knowledge and they can be done. Those jobs can literally be given to anybody and the company can still function properly.

Further more, the top 20% people who owns professional knowledge will be expensive anyways. For the employers, sometimes they want cheaper labor for easy jobs and those jobs can be given to anybody with common knowledge.

It's the same reason why people often hire junior positions instead of all senior: to save money since super skilled employees are not always necessary.

So, if diversity hire is being viewed as a positive image in the society, it actually makes sense to use such practice because many of positions in the job market never need high skill level anyways, they are just labor job with low wages. and the company earns positive rep in the society by giving those jobs to different groups.

I'm envious of the companies/orgs who have enough qualified, good candidates that they are able to exclude people based on factors beyond their personality and competence.

I've done a lot of interviews over the years (one place I did 3-4 every week for 2 years) and the vast majority of people sucked. They'd put things on their resume they knew nothing about, then try to BS their way around it instead of just admit what they did or didn't know. The ones that always baffled me (PLURAL) were the ones who came into the interview and told us we couldn't afford them (why show up???). The other remarkable thing is that across my career and interviews, the worst interviews or people I worked with were people with PhDs, they had the highest education available in their field and acted like they've never seen a line of code in their life or didn't understand basic architecture questions that were part of the job they applied for. My first time interviewing a PhD from a major school, I prepped a bunch of much better questions/exercises than normal, when I showed it to my colleague they told me "take it to a kindergarten level" and, sure enough, they were right.

The idea that people are somehow getting enough good candidates in that they can supposedly exclude based on race/gender/orientation/etc, even living location, is mind blowing to me.

Welp, that was a great EVO Grand Final

Like I said, 80% of the employees in job market only have common knowledge of a job, only 20% have real professional knowledge. It's common to find people lacks real professional skills that is 100% fit in an interview most of the time. With or without diversity hire.

Those top 20% people aren't going to be cheap usually. So most jobs in the job market are basically replaceable position with low wage with or without diversity hire. The real position that requires professional skill won't even appear on job ads most of the time. And their salary will be much higher than what you see on the job ad.

Did someone mention guard dogs?

oh, hello little buddy

My current job (and the preview one) had the following recruitment strategy: doing a public test competition, with questions covering like an entire high school/university core subjects, setting a passing grade and reaping the candidates who were the first (number of vacancies * 10) ranked.

Add this with good work conditions like above average salary, low chance to being fired, all the health care stuffs, then overall, quite good people join the company. My current training has lots of people with PhD, years of experience, etc.

As i also work with outsourced people, its kinda clear the difference in potential between one who is willing to undertake a competition than other that just want to talk his way into the job.

Imo, i dont think there is a better way to find good people: make a competition to find people who is willing to learn to surpass the others who dont, have a good offer to increase the pool of appliances, then train the specific knowledge the guy needs.

Personally, companies tend to get subpar results with employees because 1) they arent actually willing to pay the quality they look for, 2) they cant actually see what really distinguish good people from the rest (hint: soft skills and high degree in the many dimensions of intelligence - emotional, social, mathematical, etc).