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Browser Choice May Affect Your Job Prospects
krygny sends this quote from The Economist:
"The internet browser you are using to read this blog post could help a potential employer decide whether or not you would do well at a job. How might your choice of browser affect your job prospects? When choosing among job applicants, employers may be swayed by a range of factors, knowingly and unknowingly. ... Evolv, a company that monitors recruitment and workplace data, has suggested that there are better ways to identify the right candidate for job. ... Among other things, its analysis found that those applicants who have bothered to install new web browsers on their computers (such as Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome) perform better and stay in their posts for 15% longer, on average."
Among other things, its analysis found that those applicants who have bothered to install new web browsers on their computers (such as Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome)
You can't judge that, all you can judge is which browser people are using. I'm using Safari on Mac, but I have Chrome (and the Dart version) FireFox, and Opera installed. None of them integrate properly with the system toolchain, none has the nice command-number shortcuts for the bookmarks bar, and all have other UI quirks that annoy me (although Safari's integration of the address and search bars is really pissing me off, as it keeps autocompleting search terms to random URLs).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Specifically, both being able to install a browser and staying in your job longer could easily be caused by a third factor, namely not being an idiot.
I am officially gone from
From the article "A study of 20,000 workers showed that more honest people tend to perform better and stay at the job longer. For some reason, however, they make less effective salespeople."
Anybody surprised by this?
Given that the population we are discussing are developers and other IT people, intuitively it makes sense because FF and Chrome provide all sorts of developer tools that you don't get with IE.
retire or are overdue for retirement...
But now that this is out, people looking for jobs are all going to switch to firefox and chrome. They probably still won't have whatever quality makes them good at the job, but they will have lived up to the expectations of the HR algorithm.
What if I still use Netscape Navigator?
They'll only hire you as a sysadmin
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
I use Lynx you insensitive clod!
Can I come in for an interview?
Uses deliberately installed alternate OS
Microsoft is now polluting meatspace?
Where's that Gates of Borg image?
most dev people have to do cross browser debugging so they install at least 4... do they get extra points?
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Well, the saying is "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft software" (which is a variant from the original "No-one gets fired for buying IBM software (alternate reference here ). That might have to be modified to reflect this new reality: "Nobody ever got hired if they're still buying [or running] Microsoft software" ! :>)
.
Or, as many other posters have pointed out, being able to replace the stock software installed on your computer means you've got some smarts at least. IMHO, installing a full GNU/Linux distro on your system must make you a genius (not that Apple "genius bar" kind of genius either!)
Time for HR to take Old Yeller out back and "process" his application.
If your browser string looks like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:20.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/20.0
You're not a corporate believer and should never have a job... ever...
-- your typical H.R. idiot.
What about Opera? you insensitive clod!
Or, to an H.R. drone, unqualified because there isn't a "Microsoft" in there somewhere.
Yes... they think that way. If they can think this way because you don't use Office and DARE to send your resume out in PDF format, they can easily think this way about an Open Source distro.
I had a recruiter dress me down about this before. He had never heard of "Open Office" and I am not sure he had ever heard of Linux, either.
Unless you mean Navigator 9, get back in your http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Tub_Time_Machine>Hot Tub Time Machine and tell your past self to buy shares of Apple and NOT to buy any shares in Netscape. Oh, and Pets-dot-com will tank too, though that cute sock-puppet-doggie will live on. And hoard Hostess Twinkies: they'll stop making them someday!
upon the type of work im doing. if i need access to a wiki article or something at work, netcat is fine. other times i might need to download the latest version of some software to test, so ill defer to curl (i understand its a resource hog, but im getting lazier as an admin in my old age.) One of the most frustrating things ive had to deal with at work however is sharepoint. Ive submitted several bug reports for the software but frankly, i cant get it to render properly in anything i use. even a full-featured monster like lynx cant handle it! For now ive worked around it by taking dd snapshots of the sharepoint san and parsing them using ed for the relevant articles.
Good people go to bed earlier.
And job candidates who customize their user agents are smart asses who will probably hack all of your systems.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
Why is it that in every field you always see a jackass like that coming up with totally unrelated methods to weed people out. Why not have them do the actual job you want and see how they perform. Even if you have too many applicants you can just have a first come, first serve policy, and based on the test of the first group, the best person gets the job.
When I use Chrome, I can right click and inspect an element. How do I do that in IE?
Google ie dom inspector revealed a whole bunch of add-ons that provide similar functionality.
Bullshit
get back in your Hot Tub Time Machine
But be careful not to set it to the 803rd millennium unless you want Morlocks stealing your hot tub.
And hoard Hostess Twinkies: they'll stop making them someday!
But by that time, you'll be able to download Twinkies from the cloud.
What are we measuring here? Which browsers are best or whether people who care enough to take an extra step and fit themselves with the browser of their preference also care enough to do a better job?
They probably brush their teeth more often too and are more considerate lovers, if only of themselves.
I think we should be able to vote on what gets called a "study".
You are welcome on my lawn.
...you find yourself stuck with IE6 on XP, and installing Firefox is a sackable offence.
Anyone stupid enough to fall for browser advertising or co-installers has Chrome. Those people would NOT be allowed at my company. At my repair shop, 99% of people with Chrome claim they don't know how they got it. They usually also have a ton of malicious plugins in all browsers.
Honestly most of the HR people I have met seem to have come directly from the B Ship. HR is seemingly a position for those who cannot perform a useful function at a company, and don't understand the qualifications required for a job at that company.
So what about all the job sites that basically require IE in order for them not to lose your application at some random time? Does not putting up with their buggy software mean that you're less capable?
Ha, beat this:
For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
You can't handle the truth.
Be sure to write him back, "Can you start Monday, Mr. Stallman?"
From the article, "Collectively, such findings suggest that algorithms and analysis of "big data" can provide a powerful tool to help employers sift through job applications. They might also make things fairer, by taking the personal prejudices of recruiters out of the equation."
In other words, forget about applying individual judgment regarding the fitness of an applicant, let's use cookie-cutter search patterns instead. It'll be fine, you see, because it's done on "big" data, which everyone knows is way better than "little" data.
The idea that this somehow takes "personal prejudice" out of the process is just laughable, of course. Following this program would do just the opposite: set the one-size-fits-all personal prejudices of search pattern writers into concrete, and then amplify it 10,000 times over with the aid of a computer.
I am daily astounded by the tenacity of the idea that using a computer to do something somehow makes it less "personal".
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Gosh, it's nice to know that my employer sees me as a good bet to stick around after I was hired. But I can remember having to resort to using my wife's Windows laptop to even apply for jobs at many companies because their damned web site would not render properly unless you used IE. I had found that company's jobs sites that employed a popular (*cough* Taleo *cough*) to run their job listings and application process were pretty bad with Firefox compatibility (making you re-enable all the add-on toys that many FF users turn off due to their annoyance factor and their security holes). The absolute worst, though, were the "homegrown" HR pages.
Aside: let's not even get into the requirement for a Word version of your resume when applying for a UNIX- or Linux-heavy position. Again, the wife's Windows laptop was handy since all the other computers in the house have been Microsoft-free for the last ten years or so. Saved me from having to schlepp over to the local public library with my resume on a USB drive just to make Word versions. The Word/Office files that are created from LibreOffice/OpenOffice are considerably larger than the same file created directly from MS-Word, sometimes larger than the company's upload limit. (Clever means of filtering out older, more experienced UNIX/Linux people with longer resumes?)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I know damn well I would never hire or keep someone if they insisted on using IE 6.
Also, I have no tolerance to work for a company that forces IE 6 on me, so chances are I would quit before they get around to firing me.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I think it's prudent to use IE at most job sites. I've had difficulties in the past using Opera. The last thing a job applicant wants is to have the resume submission process go haywire because of a non-standard browser. Since company job boards are likely designed for IE, why not use it, especially if it reduces your chances for errors ?
Considering that some of the most brilliant engineers I know still use some VERY antiquated technology and software, but have customized and adapted it over the years to integrate with newer technology to do things that no off-the-shelf software can do.
That this is absolute bullshit.
"Among other things, its analysis found that those applicants who have bothered to install new web browsers on their computers"
How do they distinguish those who installed a new browser from those that let their boyfriends, brothers, friends, etc. install a new browser?
Do I get to be CIO?
I can correlate a bunch of different things, doesn't mean they have anything to do with each other. Hope nobody takes this seriously.
I'm using Lynx, whose the power employee NOW?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
What a subjective question. These browsers have changed "skins" so many times in such great frequency now. I sure hope they change the "Correct" answer from time to time. Froma technical stance I prefer chrome, but it's recent RAM spikes are enough to make me irritated.
I am currently applying to jobs and what I noticed is: ...). Employers most commonly use MSIE and therefore assume that everyone else does; why would they pay their webmaster/designer to ensure compatibility for other browsers?
- Chrome is often properly unsupported, leading to display glitches (calendars not showing up for dates, erratic formatting, misalignments,
- Numerous companies use Taleo and even more do not configure it properly. Only yesterday was I unable to complete an application because when picking up the Country, I was prompted to pick up US states only, regardless of the said Country I chose.
If an employer required me to use IE to apply, I'd think long and hard whether it's really worthwhile. My current employer has adopted a new HR system which will soon require a Java applet to apply and if I wasn't already employed that might be enough to dissuade me. (Already working here, I know Java is non-existent internally, but as a new applicant, I'd assume it was a Java shop).
Implicit Evaluation with PHP
Having more than one browser should NOT be a deciding factor on your productivity. For all we know, using more than one browser maybe a forced issue simply based on the incompatibilities of some websites towards a preferred browser.
And for all we know, more than 1 browser, could also mean, less work, because being at your desk and producing isn't synonymous with being at your desk and browsing websites.
It's exchanging one person's personal prejudice for another's. However, it's really a good thing: the personal prejudices of recruiters are stupid; if they can replace those with the personal prejudices of hiring managers, the companies would be much better off. The problem in hiring, for many companies, is that hiring managers (the guy you end up working under every day if you get the job, the guy who actually knows what you do, and probably did something similar when he was more junior) is separated from candidates by know-nothing recruiters and idiotic HR staff, who know absolutely nothing about the job except for some buzzwords they don't understand like "C++". So hiring managers end up getting presented with tons of resumes from useless candidates who are totally unqualified for the job.
Anything which reduces the influence of recruiters and the morons in HR has got to be an improvement.
IMHO, installing a full GNU/Linux distro on your system must make you a genius
Which would not be a good thing. First, geniuses know more than their manager. Then, geniuses get bored easily and will spend their "work" time on more interesting things... And finally, geniuses know how to set up a VPN or ssh tunnel from work to their system at home (or their system at whatever association they volunteer "their" time for sysadmin).
It seems like there could be a lucrative opportunity for HR people (or the techs who wrote the automated roundfile routines) to sell a list of all the stupid, irrelevent "mistakes" that are frustrating job applicants and clogging the HR system (yes, I understand HR is inundated with hundreds or thousands of applicants for each position and have to have a quick way to weed them -- but the problem is exacerbated when the system mandates that most applicants have to submit, say, a hundred resumes to get one pair of human-operated eyeballs to look at them).
The counterargument to that is the danger of increasing uniformity. If everyone is using the same algorithms then they're all sensitive to the same potential biases and mistakes, whereas individual recruiters' biases will tend to cancel each other out over the population of a large company. If all companies were using the same algorithms, then any mistakes in the algorithm would mean that certain people might not be able to find a job anywhere.
Recently I came across a Siebel/Oracle CRM (Customer relations management) system that required IE7 or IE8. Who has these versions? On Win 7, Microsoft has pushed out IE9 as a default update.
So here is a company requiring its customers to use an old version of IE that few people will actually have. While it wasn't the largest company in the USA, it is in the S&P 500 list.
I tested using FF with the User Agent plugin, but the website uses ActiveX, so it definitely required IE.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
If they see you browsing from a FreeBSD machine, with a custom compiled Firefox 20 with profile guided optimization enabled, you might be too nerdy to fit in any place!
(Posting as Anonymous coward! :-) )
Why would all companies use the same algorithms? Do all companies now get together and discuss how they hire employees? Of course not, because they're competing for those employees, and frequently trying to steal them away from each other. Why on earth would all companies decide to suddenly cooperate and share their hiring-discrimination algorithms? If anything, that information would be considered a highly-protected trade secret.
I still use lynx.
Whose luck are you measuring? How do you know you are not throwing away your best candidate(s) because you are unlucky?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I'm going to submit my resumes using netscape navigator 4.0 from now on to weed out any employers who would do this from even considering me.
What if the job you're applying for uses an obnoxious, antiquated online application system that only works with IE?
Can you explain for us why you'd ever get into an argument with a recruiter about the format of your resume?
For fuck's sake. "Here's a copy of my resume in .PDF format... if you need Word format, let me know and I'll send that over."
9 times out of 10, they will say, "PDF is fine." The 1 time they don't, you go into LibreOpenGoogleDocsOffice, "Save as..." "Word document" and send them the .doc.
If you're the type of person who's going to sit there arguing with them about choice of software to generate that .doc, there's a reason you're not getting hired, and it has nothing to do with your choice of word processor.
Bullshit yourself. Correlation is not causation, but it is still correlation. Whether you believe it or not is independent of its truth.
installing a full GNU/Linux distro on your system must make you a genius
Smarter than installing Windows, even though (actually partly because) Windows is a much worse pain in the ass to install than any Linux distro I've tried.
Which browser do you use ? ... IE .. welcome aboard!.
Cyanide and Happiness #1896
It doesn't reduce their influence, it just reduces their accountability. I work for a company that does this kind of carp all the time. They have a filter that they apply to all applicants, if you get stuck in the filter you are SOL. We miss Godzilla people and employ rodent because of this. What do HR say when they don't even reply to a letter from Gordon Letwin but hire a Lisp specialist as an assembler coder? "The screening didn't think he was a good fit." That is pure Bullshit! They do not have a clue of what they are doing...
Something that may be even more important is if they read your resume on Monday morning or on Friday afternoon. Or if they gotten any at home or had to give it up at home. Or if the HR persons kids are sick.
It will depend a lot on the job. The best advice I have gotten is to be yourself. If they do not want to hire you because you use the wrong browser, you are better without them. If you just want the job for the money, there are other ones that pay better. (OK, some might not be legal or at least not socially accepted, depending on the country you live in.)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Don't judge a book by its cover.
Here in Europe we've got plenty of women in all roles that look good in tight dresses, and most of them, including in HR, are also pretty good at their jobs. In HR, they're frequently better than men, (something to do with superior organisational and communication skills, I understand).
In my job, I've frequently had to deal with HR people for hiring. The main reason I've seen that stop them from recruiting good talent is the totally crap job/person descriptions they get from managers. The absolutely best results I ever got was when working with a stunningly-attractive lady who also had the brains to match. She asked me clear, precise questions about the requirements, which we formalised using standard tools her department had created, and within a few days her team had started to present pre-screened candidates, all of whom were a good fit for the job. This was my introduction to competency-based management, which works well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competency-based_management
At the same time, others in the organisation were complaining about their inability to recruit. Maybe if they'd stopped staring at her bust, and worked as professionals instead, they'd have got better results?
I prefer Safari over Firefox or Chrome.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I am a rare one! :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I had one do something like that but it was even worse than what you mentioned: the asshole headhunter changed my resume -- adding experience I didn't have -- and sent me off to an interview. When the interviewer picked up the copy of my resume from his desk and started asking me odd questions -- for example: "Tell me about how you used technology XYZ" and "XYZ" was not in my resume; or so I thought -- that had absolutely nothing to do with my background, I asked to see the resume and found that the headhunter had added text that indicated that I had experience in using 2-3 technologies that I had zero experience with. I apologized telling him that my resume had been significantly altered before it was sent to him and ended the interview at that point. I later called the headhunter and read him the riot act and never worked with anyone from that firm ever again.
THAT's why I prefer to submit PDF-formatted resumes. It's all to easy for someone to go messing around with your resume when it's in Word-format. (Granted it's not impossible to muck around with my PDF file but why make it easy for 'em.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Just like the color of your shoes. Or it may not.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
A company that works in recruitment claims to know how to select personnel...
This is spurious on its face.
I'm always right, except when i'm not.
Something like this is why I consider current anti-discrimination laws probably fundamentally flawed, BTW.
with the aid of a computer
Have you already filed for a patent?
I have IE 7 and Netscape 4.76 on my work computer. Not kidding. Sometime this year we are getting upgraded to IE 8. Hopefully before they release IE 11.
Well my point wasn't that something like this has the potential, if handled properly, to allow hiring managers to configure the system with their own personal biases, rather than the HR morons' biases. Obviously, your company doesn't do this: it has instead allowed the HR fools to program the system with their biases, and the result is a disaster. Well what did you expect? If you allow the HR idiots to filter resumes, it doesn't matter if they do it on an individual basis, or they make an algorithm and allow a computer to do it automatically, the result is always going to be bad, because HR people are idiots who aren't able to do real jobs--that's why they're in HR, and allowing them to screen applications will always have a bad result.
At least with a system in place allowing someone to configure it to use their personal biases to filter resumes, if a company is smart, they could set it up so that the hiring managers set up these filters, rather than the HR morons. But that would require a company that has some intelligent executives which don't allow HR to do whatever they want, and most companies I've seen aren't like this; for some reason, it's pretty normal for companies to assume that HR personnel are somehow experts in hiring people in fields they don't understand at all, and then just allow them to have all the power in this process, even though everyone complains about it.
HR all across the nation are requiring employees to install Firefox or Chrome.
That means they keep their employees longer, and it's the cheapest-ever solution for employee retention!
Is it a prejudice if it is a fact? If it's simply true that browser choice is a signal for competence in a job, then it's not about the prejudices of pattern writers, it's just about facts. In any case, the pattern writers don't decide what the facts are - they come up with hypotheses for connections that might exist and then it is up to statistics on the data to decide whether their suggestion is a good one or not. So their personal prejudices have no relevance to the evaluation of any given idea.
The true problem with this approach is actually the complete opposite of your criticism. The real problem is that it is too effective at uncovering connections. That leads to bad PR and lawsuits. Suppose you are hiring child-toy designers and suppose that pedophiles happen to be more competent at that than other people. I don't know if that's true or not, the point is that it makes a good example of a pattern that might be true and that is also unacceptable politically. Suppose that there are enough data on correlates of being a pedophile so that the algorithm can actually do its job so well that it ends up hiring a team full of highly competent pedophile toy designers. That's a PR nightmare for a toy-maker and it may even be illegal due to discrimination of non-pedophiles. It will all happen without anyone involved knowing that it's happening. Being effective at hiring competent people without regard to the human prejudices that won't accept non-politically correct results is dangerous for a company. I'm sure you can extrapolate from this example to other connections that are possibly true yet politically and legally unacceptable.
And the large number of people working in organisations with locked down configurations? Are you really going to evaluate an IBM employee because he is refused the option to install IE or and MS Office software? Or an Apple employee forced to use Safari or - which I guess is the target jab of the OP - anyone working in a locked-down Windows/Office environment?
SLow news day obviously....but pathetic nonetheless...nice product placement and free advertising if you're stupid enough to follow their advice or use their services