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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."
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?
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.
Did you really feel you had to defend yourself?
They'll only hire you as a sysadmin
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Actually, the IE developer toolbar (F12) is as effective as FireBug and the Chrome developer tools. Chrome is the only one that shows local storage (Indexed DB, WebSQL, etc.) easily, but they all show the loaded files, the network timing, cookies, allow breakpoints, inspect CSS, etc. The developer tools were an add-on in early versions, but has been integrated since version 8 I think.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
"Did you really feel you had to defend yourself?" ...
Yes, because this is another transparent attempt to find pretexts on which to declare all US job appplicants to be "unqualified".
Save it for the interview .... if you get that far
how many are there Mac users?
Its mostly aimed at windows user most likely.
If you happy with IE under winXP - you are probably lazy to educate self, ignoring a lot of facts and dont have or dont listen to friends with IT background. It can all say something about you. All of that is negative. pretty simple, right?
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.
He won't... that's the point.
This is just another arbitrary way to "weed out" candidates. You wonder why the screeching that "the U.S. has no qualified candidates" to do jobs... this is one of the reasons. We have H.R. people that roundfile applications because of their own lack of knowledge.
...you find yourself stuck with IE6 on XP, and installing Firefox is a sackable offence.
I wouldn't hire you because you are a Mac user. I need people with morals and values, and a concept of the value of a dollar. Why would you buy what is effectively just a dell for 3x the money with near useless software? Not what I'm looking for.
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.
You get 100+ qualified applicants for every job. Of course statistics are going to be used to narrow down the pool. If you share a characteristic with others that have a higher than average chance of being problematic, that is going to be a factor of whether or not you get considered for the position. If they do find another qualified candidate without any of those factors, it doesn't matter to them that you are also qualified. If they don't find another one, you're going to get a call anyway.
They simply do not have the time, opportunity, or justification to hold a magnifying glass up to every candidate that applies for a position. It's up to you to ensure that there are no silly reasons for them to discard you out of hand.
That said, though... this one is a little silly on their part.
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.
There's also the point that, in my opinion at least, IE has closed the gap with the other browsers quite a bit in recent years. I'd been using Firefox since 2004, but had grown increasingly irritated with a number of its quirks and foibles.
Got a new PC a couple of weeks ago and decided that was a good spur to check around and see how other browsers measured up. Having done so (and slightly through gritted teeth), I actually settled on IE.
Five years ago, somebody who was using IE was either ignorant or browsing from an office PC where they had no choice. I just don't think that's the case any more.
They simply do not have the time, opportunity, or justification...
THIS. THIS A THOUSAND TIMES
If someone doesn't know many employers use arbitrary methods to weed out hundreds, even thousands of applicants to something manageable that they can look at properly, they need to come back to reality
From a single typo to Times New Roman font, anything that has (and some have that no) statistical value (like, say, literally taking the second half of applicants and rejecting them), can and will be used. Only now I'm seeing companies use the "if you don't hear from us in X days, you were unsuccessful/ignored" in response to how bad it is you don't even get a 'no' these days
As long as applying will be as simple as emailing a CV/resumé/application and a human has to look at it for a response, there will be a huge bottleneck in business resources in responding to them and will do things like this
Do you mean "know-it-all"? If you used Safari, you probably would have caught that.
I take it you haven't dealt much with the type of people most companies hire for the Personnel department.
From the 3 gov't agencies, two non-profits and half-dozen private companies I've worked for as evidence, it seems that looking good in a tight dress is the major qualification.
I stopped reading after "THIS."
It's juvenile. Please stop.
This.
I throw out half of all applications without reading them.
I don't want to hire someone that's unlucky.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
How did "U.S." get into this and NickGnome's comments? It isn't present in the context at all, unless you're saying that people in the US have an unusual bias toward keeping distribution-default browsers, whereas non-US people are more likely to install something else.
"Scientists claim to have discovered a new species of pterodactyl, but this claim is really just a thinly veiled attempt to undermine OS/2." Such a statement would be paranoid unless you've got evidence that OS/2 was written by people who are also paleontologists who have published papers saying they already discovered all of the pterodactyls. If that's what you're saying and you can back it up, then ok, the new-pterodactyl claim is maybe an ad-hominem attack on OS/2. But without the OS/2-pterodactyl link, it's bullshit.
Just as your the anti-US conspiracy theory is obviously bullshit, unless you have a US-defaultbrowser link. Do you?
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
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).
I'm half-owner of a small business. We recently had to go through the grind of hiring a new front desk person, a yearly task it seems. After a few days with a Craigslist posting, we had 70 or 80 resumes which we each had to read in our spare time. The first to go are those who can't follow a simple instruction (e.g., we get a resume only, but asked for resume and cover letter), then the ones with egregious grammar or spelling errors, or "WEIRd" capitalization patterns, and so forth. Sometimes it is rather arbitrary, such as: lives too far away, or uses an unprofessional sounding email address (for example: hotkitty@aol.com). But arbitrary choices work the other way too. This last time, after picking eight people, I put the whole stack of remaining applications together, shuffled them, and picked two at random. Only one of the randoms didn't show, but the other one almost made it into the final pool.
Anyway, this article makes me glad I'm not an applicant: my selection of a browser is well considered and goes beyond merely selecting Firefox, despite the fact I'd end up not using Firefox to fill out an application. On my Linux Desktop and Mac laptop, I use Firefox with the No Script and Self Destructing Cookies plugins. If the application process relies on javascript and cookies -- there's a reasonable chance it would fail despite temporarily allowing this or that, and rather than take that risk, I'd fire up Safari like I always do when I need to visit a site that requires javascript and cookies. But that would make it appear to HR that I just used the default browser without giving it any consideration, which is exactly the opposite of the truth.
There are lots of ways self-employment sucks, but the amount of arbitrary decision making (*) in hiring is one reason why I'm glad I'll never be on the other side of an interview.
(*) and yeah, I realize I make arbitrary decisions and I can understand why that happens. The number of people looking for work is huge and there is only so much time in the day. It's a thorny issue.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
That's exactly my problem, STATISTICS are used instead of fuckin' ASKING the guy that wants to hire. Because HR doesn't have an effin' clue what they're looking for. Not their fault, I don't want a security expert to work in HR, I want them to work here in MY crew!
I'm currently in exactly this spot. I want, need, crave, (insert word meaning "more than a 35 year old virgin wanna get laid") a good security person. I wrote down my requirements, then I heard what the sheik (ok, the CFO) is willing to part monthly with, lowered my requirements and handed them to HR. You know that I'd by now be willing to spend my spare time hiring, but I must not. HR is defending that turf quite vehemently.
So what I get for the interviews (where I may thankfully be present at least) is what remains after statistics butchered down my applicant pile. I want experts at assembler and networking protocols, and I get experts at Javascript and webdesign.
What the fuck?
By now I'm at the point where I spend more time down in HR than doing my job to keep them from tossing out candidates for some random reason that has NOTHING to do with the job that could at least qualify (it's not easy I tell you, people tend to know their worth when they're worth something...).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sorry, but if a company cannot be assed to at least write you a "no sorry" letter TO AN EMAIL APPLICATION, they have problems. I make sure that every applicant gets an automated reply when they write to us, thanking them for their effort to mail us their resume. That's trivial to set up, an autoreply does that. It's equally easy to collect the bunch in a database, pick away the few that you want to interview then hit the red "reject" button sending a "sorry you didn't make it" reply.
A company that can't get that together is probably not a company you want to work for. You'll be dealing with more problems than just your job, they got serious issues in the procedures department.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
From the 3 gov't agencies, two non-profits and half-dozen private companies I've worked for as evidence, it seems that looking good in a tight dress is the major qualification.
What does that say about you? Personally, I think it would be distracting to work in an environment where all the guys run around in tight dresses all day.
I take it you haven't dealt much with the type of people most companies hire for the Personnel department.
From the 3 gov't agencies, two non-profits and half-dozen private companies I've worked for as evidence, it seems that looking good in a tight dress is the major qualification.
That's because, historically, personnel departments have been staffed by women and managed by men. And, surprise surprise, the male managers chose attractive women when given a choice.
Nowadays, of course, personnel departments are mostly managed by lesbians, so you still get the most attractive women being given preference.
It's just so unfair.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Multiple wifi antennas? Really? Every laptop model I've ever worked on (and that's a few dozen) that came with wifi out of the box had at least two separate antennas. Usually one goes up one side of the screen, and the other goes up the other side.
Photo editing software can be had for free.
Since you said sub $1,000 and the closest a 13" mac gets to that is $1,199 I'll use that model for comparison.
http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MD101LL/A?#hardware
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834100228
And here is what you asked for.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834230262
It meets or exceeds the specs of your $1,199 13" Macbook Pro in every way and costs just $749 - regular price, not on sale. Your Macbook costs over 50% more.
You're welcome.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
It's a thorny issue.
No, it's not. Not at all.
I was tasked to review CVs for a Helpdesk position at a desirable corporation; as expected, my manager has thrown 121 CVs at my lap. That's nearly a whole stack of paper (500 pages) to look at.
But I read them ALL. Of course, I filtered many of them out. Of course, I had to take half of those home and work overtime to weed them out. And I spent my free time doing that. Why? Because I've been an applicant before and I know how much it sucks to not even get a "thank you, you're rejected" message back, and dealing with retarded HR personnel, and having your CV thrown to the garbage can only because it's the 11th entry and they will only look at first 10, etc., etc. And I loathed becoming part of that problem.
Looking at hundreds of CVs is a daunting task and there's nothing funny about it (well, apart from the occasional weird CV that makes you laugh), but the applicants have handed their trust to whoever reviews those CVs and I feel obliged to raise to their expectations.
My filtering methods are pretty simple: font doesn't matter, as long as it's not overly flashy (e.g. Chaplin Type); e-mail address is unimportant (I'm not hiring an e-mail address and a "professional" e-mail address can be interpreted as a sign of duplicity); 1-2 typos are acceptable (everyone makes mistakes). Unacceptable stuff: weird photos attached to CV, blatant lack of basic spelling (unless we're talking about a pure developer opening). Most important: whether the skillset fits the job requirements.
It's quite ironic that the expectations are that a CV should be extremely professional, but the methods used to weed out candidates are as unprofessional as it gets. Double standards, anyone?
As an applicant, I am weeding out responses from hiring companies. The person contacting you is an image of how the company works. If they impose a meeting time and date (especially on a very short notice), if their response is riddled with grammar and spelling mistakes, if they send you a message intended to someone else (yeah, that happened quite a few times), then I wouldn't feel right working for such a company. Unless, of course, their salary offer is outrageously large.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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
Sometimes it is rather arbitrary, such as: lives too far away, or uses an unprofessional sounding email address (for example: hotkitty@aol.com)
Is it the hotkitty or the aol part you find most unprofessional?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Last year I have applied for a job (albeit in a much better market) and I made sure that my application looks nice, my cover letters have no gross grammar or spelling errors (even made a few friends proofread them) and are actually relevant to the information in the job offer.
So, LaTeX ftw! In the end I got four offers of five interviews I've agreed to take (and have rejected countless other interview offers). The hiring manager on a job I took is actually a LaTeX fan himself so he had immediately noticed my resume :-)
If they do find another qualified candidate without any of those factors, it doesn't matter to them that you are also qualified. If they don't find another one, you're going to get a call anyway.
That only holds true in cases where an actual human is reading the résumés which have been submitted. Many businesses, particularly large multi-nationals, rely on software to reduce the pool of 100s of applicants down to a handful, not allowing even an unqualified HR person to make a call whether to move a résumé forward. The last time I hired an assistant, the automated HR system eliminated every highly-qualified candidate that I had personally recommended for the position, leaving me with 6 candidates who had no real-world qualifications but were capable of putting the right buzzwords on their application. I ended up in a protracted fight with HR that was resolved by a VP granting permission to hire out-of-scope, just to get a qualified candidate for the job.
FrontDoor 2.02; Noncommercial version Press Escape twice for...
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 am a rare one! :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
What's wrong with tight dresses :)
They're hard to reach up under to scratch your balls.
All I am saying is that you could do some sort of filtering before actually sitting down and reading every one in full. ie: stop reading when you see 2 blatant typos, don't read extremely poorly formatted resumes, don't read resumes that do not meet the requirements that you requested. You probably will filter out some perfectly good applicants... but there will be a higher percentage of good applicants in the remaining pool of resumes. Interview the remaining and if nobody fits, then go back to the stack of reject resumes.