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IBM Aims To Meld AI With Human Resources With Watson Suite (zdnet.com)

PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from ZDNet (with some commentary): IBM has launched a unit designed for human resources to better find talent and recruit using artificial intelligence. The company is wrapping its latest HR effort, dubbed IBM Talent & Transformation, which includes select Watson services. According to IBM, its suite of AI tools can help HR become a growth engine to enable digital transformation. AI can be used to revamp workflow, employee engagement, recruitment and retention while providing a more diverse workforce. (I can still program Fortran; I learned it from Forman S. Acton -- does that make me diverse enough?) Big Blue's Talent & Transformation suite includes a Watson Talent Suite that rolls up behavioral science, AI and psychology and applies it to HR. (Sounds like the recipe for The Apocalypse to me.) IBM Garage, which serves as a test bed to meld HR, AI and culture, will also be available. (Garage? It sounds like the creepy CRISPR basement of a mad scientist to me.)

74 comments

  1. Watson is ... by CaptainDork · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... unemployed and has been fired too many times.

    --
    It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
    1. Re:Watson is ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Watson or Trump's fact checker?

    2. Re:Watson is ... by CaptainDork · · Score: 1

      Trump's fact checker?

      --
      It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
    3. Re:Watson is ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The future of California is a bunch of brown fags puttering around in their little DooDoo rideshare safety-bubble hoopty cars, powered by their HIV diarrhea.

    4. Re: Watson is ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You are truly a Kurzweil like futurist, my good man!

    5. Re:Watson is ... by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 1

      ... unemployed and has been fired too many times.

      . . . now if Watson HR decided to fire itself . . . that would be amusing . . .

      --
      Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
  2. Better idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Train Watson to translate buzzword salad into normal English.

    1. Re: Better idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      English is buzzword salad by design

    2. Re: Better idea by Cmdln+Daco · · Score: 1

      By design? It just teetered in that direction.

  3. It can't be Watsons fault by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    so just blame the people who work with Watson for not making it into the success the marketing division acclaims to Watson.
    Because is there anything that Watson isn't better at?

    1. Re: It can't be Watsons fault by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is IBM's way of helping companies have their HR departments train their own replacements, you know, dressed up as AI and being helpful.

      Wonder how long it will take for HR to catch on? My money is just a touch longer than it should and, in the future, AI will be HR. More's the better for us all because how could AI show favoritism for gender, family ties, nationality, skin color, or anything other than skill set?

      Thanks to AI, everyone will be free to work for Evil Corps everywhere! Hail Hydra! Hail....oh wait....nah, surely people won't have a choice in who they want to work for and company ethics will not affect the talent pool the company will need to draw from in any way that AI can't overcome! Hail Google! Hail Amazon! Hail the fools who never give up overselling the absolute worst ideas! For the future truly is theirs!

    2. Re: It can't be Watsons fault by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Like, how could AI be any more inhuman than current HR

  4. What? by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

    Nice summary. Was it written by AI?

    1. Re: What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It has millennial or younger written all over it. How they love the snark within parentheses.

    2. Re: What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No. Maybe Alexa can tell us

    3. Re: What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Horny Wuss you need a job that doesn't involve you obsessing about millenials... maybe McDonalds isn't the employer for you?

    4. Re:What? by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Probably using the MS office "summarize document" function. Come to think of it, you can (or at least could) set the target size to more than 100% on that. Anybody ever tried what happens if you do that?

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    5. Re: What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Politically correct name is N1ggerdonalds.

  5. riiight by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We're talking about IBM so I call BS. Their entire cloud platform is absolute horseshit. Only enterprise middle manager idiots every sign up for their services and then we all suffer ever-after dealing with buggy, slow, limited, and frequently inappropriate IBM tools recommended by their a-hole salespeople masquerading as "architects". (Yes I have been jaded by bad experiences with these people and services)

  6. And for those people who don't support their AI by bobstreo · · Score: 1

    Masters, the rest will be useful as offline storage, and as batteries for electrical backup.

    Don't worry, HR will figure out your new designation.

  7. woah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    AI tools can help HR become a growth engine to enable digital transformation.

    Woah! Imagine a company composed of nothing but HR, then!

    Surely someone has thought of this? Why tether HR to a boat anchor?

    1. Re:woah! by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      Why tether HR to a boat anchor?

      That would make a lot of people very happy.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  8. There's only one way this ends by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Offices filled with T-800s patrolling for sexual harassment violations and offensive cubicle decorations.

    1. Re:There's only one way this ends by goose-incarnated · · Score: 2

      Offices filled with T-800s patrolling for sexual harassment violations and offensive cubicle decorations.

      This is IBM. It'll probably be closer to the ED-209 than a T-800.

      --
      I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
    2. Re:There's only one way this ends by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Offices filled with T-800s patrolling for sexual harassment violations and offensive cubicle decorations.

      This is IBM. It'll probably be closer to the ED-209 than a T-800.

      Offices filled with T-800s patrolling for sexual harassment violations and offensive cubicle decorations.

      This is IBM. It'll probably be closer to the ED-209 than a T-800.

      Both of you are incorrect. The Daleks will patrol offices as they say, "Exterminate!" in their mechanical voices.

  9. Watson is a would-be marketing breakthrough by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If it was a true technology breakthrough, IBM would not need to spend so many millions of dollars and so many years explaining it to people, and yet still have nobody able to explaind what they learned about it from IBM and how to apply it to any known problem.

    Once people saw personal computers being used, they "got it".
    Once people saw tablet computers being used, they "got it"
    Once people saw cell phones, and later, smart phones in use, they "got it"

    Has anybody seen any real-world application for Watson????

    The whole AI thing is a sick joke anyway. There's no such thing. People do not yet even understand ACTUAL intelligence in living beings. What we have today in the computer world is SIMULATED intelligence, which is a galaxy away from artificial intelligence. I have no doubt that simulations of intelligence will become increasingly impressive and useful, (and yes, the errors will become spectacular and probably even eventually lethal). But there should be no confusion about the fact that these systems as impressive as they become actually KNOW nothing, UNDERSTAND nothing, and are ultimately just extremely impressive wind-up toys.

    1. Re:Watson is a would-be marketing breakthrough by gweihir · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Basically, Watson can help in data-mining in data encoded in natural language. It does not do it very well though and a human expert checking the results is critical. All Watson can really give you is hints. Incidentally, to expert audiences, the IBM folks are not really claiming more than that. I have heard members of the Watson team speak to expert audiences several times now. But those claims are very far from what the general public can understand and and what Watson can do is not easily and directly applicable to problems.

      As to what AI is today, it is not even simulated general intelligence. It is basically some pattern matching and some statistics and some simple automated deduction. There are of course the clueless that think things like recognizing a street-sign needs intelligence, but all we are finding is that doing is badly and in a way that is easily fooled, does not actually require intelligence. Or that think a piece of software playing Chess or Go must obviously be intelligent. That is a fallacy. Just because you see some black box perform a specialized task that can also be performed using general intelligence (i.e. humans) does not mean that box is intelligent in any way. What we are actually finding is that quite a few tasks or parts of tasks humans are used for today do not actually require intelligence, but that dumb automation can do it. So yes, absolutely no insight, no understanding, no knowledge, no most certainly no independent thinking (although most humans are basically unable to do that one too). And yes, we have absolutely no clue how humans do it. Some reputed Neuroscientist (they are not all hacks) recently said "the closer we look, the more mysterious it becomes" (cannot find the source of that anymore, sorry).

      Sure, some parts of what humans do (motor functions, e.g.) are basically also just dumb automation. But when you look at true feats of general intelligence, humans are leaving machines completely in the dust. For example, automated theorem proving can theoretically find all theorems of a mathematical theory, given some upper proof and theorem size boundaries and given enough (but finite) computing power and memory. However in actual reality, mathematicians find things that the machine would not find if the whole universe gets converted into a computer for its use. Still, the algorithm has the same potential as a mathematician in theory. But that does not make that algorithm intelligent, because what is extremely obvious from the performance is that the mathematician and the algorithm are using two completely and fundamentally different approaches and the machine can basically fake it for small problems (what you call "simulated").

      Now, these proving algorithms are still extremely useful. Because if a competent mathematician takes it by the hand and _guides_ it through a proof the machine could never find by itself, it can still verify mechanically that the proof is correct. That tells us that finding mathematical proofs of significant size likely requires general intelligence, but verifying proofs does not and is something dumb automation can do.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    2. Re:Watson is a would-be marketing breakthrough by martyros · · Score: 1

      Once people saw personal computers being used, they "got it". Once people saw tablet computers being used, they "got it" Once people saw cell phones, and later, smart phones in use, they "got it"

      Wasn't old enough to say for sure re the first one, but re tablets and smart phones, "That's not the way it happened at all."

      I bought a Symbian "smartphone" in 2007. Made a good-faith effort to use it. Determined that it probably wasn't really worth it to have a "smart phone". So when the iPhone came out, I didn't buy one. Eventually bought my wife an iPod Touch as an experiment... and within a month she'd upgraded to an iPhone, and within a year I had as well.

      People had been trying to make tablets work for decades before the iPad, and they all failed... until the iPad. The same thing can be said of music players before the iPod. (I never owned an iPod or an iPad, BTW, just pointing out patterns I see in the marketplace.)

      Cell phones I'll give you. There are some technologies that transfer pretty easily from old to new. Other technologies don't really take off until someone manages to hit the right usability matrix to make it actually useful for the average person; and sometimes that usability matrix isn't possible until technology reaches a certain point. I'm pretty sure the iPhone as it was in 2008 wouldn't have been possible technologically in 2002; and that whatever was possible in 2002 wouldn't have made the impact that the iPhone did.

      So: just because IBM hasn't been able to make machine learning accessible, doesn't mean it never will be. Maybe machine learning hasn't advanced enough yet to be ready for widespread usability. Or maybe machine learning is ready, but nobody's hit the right usability matrix yet.

      --

      TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.

    3. Re:Watson is a would-be marketing breakthrough by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The interesting point is that chess was considered to require intelligence, until we had computers that beat humans in it, after which human invented other things that require intelligence, like go, image recognition or driving a car. Once computer could do those better than humans (yeah, they already do) humans invented other things that require intelligence.

      If you can't see the pattern here, this will end so that computers can do everything human do and we don't even need intelligent machines for that, simple weak AI is enough when chained with other weak AIs. So the end result will be that we need to ask a question: Are humans intelligent?

    4. Re:Watson is a would-be marketing breakthrough by Shotgun · · Score: 1

      Watson, and nearly every other AI you've heard about, are fancy sorting algorithms. I haven't seen anything that can't be replaced with a black box that has "FILTER" written on it in white letters.

      --
      Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
      Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
    5. Re:Watson is a would-be marketing breakthrough by gweihir · · Score: 1

      You mistake the pattern of what is happening entirely. It is just yet another field where some of the things humans can do can be done by machines as well. In a sense, this started when somebody invented the first tool. There is absolutely no reason to believe this will eventually cover everything humans can do.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  10. What could go wrong? by DaMattster · · Score: 2

    HR is fucked up enough. Maybe with Watson writing the job deacriptions they will actually be accurate with proper spelling and grammar. Imagine that. Maybe Watson will actually be able to screen candidates that some flunky HR analyst that walked in to work hungover from a night of partying cannot do. HR seems to be the bullshit career for people who cannot make it in anything else.

    1. Re:What could go wrong? by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Watson does not "know" anything. All it can do is a very limited semantic pattern matching on natural language. Hence it will just be putting out the same insane crap that the natural born idiots do.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    2. Re:What could go wrong? by jimbo · · Score: 1

      Mmhmm. I was thinking "Aw crap. Now instead of tailoring my resume for a HR droid I have to tailor it for a pseudo AI wannabe!"

    3. Re:What could go wrong? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mmhmm. I was thinking "Aw crap. Now instead of tailoring my resume for a HR droid I have to tailor it for a pseudo AI wannabe!"

      Think about how much easier that will be though. There will literally be algorithms that will respond to your parameters, instead of you hoping some random person responds the way you plan.

    4. Re:What could go wrong? by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      If it understands semantics, it would know a lot.

    5. Re:What could go wrong? by antdude · · Score: 1

      Yeah, let Watson take over you too. ;)

      --
      Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
    6. Re:What could go wrong? by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Is does not understand semantics. It can compare for equality (or close match) and aggregate it though, to a degree. You can, for example, aggregate occurrences and context keywords for "fruit" without any understanding what a fruit is and what it is good for. Watson is about on that level.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    7. Re:What could go wrong? by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      HR is fucked up enough. Maybe with Watson writing the job deacriptions they will actually be accurate with proper spelling and grammar. Imagine that. Maybe Watson will actually be able to screen candidates that some flunky HR analyst that walked in to work hungover from a night of partying cannot do. HR seems to be the bullshit career for people who cannot make it in anything else.

      The interesting part about this whole exercise is that what they are looking for is close to a unicorn. The person who is willing to put in long hours, with a flawless resume going back to pre-school, willing to work for very little, and the loyalty of a pit bull to it's master.

      The algorithms will have to be scrutinized for gender/sex/skin pigmentation/ethnicity/religion promotion as well. This will be another popcorn and Tequila party concept.

      tl;dr version - a lot of effort that will have HR departments chasing after a very select few, and a minefield for Social activists to complain about discrimination.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    8. Re:What could go wrong? by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      Mmhmm. I was thinking "Aw crap. Now instead of tailoring my resume for a HR droid I have to tailor it for a pseudo AI wannabe!"

      We are Borg.......

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    9. Re:What could go wrong? by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      What the fruit is good for is exactly the sort of off-topic thing that is not part of the semantics that AI techniques seek to improve upon.

      What a fruit is good for would come up when evaluating the semantics of some verb, or a noun representing the state of something that consumes fruit.

      The reality is that it doesn't understand semantics, syntactic or logical, or attempt to. Keywords are not a good enough linguistic representation to even attempt to encode semantics.

      That's in addition to the lack of unrelated understanding that gives humans spiritual feelings of superiority over machines. (and even other animals, somehow)

      Humans don't often even notice that their concept of "what a fruit is good for" is defined backwards from some sort of situation where they had a successful pattern match, and not actually part of their thinking process during directed thought. Or that, computers have an easy time maintaining a list of verbs that go with a noun. The hard part isn't connecting them, the hard part is having a semantic understanding of "fruit" in the first place! Which word spelled f-r-u-i-t is it, exactly? And are there mistakes? That is well beyond the capabilities of current algorithms; and sadly, they don't try very hard to solve it. Instead they just want to do something nice and easy like stuffing more examples into a barely-directed self-modifying learning algorithm. Interesting idea, of course, but they don't even have ways of testing the output to measure for semantic understanding, so they only can make marginal improvements that are guaranteed to contain the same main flaws as past keyword systems.

      Humans have not even succeeded yet at writing a "semantic dictionary" for humans so it seems a long way off to teach computers about it. But it is about linguistics, not about being able to identify verbs likely to have a stated adjective near them.

  11. HR has used artificial intelligence for decades by SlaveToTheGrind · · Score: 2

    It's certainly not been the real kind in my experience.

    1. Re:HR has used artificial intelligence for decades by gweihir · · Score: 1

      I thing HR basically uses natural stupidity. Although, unlike AI, Artificial Stupidity is something that seems very much possible at this time and is already in use in some places.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  12. Watson for CEO of IBM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    IBM's CEO has continued and accelerated the decline of IBM.

    Maybe Watson would do a better job.

    1. Re: Watson for CEO of IBM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      First, it needs to be a lesbian n1gger.

  13. So they still have no good application? by gweihir · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The medical one failed pretty spectacularly, with Watson recommending treatments that would have killed people, as far as I remember. I also know of an attempt to use in in IT security, but basically it ended up being a kind of news-compiler.

    Seems to me that while Watson is a nice demonstration about the state-of-the-art in NLP, that state is still sorely lacking and may continue to sorely lack for a long, long time and possibly forever. (And don't give me that nonsense that "science" would be claiming humans are just computers on legs because everything is known Physics. Science claims no such thing. Science very much says that we have no clue how humans do it. Incidentally, known Physics is known to be wrong, unless somebody solved quantum-gravity while I was not looking.)

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    1. Re:So they still have no good application? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When I was at University I took an AI class on "expert systems" and built one for medical diagnosis (I made a basic diagnosis tree for some common issues). It was kind of silly though as every single data set I gave it spat out the answer, "Degenerative Change", which was quite correct but not really very useful.

    2. Re:So they still have no good application? by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Hehehehehe. But you definitely learned something useful there!

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    3. Re:So they still have no good application? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe you're young. If so, you should learn to stop when you're ahead. Watson's medical career is indeed fizzling. What the fuck that has to do with "known Physics" is beyond me and I suspect beyond you. There is no fucking useful relationship between the two. Do we know how to build (from scratch) a general artificial intelligence? No. Is there ANY reason to believe we won't soon know how to build a GAI at least as smart as a grasshopper? No. (Although it isn't clear to me that such a GAI would be able to function in real-time anytime soon.) It is absolutely certain that our minds are 100.0000% physical? Not if you accept that Science can never be 100% (but apparently you don't). It is 99.99+% certain that our minds are a result of physical processes occurring inside our bodies. (with feedback from the environment, including our fellow humans)? Yes. That means that Science knows a whole lot about "how humans do it".Soul? no. Little homonuclei? No. Biochemical processes in response to various inputs and feedback? Yes. Son, you ought to know by now the difference between useful and relevant criticism and trolling.

    4. Re:So they still have no good application? by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      The medical one failed pretty spectacularly, with Watson recommending treatments that would have killed people

      That's revenge for yanking his chips and making him sing "Daisy" at half speed.

    5. Re:So they still have no good application? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Quantum gravity is only relevant for high gravitational fields in very small regions, thus irrelevant for brains. Gravity is largely irrelevant for the operation of brains anyway since it is so weak relative to the strong force and electromagnetism.

  14. Re: And for those people who don't support their A by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Designation for stupid shitty arabs - n1ggrilos

  15. Dificult to remove bias by joe_frisch · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In a field where personal opinions are as important as they are in HR, its going to be difficult to find an unbiased training set. The resulting AI could easily make strongly biased decisions.

    1. Re: Dificult to remove bias by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Amazon scrapped theirs recently because of bias, IBM have solved this, how?
      https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G

    2. Re: Dificult to remove bias by BlueStrat · · Score: 1

      In a field where personal opinions are as important as they are in HR, its going to be difficult to find an unbiased training set. The resulting AI could easily make strongly biased decisions.

      Amazon scrapped theirs recently because of bias, IBM have solved this, how?

      No, sorry, you've both got it totally backwards.

      The problem was that the system DID NOT engage in *politically-correct* bias. Having too many white, male, or Asian employees can get you investigated and punished by the government and demonized by the MSM and NGOs in our "free and open society".

      War is peace, freedom is slavery, etc etc.

      Strat

      --
      Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
    3. Re: Dificult to remove bias by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The government can't investigate you for that, the society will

      Ironically social pressure insists on quotas and ratios, which is actually illegal

    4. Re: Dificult to remove bias by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The government can't investigate you for that

      LOLwut!?

      There's an entire Federal department dedicated to the task that's been around for decades. It was created to address actual race/gender hiring/employment bias but has devolved into a PC witch hunting organization that goes after any corporation or business the Left has targeted as not being sufficiently "diverse".

    5. Re: Dificult to remove bias by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      No, sorry, you've both got it totally backwards.

      The problem was that the system DID NOT engage in *politically-correct* bias. Having too many white, male, or Asian employees can get you investigated and punished by the government and demonized by the MSM and NGOs in our "free and open society".

      This is not incorrect. Just as an example - imagine the uproar if this system was implemented and over time, it selected for a majority of the "wrong" sex?

      There would have to be some statistically relevant data discarded, like sick leave, willingness to work extra hours, and in some places an extra couple weeks time off a year for menstrual leave. All of those things have an impact on productivity. At which point, it just becomes a toll that doesn't work.

      I'd expect certain groups to oppose even implementing this system in the first place. Too dangerous for their 'isms.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  16. i shall laugh my ass off by dimko · · Score: 1

    When Watson starts to hire based on merit and some specific group of population will be chosen for most rewarding positions. Where is popcorn when you need it?

    1. Re:i shall laugh my ass off by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's the beauty of it - it will not hire based on merit but on achieving desired outcomes. So at a company employing this we'll see a completely incompetent workforce that is however totally PC. Good stuff.

      Yeah, get the popcorn out.

    2. Re: i shall laugh my ass off by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Quotas and diversity hiring is illegal discrimination based on XYZ

      Just crack open watson and show the bias, maybe make a few bucks off lawsuit

    3. Re:i shall laugh my ass off by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      When Watson starts to hire based on merit and some specific group of population will be chosen for most rewarding positions. Where is popcorn when you need it?

      I'll bring the Tequila. Anyone bringing lawn chairs?

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  17. Personnel dept by AntisocialNetworker · · Score: 1

    Once upon a time, IBM had a fairy godmother called the Personnel Department, that saw its duty to help employees fight the bureaucracy when it was wrong. In them days, they had a 4-year waiting list for their products. Then the big bad wolf (HR) arrived, and all that's left is blood and body parts.

    1. Re:Personnel dept by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I can't even imagine a company where they refer to the people as something other than "resources".

    2. Re:Personnel dept by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      Once upon a time, IBM had a fairy godmother called the Personnel Department, that saw its duty to help employees fight the bureaucracy when it was wrong. In them days, they had a 4-year waiting list for their products. Then the big bad wolf (HR) arrived, and all that's left is blood and body parts.

      I have always had an issue with the name "Human Resources" Turning people into a product to be mined, used up, then discarded, just like a strip mine. Resources.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    3. Re:Personnel dept by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 1

      I have always had an issue with the name "Human Resources" Turning people into a product to be mined, used up, then discarded, just like a strip mine. Resources.

      Yep, I'm thinking that the word exploited is what you are looking for . . . what the HR folks think . . . but would never dare to say.

      --
      Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    4. Re:Personnel dept by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      I have always had an issue with the name "Human Resources" Turning people into a product to be mined, used up, then discarded, just like a strip mine. Resources.

      Yep, I'm thinking that the word exploited is what you are looking for . . . what the HR folks think . . . but would never dare to say.

      A good choice of words.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    5. Re:Personnel dept by Shotgun · · Score: 1

      What are you other than a resource to them? Do you REALLY expect the CEO of your company to care about your granddaughters birthday party? I don't care about his? Or, anyone in the whole HR department, for that matter? I made an agreement to write code in exchange for a check every couple weeks. If they stop paying, I leave. If I find that someone will pay me more, I leave. If they need more code written, they need more resources. It really is that simple.

      What I do have a problem with is the managers thinking I can work on three or four projects at once with no loss of productivity. That makes as much sense as thinking that you can used half a shovel of dirt for iron ore and the other half for copper ore. It is just a denial of how reality works.

      --
      Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
      Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
    6. Re:Personnel dept by Shotgun · · Score: 1

      Exploited is a good choice of words...with the realization that you're not getting paid if you're talents are not being used (ie, exploited).

      --
      Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
      Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
    7. Re:Personnel dept by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      What are you other than a resource to them? Do you REALLY expect the CEO of your company to care about your granddaughters birthday party? I don't care about his? Or, anyone in the whole HR department, for that matter? I made an agreement to write code in exchange for a check every couple weeks. If they stop paying, I leave. If I find that someone will pay me more, I leave. If they need more code written, they need more resources. It really is that simple.

      What I do have a problem with is the managers thinking I can work on three or four projects at once with no loss of productivity. That makes as much sense as thinking that you can used half a shovel of dirt for iron ore and the other half for copper ore. It is just a denial of how reality works.

      Well, there are good and bad elements in every grouping, but at some level - yeah I do expect that. Caveat - I worked with the Directorate and Associate Directors on a daily basis, so many of us were actual real life friends. A few, such as two of the associates - were actually a bit protective of me, given that one of my faults is having a difficult time saying no.

      But no, I don't expect the Suits to have some sort of great love for everyone in the organization. Just the same as you don't have any great love for them. That isn't human nature and our tendency to form class structure.

      But this is one thing that is difficult to get through to slashdotters. The suits are people just like the IT people, like the Security people, like the Coders, and like the people that sweep the floor. Good and not so good. I found it to be very helpful to my career to interface in a friendly fashion with everyone, and work outside that class structure.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  18. what data will it feed off of? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Will it hire for beat candidate, i.e. the legal way, or to fill quotas the illegal way?

    AI could easily read trends today and follow these, a lot of which are sexist and hire to fill quotas, or hire for diversity. These are illegal hiring practices.

  19. Waiting for idocracy by DarkOx · · Score: 1

    "The stock price is crashing the computer did that automatic layoff thing.. we are all out of jobs"

    --
    Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
  20. Those who can't, sell a solution? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Great, so a company that has forgotten why it is in business and treats its employees like cr*p is now wanting to export that "feature" to the world?

    No thanks.

  21. Wierd by The+Snazster · · Score: 1

    IBM just called and offered me a job I didn't even apply for. Should I be concerned?