I wouldn't worry about that, employment laws are well entrenched. IANAL (though I am an industrial/organizational psychologist at Evolv), but the employment laws are pretty clear when it comes to discriminating against protected classes. We've also known for years that intelligence is the single best predictor of performance across all job types, but as an industry we can't really use it because intelligence tests tend to discriminate. That's why you see so many personality-style tests.
There are a lot of specific questions employers cannot ask (personal, disability, some criminal history) as well as protected classes which cannot be arbitrarily discriminated against. Protected classes include ethnicity/race, gender, and age (people over 40). We're constantly checking our assessments to ensure they do not discriminate against women, any ethnicity, or older applicants.
Things get trickier when you add the notion of job relevance. IF you are using a screening tool that discriminates, it MUST be job relevant. You cannot disproportionately screen out women who can't lift xx lbs over their head from a firefighting job if that's not something a firefighter actually has to do on the job. You CAN disproportionately screen out blind people for the job of fire truck driver because vision is obviously job relevant.
Most employers try to stick with screening tools that are job relevant AND don't discriminate. Rarely do you see an idiot employer who screens based on some illegal, discriminatory criteria. More commonly it's an edge case, where a tool is job relevant but is discriminatory against some protected class (and isn't as obvious as the blind driver). Somebody sues and it gets settled out of court. It's just safer legally to not discriminate at all, job relevancy or no. At Evolv we include job relevant questions (i.e., call simulations for call center applicants; retail simulations for retail applicants) and situational judgment tests AND check to make sure they don't discriminate against a protected group. We could use job relevant questions that do discriminate since it would be legal, but it's just not worth the risk so you typically don't see it done.
I'm an industrial/organizational psychologist at Evolv. I help build assessment content and I work closely with our predictive algorithms. A few clarifications from the WSJ article & responses to/. comments:
Yes, creativity and empathy are important for some positions, even in call centers! We're not looking for hateful drones who will hang up on you when you call in. In addition to staying longer, our recommended hires perform better as well. That means increases in both customer satisfaction and efficiency (we call it "average handle time"). But it's a curvilinear relationship - somebody who is too inquisitive is going to tend to waste your valuable time (and their employer's) while trying to resolve your issue. There's a balance.
Most test vendors put a test in place and walk away. At Evolv we take all the post-hire data from our clients and continually feed it back into our algorithms. The content, scoring, and weighting adjust over time to be more predictive.
At Evolv, we don't pair obvious responses when we create questions. So no "I like to steal office supplies" vs "I always show up to work on time" questions. Coupled with the continual refresh & validation of the content, there is no "answer key" that will get you a job. One of the neat things about this approach that we've found is that people applying to entry level positions often don't know what they're good at. Either they've bounced around a few jobs or they're just out of high school. So when somebody applies to a call center job that's hiring for both customer service and sales positions, and we can recommend the position for which they're likely to be "fitter, happier, and more productive"... that's kind of cool. Their employer will make more money off a more stable employee, and the employee ends up doing something they will enjoy just a little bit more. I know some folks will see it from the Radiohead point of view, as creepy (and I respect that), but we think it's better than dumping somebody into a position they're not going to enjoy just because they had the right keywords on their resume or they BS'd their way through an interview.
Science & statistics help eliminate some crazy gut-based hiring decisions. Some hiring managers want to ask call center applicants what they'll be doing in 10 years with an expected response of "I'll be working at this call center". But let's be realistic - while some people enjoy them and thrive, call center jobs are typically not where you plan to be in 10 years. We've also found that resume experience for entry level positions is less important than basic skills and attitude. It's easy to look at that and say "duh" but you'd be surprised how many people hiring & screening for these roles want to exclude applicants who don't have prior experience. So we can cut things out of the interview and hiring process that just don't mean anything.
Evolv doesn't just do employment screening. We periodically follow up with people after they're hired. We find out what information wasn't communicated well during the hiring process, get their feedback on how their training is going, their thoughts on their supervisor, that sort of thing. We feed all of this back in to improve the process. In some cases, that means identifying the trainers whose students perform poorly when they start working. Other times it could be flagging a tenured stellar performer whose numbers are starting to dip for a new position to help reinvigorate them. We strive to improve profitability across the workforce, and do so in an employee-friendly way.
Last but not least, we're still expanding through Xerox, so if you've called their customer service and had a bad experience it must not have been one of our hires. Joking aside, agents are people too, and even our top recommendations have a bad day. We're working hard to to make it better though!
Hope that helps! Yes, there definitely are risks with employment testing, but we try to avoid them and build solutions that make everybody's life a little better.
Isn't that the point of the whole Google Fiber experiment? If Google can get generate enough interest to merely break even on Fiber, they can deliver ALL of our information from the cloud, uncapped, and fully scanned/monitored/analyzed 24/7... Advertisers will have no choice but to go through Google. The government will be fully on board because Google will grant monitoring access.
This. I definitely consider myself on the noob end of the Pi experience spectrum, but it didn't take me long to figure out that all the advice online recommending the use of a solid power supply (> 1A) was *gasp* correct. I started out with a minimum spec power supply when mine first arrived and was experiencing issues. I've since swapped out for beefier power sources and had two Pi's running RaspBMC for a while now, one on ethernet and the other on wifi, with no USB hubs. I don't have a bazillion devices plugged in either, so YMMV.
Sure, the USB wifi dongle was a bitch to get running at first, but for a $35 toy I can velcro to an unused LCD and deliver streaming media throughout the house, I'm happy.
The questions posted are stuff an interview gets anyway, because every job application has a form to fill asking for race, religion, etc. It supposedly is optional, but in reality, if an applicant bins that form, their resume gets binned.
Um, no. My company provides job application assessments and applicant tracking systems - we do collect the information for legal compliance but the interviewer at the client site never sees it. The only way this could really happen would be if you submitted a paper application (who here does that?) and they used that information for hiring, which is illegal. Otherwise, the people doing the hiring & screening do not see that information.
As for the interview questions you listed, I agree they are generally awful.
I'm a doctoral student in industrial & organizational psychology and work at a start-up. I'm also technically inclined, but by no stretch of the imagination a serious programmer. Good psychologists can set behaviorally based seeds for machine learning to increase accuracy from the get-go. Psychology & machine learning are very complementary, as are the statistics skills needed to make sense of big data - I would suggest you ensure your statistics skills are strong if they aren't already. That's usually not a problem for programmers since statistics boils down to algorithms.
I would expect your chances of falling into a job at hot-tech-company-of-the-month are low, but there are so many small companies trying to make sense of their data that I think you could carve out quite a niche while combining your interests. Best of luck!
We use JIRA and follow a general template (description of problem, steps to reproduce, users impacted/business impact, severity). Tickets submitted under a few different main project areas go to the respective SME for triage (follow-up, prioritization, reassignment to engineering). Speaking as one of the non-devs but with some prior QA experience, it seems to work just fine.
Not to mention the rest of the device -- I'm sure you've seen what happens to plastic left in the sun! That clear plastic screen will look great once it turns yellow. Of course, I imagine it's a) mainly a gimmick and b) designed to die (so we can buy the newer model) long before sun damage...
We've been manipulating and modeling human behavior for decades. We chuckle when economists suddenly realize that humans act in so-called "irrational" (but theoretically and statistically predictable) ways. It's only irrational insofar as economists don't understand it.
Exactly. I'm currently finishing the write-up for a study that shows a correlation between low conscientiousness + low agreeableness and high texting use at work. One of the key variables we controlled for is age. If you are less responsible, independent of age, you're more likely to act irresponsibly (should be obvious, right?). Irresponsible kids are more likely to do it through texting while irresponsible adults do it in other ways. Texting just happens to make the news because it's "novel".
Disclaimer: correlation does not equal causation. BUT logically, personality dimensions are relatively static -- it is NOT reasonable to say texting somehow makes a person less conscientious or agreeable.
Same here, I've already been running it for months so what do I have to lose? Odds are, we'll have people over some day during that week anyway, so if MS wants to give me a free copy of Win 7 I won't complain.
You're absolutely right, but here's the problem: segregating by intelligence will lead to self-fulfilling results (see Pygmalion research) on the part of the students and the teachers (low or high expectations given the group). That means kids in the low intelligence group will do even worse than if they had been mixed with everyone else. But at the same time, high intelligence kids will do better as a group than if they are mixed with everyone else. The question is whether we want a select group of extremely intelligent individuals at the expense of the overall population, or an overall population that is generally more intelligent but does not have as many super geniuses.
Okay, not a museum... but as far as zoos go, it's pretty interactive. Make sure you walk through the indoor rainforest. AFAIK you might otherwise hit an open stretch of no museums while you cross the midwest, so it's a valid excuse to drop in!
While I'm on the subject of W7 bugs, I've said this before and I'll say it again: be wary of Homegroup. It's great when it works and it usually works, but it can destroy all it touches if it gets upset.
Obviously they are not perfectly analogous. But current (more technical) users are also more likely to correctly report bugs. In addition, not all of the current users are techies. Speaking only for myself, I have migrated a number of friends/family to Windows 7 RC because there were running Vista. *shudder*
There's no doubt in my mind more bugs will surface with the much wider install, but if this site is correct Windows 7 is already close to 1% of the OS market, a respectable install base for an unreleased OS.
For the anecdotal record, I installed the RC on my ye olde underpowered XP laptop (512 MB RAM) and with the bare bones, stripped down setup it runs about the same as it did using XP. If nothing else, the fact that I've left it on for 3 months underscores my lack of desire to return to XP.
Yeah, I was too lazy to remove Vista from a new machine I ended up with (it works well enough) so I jumped on the Win7 RC. It works great, just be wary regarding Homegroups. When they work they are easy as pie and useful, but if they get screwed up they can take down everything they touch.
Realistically, who isn't going to delete the W7 files off the USB drive when they're done so they can use it for other things? Should you ever need to reinstall, you'll have to buy another one. A clever win/win for Microsoft.
The core files I use on a daily basis do not take up more than a few GB. For anything beyond that I do use my web server, but for the vast majority of my usage Dropbox (or LiveMesh or whatever) works & is easier.
This is just my two cents, but it seems it could be great for the/. community. I think it is too "difficult" for the unwashed masses. ("What do you mean I have to pay extra to access my data all the time?") I use the free version of Dropbox for my basic file syncs and it's simply seamless *BUT* it is constantly in contact with the server as I update files or move them around, admittedly sometimes on a whim. As you pointed out, that bandwidth would be hell on your proposal. If *I* wanted to, I could use my Dropbox bandwidth more conservatively, but I think that is beyond the typical user.
If aimed correctly, say at/. users, it could make sense. I know I would be interested personally, but I would be hesitant to suggest it to my luddite family members as they'd probably end up accidentally using too much expensive bandwidth.
And if somebody knows of a service already offering this, post it!
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't worry about that, employment laws are well entrenched. IANAL (though I am an industrial/organizational psychologist at Evolv), but the employment laws are pretty clear when it comes to discriminating against protected classes. We've also known for years that intelligence is the single best predictor of performance across all job types, but as an industry we can't really use it because intelligence tests tend to discriminate. That's why you see so many personality-style tests.
There are a lot of specific questions employers cannot ask (personal, disability, some criminal history) as well as protected classes which cannot be arbitrarily discriminated against. Protected classes include ethnicity/race, gender, and age (people over 40). We're constantly checking our assessments to ensure they do not discriminate against women, any ethnicity, or older applicants.
Things get trickier when you add the notion of job relevance. IF you are using a screening tool that discriminates, it MUST be job relevant. You cannot disproportionately screen out women who can't lift xx lbs over their head from a firefighting job if that's not something a firefighter actually has to do on the job. You CAN disproportionately screen out blind people for the job of fire truck driver because vision is obviously job relevant.
Most employers try to stick with screening tools that are job relevant AND don't discriminate. Rarely do you see an idiot employer who screens based on some illegal, discriminatory criteria. More commonly it's an edge case, where a tool is job relevant but is discriminatory against some protected class (and isn't as obvious as the blind driver). Somebody sues and it gets settled out of court. It's just safer legally to not discriminate at all, job relevancy or no. At Evolv we include job relevant questions (i.e., call simulations for call center applicants; retail simulations for retail applicants) and situational judgment tests AND check to make sure they don't discriminate against a protected group. We could use job relevant questions that do discriminate since it would be legal, but it's just not worth the risk so you typically don't see it done.
I'm an industrial/organizational psychologist at Evolv. I help build assessment content and I work closely with our predictive algorithms. A few clarifications from the WSJ article & responses to /. comments:
Yes, creativity and empathy are important for some positions, even in call centers! We're not looking for hateful drones who will hang up on you when you call in. In addition to staying longer, our recommended hires perform better as well. That means increases in both customer satisfaction and efficiency (we call it "average handle time"). But it's a curvilinear relationship - somebody who is too inquisitive is going to tend to waste your valuable time (and their employer's) while trying to resolve your issue. There's a balance.
Most test vendors put a test in place and walk away. At Evolv we take all the post-hire data from our clients and continually feed it back into our algorithms. The content, scoring, and weighting adjust over time to be more predictive.
At Evolv, we don't pair obvious responses when we create questions. So no "I like to steal office supplies" vs "I always show up to work on time" questions. Coupled with the continual refresh & validation of the content, there is no "answer key" that will get you a job. One of the neat things about this approach that we've found is that people applying to entry level positions often don't know what they're good at. Either they've bounced around a few jobs or they're just out of high school. So when somebody applies to a call center job that's hiring for both customer service and sales positions, and we can recommend the position for which they're likely to be "fitter, happier, and more productive"... that's kind of cool. Their employer will make more money off a more stable employee, and the employee ends up doing something they will enjoy just a little bit more. I know some folks will see it from the Radiohead point of view, as creepy (and I respect that), but we think it's better than dumping somebody into a position they're not going to enjoy just because they had the right keywords on their resume or they BS'd their way through an interview.
Science & statistics help eliminate some crazy gut-based hiring decisions. Some hiring managers want to ask call center applicants what they'll be doing in 10 years with an expected response of "I'll be working at this call center". But let's be realistic - while some people enjoy them and thrive, call center jobs are typically not where you plan to be in 10 years. We've also found that resume experience for entry level positions is less important than basic skills and attitude. It's easy to look at that and say "duh" but you'd be surprised how many people hiring & screening for these roles want to exclude applicants who don't have prior experience. So we can cut things out of the interview and hiring process that just don't mean anything.
Evolv doesn't just do employment screening. We periodically follow up with people after they're hired. We find out what information wasn't communicated well during the hiring process, get their feedback on how their training is going, their thoughts on their supervisor, that sort of thing. We feed all of this back in to improve the process. In some cases, that means identifying the trainers whose students perform poorly when they start working. Other times it could be flagging a tenured stellar performer whose numbers are starting to dip for a new position to help reinvigorate them. We strive to improve profitability across the workforce, and do so in an employee-friendly way.
Last but not least, we're still expanding through Xerox, so if you've called their customer service and had a bad experience it must not have been one of our hires. Joking aside, agents are people too, and even our top recommendations have a bad day. We're working hard to to make it better though!
Hope that helps! Yes, there definitely are risks with employment testing, but we try to avoid them and build solutions that make everybody's life a little better.
Cheers,
Tim
Isn't that the point of the whole Google Fiber experiment? If Google can get generate enough interest to merely break even on Fiber, they can deliver ALL of our information from the cloud, uncapped, and fully scanned/monitored/analyzed 24/7... Advertisers will have no choice but to go through Google. The government will be fully on board because Google will grant monitoring access.
This. I definitely consider myself on the noob end of the Pi experience spectrum, but it didn't take me long to figure out that all the advice online recommending the use of a solid power supply (> 1A) was *gasp* correct. I started out with a minimum spec power supply when mine first arrived and was experiencing issues. I've since swapped out for beefier power sources and had two Pi's running RaspBMC for a while now, one on ethernet and the other on wifi, with no USB hubs. I don't have a bazillion devices plugged in either, so YMMV.
Sure, the USB wifi dongle was a bitch to get running at first, but for a $35 toy I can velcro to an unused LCD and deliver streaming media throughout the house, I'm happy.
The questions posted are stuff an interview gets anyway, because every job application has a form to fill asking for race, religion, etc. It supposedly is optional, but in reality, if an applicant bins that form, their resume gets binned.
Um, no. My company provides job application assessments and applicant tracking systems - we do collect the information for legal compliance but the interviewer at the client site never sees it. The only way this could really happen would be if you submitted a paper application (who here does that?) and they used that information for hiring, which is illegal. Otherwise, the people doing the hiring & screening do not see that information.
As for the interview questions you listed, I agree they are generally awful.
I'm a doctoral student in industrial & organizational psychology and work at a start-up. I'm also technically inclined, but by no stretch of the imagination a serious programmer. Good psychologists can set behaviorally based seeds for machine learning to increase accuracy from the get-go. Psychology & machine learning are very complementary, as are the statistics skills needed to make sense of big data - I would suggest you ensure your statistics skills are strong if they aren't already. That's usually not a problem for programmers since statistics boils down to algorithms.
I would expect your chances of falling into a job at hot-tech-company-of-the-month are low, but there are so many small companies trying to make sense of their data that I think you could carve out quite a niche while combining your interests. Best of luck!
We use JIRA and follow a general template (description of problem, steps to reproduce, users impacted/business impact, severity). Tickets submitted under a few different main project areas go to the respective SME for triage (follow-up, prioritization, reassignment to engineering). Speaking as one of the non-devs but with some prior QA experience, it seems to work just fine.
Thank you! I wish I had mod points. It's a nice article but you'll get all of this and more in a decent research methods class.
Not to mention the rest of the device -- I'm sure you've seen what happens to plastic left in the sun! That clear plastic screen will look great once it turns yellow. Of course, I imagine it's a) mainly a gimmick and b) designed to die (so we can buy the newer model) long before sun damage...
Why wait? You can follow my Twitter feed to learn what I had for breakfast!
We've been manipulating and modeling human behavior for decades. We chuckle when economists suddenly realize that humans act in so-called "irrational" (but theoretically and statistically predictable) ways. It's only irrational insofar as economists don't understand it.
Exactly. I'm currently finishing the write-up for a study that shows a correlation between low conscientiousness + low agreeableness and high texting use at work. One of the key variables we controlled for is age. If you are less responsible, independent of age, you're more likely to act irresponsibly (should be obvious, right?). Irresponsible kids are more likely to do it through texting while irresponsible adults do it in other ways. Texting just happens to make the news because it's "novel".
Disclaimer: correlation does not equal causation. BUT logically, personality dimensions are relatively static -- it is NOT reasonable to say texting somehow makes a person less conscientious or agreeable.
Same here, I've already been running it for months so what do I have to lose? Odds are, we'll have people over some day during that week anyway, so if MS wants to give me a free copy of Win 7 I won't complain.
You're absolutely right, but here's the problem: segregating by intelligence will lead to self-fulfilling results (see Pygmalion research) on the part of the students and the teachers (low or high expectations given the group). That means kids in the low intelligence group will do even worse than if they had been mixed with everyone else. But at the same time, high intelligence kids will do better as a group than if they are mixed with everyone else. The question is whether we want a select group of extremely intelligent individuals at the expense of the overall population, or an overall population that is generally more intelligent but does not have as many super geniuses.
Okay, not a museum... but as far as zoos go, it's pretty interactive. Make sure you walk through the indoor rainforest. AFAIK you might otherwise hit an open stretch of no museums while you cross the midwest, so it's a valid excuse to drop in!
While I'm on the subject of W7 bugs, I've said this before and I'll say it again: be wary of Homegroup. It's great when it works and it usually works, but it can destroy all it touches if it gets upset.
/twocents
Obviously they are not perfectly analogous. But current (more technical) users are also more likely to correctly report bugs. In addition, not all of the current users are techies. Speaking only for myself, I have migrated a number of friends/family to Windows 7 RC because there were running Vista. *shudder*
There's no doubt in my mind more bugs will surface with the much wider install, but if this site is correct Windows 7 is already close to 1% of the OS market, a respectable install base for an unreleased OS.
For the anecdotal record, I installed the RC on my ye olde underpowered XP laptop (512 MB RAM) and with the bare bones, stripped down setup it runs about the same as it did using XP. If nothing else, the fact that I've left it on for 3 months underscores my lack of desire to return to XP.
Yeah, I was too lazy to remove Vista from a new machine I ended up with (it works well enough) so I jumped on the Win7 RC. It works great, just be wary regarding Homegroups. When they work they are easy as pie and useful, but if they get screwed up they can take down everything they touch.
No love for the minions?
Realistically, who isn't going to delete the W7 files off the USB drive when they're done so they can use it for other things? Should you ever need to reinstall, you'll have to buy another one. A clever win/win for Microsoft.
The core files I use on a daily basis do not take up more than a few GB. For anything beyond that I do use my web server, but for the vast majority of my usage Dropbox (or LiveMesh or whatever) works & is easier.
Good to know, I'll have to give it another shot!
This is just my two cents, but it seems it could be great for the /. community. I think it is too "difficult" for the unwashed masses. ("What do you mean I have to pay extra to access my data all the time?") I use the free version of Dropbox for my basic file syncs and it's simply seamless *BUT* it is constantly in contact with the server as I update files or move them around, admittedly sometimes on a whim. As you pointed out, that bandwidth would be hell on your proposal. If *I* wanted to, I could use my Dropbox bandwidth more conservatively, but I think that is beyond the typical user.
/. users, it could make sense. I know I would be interested personally, but I would be hesitant to suggest it to my luddite family members as they'd probably end up accidentally using too much expensive bandwidth.
If aimed correctly, say at
And if somebody knows of a service already offering this, post it!