Why not just remove HR from the equation, and teach managers how to do their jobs properly? Managers should be able to... you know... manage people...
I know, this means that they need to develop the soft skills, need to learn how to be effective mentors, how to avoid getting into turf wars and pissing contests, how to better communicate, how to protect their people... all the things that those "team-building" exercises are supposed to teach, but don't, because it's not just something you can do by filling in a checklist.
Weinberg had it right:
No matter what they say, there's always a problem;
No matter what they say, it's always a PEOPLE problem;
If you know how to listen, they will tell you the solution in the first 5 minutes, then spend the rest of the time putting up roadblocks to the solution
In this case, the article tells us that the REAL problem is that most management doesn't have either the skills to identify the problems with employees, or the interest in helping them - it's easier (though more expensive) to just swap people around, than it is to change the culture so that every employee is given the resources needed to do their job (which in some cases might be being mentored by someone else, and in other cases might mean figuring out how to identify weak areas in a non-threatening manner).
I'm not saying toss the engineers - what I'm saying is that there are a lot of cases where there's more than meets the eye. People can be compared to surface excavations - soil stability depends not just on the composition of the soil, but its' history, same as people. Unconsolidated soil is a b*tch to work with. So is soil that has a lot of organic matter (dead vegetation, etc). Try building a house on clay and watch your foundation crack when you have an unusually dry summer and the ground shrinks away from the footings. Some aggregates (gravels) also don't compact properly - we've had class-action suits over this. People are the same - they don't all respond the same way to pressure and changing conditions.
This is why you shouldn't reduce some problems to a simple number - you end up with a less-than-optimal solution, whether it's wrt handling people or piles of earth.
Now the REAL thing I find interesting is that this new "tool" doesn't propose how to improve the people who are supposed to be "bottlenecks". It would seem to me that the more efficient approach would be to not lose the investment that the business has already made in the person, and the need to duplicate that same investment in getting a new person up to speed on such things as the people, places, projects, and procedures. People ARE resurces, and as such, they should be valued, not just swapped out for another one because the latest craze says "do this because the numbers say so". The numbers only tell a part of the story.
What I quoted is from an actual test of civil engineers. NONE of them got it anywhere near right - the best were off by 50%.
Note that most will use a fudge factor to make sure that there's enough safety in their predictions/estimates - but that's not the same thing as saying "you can undecut so much and no more - it will collapse at that point +/- x %.
Case in point - the engineers scoffed when I told them to build a trench box, despite excavating with no more than a 45% slope, when we were doing near-vertical cuts everywhere else on the project. The reasoning was simple - the absence of older trees in the area to be excavated for the main sewer collector cut. Obviously (to me) the area had originally been much lower, and had over the years been a convenient dumping ground for earth from other work while the city was under development. They scoffed, pointed out the delay, but built it anyway - and the plumbers who were in the trench to make the final connections still almost shit themselves when a small portion of the slope that wasn't sloped to my recommendations collapsed. And here we're talking about a cut of no more than 20' into the earth, not the 60' high pile of unconsolidated earth in the example.
Number crunching, a staple for decades in the quantifiable domains of engineering and finance, has spread in recent years into marketing and sales.
Engineering only works because you still have people vetting the numbers. However, even there, there are problems that you just need a human opinion, because the engineers can't figure it out. One example - engineers called in to calculate how much you can cut a pile of earth back without shoring it up. None of them got within 50% of the actual number derived by subsequent tests. The solution is simple - call someone in whose work is excavating, and they'll give you a more accurate answer just by eyeballing.
Bottom line: If your boss doesn't know how much your're contributing to the company, then your boss is deadwood and should be fired. No need for statistical analysis to replace common sense (which is what created the toxic CDOs and SIVs, etc)... but the deadwood boss will like this, because now it's not their job to know what you do any more - they can point to a chart.
I thought this was common practice. Sorry, I never worked H.R.
That's why most people who go into HR - to avoid work.
They're "networking", they're "in meetings", they're "interviewing candidates" - and anyone who's read Dilbert knows that's just job-speak for schmoozing, dozing off, and more schmoozing.
Confidentiality is only between the two people. If someone and their lawyer are sitting in front of me on the bus talking about their case, and I overhear them, nothing stops me from being subpoenaed and forced to testify in court as to that conversation.
Nope, bad analogy.
On the bus, there's no expectation of privacy.
When you limit stuff to only a small group, it's by definition non-public.
Confidentiality is definitely more than one-on-one - otherwise, a person couldn't talk to a legal team composed of more than one lawyer.
Or Netflix isn't actually throttling and kdawson is a moron who just greenlit another "article" with faulty reasoning, bad accusations, and the general stupidity that I've come to expect from him.
This must be the 20th comment slagging kdawson.
You know, there's two ways of looking at this... one way being that the article is posted and the community then gets to either verify or debunk it. If Netflix WERE throttling, instead of individual IPSs, the only way to know would be to get people from all over to post their observations. So, aside from posting the article, can you come up with another mechanism that gets feedback from everyone?
Not every rumour is true - but this is as good a way as any to weed out the wheat from the chaff - put the problem to the community to either confirm it with multiple data points, or debunk it.
It is like water pressure when taking a shower. When too many people try to watch a movie at the same time the pressure drops. Then there isn't enough force to get it to your TV or computer, and whatever does make it through is so weak that it has trouble pushing photons out the screen. They sort of dribble out and the quality sucks.
It's like water pressure when everyone watching the hockey finals goes to the bathroom during a commercial and they all flush and the pressure drops. But there's so many hockey teams that make it into the playoffs that the season sort of dribbles on and on and the quality sucks. And they've got such big beer guts that later on at night, when it comes time to "perform", they also just sort of dribble out and the quality sucks. Just like we elect more and more people to government, and the average quality drops, and reforms just sort of dribble out and the quality sucks.
I for one welcome our new dribbling-out-and-the-quality-sucks meme.
The only communication that is protected is that with one's lawyer or priest. Close friends on Facebook certainly don't count as protected.
What if his lawyer is among the "friends", and privileged communications were taking place in a setting where only people who were giving him advice (his lawyer) and other privileged support (his psychologist) had access to them?
Your Stink-o-Lie-Meter
1. Kid with hand in cookie jar
10. Madoff with hand in cookie jar
66. Used car salesman
666: Bush "They Have WMDs" salesman
2. "No, the dress doesn't make you look fat."
0. "It's not the dress."
9. "It's not the dress, and I ENJOY sleeping on the couch!"
4. It's a bug (it's not a "bug" - it didn't crawl in on its' own volition - fess up and admit you made a mistake).
40. It's a feature.
0. "They're real." (It's none of your business, Jack!)
9. "I didn't forget your birthday."
500. "We have a plan to deal with the current financial crisis" - ANY POLITICIAN - we KNOW you're just making this sh*t up as you go along.
499. "Bankruptcy is not an option." - GM head honcho Ron Wagoner
Well, the first thing to patent will be the method and device for tracking the sun. It's round, with a photo-receptive surface - which we can trademark as the "eye-ball", and fits in a skull-shaped object, which we can call an "eye-pod".
For the past several months, Microsoft has engaged in an extended public mea culpa about Vista, and in the past two weeks alone has given a series of press interviews to explain how it changed the development process of Windows 7, the forthcoming client release, to learn from the mistakes it made in the past.
So, now that they admit that it's a steaming pile of crud, where's my refund for this defective product that I don't use that came bundled with my laptop?
That is the point of the term. To eventually muddy the waters enough that the big corporations can have an item and be able to enforce their monopoly with the freedom of trademarks, the term length of copyrights and the enforcement powers of patents.
Better watch it - you've just infringed some corporations' trademark, patent and copyright IP you terr'ist!
14 years from first publication for copyrights, 20 years for patents (you have 6 years to bring it to market initially or lose it), forever for trademarks. No "lifetime" involved, since that's too variable.
On top of which the quoted sources are essentially "some guys I know". High class writing there... real high class.
It's better than "some guys I don't kow" - which is what most PR flacks are - and yet they're given credence because they're PAID shills.
Where's the logic in that? It's the same as the "professional financial advisors" hyping the stock market last year - "buy on the dips / dollar-cost averaging - you can't lose", whereas dollar-cost averaging is the surest way to lose, it's there so dumb fucks who can't do math continue to buy stocks and keep the market liquid so those with a clue can sell out.
This is not human intelligence. But it is intelligence: a compounding of general knowledge, relationships between that knowledge, and the ability to transform an inquiry into an answer.
Nope. It is the result of intelligence, not intelligence itself. There's a difference between the tool and the creator of the tool - the tool maker thought it up, whereas the tool is the product of the thinkers' intelligence.
How is the computer able to pick anything but what it is programmed to pick?
I, on the other hand, may decide that I *want* to lose, so as not to discourage a niece.
My decision is not constrained by the rules of the game and the goal of winning - because I am thinking of someone else.
We could program machines to be similarly altruistic, but it would require OUR thinking to include that as an option in the first place. It isn't emergent behaviour.
Your algorithm fails on boundary cases. LIke the donkey stuck equidistant between two equally large stacks of hay, it cannot decide which of the two to go for, since they both are equally attractive, both equally distant, and both yield an equal amount of energy.
Whereas a human would say "fuck it, I'm going for a beer!"
The room can mimic thought, but there's a difference between mimicry and the real thing, which can be shown because we have access to the room, and we can show how it was built to mimic thought. Humans aren't built to mimic thought - they (sometimes) think - politicians excepted.
At least Seagate offer a 5 year warranty, so you can probably rely on a couple of offline mirrored HDDs for at least that long.
A bit optimistic... I bought 2 seagates to do a raid1 - they were both defective, so I bought 2 more, and THEY were both defective. I'm on drives 12 through 14 (only one has lasted more than a week). It looks like ONE of those 3 is acceptable...
While truly Turing-complete machines are very likely physically impossible, as they require unlimited storage, Turing completeness is often loosely attributed to physical machines or programming languages that would be universal if they had unlimited storage. All modern computers are Turing-complete in this loose sense, or more precisely linear bounded automaton-complete.
For a bad analogy that doesn't involve cars, it's like saying that there is a complete set of integers... I can always add one more and get yet another one.
Solve the halting problem without a time machine and I'll believe you.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not just remove HR from the equation, and teach managers how to do their jobs properly? Managers should be able to ... you know ... manage people ...
I know, this means that they need to develop the soft skills, need to learn how to be effective mentors, how to avoid getting into turf wars and pissing contests, how to better communicate, how to protect their people ... all the things that those "team-building" exercises are supposed to teach, but don't, because it's not just something you can do by filling in a checklist.
Weinberg had it right:
In this case, the article tells us that the REAL problem is that most management doesn't have either the skills to identify the problems with employees, or the interest in helping them - it's easier (though more expensive) to just swap people around, than it is to change the culture so that every employee is given the resources needed to do their job (which in some cases might be being mentored by someone else, and in other cases might mean figuring out how to identify weak areas in a non-threatening manner).
I'm not saying toss the engineers - what I'm saying is that there are a lot of cases where there's more than meets the eye. People can be compared to surface excavations - soil stability depends not just on the composition of the soil, but its' history, same as people. Unconsolidated soil is a b*tch to work with. So is soil that has a lot of organic matter (dead vegetation, etc). Try building a house on clay and watch your foundation crack when you have an unusually dry summer and the ground shrinks away from the footings. Some aggregates (gravels) also don't compact properly - we've had class-action suits over this. People are the same - they don't all respond the same way to pressure and changing conditions.
This is why you shouldn't reduce some problems to a simple number - you end up with a less-than-optimal solution, whether it's wrt handling people or piles of earth.
Now the REAL thing I find interesting is that this new "tool" doesn't propose how to improve the people who are supposed to be "bottlenecks". It would seem to me that the more efficient approach would be to not lose the investment that the business has already made in the person, and the need to duplicate that same investment in getting a new person up to speed on such things as the people, places, projects, and procedures. People ARE resurces, and as such, they should be valued, not just swapped out for another one because the latest craze says "do this because the numbers say so". The numbers only tell a part of the story.
What I quoted is from an actual test of civil engineers. NONE of them got it anywhere near right - the best were off by 50%.
Note that most will use a fudge factor to make sure that there's enough safety in their predictions/estimates - but that's not the same thing as saying "you can undecut so much and no more - it will collapse at that point +/- x %.
Case in point - the engineers scoffed when I told them to build a trench box, despite excavating with no more than a 45% slope, when we were doing near-vertical cuts everywhere else on the project. The reasoning was simple - the absence of older trees in the area to be excavated for the main sewer collector cut. Obviously (to me) the area had originally been much lower, and had over the years been a convenient dumping ground for earth from other work while the city was under development. They scoffed, pointed out the delay, but built it anyway - and the plumbers who were in the trench to make the final connections still almost shit themselves when a small portion of the slope that wasn't sloped to my recommendations collapsed. And here we're talking about a cut of no more than 20' into the earth, not the 60' high pile of unconsolidated earth in the example.
Engineering only works because you still have people vetting the numbers. However, even there, there are problems that you just need a human opinion, because the engineers can't figure it out. One example - engineers called in to calculate how much you can cut a pile of earth back without shoring it up. None of them got within 50% of the actual number derived by subsequent tests. The solution is simple - call someone in whose work is excavating, and they'll give you a more accurate answer just by eyeballing.
Bottom line: If your boss doesn't know how much your're contributing to the company, then your boss is deadwood and should be fired. No need for statistical analysis to replace common sense (which is what created the toxic CDOs and SIVs, etc)... but the deadwood boss will like this, because now it's not their job to know what you do any more - they can point to a chart.
Short any company using this method.
That's why most people who go into HR - to avoid work.
They're "networking", they're "in meetings", they're "interviewing candidates" - and anyone who's read Dilbert knows that's just job-speak for schmoozing, dozing off, and more schmoozing.
Nope, bad analogy.
On the bus, there's no expectation of privacy.
When you limit stuff to only a small group, it's by definition non-public.
Confidentiality is definitely more than one-on-one - otherwise, a person couldn't talk to a legal team composed of more than one lawyer.
This must be the 20th comment slagging kdawson.
You know, there's two ways of looking at this ... one way being that the article is posted and the community then gets to either verify or debunk it. If Netflix WERE throttling, instead of individual IPSs, the only way to know would be to get people from all over to post their observations. So, aside from posting the article, can you come up with another mechanism that gets feedback from everyone?
Not every rumour is true - but this is as good a way as any to weed out the wheat from the chaff - put the problem to the community to either confirm it with multiple data points, or debunk it.
It's like water pressure when everyone watching the hockey finals goes to the bathroom during a commercial and they all flush and the pressure drops. But there's so many hockey teams that make it into the playoffs that the season sort of dribbles on and on and the quality sucks. And they've got such big beer guts that later on at night, when it comes time to "perform", they also just sort of dribble out and the quality sucks. Just like we elect more and more people to government, and the average quality drops, and reforms just sort of dribble out and the quality sucks.
I for one welcome our new dribbling-out-and-the-quality-sucks meme.
What if his lawyer is among the "friends", and privileged communications were taking place in a setting where only people who were giving him advice (his lawyer) and other privileged support (his psychologist) had access to them?
Actually, they could have gone to a MUCH larger diameter fan, with a lower rotational speed, and still moved a lot more air with a lot less noise.
Besides, in 5 years an el-cheapo box will have the same performance. Or for less they could have built 3 supercomputers supercomputer.
After all, it would be nice to be able to say that Office Depot's policy of lying to customers literally STINKS!
So how are they going to calibrate this?
Your Stink-o-Lie-Meter
1. Kid with hand in cookie jar
10. Madoff with hand in cookie jar
66. Used car salesman
666: Bush "They Have WMDs" salesman
2. "No, the dress doesn't make you look fat."
0. "It's not the dress."
9. "It's not the dress, and I ENJOY sleeping on the couch!"
4. It's a bug (it's not a "bug" - it didn't crawl in on its' own volition - fess up and admit you made a mistake).
40. It's a feature.
0. "They're real." (It's none of your business, Jack!)
9. "I didn't forget your birthday."
500. "We have a plan to deal with the current financial crisis" - ANY POLITICIAN - we KNOW you're just making this sh*t up as you go along.
499. "Bankruptcy is not an option." - GM head honcho Ron Wagoner
Well, the first thing to patent will be the method and device for tracking the sun. It's round, with a photo-receptive surface - which we can trademark as the "eye-ball", and fits in a skull-shaped object, which we can call an "eye-pod".
Or for simplicity, an "iBall" and an "iPod".
.htaccess file and user names/passwords.
Kids sitting in front of the TV arent outside playing - so they're exposed to higher concentrations of second-hand smoke for longer periods of time.
It's so obvious that maybe I should apply for a grant to show how the sun is in the sky only during daylight hours.
FTFA:
So, now that they admit that it's a steaming pile of crud, where's my refund for this defective product that I don't use that came bundled with my laptop?
Better watch it - you've just infringed some corporations' trademark, patent and copyright IP you terr'ist!
14 years from first publication for copyrights, 20 years for patents (you have 6 years to bring it to market initially or lose it), forever for trademarks. No "lifetime" involved, since that's too variable.
It's better than "some guys I don't kow" - which is what most PR flacks are - and yet they're given credence because they're PAID shills.
Where's the logic in that? It's the same as the "professional financial advisors" hyping the stock market last year - "buy on the dips / dollar-cost averaging - you can't lose", whereas dollar-cost averaging is the surest way to lose, it's there so dumb fucks who can't do math continue to buy stocks and keep the market liquid so those with a clue can sell out.
Nope. It is the result of intelligence, not intelligence itself. There's a difference between the tool and the creator of the tool - the tool maker thought it up, whereas the tool is the product of the thinkers' intelligence.
Your definition of thought is "random responses"?
Free will is a prerequisite, but it isn't the only one. Random noise is not thought ... even on slashdot :-)
How is the computer able to pick anything but what it is programmed to pick?
I, on the other hand, may decide that I *want* to lose, so as not to discourage a niece.
My decision is not constrained by the rules of the game and the goal of winning - because I am thinking of someone else.
We could program machines to be similarly altruistic, but it would require OUR thinking to include that as an option in the first place. It isn't emergent behaviour.
Your algorithm fails on boundary cases. LIke the donkey stuck equidistant between two equally large stacks of hay, it cannot decide which of the two to go for, since they both are equally attractive, both equally distant, and both yield an equal amount of energy.
Whereas a human would say "fuck it, I'm going for a beer!"
The room can mimic thought, but there's a difference between mimicry and the real thing, which can be shown because we have access to the room, and we can show how it was built to mimic thought. Humans aren't built to mimic thought - they (sometimes) think - politicians excepted.
A bit optimistic ... I bought 2 seagates to do a raid1 - they were both defective, so I bought 2 more, and THEY were both defective. I'm on drives 12 through 14 (only one has lasted more than a week). It looks like ONE of those 3 is acceptable ...
Your definition is flawed - turing-complete machines are impossible
For a bad analogy that doesn't involve cars, it's like saying that there is a complete set of integers ... I can always add one more and get yet another one.
Solve the halting problem without a time machine and I'll believe you.
a particular machine, not a "concept" - which in the case of IBM, would translate to "show me a frigging product, not a concept".
Used to be that the patent office required a working model. Hopefully, they'll go back to that.
Can't patent methods and concepts. Just implementations.
Hey, my grade-school teacher had prior art on that one, from "No chewing gum in school" to "There'll be a test at the end."
This patent is just more bullshit. Didn't IBM get the memo on "in re Bilski"? Can't patent something that's not a product ...