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User: slasho81

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  1. Crash Course! on Ask Slashdot. Best Online Science Course? · · Score: 1

    Check out Crash Course for two great courses in biology and world history.

  2. Re:Personnel selection is hard. on The Gamification of Hiring · · Score: 1

    See my other reply in this thread. Respectable certificates are a filtering tool, not evidence one can do the job. That's what the job sample part is for.

  3. Re:Personnel selection is hard. on The Gamification of Hiring · · Score: 1

    See my other reply regarding past job experience.

    The purpose of respectable credentials is to serve as a general quality cutoff point for filtering the candidate pool. Sure, we've all seen great workers without any credentials and terrible workers with plenty of respectable credentials, but those are exceptional anecdotes, not the rule. The group of candidates with respectable credentials are, as a group, much better on every dimension than those without. So it's practical to use respectable credentials as a filter to get the candidate pool to a manageable size.

    For job positions which attract only few candidates, you can't and shouldn't use credentials as a filtering tool, obviously.

  4. Re:Personnel selection is hard. on The Gamification of Hiring · · Score: 1

    The problems with past job experience:

    • * It's hard to verify and therefore heavily fudged. If you select using a heavily and easily fudged indicator, you're just fooling yourself.
    • * Unless the job position is exactly the same as was previously occupied, which is rarely the case, the past experience may not be relevant and it usually isn't.
    • * The fact that candidates have past job experience doesn't indicate whether they were any good at the job. They could have been terrible at the job and got fired, which is why they're now applying to your organization.
    • * And finally and most importantly, requiring past job experience deters or outright rejects capable candidates. Those candidates can be just as capable as those with job experience and they're way cheaper (they're young and eager).
  5. Personnel selection is hard. on The Gamification of Hiring · · Score: 2

    Personnel selection is an extremely hard problem. Sorting out people for jobs is one of the most important problems organizations face. It's almost always unrecognized in its complexity, and the majority of decision makers are unaware of the current process's inefficiency and ineffectiveness.

    The solution the startup in the post offers is preposterous and obviously ineffective. It's also downright insulting to prospective employees. A degrading selection process will have a negative effect on the quality of the prospective candidate pool you'll have.

    If you take into account current research findings and practicality, the best you can do today to select someone for a job is:

    1. Only consider candidates with a respectable educational certificate (i.e. those with quality education, either academic or vocational).

    2. Let candidates perform a sample of the job they're interviewing for. Score their performance objectively. Select the highest performers.

    That's it. No interviews, assessment centers, theoretical exams, references, past job experience, resume screening, etc. They're all worthless and impractical.

  6. Betteridge's Law of Headlines on Is Facebook Going To Buy Opera? · · Score: 1

    Enough with the speculative posts.

  7. we have about 10 people

    You're not sure how many people work at your company?

  8. Aggressive promotion on Chrome Browser Usage Artificially Boosted, Says Microsoft · · Score: 1

    Eventually Chrome will rule the market. Google promotes it aggressively from their homepage. Under today's musical doodle was this text: "Upgrade to a modern browser and see what this doodle can really do." I'm on Firefox 12, by the way.

  9. Re:Is this "stuff that matters?" on Zuckerberg Updates Relationship Status To "Married" · · Score: 0

    It's news for nerds because it implies that if Zuckerberg can get married, then so can we.

  10. Google's? on Researchers Use Google's Search Algorithms To Fight Cancer · · Score: 1

    The technique these researchers and Google Search use is known from the 1950s. Google didn't invent it. Just as Steve Jobs didn't invent the smartphone, Mark Zuckerberg didn't invent social networks, and Bill Gates didn't invent the PC.

  11. Re:Why? on DVDs, Blu-Rays To Show 20-Second Unskippable Govt. Warnings · · Score: 1

    The corporate scumbags want to make sure the next DVD these people see is also original. Scare the masses into submission.

  12. Native apps are walled gardens. on Facebook Announces App Center · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It blows my mind to think just how much wasteful effort has gone into making the same applications work on the iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Android tablets, and also for Chrome apps, regular webapps, now Facebook Apps, and next time it would be WinPhone apps.

    Another freaking walled garden. Now we will have 3 major walled gardens (Apple's, Google's, and Facebook's) and soon Microsoft will join in as well. Is that what passes as "innovative" nowadays?

    Apps are not the future. They are the past.

    Webapps or just web pages, as we used to call them, are the future of software. You just enter an address or click a link and you get to the most up to date "app". No installation, no updates, no permissions, no specific OS or hardware or platform necessary. It works everywhere by everyone and all the time with no hassles.

    The reason apps made a comeback is because you can charge for apps. An app is a defined thing and an installation is a chargeable privilege. So thank Apple and all the me-too followers for burdening us with software deployment and management just as we were about to escape those unnecessary activities.

    Apps as platform is not driven by mobile OSes, browsers, social networking sites, or other modern technology. It is driven by capitalism.

    So don't get sucked into yet another walled garden.

    Apps are not the future. They are the past.

  13. Re:Now or then? on Astronomers Find Most Distant Protocluster of Galaxies · · Score: 1
  14. Clojure on Ask Slashdot: What Language Should a Former Coder Dig Into? · · Score: 2

    If you're doing it for personal stuff and don't have the constraints of the corporate world - Clojure. It's the cutting edge. It's way ahead of anything else out there today.

  15. Re:Microsoft Business Disaster Model on Is Google the New Microsoft? · · Score: 1

    For that you need to sprinkle in some evil on top.

  16. Money money money on Leave Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson Alone! · · Score: 1

    The whole argument comes down to: You can get away with being morally bankrupt if you make a lot of money.

  17. Microsoft Business Disaster Model on Is Google the New Microsoft? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Shamelessly stolen from four years ago:

    Google now has a full-blown case of the Microsoft Business Disaster Model. This model goes like this:

    • Get a highly profitable monopoly.
    • Watch gigantic sums of cash accumulate.
    • Panic at the thought of actually distributing that cash to shareholders, as the law requires.
    • Start throwing money at any additional product line you can think of, believing that because you got that first profitable monopoly (largely by luck), you are Really Smart, and therefore you can make money at anything.
    • Watch with relief as stockholders don't notice how much of their money you are shoveling into the fire, because your core monopoly is still making huge profits.
    • Spend years telling yourself that having divisions that lose gigantic sums of money for years means you are now a "long term" strategist.
    • Drift slowly into decay like the Soviet Union, still powerful, still important, but internally depressing, wasteful, and decrepit.

    The most profitable company this year (2008) was Exxon-Mobil. A company that has to get its hands dirty and actually move a physical product had higher profits than Microsoft, a company that just thinks up bits that it then distributes, largely electronically. Imagine the profits if Microsoft were to sell off all its huge money losers, retain only enough employees to maintain Windows and Office, and pay out all the profits as dividends. It would be the most incredible stock the market had ever seen.

  18. Slippery slope on British Prime Minister To Announce Porn Blocking Plans · · Score: 1

    That slope got slippery because I accidentally spilled some lube. Sorry about that.

  19. Re:Won't happen on Rand Paul Has a Quick Fix For TSA: Pull the Plug · · Score: 1

    Voters care about the economy, not about economics.

  20. Won't happen on Rand Paul Has a Quick Fix For TSA: Pull the Plug · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The TSA employs about 58,000 employees.

    The number one thing by far that voters in the US care about is jobs.

    This will never happen.

  21. Re:Doesn't that make him a better CEO? on Yahoo CEO Wrongly Claimed To Have Degree In Computer Science · · Score: 1

    Sure, but if that's what they want, they also want someone who can get away with it.

  22. Meh on The Science of Handedness · · Score: 1

    I haven't RTFA (obviously), but it sounds like those fellas hammered a model onto a data set and attached a nice simplistic explanation on top of it.

    The reason many lefties excel in some sports is due to the element of surprise their left-handedness gives them. Finding a simple formula to determine lefties percentage depending on some arbitrary criteria of cooperation/competition, which is an enormously complex subject in itself, sounds like complete nonsense.

  23. Re:Why is this needed? on Bill Banning Employer Facebook Snooping Introduced In Congress · · Score: 2

    Not everyone has the privilege of walking out of interviews.

  24. Here we go on VeriSign Could Add 220 New Top Level Domains · · Score: 1

    Let's hope none of those top-level domains is named 'intranet'.

  25. Startups these days are focused, driven, and efficient, creating products that people actually use.

    Right...