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I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

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Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#201

Post by tyingq »

wayneftw wrote: post #195
tyingq wrote: post #18

Oy. Similarly, I'm mystified with the CIA's and NSA's fascination with mandatory recurring polygraph tests. It's pretty well known the whole area is flawed bullshit. It doesn't measure anything remotely related to "truth". Edit: I know we aren't supposed to discuss downvotes here, but the activity on this comment and my replies are very interesting. It's curious why discussion on this topic is so controversial. Why w…

IMO discussion forums should show the user comments that they'd likely agree with instead of comments that some majority-of-the-moment agrees with. Sorting comments on a majority average is such a dumb metric. The Internet would be a better place if forum discussions more closely modeled real life, where we simply don't have disagreeable opinions constantly shoved in our face because we don't hang around with those p…

Insightful, thank you. It's a bit theoritcal, but I'd like a way for replies to be sorted by merit versus controversy or popularity. I'm not adverse to the idea that I'm wrong.

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#202

Post by smegma2 »

grecy wrote: post #172
BurningFrog wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has record low unemployment. There are many fields outside tech where workers can be picky about jobs.

Yes, and millions of people working multiple jobs are considered to be living below the poverty line. America is the only developed country that has the class of "working class poor" More crap jobs is not a good thing, and nobody should want that.

> America is the only developed country that has the class of "working class poor"

I'd be interested in seeing a source on this, if you have it

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#203

Post by wolfgang42 »

wayneftw wrote: post #183
thaeli wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do work with people who don't think I should be allowed to exist. But they're required to be polite to me at work, and to use my pronouns, and as long as they do that no lines have been crossed.

If my personal issues demanded that people use special pronouns around me in order to protect my own self identity, I think that I would eventually be more self-conscious about the fact that the majority of people in my office are now most likely making fun of me behind my back and calling me whatever they want when I'm not around... Don't people just avoid using pronouns altogether for you though if they feel so opp…

I don’t even know where to start with this comment, so I’ll single out a bit of it:

> What do you do that people are consistently talking about you in the third person anyway?

Ummm… exist? Do their job? “Hey, I was talking to thaeli, and %s said that I should ask you about…”

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#204

Post by grecy »

smegma2 wrote: post #202
grecy wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and millions of people working multiple jobs are considered to be living below the poverty line. America is the only developed country that has the class of "working class poor" More crap jobs is not a good thing, and nobody should want that.

> America is the only developed country that has the class of "working class poor" I'd be interested in seeing a source on this, if you have it

https://qz.com/879092/the-us-doesnt-look-like-a-developed-co...

https://eand.co/why-america-is-the-worlds-first-poor-rich-co...

https://eand.co/half-of-americans-are-effectively-poor-now-w...

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#205

Post by Aardwolf »

doitLP wrote: post #176
Aardwolf wrote: post #22

Running a simple algorithm that flags specific words in liked tweets: meh, whatever. But why waste 350 printed pages of paper for that?

They offer the checked person the option to get a report of whatever they found and reported to the company.

Would a PDF not work?

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#206

Post by mplanchard »

wayneftw wrote: post #183
thaeli wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do work with people who don't think I should be allowed to exist. But they're required to be polite to me at work, and to use my pronouns, and as long as they do that no lines have been crossed.

If my personal issues demanded that people use special pronouns around me in order to protect my own self identity, I think that I would eventually be more self-conscious about the fact that the majority of people in my office are now most likely making fun of me behind my back and calling me whatever they want when I'm not around... Don't people just avoid using pronouns altogether for you though if they feel so opp…

This comment feels remarkably uncharitable and unkind. Many of us are perfectly happy to refer to people by their chosen pronouns without making fun of them behind their backs. Hopefully the poster you were replying to works in an office where people are not as childish and inconsiderate as you assume they would be.

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#207

Post by maest »

guntars wrote: post #164
n4r9 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine and dandy for people in tech but if you're a single parent with a narrow set of skills who's struggling and been applying for jobs for over a month then you're going to take the offer. And then you're not going to have much time to continue job searching.

Who’s responsible for you being a single parent with limited skills? The corporation?

I think I see why you'd say that, but I think it's a very narrow viewpoint.

I'd argue that it's in _everybody's_ interest that a social safety net exists for people like the GP.

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#208

Post by otabdeveloper2 »

brenden2 wrote: post #4

Here's the company doing this: https://fama.io/ The idea that you can assess someone's workplace performance based on automated screening of their tweets is utterly absurd. If anyone works somewhere that uses this tool, or anything similar to it, you should run far, far away from that company. This is a terrible precedent, and much too much Orwellian for my taste. EDIT: somewhat related, but a while back I made a Twi…

So don't use Twitter. Problem solved.

Unless you're getting paid handsomely to do it, there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to broadcast your personal life to the Internet.

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#209

Post by BlueTemplar »

allovernow wrote: post #142
BlueTemplar wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is rather likely to be to not have someone with human science background... but then that person would likely just tell them their whole premise is flawed?

I don't think so. There are valid use cases for sentiment analysis, but you need to understand the limitations of your training data and probably still want humans to QC at least some representative proportion of flagged posts, if you're going to do this legitimately. Of course a company like this just wants to sell any garbage they can dig up.

Well, I will admit that I am quite ignorant of what exactly a background check is, but I just don't see how such a morally fraught question can be legally allowed to be decided by anyone else than a psychologist.

In fact, considering the moral hazard, I don't even see how even using an AI, even as simple as "grep", helping that psychologist in the cost-minimization contexts of a private company would not result in an unacceptable slippery slope where the psychologist would end up just rubber-stamping the decisions of the AI and its creator ? Maybe someone with a dual data "science" / psychology degree would be acceptable, but I'm guessing he/she wouldn't be able to use any "black box" AI...

Re: I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf

#210

Post by ci5er »

heavyset_go wrote: post #64
brenden2 wrote: post #4

Here's the company doing this: https://fama.io/ The idea that you can assess someone's workplace performance based on automated screening of their tweets is utterly absurd. If anyone works somewhere that uses this tool, or anything similar to it, you should run far, far away from that company. This is a terrible precedent, and much too much Orwellian for my taste. EDIT: somewhat related, but a while back I made a Twi…

> If anyone works somewhere that uses this tool, or anything similar to it, you should run far, far away from that company. This is a terrible precedent, and much too much Orwellian for my taste. Background reports like these, along with drug testing for office jobs that don't deal with heavy machinery, are indicative of companies that have unhealthy views of the employer-employee relationship, especially in a countr…

Often the drug-testing things are related to contracts with either the (US Federal) government or contracts with companies that have contracts with the (US Federal)government, such as O&G, Healthcare and Banking.

That is to say: Sometimes companies don't have much choice in some of this.

EDIT: I just remembered that I was talking to my corporate attorney's office recently (medium-size-law), and they say that if any applicant's facebook page over spring-break was too salacious (for example), they wouldn't be willing to hire them, because they didn't want the client to think that they were not 'conservative and judicious and considered' (when I say 'conservative' here, it has nothing to do with left-/right- wing politics in the US)

Employees in a client-facing role have the potential to harm a company badly. Companies are cautious. Now, I believe this twitter thing in the OP is ridiculous, and their faulty use of NLP is beyond atrocious, I think that it is fair for employers to be concerned about linking their reputation to that of "proven" rogues, renegades (I can't even spell renegade, George), party-animals, and revolutionaries.

Do you disagree?

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