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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

#271

Post by h_r »

cheez wrote: post #264
acdha wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, lucky people have more flexibility. The problem is that very few people avoid getting sick or hurt[1], having kids, needing loans, getting laid off, etc. and a healthy society should work for more than 10% of the population. 1. “Keep your health” up is obviously naive to start with but also ask how many people are, say, hurt in car crashes or on the job every year and how cruel your advice would sound to them.

Do 80% of people get into car crashes or hurt on the job every year? No? Then my advice can apply to 80% of the people.

A very high percentage choose to buy a house or car, or have children as part of their life planning when things look fairly stable. When you grow up and have adult responsibilities, the youthful feeling of invulnerability starts to fade.

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

#272

Post by wespiser_2018 »

I've built a very similar algorithm and website for a class I was taking a few years ago, however, we never considered monetizing it like this: https://github.com/adamwespiser/toxic-twitter

There is a large collection of "negative tweets" available in a public dataset, and training a simple neural network will give you a rough way to classify a tweet as either "toxic" or not with decently accuracy. However, there are problems.

- Basic algorithms are "context-free" and therefore don't get sarcasm or jest. There are more sophisticated approaches that can handle these semantic categories, but they require large datasets of tweets that do not publicly exist.

- The easiest thing the algorithm can learn is profanity, so for example, the model we built classified tweets in poor taste as "okay", if they were used with decent language.

- There is definitely a balanced dataset issue that makes training good classifiers harder, due to the overwhelming majority of tweets on twitter being positive, and it being hard to find unblocked toxic users.

At the time, we figured the best use of the website was to check your own twitter history, and although I find some of this user's tweet pretty offensive, I'm sad the day has come where people would actually need to use something like "toxic-twitter" to get a job! If anyone wants to fork this repo and get it up again, please reach out!

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

#273

Post by astura »

dvtrn wrote: post #229
lovehashbrowns wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HireRight almost failed my background check because I got the month wrong on my graduation from high school. I legitimately don't understand why a background check has to be this in-depth. Edit: actually I think it was elementary school. Even worse.

I often get questions about background checks because I have a painfully common American name and there's a few people who share this name that have been convicted of some pretty serious crimes. On the one hand I'm not sure what this says about the veracity of background checks performed at the time, on the other hand I'm glad one job bothered to bring this up and ask "This isn't you is it?" I ended up petitioning th…

>The company wouldn't tell me who the background check provider was so I could try setting the record straight

Holy moly, this is a serious violation of the FCRA (if you're in the US)

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

#274

Post by astura »

Auslaender wrote: post #261
thenewwazoo wrote: post #40

From their "Privacy" page[1]: --- You have the right, and we encourage you to: View the publicly available information that is available about you online. Contact us at privacy@fama.io to see a copy of your Fama report, if it has been created on behalf of a Customer. We’ll get back to you within 24 hours. ... You can opt out of our service by contacting us at privacy@fama.io, as long as you have not provided written…

Isn't this against GDPR?

1) no

2) they don't appear to be doing business in Europe anyways (based in California, only contact number is North American)

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

#275

Post by astura »

mikedilger wrote: post #260

The reason companies have to do so damn much checking upon hiring is because the employment laws make it damn near impossible to recover from a mistake. If you want to make a difference in this space, don't always vote for whatever issue the screws the rich companies.

Definitely not true in America, most low skill jobs I've worked about 40%+ of employees ended up fired. Most for "just not working out" rather than blatant insubordination.

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

#276

Post by commandlinefan »

wolco wrote: post #152
Aloha wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about something, would most of the people who are aghast at this be as aghast at it if this had flagged someone who was racist, sexist, transphobic, or homophobic? I would be, but I wonder if I'm in the minority or not. This pilfering of your digital history is on the order of what's needed to get a security clearance - where it's at least somewhat justified. There is no case where I can see this being ju…

I would be in thoery but I'm not aghast at all. This is a great opportunity to remind people that the hacker in hackernews needs to shine. Start creating your fake profile now. Start preparing to game your online profile to navigate this new normal.

Years ahead of you.

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

#277

Post by n4r9 »

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?

Personal responsibility is obviously something that should be encouraged. To employ it as a scapegoat in order to avoid social change is not.

A world in which some classes of people find it hard to freely choose their employer is one in which the free market will not work.

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

#278

Post by mikedilger »

astura wrote: post #275
mikedilger wrote: post #260

The reason companies have to do so damn much checking upon hiring is because the employment laws make it damn near impossible to recover from a mistake. If you want to make a difference in this space, don't always vote for whatever issue the screws the rich companies.

Definitely not true in America, most low skill jobs I've worked about 40%+ of employees ended up fired. Most for "just not working out" rather than blatant insubordination.

California is different than the rest of America, and that's where my experience is from. Sun paid me out 6 months severence pay... it didn't seem fair to them. While working there it took about 6 months of intermittant dedicated effort for our manager to fire one of our co-workers.

In NZ I was hired via a 90-day trial where the employer could let me go for no reason given within 90 days. Without that trial, I probably wouldn't have gotten the job because my resume had a big gap. But 10 years on and I'm still working for the guy who hired me.

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

#279

Post by mikedilger »

bsanr2 wrote: post #262
mikedilger wrote: post #260

The reason companies have to do so damn much checking upon hiring is because the employment laws make it damn near impossible to recover from a mistake. If you want to make a difference in this space, don't always vote for whatever issue the screws the rich companies.

I'm not sure where this comes from. Any halfway-competent company in a right-to-work state can drop you like a sack of potatoes with no cause or notice, and you won't be able to do anything unless you have a documented history of them doing something stupidly, obviously discriminatory.

It's coming from California. Sorry, that's my only experience.

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

#280

Post by mandelbrotwurst »

cheez wrote: post #264
acdha wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, lucky people have more flexibility. The problem is that very few people avoid getting sick or hurt[1], having kids, needing loans, getting laid off, etc. and a healthy society should work for more than 10% of the population. 1. “Keep your health” up is obviously naive to start with but also ask how many people are, say, hurt in car crashes or on the job every year and how cruel your advice would sound to them.

Do 80% of people get into car crashes or hurt on the job every year? No? Then my advice can apply to 80% of the people.

Your advice would be good if there were a way of knowing upfront whether you were in the 80%.

Assuming that you are lucky is an extremely poor planning strategy that, yes, much of the time will result in better outcomes than not.

That said, it will also result in some highly negative outcomes in other situations.

Insurance has value.

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