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Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

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Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#41

Post by olefoo »

Let me present a slightly more dystopian twist to this already unpleasant future scenario.

In the future the pool of jobs that require a human and do not require an Olympian level of focus and dedication that few people can hope to achieve without major sponsorship is going to be quite small. In other words the job market is going to become even more of a winner take all contest, and less of a matching market.

The question the hiring committee will be asking will be "Given her past history, if we hire her will she be one of the top five negotiators _in_our_industry_?" and if the answer is no... then she might not find a job at all.

Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#42

Post by Apocryphon »

tptacek wrote: post #35
michaelochurch wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a little hard for me to feel sympathetic with the need to conceal dishonesty on resumes. It depends what the "dishonesty" is. Claiming a skill you don't have is unethical. Bumping your college degree by 5 years in order to seem 5 years younger is, in my opinion, ethically OK. There's a difference between quackery (faking a skill you don't have, and potentially hurting people) and social status inflation. One is…

I would never want to work with someone who felt like lying about the year they got their college degree was "ethical". In fact, I'd really rather not have to think too much about where the ethical line is on "lying" with anyone. Does that mean I never lie? Of course it doesn't. We've all done unethical things. Ethical people call those "mistakes" and don't paper over them.

I think the concern here is that people would edit the year they would graduate in order to escape being excluded because of ageism, a trend which Silicon Valley is notorious for.

Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#43

Post by mikeash »

michaelochurch wrote: post #26
tptacek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a little hard for me to feel sympathetic with the need to conceal dishonesty on resumes. Meanwhile, we talk to lots of great people who don't have LinkedIn profiles; it is by no means a standard requirement. If you can't be honest to LinkedIn, just keep your profile off it. No matter who gets elected in November, by 2015 guaranteed-issue health insurance is going to be the norm, so this health insurance story a…

It is a little hard for me to feel sympathetic with the need to conceal dishonesty on resumes. It depends what the "dishonesty" is. Claiming a skill you don't have is unethical. Bumping your college degree by 5 years in order to seem 5 years younger is, in my opinion, ethically OK. There's a difference between quackery (faking a skill you don't have, and potentially hurting people) and social status inflation. One is…

Deeply unethical people may have enough experience to get away with stuff, but there's a huge spectrum between "deeply unethical" and "entirely ethical", which includes many people I would not want to work with or hire.

Anybody who deliberately lies about the year they graduated will immediately become highly suspect in that regard, even if they're probably generally an OK guy. So maybe they're not going to be defrauding people or whatever, but what other small, "harmless" lies will they think they can get away with?

Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#44

Post by Bud »

tptacek wrote: post #35
michaelochurch wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a little hard for me to feel sympathetic with the need to conceal dishonesty on resumes. It depends what the "dishonesty" is. Claiming a skill you don't have is unethical. Bumping your college degree by 5 years in order to seem 5 years younger is, in my opinion, ethically OK. There's a difference between quackery (faking a skill you don't have, and potentially hurting people) and social status inflation. One is…

I would never want to work with someone who felt like lying about the year they got their college degree was "ethical". In fact, I'd really rather not have to think too much about where the ethical line is on "lying" with anyone. Does that mean I never lie? Of course it doesn't. We've all done unethical things. Ethical people call those "mistakes" and don't paper over them.

Ethical people call those "mistakes" and don't paper over them.

Well, sort of. They call them "mistakes" after they get caught, or, rarer, after they have admitted what they did. Before such time, however, said ethical people don't call their unethical foibles anything, because they aren't talking about them.

I have to agree with the GP's specific point, here. It is a bit sad that the ability to bump your age a bit and perhaps dodge age discrimination has probably now been permanently lost. I find it hard to summon very much outrage about someone trying to dodge age discrimination, which is itself unethical and unfair.

Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#45

Post by 16s »

Lasher wrote: post #3

It might be unpopular to say it out loud, but I would bet most HN readers have at least one person on their Facebook page they would not hire base on what they've seen posted there - people they might have otherwise considered hiring. I hope the scenario posted in that article doesn't play out on that scale, but it's surely already happening at an individual level. Great read though!

Some HN readers don't have Facebook accounts. I don't.

Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#46

Post by Daniel_Newby »

crazygringo wrote: post #23

I think this just reveals bad hiring practices, more than anything else. There are 1,000 different things that can affect your productivity. Maybe her migraines cause 15% "lost productivity", but her enthusiasm causes 35% better quality work, her daydreaming cuts 10%, and her intelligence adds 20%, the fact she's stimulated by spicy food adds 5%, etc. Companies that might attempt to do this kind of micro-analysis mis…

It's even sillier than that. The performance gap between the best and worst is a factor of hundreds or even millions and the best performers are very rare and expensive. Worrying about a 15% performance loss is like finding a $100 bill and complaining that there was not a penny too.

In reality, these social analysis companies will be data mining to find people far to the right on the performance bell curve. They might try to weed out the particularly crazy, but the ones you most want to weed out are masters of deception.

Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#47

Post by m0nastic »

Apocryphon wrote: post #42
tptacek wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never want to work with someone who felt like lying about the year they got their college degree was "ethical". In fact, I'd really rather not have to think too much about where the ethical line is on "lying" with anyone. Does that mean I never lie? Of course it doesn't. We've all done unethical things. Ethical people call those "mistakes" and don't paper over them.

I think the concern here is that people would edit the year they would graduate in order to escape being excluded because of ageism, a trend which Silicon Valley is notorious for.

It would seem like this doesn't actually buy you very much, because presumably the same places that would exclude your resume because of an ageist bias, would also pass on you after interviewing you (in which case lying about your graduation dates just causes you to have to sit through more interviews with places that won't hire you).

I guess the assumption is that you might be able to "win them over" in person, assuming you get past the first interview screen?

I do find myself having to try very hard to ignore my "experience bias" when hiring infosec folks. My first inclination after seeing a resume from someone with "25 years of information security experience" is to cringe (Oh good, this person has spent 20 years doing C&A's, which are fundamentally useless).

Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#48

Post by gaius »

rdtsc wrote: post #33
majormajor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this hypothetical Narrative Data company would have a largely-illegal business plan, and nobody would notice? There wouldn't be any whistleblowers? People would be willing to contract their HR stuff out to them? In my view, there's a pretty bright line between the described business and today's background check companies.

There is illegal and un-ethical. Sometimes there is a fine line but often most people involved realize what that line is and they hang out just outside of it without stepping over. Imagine a meeting with HR. Company is racist. They never really made it into an official police of course but just by joking or sort of non verbal communication they figure out that other higher ups hate certain races. They will talk about…

Not at all far-fetched: http://www.thestar.com/article/297666

Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#49

Post by dredmorbius »

michaelochurch wrote: post #14

LinkedIn scares me more, because I think most 22-year-olds don't really foresee that they might have the need to change their career histories. The idea that you might have to bump your college degree by 5 years is unimaginable at age 22. I don't foresee myself ever needing an explicit lie, but it's hard to keep a story consistent over 20 years. The online paper trail is a bit scary. I wouldn't even have a LinkedIn p…

Which is among the reasons I've revised my LinkedIn profile to a de minimas version. Name. Field. No job history. No resume. Contacts, which I keep trimmed in public views (lord knows how they're available behind my back, of course).

I also maintain no FB profile.

My prediction: the "social web" will end very badly. Mostly as the present cohort hits its 30s and early 40s, with concomitant life issues (marriage, children, breakups, divorce, bankruptcy, minor or not-so-minor legal issues).

The real world isn't 4 years of Ivy League experience you want to brag about openly.

Re: Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare

#50

Post by DanielBMarkham »

Here's an easy one somebody could write up over the weekend:

You apply for a job with a resume. The resume lists the dates you worked various jobs.

So you just go out and comb the social networks to find all the posting times for this person and cross-reference it with their work hours. You've just made a predictor of how much time they'll be spending on your dime trolling the net.

Now perhaps that's only 1 in 20 secondary factors you look at in hiring. But I bet it's easily one of those 20.

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