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Pixels don’t care

warpspire.com

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Re: Pixels don’t care

#111

Post by corporalagumbo »

delinka wrote: post #39
FireBeyond wrote: post #13

What a strange claim. "Looking back", he can't help but feel discriminated against due to his height. It couldn't possibly be because of his "no formal eduction, no experience with any big clients", could it?

If you have demonstrably great work, what does formal education do for you that will affect your work for some company? Similarly, if this guy isn't the one landing the client or dealing directly with them on a regular basis, how can the pixels possibly care about for whom they are assembled? I read these parts of his anecdotes as excuses concocted only after an in-person meeting.

Completing formal ed generally indicates good character and work ethic in a person. They will focus on the task, get it done well and on time, are reliable, polite, think problems through, work well with others too, etc. Conversely, it is possible to be very talented technically but have a poor character, which will inevitably create problems.

Raw talent is just one factor in finding good employees. A successful company requires well-rounded individuals, or a strong structure if you're going to successfully incorporate poorly-rounded individuals. Everyone in a company has to work together in a team in some fashion.

Re: Pixels don’t care

#112

Post by dbattaglia »

noonespecial wrote: post #27
FireBeyond wrote: post #13

What a strange claim. "Looking back", he can't help but feel discriminated against due to his height. It couldn't possibly be because of his "no formal eduction, no experience with any big clients", could it?

Height is actually a weird one when people get fixated on it. I worked with a guy once who was about 5,5 but was absolutely obsessed with "height discrimination". He filtered everything that happened to him through that lens and it severely warped his view on reality and it kept him from addressing real issues that would have made him a more hireable employee.

I'm 5'5" myself and rarely even think about it, other than to make the occasional self-deprecating joke about it. Everyone's life experience is different but I think you are right that people can focus on more insignificant "shortcomings" (har har!) to take focus off their real problems.

Re: Pixels don’t care

#113

Post by corporalagumbo »

mnicole wrote: post #36

Echoing the article and everyone else that this was an issue for me as well. I had an interview at a small-town agency once with the two owners. They talked to me for awhile, and then walked out of the room to speak privately. When they came back, one of them said he loved my work and he'd hire me today, but his co-founder wasn't comfortable with hiring someone "so young without any formal education" and wanted me to…

Or perhaps instead of trying to fight their age to project a defensive false equivalence with older workers, these kids are embracing and flaunting their age as a virtue - their precocity, enthusiasm, even naivety. You said it yourself - you look kindly on young kids with the balls to show off something cool they've made on HN. It's natural as an older person to feel charitable towards earnest kids, so what's wrong with leveraging that?

I'm still pretty young and I often either genuinely come across as or play up a little an appearance of being incompetent and bewildered when I'm interacting with older, female shop assistants and office clerks in retail or bureaucratic environments. They like it, though they wouldn't necessarily admit it, and I get treated with faux-grumpy generosity. Works for me!

Re: Pixels don’t care

#114

Post by dbattaglia »

MattyRad wrote: post #28

I know how it feels... I'm 22, 5'4", and look like I'm 17. This post reminds me of the Hacker Manifesto, by The Mentor: we exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias.

I'm 32 and look like I'm 22 to most people. Trust me you start appreciating it more the older you get. :)

Re: Pixels don’t care

#115

Post by corporalagumbo »

yuhong wrote: post #89
cheapsteak wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet was a much smaller place. Instead of seeing the change in the way most of the web is used as invading this anonymous meritocracy, perhaps it would be more reasonable to say that the meritocracy is now surrounded by settlers who are using the land in a different way.

In the long term, anonymity is not the real solution to the problem anyway.

What is the problem?

Re: Pixels don’t care

#116

Post by corporalagumbo »

mvleming wrote: post #44
pnathan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weird thing is, I've been in some of those avatar worlds, and people still want to look humanoidish, often outlandishly 'supermodel'. Almost no one actually experiments beyond that. It's weird when I recall cyberpunk short stories from the 80s where people had all these radically weird and different avatars. Why should we be confined by our minds to looking like supermodels, why shouldn't we look like some sort o…

I never thought about it in that way, and that is interesting. It's like the more we have the opportunity to not look human, we take that opportunity to look more human. But, thinking about it, it makes sense. It's personifying what society has deemed as the perfect image. In response to your comment, I think you just need to give culture time to experiment with new ideas when new opportunities rise up. I've actually…

>personifying what society has deemed as the perfect image.

Ugh, social construction theory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_aesthetics

Re: Pixels don’t care

#117

Post by corporalagumbo »

It's a perspective thing. I think he missed an alternate reaction to his position. He could have been pleased with the money he was paid, honoured by the responsibility he was given, and driven to do the best he could. Instead he spent most of his time feeling hard done by. That's the kind of attitude problem that people pick up on when they consider people for a position - will this guy work his ass off for me? Oh, he thinks too much of himself? No thanks.

Re: Pixels don’t care

#118

Post by treerock »

corporalagumbo wrote: post #117

It's a perspective thing. I think he missed an alternate reaction to his position. He could have been pleased with the money he was paid, honoured by the responsibility he was given, and driven to do the best he could. Instead he spent most of his time feeling hard done by. That's the kind of attitude problem that people pick up on when they consider people for a position - will this guy work his ass off for me? Oh,…

This is an attitude that employers work hard to cultivate. I don't think it's healthy for workers to 'work his ass off' for a company that isn't willing to reward those efforts. It's a weakness and employers will take advantage.

Re: Pixels don’t care

#119

Post by pauljburke »

FireBeyond wrote: post #13

What a strange claim. "Looking back", he can't help but feel discriminated against due to his height. It couldn't possibly be because of his "no formal eduction, no experience with any big clients", could it?

I'm sure they gave the client a discount to reflect that. 2,083% does seem a little low. I started out in a consultancy that did the same sort of things. There's only so many times you can bill more than your annual salary every month and be told there's no money for raises (or in one memorable case, a laptop).

Re: Pixels don’t care

#120

Post by chimeracoder »

vidarh wrote: post #100
chimeracoder wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While the Internet is no longer as anonymous > You don't know who I am from this comment (unless you stalk my bio and find me on Twitter). If you like it you'll upvote it. That's exactly (one of the many reasons) why I love the Internet. That's the one sad thing, though: as you yourself point out, the Internet is moving in a direction where this concept of an anonymous meritocracy is already becoming more and more…

It might become more difficult, but mostly because most of us don't care enough about being hard to track down. Piecing together most of my "online identity" for example is easy, because I don't care. My id here is my first name and last initial. My name is all over my blog which I've acknowledged ownership of in many contexts, even where I use user names that does not match my name in any way, for example. But there…

> It might become more difficult, but mostly because most of us don't care enough about being hard to track down

I would argue that's already not possible anymore, with today's Internet.

Being completely anonymous, including to Google/Facebook/your ISP is much more difficult than you think. You essentially have to write off large parts of the web as unviewable, which to me only confirms that anonymity on the Internet is all but a thing of the past.

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