Are there good HR departments? I haven't had the honor of seeing any so by my book they're classified in the same section as unicorns and fairies.
> Are there good HR departments? That depends. Are they staffed by psychologists? If yes, then no. Psychology and psychological testing are losing credibility very rapidly right now: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effects/201305/the-...
There are some psychologists that actually try to be scientific (my GF is doing a postgraduate degree in neuropsychology).
Unfortunately, they're overwhelmed by the majority, which are full of pseudoscience.
Maybe the more rigorous ones should change their titles, not to be associated with standard "psychologists" anymore?
It's perfectly valid. "X and I" is only valid if the sentence makes sense if you only used "I". This article makes one valid use of "me and X": > in an effort to score extra points with me and Carl. If you changed that to "Carl and I" then took out Carl it would be "to score extra points with I", which is disturbing and wrong.
Notice that I said "as the subject of a sentence". It certainly works in the single case you chose. How about these: "… and me and Carl were quietly trying to weigh up which team …" "Me and Carl had a winner and …" "During the excercise me and a colleague, Carl, made ourselves available …"
Yes, those are incorrect. Perhaps it's just because I'm not located in the UK, but it really stands out for me. Those, the lack of periods and phrases such as:
>and thinked the way most of the team already worked and thought
> Are there good HR departments? That depends. Are they staffed by psychologists? If yes, then no. Psychology and psychological testing are losing credibility very rapidly right now: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effects/201305/the-...
The article you linked to talks about psychiatry (the DSM is tightly bound to psychiatry, not psychology). I don't know if you meant by including that link that psychologists criticising psychiatrists undermines their credibility, but if that's the case I disagree strongly.
> The article you linked to talks about psychiatry (the DSM is tightly bound to psychiatry, not psychology).
Not so. The DSM is the central authority and diagnostic manual for both psychiatry and clinical psychology. Reference:
> I don't know if you meant by including that link that psychologists criticising psychiatrists undermines their credibility ...
I included the link only to show that the DSM is being abandoned by mental health professionals, not to suggest a schism between psychiatry and psychology. The latter has been true for decades and goes without saying.
I very much dislike the idea that you can't give special treatment to individual candidates. The job of a recruiter is to find the best candidate for the job, not to treat all candidates equally. Now obviously we can't go around discriminating against candidates based on attributes not relevant to their ability to perform (ie gender, race, religion etc), but that doesn't mean we can't make use of any extra informatio…
> The job of a recruiter is to find the best candidate for the job, not to treat all candidates equally. I won't disagree, but I would like to restate that a little more carefully: "The job of a recruiter is to measure which candidate is best for this job, fairly and without bias." As you point out, there are quite a few reasons that people try to weedle out of actually hiring the best person, some of them not so sav…
It's probably true that in my example, I was good but not exceptional enough to justify overriding procedure. Thanks for giving me that perspective!
I disagree very much. There are many bad HR people, and many HR people who are given bad direction. It's very hard to imagine a company of over 30 or 40 people surviving without one. Is the CEO supposed to be up on all the HR rules? Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day? Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs? Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens? Chase down back…
> Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs? Optimal for what? I do think the CEO or someone similar needs to figure out what you want from the organization and design it. HR may have input but it is just input. HR can do the market calibration research. That's a good role for them. Initial fit? That should be the team or team manager. Background checks? Either HR or an administrative assistant s…
If the team manager is doing background checks - initiating, conducting, following up, etc.- how much time does that allow for him/her to manage the team, do whatever technical work is required at level, interact with the rest of the company as required, take a breath and think strategically, etc.? And how many team mangers WANT conducting background checks as part of their jobs? Even farming that out to a contractor - finding a good one, following up, ensuring quality, making sure deadlines are met, etc. - takes time.
This has nothing to do with HR, but everything to do with the power HR was given by the directors, or what ever. Good, well positioned HR staff are invaluable.
I wonder how many times technical staff have had hiring lumped on them, and got it horribly wrong?
Improving a company 101: * Get rid of HR people. * Profit.
Keep in mind you see strong selection bias. First, you only hear about extremely good or extremely bad cases. Second, on a site like Hacker News, you're more likely to hear about the bad HR departments.
Most HR people are at least somewhat competent and help the company, and good HR people are worth their weight in silver. When Human Resources actually understands the needs of the employees and is able to enact policies that make them happier, that's extraordinarily useful.
Thought experiment: For those running companies and hiring people. Would you take the time to occasionally run your interview processes over your existing employees? I'm not talking about involving them, I mean actually putting them through it. It would be one way to sanity-check that the process is selecting for the things you want from those coming from outside . As a company grows, the non-technical systems and po…
Here here, I'll second-that. Most management types are disconnected from the processes that their staff are instructed to follow. I've ran through application demos and walkthroughs with senior managers before where at the end they ask "Why do we do that?"
Most technical types are disconnected from the realities of sales, marketing, finance, law, etc, etc
IQ numbers vary based on tests, to some degree, so "130" doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot. What I'd found is that I was in the same percentile on all tests (took 3 a few years ago) compared to tests from 30 and 20 years ago. The raw score numbers might have changed up or down slightly, but same percentile in my case.
... IQ is supposed to be a normal distribution, ">= 130" === "3 sigma above the mean," i.e. top 0.1%. (bearing in mind that the test is inescapably biased towards people with our background - US/UK/etc, certainly English speaking, probably university educated.)
To be fair, I wasn't university educated at 9, when I took my first tests, although I was born in the US and spoke English.
> Are there good HR departments? That depends. Are they staffed by psychologists? If yes, then no. Psychology and psychological testing are losing credibility very rapidly right now: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effects/201305/the-...
There are some psychologists that actually try to be scientific (my GF is doing a postgraduate degree in neuropsychology). Unfortunately, they're overwhelmed by the majority, which are full of pseudoscience. Maybe the more rigorous ones should change their titles, not to be associated with standard "psychologists" anymore?
> Maybe the more rigorous ones should change their titles, not to be associated with standard "psychologists" anymore?
I have been recommending that serious students, those who want to avoid the stigma of psychology, enter the field of neuroscience instead. Neuroscience will eventually replace psychiatry and psychology as the preferred approach to treating what we now call "mental illnesses", most of which are actually biological illnesses with mental symptoms. Reference: