Yeah, I have some background in psychometrics. I looked into getting work in these HR psychomestric firms at some point. I discounted it out of hand as I did not want to be involved in such a dodgy enterprise. Corporate psychologists give me th heebeejeebies (wearing one of my hats I'm now a corporate sociologist, which is a much more sensible gig).
He got 1%, we can't hire him
111–120 of 594 posts
Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#112Where do you work that psychometric tests are required of candidates? It's the first I've heard of something like this (outside of various gov't/military jobs).
My current company do this, we've around 600 employees across Europe and every candidate for an IT position in the UK takes the same test at a 1st/2nd level interview. Unlike the OP it's at the hirer's discretion how much weight they put in the score and it's made clear to us there's a definite pattern that more nervous candidates & those without English as a natural language score less well. We ask them to come into…
"will have days where he's uncommunicative or seems unfriendly and days he's warmer"
Yeah, I think that describes approximately 1 of out every 1 persons.
Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#113> The problem here is that we didn't have the final say. Yup ... There is going to be a real big shift in the next twenty years. We look at things like Developer Anarchy and say "what let the programmers run the company?" - but that's the wrong idea. It's let those with software literacy run the company - just as 500 years ago those who were literate took over running companies For a while we shall see parallel organ…
This isn't just about developers and hiring practices. This is about systemisation and bullshit metrics being used to make opaque and life-changing decisions.
This is about the same kind of shitty thinking that results in surveillance states.
"We can't employ/feed you/let you travel/let you have a mortgage/let you open a bank account, you are Invalid."
"Invalid, what do you mean?"
"We are not allowed to tell invalids why they are invalid. Report for reprocessing."
Edit: Oh, and psych tests are bull. It's pretty obvious what the "right" answers are - so all you actually succeed in doing is filtering the psychopaths in.
Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#114"The psychometric test was supposed to produce a "true" reflection of how someone saw themselves, and I was told it couldn't change over time - i.e. whatever it determined was fixed, immutable and infallable." 20 years ago I took the Meyers-Briggs test multiple times (well, once a year for 3 years). My numbers changed a little bit each time - I was fairly strong I and N, but very weak 'T' and 'J', to the point where…
I've taken the Meyers-Briggs several times and tried to answer in a way to get different outcomes. I've answered realistically, speculatively, and hopefully. Each time I got the same result.
Interesting. How strong are those results each time?
Each of my 4 scores have had a % strength with them - my I and N have been fairly high (30-60% over time), and the T/J were always < 10%, slipping in to F/P on occasion.
Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#115[deleted]
Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#116"The psychometric test was supposed to produce a "true" reflection of how someone saw themselves, and I was told it couldn't change over time - i.e. whatever it determined was fixed, immutable and infallable." 20 years ago I took the Meyers-Briggs test multiple times (well, once a year for 3 years). My numbers changed a little bit each time - I was fairly strong I and N, but very weak 'T' and 'J', to the point where…
remember that MBTIs have no evidence base - they can be helpful in allowing someone to "see" jobs they might be happier in, as they did for me, but they don't necessarily measure anything statistically significant about a personality.
Sure - they're not the be-all answer to everything, but I've found them helpful in (re)assessing myself lately.
I found much more static-ness in my IQ over the last 30+ years. I was actually surprised at how consistent it was over decades and various tests (and, dare I say, slightly disappointed).
Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think there is a need to "respectfully disagree" to a disrespectful comment. Just like there are terrible dev teams there are terrible HR departments, and this sounds like one of them. But as you mention, if developers were to handle everything related to hiring, firing, sick reports, vacation, benefits, contracts, compliance etc. that HR does, I doubt there would be any profit.
The problem with HR is that they do tasks they are not qualified to as a mission . It's the role that's broken, note the teams.
As with all departments in a company, HR does the tasks that they're assigned to do. It's a task, not a mission. There's scope creep and mission creep as with every task we're used to. If they do stuff that they're not supposed to do and make decisions that they're not supposed to make, it's the team and the person handling the team that's broken and time to reevaluate and adjust what value the team is supposed to bring to the company. That however is not unique to HR but applies to all roles and teams in a company. I worked with great HR people and less than stellar. But I also had to constantly battle system administration that made technical decisions for developers (no, we can't deploy this because ..., you must code your projects in ...) and stellar OPS teams that worked with the dev teams to provide an insane amount of knowledge, experience, insight and help.
It's easy to bash HR people just as "regular" employees often bash IT ("They won't provide that simple feature that I've been asking for ever since, just because they hate me."). But calling the role "broken" does not magically make it disappear. Someone needs to handle the employer/employee relationship and all attached nuisances - any organisation with employees that does not handle this role is more broken than any HR department I've ever seen.
I'd really hope that we'd be over this and appreciate that other people in our organisation provide value and experience that we maybe can't see at fist glance. Instead we close our eyes and call their role "broken".
Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#118Improving a company 101: * Get rid of HR people. * Profit.
Only once have I had a job where I was interviewed by a HR person. The whole interview made me feel uneasy, but I took the job anyway. I should have trusted my instincts and rejected the job, on the grounds that they put HR people to interview engineers with silly questions. The job, and the working environment in particular, was horrible and I didn't stay after my probation period. On the other hand, I was put on a…
There was an article posted about someone that worked for a large corporation and they forgot about him but continued to pay him for years.
At the time I thought it was a hoax, after your story I'm not so sure.
Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#119Thought 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…
How many people trust their employer to take a negative result on such a test as a sign of a poorly functioning test rather than a poorly functioning worker.
But if you work at the company for some time your employer has much better metrics to grade you than hiring process.
Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only once have I had a job where I was interviewed by a HR person. The whole interview made me feel uneasy, but I took the job anyway. I should have trusted my instincts and rejected the job, on the grounds that they put HR people to interview engineers with silly questions. The job, and the working environment in particular, was horrible and I didn't stay after my probation period. On the other hand, I was put on a…
There was an article posted about someone that worked for a large corporation and they forgot about him but continued to pay him for years. At the time I thought it was a hoax, after your story I'm not so sure. https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087935
It was a hoax, but there are plenty of true stories in the same vein. What sets the parent's true story apart is that the protagonist did something productive with the time he had been given, whereas in the story you linked, the guy spends his days wasting away.