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The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

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Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#131
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well stated. Bookmarked. One additional bullet point I would add: Hiring. If an isolated HR unit controls hiring and freezes the hiring managers and team out of the process, or effectively alienates them, you're wasting a huge amount of energy. This is part of the methodology I try to weave into my organizations: - A thoughtful and literate job posting, purged of gratuitous jargon, will accurately describe the job an…

>Candidates will be evaluated using a simple quantitative assessment of core competencies. I've tried implementing that with a coding take-home task, with "mixed results". On-paper great candidates often refused. On-paper good candidates made mistakes because they completed it very quickly, while mediocre candidates invested x10 the time and produced "better objective result". Comparing code turned out to be much les…

So...how did you actually do in filling the role?

I don't care how someone looks on paper. Nor should you. Your process should optimize for people who are good at the job. You can look at all the negatives and try and guess "maybe that was a false negative!"...but who cares? What's your rate of true/false positives? That's the only data point you have; optimize for that.

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#133
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Candidates will be evaluated using a simple quantitative assessment of core competencies. I've tried implementing that with a coding take-home task, with "mixed results". On-paper great candidates often refused. On-paper good candidates made mistakes because they completed it very quickly, while mediocre candidates invested x10 the time and produced "better objective result". Comparing code turned out to be much les…

So...how did you actually do in filling the role? I don't care how someone looks on paper. Nor should you. Your process should optimize for people who are good at the job. You can look at all the negatives and try and guess "maybe that was a false negative!"...but who cares? What's your rate of true/false positives? That's the only data point you have; optimize for that.

In my case I got zero positives. It's easy to build an accurate classifier if recall is ignored. Not a single candidadte completed the task perfectly. Not hiring would be a failure for me.

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#134
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, his “cancellation” stems from one thing, and one thing only: He says that Trump is skilled at being convincing (and explains how, at length). This, in the eyes of others, makes him a Trump apologist, and must therefore be shunned. If you had a link to that weird tweet I would like to see it; it would be interesting to see if I agree with your characterization.

"Trump is skilled at being convincing" Isn't that an odd thing to say, from a completely objective, dispassionate, and non-partisan perspective? Perhaps it just seems obvious to me because I am familiar with the page on 538[1] where they track approval ratings in parallel with (I think) every other administration that was heavily polled. Every other president has had their ups and downs, no matter how controversial o…

Well, that’s like saying “Trump lost the popular vote”. Sure, he did. But that wasn’t the game Trump was playing. Trump was aiming for the electoral college, which is the actual game that matters. In the same way, (Scott Adams claims) Trump is skilled in convincing the people who matter for each issue, Trump is not trying to convince all people in general.

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#135
post #124
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, actual references to your allegations would be useful.

https://ew.com/article/2011/03/30/dilbert-scott-adams-femini... https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/11556797972... https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/75939845922... Also the sockpuppet incident: https://www.salon.com/2011/04/19/scott_adams_sock_puppetry_s... There's also the Affirmations thing - the guy believes in his own brand of The Secret, where writing something down over and over agai…

All right. Let me respond point by point.

> > It's not just the Trump thing. He loves to butt heads with the social justice types in a way that makes him look awful. Wrote some creepy antifemist blog-posts too.

> https://ew.com/article/2011/03/30/dilbert-scott-adams-femini...

That article, about a blog post of his, is a hit piece which takes the most inflammatory-sounding quote and displays it out of context. I think his explanatory post (https://www.scottadamssays.com/2011/03/27/im-a-what/), which includes the whole original blog post, explains everything quite clearly. Note that even the original blog post text includes a clarification that precisely the quoted inflammatory-sounding text does not mean what one might be tempted to believe if one were to read it out of context.

> > In the wake of a shooting (can't remember which) he tried to push his WhenHub product as a journalism tool.

> https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/11556797972...

It’s a free app, where people can declare that they have been witnesses to a newsworthy event, and journalists can use the app to find said witnesses and even talk to them using the app. What’s not to like? It’s like mentioning your gas-powered generators rental service during a widespread power outage. It might be slightly self-serving, but it’s useful information, and it’s not like he’s price gouging or taking any specific advantage of people’s misfortune. In fact, the very people who were impacted by the shooting can choose to earn money by setting an hourly price for journalists to interview them. Or they can set the price to zero if they just want to get the information out.

> > Like, Ive seen him in political flamewars on Twitter responding to criticism with pictures of his abs.

> https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/75939845922...

That tweet was a response to someone else’s tweet saying “this coming from the guy who thinks pop news nutrition is same thing as science.” – a picture displaying his health status was a perfectly relevant response (a mite adversarial, but this is Twitter) to something which, mind you, was an irrelevant off-topic ad-hominem personal attack. This is what you call “criticism”?

> Also the sockpuppet incident: https://www.salon.com/2011/04/19/scott_adams_sock_puppetry_s...

Yeah, OK, that one was weird.

> There's also the Affirmations thing - the guy believes in his own brand of The Secret, where writing something down over and over again and wanting it bad enough will magic the universe into making it happen.

> http://mindhacks.org/scott-adams-affirmations/135

What? No. Here’s a direct quote from that very link:

At this point, allow me to correct a mistake I made the first time that I described my experience with affirmations. If you only hear the objective facts, it sounds as if I believe in some sort of voodoo or magic. That’s not the case. While I do think there is something wonderful and inexplicable about affirmations, I have no reason to conclude it is any more than a pleasant hallucination.

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#136
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, his “cancellation” stems from one thing, and one thing only: He says that Trump is skilled at being convincing (and explains how, at length). This, in the eyes of others, makes him a Trump apologist, and must therefore be shunned. If you had a link to that weird tweet I would like to see it; it would be interesting to see if I agree with your characterization.

"Trump is skilled at being convincing" Isn't that an odd thing to say, from a completely objective, dispassionate, and non-partisan perspective? Perhaps it just seems obvious to me because I am familiar with the page on 538[1] where they track approval ratings in parallel with (I think) every other administration that was heavily polled. Every other president has had their ups and downs, no matter how controversial o…

It might look odd but to me it is no difference in saying that charismatic religious leaders are good at convincing people, even if the vast majority that represent non-believers think that the person is nuts.

I am sure that I am not the first person looking at the polarization of US politics and finding similarities to religion, and with religion it makes sense that the more conflict there is between religions, the more set in stone people's beliefs become. It is likely even a effective strategy for religious leaders in position of power to fuel that conflict in order to cement their followers' conviction even further.

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#137
post #48
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like books which are sort of lessons within a biography format. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert) also fits this description.

Why is this being downvoted? Did Scott Adams get cancelled or something?

Hilarious people downvoted me even asking why the other guy was getting downvoted. I guess people are so upset by even seeing this guys name they feel the need to lash out at it no matter the context. My inquiry was a sincere attempt to understand what had happened with Scott Adams, but I guess even mentioning his name is enough to justify a downvote. Hacker news used to be able to discuss things without everyone trying to silence and censor anything they disagree with...

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why CEOs make less $ than software engineers right?

I don't really agree with commenter above, but this argument is blatantly wrong. Executives are paid the way they are just because they are in charge of, among other things, compensations.

The executive is not choosing their own pay. The CEO's "boss" is generally a board representing the owners of the company.

Re: The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read

#140
post #69

Wonder if anyone on here has read Ben Horowitz's latest book on culture "What You Do Is Who You Are"? I skimmed through a bit of it but find the war analogies to be a little over the top so far...

It's worth sticking with. Later on he draws more on some of his personal experience (similar to THTAHT) and there are some hilarious anecdotes.
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