71–80 of 143 posts
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I've seen several job ads requiring "5+ years experience with Technology X" where Technology X is not yet 5 years old.
kenrikm, you have been hellbanned -- your posts are not visible but you're not informed of this. I hope you see this. I'm seriously considering leaving the HN community because of the frequency with which I see good contributors hellbanned.
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kenrikm, you have been hellbanned -- your posts are not visible but you're not informed of this. I hope you see this. I'm seriously considering leaving the HN community because of the frequency with which I see good contributors hellbanned.
Where to? What is a good discussion site similar to HN nowadays?
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well, it is a correct observation that HR (and marketing) departments have the highest female ratio in pretty much any company. let's look at famous examples: Carly Fiorina? Marketing. Brigitte Ederer (Siemens)? HR. Meg Whitman? Marketing (started as a Brand Manager) the cute moniker is unnecessary, I agree. the overall observation is correct. i agree in particular with the fact that once HR takes over hiring from th…
You are missing the point and flailing at straw men. I don't care about the female ratio (Neither I think does any one who downvoted the OP). I am not going to discuss the utility of the HR department, the issue here is that they are human beings whom no one has the right to reduce as being mere eye-candy (which is particularly freaking sexist).
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No we can't. I base that on being a software architect who sat through endless useless marketing meetings from IBM & their ilk promising the imminent advent of Doodleware (have a business person with domain knowledge & no technical skills draw a process on this monkey-easy UI tool & we'll generate a working application from it.) I maintain that being a programmer will still be a highly paid skill in demand for decade…
To be fair, in CNC milling, it is actually possible and common to design your part in a CAD software, and then have the software write the actual instructions for the machine. But of course this still requires a lot of technical knowledge. In a way it's only as "meta" as it is to have a compiler generate your assembler code.
Economist Dean Baker comments on this: That Shortage of Skilled Manufacturing Workers is Really a Shortage of Employers Willing to Pay the Market Wage News stories have been filled with reports of managers of manufacturing companies insisting that they have jobs open that they can't fill because there are no qualified workers. Adam Davidson at the NYT looked at this more closely and found that the real problem is tha…
I think it is important to note that the fast-food jobs with comparable pay are low level managerial positions , not entry level ones. You can start working for minimum wage at a fast-food job without any previous experience and/or skills. These jobs require very little training, and allow employees to add value almost immediately (and well before promotion to the $15-$20 an hour positions). Contrast this to the skil…
And that is an artefact of industry killing on-the-job training and apprenticeships in any meaningful way.
My dad went from sweeping the floor to designing satellite test rigs with on-the-job training. My partner's dad went from painting ships to designing nuclear reactors with on-the-job training.
My dad never went to university. Started off helping out at my granddad's shop. Moved from there to an apprenticeship scheme at a local engineering firm. From there went into the drafting room. From there learned more engineering. When I was in my teens he was designing satellite test rigs for BA. Ended up a very expensive contractor specialising in conveyor systems of all things.
My partner's dad never went to university. Entered an apprenticeship scheme at Chatham Dockyard. Started off painting navy ships during construction. Moved into drafting office. Started doing more engineering work. Became a member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers as a Chartered Mechanical Engineer in 1966. Worked on the design and building of early UK marine nuclear reactors, nuclear containment facilities, etc. He ended up working in nuclear medicine before he retired.
On the job training is possible. Just nobody in the US and UK seems to want to do it any more ;-(
(Favourite "I wish I knew that at the time and kept it" moment from my youth. My dad always brought home used A1/A0 paper from his design work for me and my brothers to scrawl on. I remember one when I was about seven or eight that was of this massive array of tiny ovals in a mesh of wires. I though the pattern was cool and stared at it for some time, before turning over to try to improve my drawing of Spider-Man. I now know what I was looking at was an A0 schematic of some magnetic-core memory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory). So wish I had that now so I could frame it for the wall ;-)
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It's not just HR. I did an interview with a YC startup that obsessed over my lack of Rails experience. I have several years of industry relevant professional experience in Java, Python and PHP, but only ever dabbled in Ruby and Rails. Their offer (which did come through, grudgingly, through many repetitions of "so will you commit to teaching yourself rails before starting?" (No, I won't.) was quite a bit on the low e…
There are two sides to this: Either you have another skill that they need, or they just want a "generic (good) rails programmer" Of course skills are transferrable, within a timeframe. So if you're trying to ship something in 6 months this may not be acceptable
- Knowing and using the basic underlying technologies (languages, but also concepts, like machine learning, databases, UI skills or so on)
- Knowing the specific codebase and process for those projects (how the build works, what are the components, what they do, etc).
True, someone knowing the first skillset has an advantage, but a talented person will have no problem doing the second one much faster. For an hire, I would rather factor in the long term. It's about sane finance management and ROI, actually. For any given pool of candidates, you are considerably reducing the chance you hit a talented people, if you interview only 10% of all candidates just based on their previous base skills.
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I think a core problem is "HR" departments with absolutely no understanding of the positions they are supposed to be hiring for, even for technology companies where technology is supposed to be a core competency. The only thing stopping me from calling out HR departments in general as a sign of organisational cancer, since I am yet to encounter one that pulls even a tenth of its weight, is that they tend to be compri…
Nice, very classy of you. Tell me again, how does it feel to time travel here from the fifties?
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I've seen several job ads requiring "5+ years experience with Technology X" where Technology X is not yet 5 years old.
kenrikm, you have been hellbanned -- your posts are not visible but you're not informed of this. I hope you see this. I'm seriously considering leaving the HN community because of the frequency with which I see good contributors hellbanned.
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You are missing the point and flailing at straw men. I don't care about the female ratio (Neither I think does any one who downvoted the OP). I am not going to discuss the utility of the HR department, the issue here is that they are human beings whom no one has the right to reduce as being mere eye-candy (which is particularly freaking sexist).
> I am not going to discuss the utility of the HR department, the issue here is that they are human beings whom no one has the right to reduce as being mere eye-candy this attitude, to me, is unbelievable. Of course they are human beings. What else would they be? If you're going to make a claim about HR, make it on its merits. I have said they're nothing but a bunch of good looking girls. They have zero understanding…
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kenrikm, you have been hellbanned -- your posts are not visible but you're not informed of this. I hope you see this. I'm seriously considering leaving the HN community because of the frequency with which I see good contributors hellbanned.
How did you see the hellbanned post?