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There are a lot of objections on here to being "valued" and "commodified." I don't understand why. You are valued every time you go to an interview or ask for

There are a lot of objections on here to being "valued" and "commodified." I don't understand why. You are valued every time you go to an interview or ask for a raise. You can leverage your network in the same way as you can leverage "investment." To me this is already a more transparent version of what already happens.

louis___ 6y ago
> There are a lot of objections on here to being "valued" and "commodified." I don't understand why. Because it is immoral. It is not because it is maybe commonplace, and valued in a capitalist society, that it is a good thing. And, the more you apply that mindset in the workplace, the more you will do it outside the workplace.
clairity 6y ago
points are a pretty poor proxy for the amazing variety of skills, proficiencies, and perceptions of humans (or even animals), no matter how sophisticated the point system might be. it also paints an illusory objective sheen (aka ass cover™) over a highly subjective evaluation. you might believe in the point system if it favors you, but that doesn't make the point system any more transparent or "good". we're just not as fungible as nearly a century of mass industrialization would have us believe. we devalue humans by trying to bucketize a set of skills and buy only those skills on the labor market, despite the vast richness that each person brings to the table. that we allow the labor market to be commoditized this way is already a huge imbalance between worker and corporation. we need fair and transparent labor markets for people, not corporations.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > the amazing variety of skills, proficiencies, and perceptions of humans Does this matter for the vast majority of jobs? I have lots of skills. I am a published writer. I have won innovation competitions. I can build large cities with high property values in SimCity. None of that matters for my employment. I am a software engineer. For the purposes of work I am a commodity. My past job replaced me fairly easily when I left. Companies are truly only buying a subset of skills on the labour market.
  - jwozn 6y ago
    Genuinely curious and not just trolling, but do you put this on your resume: "I can build large cities with high property values in SimCity." I do not play SimCity so am unaware of the difficulty of building cities of any size.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      It has been a long time since I have used that one, but I once did. This was when I was young and needed stuff to fill my resume.
  - clairity 6y ago
    > "I am a software engineer.... Companies are truly only buying a subset of skills on the labour market." yeah, if you buy in wholesale and premise your argument that way, then of course arguing the premise seems ludicrous. i'm questioning that acceptance itself. when it comes to value creation, it's rarely the skills list that makes a person, a team, a company, effective, but rather an unquantifiable synergy of individualistic and combined abilities. on a basketball team, you can assume every forward is interchangable with every other one, but then you'd never win a championship and presumably would never understand why.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      > but rather an unquantifiable synergy of individualistic and combined abilities. Interesting. Basketball is an extremely team integrated sport. 100% of the time is spent playing as a team. Do you find workplace teams to be near that level of integration? Maybe my thinking comes from not working on particularly integrated teams.
      - clairity 6y ago
        knowing nothing else, i'd bet that your workplace value creation encompasses a bigger team around you than you may perceive in your day-to-day. that is, unless you're designing, developing, testing, deploying, securing, marketing, documenting, supporting, accounting for, financing, and selling everything yourself. but even then, you'll often have others helping you, either on contract or in an advisory or support capacity. all of that stuff needs to be sync'ed up and holistically delivered to customers. basketball is my go-to first-order microcosm of work life, but you can see the same representative dynamics in other facets of life, like a band. similarly, i think of pets as first-order humans, endlessly fascinating and instructive to observe and interact with. =)
- mdausmann 6y ago
  I agree with this. Real networks are networks of people you respect and trust. Trying to reduce that to a point system is a poor proxy.
grenoire 6y ago
But... it's not transparent? I have no idea what a 1-1000 rating means, or how it's calculated. The function by which this number is generated might not suit my proxy for trust. And if I see someone with an outstanding score the first impression that it sparks won't be trust, but that this person must've successfully gamed it somehow.
- 4sellff 6y ago
  We have tried to be very clear on how the TRU Score is determined [hover over the number and you will see a tooltip/modal that provides details]. Obviously, sharing the actual algorithm would most certainly allow people to game the system. A couple of other items to consider: [1] The TRU Score is updated 1x day [2] The TRU Score is a very slow moving value [3] As designed, it would likely take years for a member to make it above 900 [4] The TRU Score is primarily based on your activity on the platform and the community reaction to that activity [5] Outside of the algorithm used, we do not have any direct influence on the TRU Score Additionally, we are not suggesting that the TRU Score is the absolute measurement of trust or reputation of a person. Instead, it is an additional data point that you can take into consideration when deciding if you want to work with someone. Or, if they want to work with you [both parties have their own TRU Score]. At time of registration, all members start with a TRU Score of 400. Therefore, even the most trustworthy/reputable person on earth will almost certainly have a lower score than you, if you have been on the platform for some time. I welcome all suggestions on how you think we could be more transparent in determining the TRU Score. We all benefit if it were easier to make better decisions about who we choose to work with.
  - vector_spaces 6y ago
    It makes sense to me that you'd need a way to regulate the platform's content to avoid it filling up with the spammy garbage that LinkedIn is known for, and I'm not sure what the right solution is. You've obviously spent more time thinking about this than I have, but my gut reaction is that this scoring approach would be super harmful for non-traditional or non-elite candidates. To use tech as an example, in the limit, regardless of how meritocratic we claim we are as an industry, my experience has been that folks hiring technical teams are more receptive to inquiries from someone with an Ivy League education in CS than they are from someone self-taught without a degree or who has a degree in something unrelated. I assume that reaching out to several hiring managers and getting zero response would hurt your TRU score, regardless of the quality of your messages. Meanwhile a traditional candidate with a higher response rate wouldn't see their score fall quite as much, even if they couldn't pass a simple fizzbuzz technical screen. Having to work harder than a traditional candidate to get a response is expected in this scenario, but it'd be a huge bummer if the platform itself acted as a gatekeeper in this way.
gnicholas 6y ago
Reminds me of the Karmageddon episode of The Program: https://programaudioseries.com/3-four-ways-to-stop-your-system-from-freezing/ https://programaudioseries.com/3-four-ways-to-stop-your-syst...

louis___ 6y ago

> There are a lot of objections on here to being "valued" and "commodified." I don't understand why. Because it is immoral. It is not because it is maybe commonplace, and valued in a capitalist society, that it is a good thing. And, the more you apply that mindset in the workplace, the more you will do it outside the workplace.

clairity 6y ago

points are a pretty poor proxy for the amazing variety of skills, proficiencies, and perceptions of humans (or even animals), no matter how sophisticated the point system might be. it also paints an illusory objective sheen (aka ass cover™) over a highly subjective evaluation. you might believe in the point system if it favors you, but that doesn't make the point system any more transparent or "good". we're just not as fungible as nearly a century of mass industrialization would have us believe. we devalue humans by trying to bucketize a set of skills and buy only those skills on the labor market, despite the vast richness that each person brings to the table. that we allow the labor market to be commoditized this way is already a huge imbalance between worker and corporation. we need fair and transparent labor markets for people, not corporations.

MattGaiser 6y ago
> the amazing variety of skills, proficiencies, and perceptions of humans Does this matter for the vast majority of jobs? I have lots of skills. I am a published writer. I have won innovation competitions. I can build large cities with high property values in SimCity. None of that matters for my employment. I am a software engineer. For the purposes of work I am a commodity. My past job replaced me fairly easily when I left. Companies are truly only buying a subset of skills on the labour market.
- jwozn 6y ago
  Genuinely curious and not just trolling, but do you put this on your resume: "I can build large cities with high property values in SimCity." I do not play SimCity so am unaware of the difficulty of building cities of any size.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    It has been a long time since I have used that one, but I once did. This was when I was young and needed stuff to fill my resume.
- clairity 6y ago
  > "I am a software engineer.... Companies are truly only buying a subset of skills on the labour market." yeah, if you buy in wholesale and premise your argument that way, then of course arguing the premise seems ludicrous. i'm questioning that acceptance itself. when it comes to value creation, it's rarely the skills list that makes a person, a team, a company, effective, but rather an unquantifiable synergy of individualistic and combined abilities. on a basketball team, you can assume every forward is interchangable with every other one, but then you'd never win a championship and presumably would never understand why.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    > but rather an unquantifiable synergy of individualistic and combined abilities. Interesting. Basketball is an extremely team integrated sport. 100% of the time is spent playing as a team. Do you find workplace teams to be near that level of integration? Maybe my thinking comes from not working on particularly integrated teams.
    - clairity 6y ago
      knowing nothing else, i'd bet that your workplace value creation encompasses a bigger team around you than you may perceive in your day-to-day. that is, unless you're designing, developing, testing, deploying, securing, marketing, documenting, supporting, accounting for, financing, and selling everything yourself. but even then, you'll often have others helping you, either on contract or in an advisory or support capacity. all of that stuff needs to be sync'ed up and holistically delivered to customers. basketball is my go-to first-order microcosm of work life, but you can see the same representative dynamics in other facets of life, like a band. similarly, i think of pets as first-order humans, endlessly fascinating and instructive to observe and interact with. =)
mdausmann 6y ago
I agree with this. Real networks are networks of people you respect and trust. Trying to reduce that to a point system is a poor proxy.

grenoire 6y ago

But... it's not transparent? I have no idea what a 1-1000 rating means, or how it's calculated. The function by which this number is generated might not suit my proxy for trust. And if I see someone with an outstanding score the first impression that it sparks won't be trust, but that this person must've successfully gamed it somehow.

4sellff 6y ago
We have tried to be very clear on how the TRU Score is determined [hover over the number and you will see a tooltip/modal that provides details]. Obviously, sharing the actual algorithm would most certainly allow people to game the system. A couple of other items to consider: [1] The TRU Score is updated 1x day [2] The TRU Score is a very slow moving value [3] As designed, it would likely take years for a member to make it above 900 [4] The TRU Score is primarily based on your activity on the platform and the community reaction to that activity [5] Outside of the algorithm used, we do not have any direct influence on the TRU Score Additionally, we are not suggesting that the TRU Score is the absolute measurement of trust or reputation of a person. Instead, it is an additional data point that you can take into consideration when deciding if you want to work with someone. Or, if they want to work with you [both parties have their own TRU Score]. At time of registration, all members start with a TRU Score of 400. Therefore, even the most trustworthy/reputable person on earth will almost certainly have a lower score than you, if you have been on the platform for some time. I welcome all suggestions on how you think we could be more transparent in determining the TRU Score. We all benefit if it were easier to make better decisions about who we choose to work with.
- vector_spaces 6y ago
  It makes sense to me that you'd need a way to regulate the platform's content to avoid it filling up with the spammy garbage that LinkedIn is known for, and I'm not sure what the right solution is. You've obviously spent more time thinking about this than I have, but my gut reaction is that this scoring approach would be super harmful for non-traditional or non-elite candidates. To use tech as an example, in the limit, regardless of how meritocratic we claim we are as an industry, my experience has been that folks hiring technical teams are more receptive to inquiries from someone with an Ivy League education in CS than they are from someone self-taught without a degree or who has a degree in something unrelated. I assume that reaching out to several hiring managers and getting zero response would hurt your TRU score, regardless of the quality of your messages. Meanwhile a traditional candidate with a higher response rate wouldn't see their score fall quite as much, even if they couldn't pass a simple fizzbuzz technical screen. Having to work harder than a traditional candidate to get a response is expected in this scenario, but it'd be a huge bummer if the platform itself acted as a gatekeeper in this way.

gnicholas 6y ago

Reminds me of the Karmageddon episode of The Program: https://programaudioseries.com/3-four-ways-to-stop-your-system-from-freezing/ https://programaudioseries.com/3-four-ways-to-stop-your-syst...