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My, what a bad chain of analogies. >Think about time invested in the purchase of an automobile or a house, relative to the cash outlay. That's the time invest

My, what a bad chain of analogies. >Think about time invested in the purchase of an automobile or a house, relative to the cash outlay. That's the time invested by ther party paying the money. They can spend all the time in the world on that (and they are usually the ones that do). Where the owners spend their time is making the property attractive to the buyer. The owners aren't doing labor for customers. And you surely don't get to borrow a car for the weekend from the dealership, or live in a house that you want to buy for a bit. >For a new job from the individual's point of view, think of the life-event risk they're taking on by betting on this new firm. The life-event risk of being able to pay rent/mortgage/bills? Oh my. Employment contracts aren't binding either way. Employees can quit at any time and can be fired at any time. Lateral promotion is a more likely scenario than in-company promotion. Think about how that factors into opportunity cost. >Finally, think about the time spent dating before people move in together, not even get married. That's called having a relationship, something that's a two sided thing. The game isn't one side doing labor for the other, and so the comparison is unjustified. (If yours does, you're not having a relationship, you're being used. Run.) >On a time per commitment cost / risk-adjusted basis, extensive job interviews may still be underinvesting. On the employer's side, perhaps. Many of them aren't doing due diligence. You'd think that spending multiple days on an interview process would involve someone at a FAANG-level company asking a question like Do we actually have any projects that utilize the skills that make this candidate attractive to us?, but in my experience, this is not always the case, by far. >All that said, a majority of candidates can be filtered out within 15 minutes. As could, if you care, a majority of workplaces. Applicants usually have no problem filtering out the workplaces. Selecting between multiple job offers is a good problem to have. Without an offer, there's nothing to filter. >See also “information asymmetry” and “adverse selection” resulting in disproportionate number of lemons on the market as discussed in “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons The whole thing is premised on buyers (employers, in our case) being uninformed and having no clue about what they're paying money for. Which is exactly the problem here. And tech interviews getting out of control is a symptom of the problem, not a solution.

deleted 3y ago
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Terretta 3y ago
> The whole thing is premised on buyers (employers, in our case) being uninformed and having no clue about what they're paying money for. Which is exactly the problem here. > And tech interviews getting out of control is a symptom of the problem, not a solution. Agree with both of these. "Contentless management" is the worst. I see I expressed myself poorly when making comparisons to other events either side or both sides invest time to learn information, since both my statements and your responses seem correct to me.
- romwell 3y ago
  Ah, I see. Indeed, your statements aren't inherently incorrect. That's the danger with analogies: without additional structure, they make it easy to get different readings out of the same text. Safe use of an analogy "A is like B" would have the following: * Specifying exactly which parts of concept A are matched to which parts of concept B; * Specifying the limits of the analogy; * Having some examples of how A and B manifest or behave in the same way; * Justify the analogy with an argument showing why you can expect A and B to behave in the same manner. If you skip a step here, you're counting on that step being blatantly clear to the reader — but that's often far from being the case when we are talking about complex concepts that prompt the use of analogies in the first place. (For a nostalgic moment, recall the infamous car analogies on Slashdot, where they became a running gag). I've also seen many cases of using analogies to justify awful opinions with bad faith arguments, e.g. A key that opens many locks is a master key.... Which isn't to say that analogies are bad, but that using them without extra scaffolding (in the context of making a point) is like skipping steps in writing a proof: justified when the skipped parts can be unambiguously inferred by the reader and routinely done for conciseness, but is also a trait of mistake-ridden proofs produced either by cheats, or people who simply didn't think the whole thing through. I'm not talking about the poetic use of analogies here, where the goal of using them is to evoke an emotion or feeling. And like in the case of false proofs, the conclusion of an argument made with an unclear analogy isn't necessarily incorrect; it's the argument itself that has an issue. Using an analogy without going into details means that the author expects the reader to make a leap of faith (and swallow that analogy without thinking much, trusting that the author has done the thinking that analogy is truly fitting) — or the author is making a leap of faith themselves, expecting the reader to do due diligence and think through the steps. There's a level of trust and delegation of thinking in both cases that's too high for my taste. After all, the entire point of using an analogy is saying "you can understand A by understanding B". But to truly understand why that's the case, one needs to understand both A and B, as well as the connection between them. This is good when one is giving an in-depth exposition, or introduce a new concept to the reader (giving them an idea about what to anticipate or what to look for), but defies the point when you're trying to simplify or make a case that A is like B in a certain way. The argument then becomes circular: A is like B in a certain way because A is like B. (For another nostalgic moment, recall that the Internet is just a series of tubes, and not a truck you can just dump something on). That's why I generally try to avoid using analogies to make a point (..and, of course, fail, as you can see here). In our case, I felt that the extent (if any) to which your analogies apply to job-seekers is far smaller than the extent to which they apply to employers in this situation, but the expression didn't make it apparent.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Terretta 3y ago

> The whole thing is premised on buyers (employers, in our case) being uninformed and having no clue about what they're paying money for. Which is exactly the problem here. > And tech interviews getting out of control is a symptom of the problem, not a solution. Agree with both of these. "Contentless management" is the worst. I see I expressed myself poorly when making comparisons to other events either side or both sides invest time to learn information, since both my statements and your responses seem correct to me.

romwell 3y ago
Ah, I see. Indeed, your statements aren't inherently incorrect. That's the danger with analogies: without additional structure, they make it easy to get different readings out of the same text. Safe use of an analogy "A is like B" would have the following: * Specifying exactly which parts of concept A are matched to which parts of concept B; * Specifying the limits of the analogy; * Having some examples of how A and B manifest or behave in the same way; * Justify the analogy with an argument showing why you can expect A and B to behave in the same manner. If you skip a step here, you're counting on that step being blatantly clear to the reader — but that's often far from being the case when we are talking about complex concepts that prompt the use of analogies in the first place. (For a nostalgic moment, recall the infamous car analogies on Slashdot, where they became a running gag). I've also seen many cases of using analogies to justify awful opinions with bad faith arguments, e.g. A key that opens many locks is a master key.... Which isn't to say that analogies are bad, but that using them without extra scaffolding (in the context of making a point) is like skipping steps in writing a proof: justified when the skipped parts can be unambiguously inferred by the reader and routinely done for conciseness, but is also a trait of mistake-ridden proofs produced either by cheats, or people who simply didn't think the whole thing through. I'm not talking about the poetic use of analogies here, where the goal of using them is to evoke an emotion or feeling. And like in the case of false proofs, the conclusion of an argument made with an unclear analogy isn't necessarily incorrect; it's the argument itself that has an issue. Using an analogy without going into details means that the author expects the reader to make a leap of faith (and swallow that analogy without thinking much, trusting that the author has done the thinking that analogy is truly fitting) — or the author is making a leap of faith themselves, expecting the reader to do due diligence and think through the steps. There's a level of trust and delegation of thinking in both cases that's too high for my taste. After all, the entire point of using an analogy is saying "you can understand A by understanding B". But to truly understand why that's the case, one needs to understand both A and B, as well as the connection between them. This is good when one is giving an in-depth exposition, or introduce a new concept to the reader (giving them an idea about what to anticipate or what to look for), but defies the point when you're trying to simplify or make a case that A is like B in a certain way. The argument then becomes circular: A is like B in a certain way because A is like B. (For another nostalgic moment, recall that the Internet is just a series of tubes, and not a truck you can just dump something on). That's why I generally try to avoid using analogies to make a point (..and, of course, fail, as you can see here). In our case, I felt that the extent (if any) to which your analogies apply to job-seekers is far smaller than the extent to which they apply to employers in this situation, but the expression didn't make it apparent.