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Another attempt to apply data analysis to produce a concrete number that represents the merits and talents of a fellow human being. How utterly irrational. It

Another attempt to apply data analysis to produce a concrete number that represents the merits and talents of a fellow human being. How utterly irrational. It's ideas like this that make me question why I bother being a programmer for anything more than leisure these days... except that I have no idea what else I could do to keep a roof over my family's head this late in my life. You call yourselves, "engineers," but I've yet to work for any company that treated you like one or even invested in your future. You're offered a salary well above average for most working adults. They lure you with frivolous perks and stock options. They never send you to school for training, offer you a pension to keep you secure in your golden years, and I've never seen any unions you could join to demand these things from your employers. Your career is probably not going to be on the line if you merge a patch that degrades performance or introduces a timing error. But don't think they'll care about you when it comes to the bottom line. Someone else seeks to profit off of your talents and abilities and nothing else. If they can hire someone to automate you away, they will. And we're all the poorer for it I think.

obituary_latte 12y ago
Well that's certainly one point of view. So how you are working to make us all the richer? How can I join in?
- agentultra 12y ago
  I haven't yet cultivated any answers to my own questions to have fomented any clear ideas or call to action. I'm presently mired in Andrew Keene's The Internet Is Not The Answer, Alexis O'Hanian's Without Their Permission, and my own hunches and experiences from my lived experience and those of people I've met. Perhaps there's an essay in it somewhere. Unfortunately there's no clean, quantifiable solution to human problems like labor relations that I can see. High-tech companies want to filter out potential hires to get the most highly-skilled candidates for the least amount of money they can get away with. They ultimately want to make more money with less capital and labor costs in order to maximize profits for their founders and investors. Which seems rather contrary to other engineering disciplines where, it has been related to me, they took in the hires they came across and made them into the engineers they needed.
pron 12y ago
You may love your job, but your job never loves you back. Don't remember where I heard this, but it's always good to remember. It applies (in varying measures) to anyone from the founders and CEO to the lowliest employee.
tptacek 12y ago
If you could tell us how to apply data analysis to produce a concrete number that represents the merits and talents of a fellow human being, I would love to hear it; it would make my job a lot easier. I didn't know that was possible. Is this some kind of linear algebra-y machine learning sort of thing?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  Most likely it is possible. Take this "Alex" you frequently speak highly of. If you gave Alex a different work sample test, do you believe he'd have done poorly on it? If not, then there is some common factor (call it H) both tests are measuring. (I can confidently state that you do believe he would have performed similarly on a different test - if he didn't, this whole idea would be fundamentally invalid.) Now the important question is to determine, for any particular subtest, how closely a person's score correlates with the hidden factor H. This is, for example, how IQ tests are created. You can take a look at the literature surrounding them. Key starting points would be principal component analysis, clustering, hidden markov models and the like. There is no simple recipe - every data analysis problem is different in it's own way. But there are general themes. I'm happy to discuss in more detail, feel free to write to me if you are interested.
  - agentultra 12y ago
    This is a good answer. I could tell if GP was being sarcastic so I deleted my original reply. The softer side of the equation is that the approach of filtering candidates for businesses allows them to minimize (to some market minimum) the cost for highly skilled individuals. Projects such as this just triggered a bone I'm presently picking over. Old-guard corporations that hire the legally-liable kind of engineer seemed to have taken a much different approach if the stories I've been told by a retired mechanical engineer who worked for Chrysler are true. A completely irrational approach. They hired people based on their potential and made them into the engineers they needed. The copy on the announcement sounds like this game will quantify everything about the performance of a participant in the game in order to sell them to a curated list of potential employers. What about this system incentives employers to invest in the career development of these people and strengthens our collective bargaining power as the people who build this stuff? To be more constructive I might suggest turning down the hyperbole and use fewer adjectives. Keep the pitch to employers for employers. Don't be patronizing to inexperienced developers: inspecting the assembly output of a compiler is not elite and not difficult to explain to someone given the right context and framing. I understand your game is about competition but the "winner/failure" schism it can create is a big turn off for a lot of otherwise intelligent, creative, and capable people. It doesn't have to be about being, "the best," in order to be fun and rewarding.

obituary_latte 12y ago

Well that's certainly one point of view. So how you are working to make us all the richer? How can I join in?

agentultra 12y ago
I haven't yet cultivated any answers to my own questions to have fomented any clear ideas or call to action. I'm presently mired in Andrew Keene's The Internet Is Not The Answer, Alexis O'Hanian's Without Their Permission, and my own hunches and experiences from my lived experience and those of people I've met. Perhaps there's an essay in it somewhere. Unfortunately there's no clean, quantifiable solution to human problems like labor relations that I can see. High-tech companies want to filter out potential hires to get the most highly-skilled candidates for the least amount of money they can get away with. They ultimately want to make more money with less capital and labor costs in order to maximize profits for their founders and investors. Which seems rather contrary to other engineering disciplines where, it has been related to me, they took in the hires they came across and made them into the engineers they needed.

pron 12y ago

You may love your job, but your job never loves you back. Don't remember where I heard this, but it's always good to remember. It applies (in varying measures) to anyone from the founders and CEO to the lowliest employee.

tptacek 12y ago

If you could tell us how to apply data analysis to produce a concrete number that represents the merits and talents of a fellow human being, I would love to hear it; it would make my job a lot easier. I didn't know that was possible. Is this some kind of linear algebra-y machine learning sort of thing?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
yummyfajitas 12y ago
Most likely it is possible. Take this "Alex" you frequently speak highly of. If you gave Alex a different work sample test, do you believe he'd have done poorly on it? If not, then there is some common factor (call it H) both tests are measuring. (I can confidently state that you do believe he would have performed similarly on a different test - if he didn't, this whole idea would be fundamentally invalid.) Now the important question is to determine, for any particular subtest, how closely a person's score correlates with the hidden factor H. This is, for example, how IQ tests are created. You can take a look at the literature surrounding them. Key starting points would be principal component analysis, clustering, hidden markov models and the like. There is no simple recipe - every data analysis problem is different in it's own way. But there are general themes. I'm happy to discuss in more detail, feel free to write to me if you are interested.
- agentultra 12y ago
  This is a good answer. I could tell if GP was being sarcastic so I deleted my original reply. The softer side of the equation is that the approach of filtering candidates for businesses allows them to minimize (to some market minimum) the cost for highly skilled individuals. Projects such as this just triggered a bone I'm presently picking over. Old-guard corporations that hire the legally-liable kind of engineer seemed to have taken a much different approach if the stories I've been told by a retired mechanical engineer who worked for Chrysler are true. A completely irrational approach. They hired people based on their potential and made them into the engineers they needed. The copy on the announcement sounds like this game will quantify everything about the performance of a participant in the game in order to sell them to a curated list of potential employers. What about this system incentives employers to invest in the career development of these people and strengthens our collective bargaining power as the people who build this stuff? To be more constructive I might suggest turning down the hyperbole and use fewer adjectives. Keep the pitch to employers for employers. Don't be patronizing to inexperienced developers: inspecting the assembly output of a compiler is not elite and not difficult to explain to someone given the right context and framing. I understand your game is about competition but the "winner/failure" schism it can create is a big turn off for a lot of otherwise intelligent, creative, and capable people. It doesn't have to be about being, "the best," in order to be fun and rewarding.