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Electronics companies should stop killing themselves

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SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: tggzzz on July 08, 2023, 07:02:52 am ---
--- Quote from: coppice on July 08, 2023, 12:04:53 am ---When sifting through piles of CVs it amazes me how many people are deeply impressed by CVs showing a long string of jobs. When you point out this means the candidate offers poor stability they have to agree, but with great reluctance.

--- End quote ---

Do people really think that? Twits.

When I started it was a common belief that you could reasonably leave a job within 1 month or after 2 years. In between was an orange flag worth investigating.

Nowadays we have the wretched "gig economy" and "hire-and-fire".

It is reasonable for consultants to have had 40 clients, but not employees to have had 40 employers.

--- End quote ---

Yeah. There's a matter of proportion though.

Many recruiters make generalizations, and like all generalizations, these are flawed. But I've certainly seen what coppice described.
- For people having had only one or a couple employers: recruiters may see this as a sign of someone inflexible, stuck to a routine, possibly not looking for challenges, in turn possibly hard to manage. And in a world where staying in the same job your whole life is now an oddity, may be seen as a sign that the candidate just had trouble finding another job.
- For people having had many jobs, sure on one hand it shows instability, but OTOH it shows that many other recruiters have chosen the candidate, so it gives social proof. Social proof is an important part of recruiting in general. On top of giving some social proof, it shows that the candidate may be more flexible and easier to get rid of if needed.

Of course none of this says if a candidate would be a good fit for a given job, but that's relatively common shit, especially for HR people, who care less about the technical aspects and more about how easy a given person will be to handle.


coppice:

--- Quote from: tggzzz on July 08, 2023, 06:54:44 am ---
--- Quote from: coppice on July 08, 2023, 12:01:48 am ---
--- Quote from: tggzzz on June 27, 2023, 10:27:36 pm ---Treez/ocset/faringdon appears to be an excellent exemplar of something described by Isaac Asimov in 1957. His novella "Profession" is still worth speedreading.
https://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html

The points in that resonated with me when I was a schoolkid, and significantly and positively benefited my career and outlook on life.

--- End quote ---
Are you sure you read that story? You seem to keep referencing it in contexts where it doesn't fit. The whole point of that story is the vast majority of people are incapable of doing anything really interesting, and the small number of truly creative are hard to recognise. There is nothing the vast majority of people can do about their lot in life. Only the small number of truly creative people can do anything about their lot in life, and really need to, as they can so easily be screwed by the clueless.

--- End quote ---

Incorrect.

For a start, the protagonists did recognise the truly creative George - because they were specifically looking for that. George didn't recognise it in himself, but that is a completely different issue.

More importantly, the "whole point", ahem, is that there is a difference between those whose
* aspirations/abilities are limited to working on specific examples of existing equipment,
* aspirations/abilities transcend that to being able to apply general principles to new conditionsIn other words, the difference between production/military training and engineering.

The key section is about 70% of the way through

--- Quote ---... said Trevelyan. “... They've been saying for weeks that the Beeman machine would be used. All the wise money was on Beeman machines. The damned Education tapes they ran through me were for Henslers and who uses Henslers?
...
“Don’t be a fool. They’ll tell me my brain was built for Henslers. Go argue. Everything went wrong. I was the only one who had to send out for a piece of equipment. Notice that?”
...
If it had been a Hensler, I would have known I was right. How could I match up then? The top winner was a San Franciscan. So were three of the next four. And the fifth guy was from Los Angeles. They get big-city Educational tapes. The best available. Beeman spectrographs and all. How do I compete with them? I came all the way out here just to get a chance at a Novian-sponsored Olympics in my classification and I might just as well have stayed home. I knew it, I tell you, and that settles it. Novia isn’t the only chunk of rock in space. Of all the damned –”
...
George said, “If you knew in advance that the Beemans were going to be used, couldn’t you have studied up on them?”

“They weren’t in my tapes, I tell you.”

“You could have read – books.”
...

--- End quote ---

Faringdon resembles Trevelyan, and seems to be incapable of thinking of being a George.

--- End quote ---
Most of the protagonists didn't recognise the creative people. They churned the handle in a system designed to automatically flag the creative for special treatment. The weird part of the story is the slow and clumsy way they do the final filtering, to ensure they have truly identified the creative. The poor suckers really go through hell feeling they have failed. Telling expectional people they are amazing every day is quite destructive, but this seems to swing to the opposite pole.

tggzzz:

--- Quote from: coppice on July 08, 2023, 11:32:26 pm ---
--- Quote from: tggzzz on July 08, 2023, 06:54:44 am ---
--- Quote from: coppice on July 08, 2023, 12:01:48 am ---
--- Quote from: tggzzz on June 27, 2023, 10:27:36 pm ---Treez/ocset/faringdon appears to be an excellent exemplar of something described by Isaac Asimov in 1957. His novella "Profession" is still worth speedreading.
https://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html

The points in that resonated with me when I was a schoolkid, and significantly and positively benefited my career and outlook on life.

--- End quote ---
Are you sure you read that story? You seem to keep referencing it in contexts where it doesn't fit. The whole point of that story is the vast majority of people are incapable of doing anything really interesting, and the small number of truly creative are hard to recognise. There is nothing the vast majority of people can do about their lot in life. Only the small number of truly creative people can do anything about their lot in life, and really need to, as they can so easily be screwed by the clueless.

--- End quote ---

Incorrect.

For a start, the protagonists did recognise the truly creative George - because they were specifically looking for that. George didn't recognise it in himself, but that is a completely different issue.

More importantly, the "whole point", ahem, is that there is a difference between those whose
* aspirations/abilities are limited to working on specific examples of existing equipment,
* aspirations/abilities transcend that to being able to apply general principles to new conditionsIn other words, the difference between production/military training and engineering.

The key section is about 70% of the way through

--- Quote ---... said Trevelyan. “... They've been saying for weeks that the Beeman machine would be used. All the wise money was on Beeman machines. The damned Education tapes they ran through me were for Henslers and who uses Henslers?
...
“Don’t be a fool. They’ll tell me my brain was built for Henslers. Go argue. Everything went wrong. I was the only one who had to send out for a piece of equipment. Notice that?”
...
If it had been a Hensler, I would have known I was right. How could I match up then? The top winner was a San Franciscan. So were three of the next four. And the fifth guy was from Los Angeles. They get big-city Educational tapes. The best available. Beeman spectrographs and all. How do I compete with them? I came all the way out here just to get a chance at a Novian-sponsored Olympics in my classification and I might just as well have stayed home. I knew it, I tell you, and that settles it. Novia isn’t the only chunk of rock in space. Of all the damned –”
...
George said, “If you knew in advance that the Beemans were going to be used, couldn’t you have studied up on them?”

“They weren’t in my tapes, I tell you.”

“You could have read – books.”
...

--- End quote ---

Faringdon resembles Trevelyan, and seems to be incapable of thinking of being a George.

--- End quote ---
Most of the protagonists didn't recognise the creative people. They churned the handle in a system designed to automatically flag the creative for special treatment.

--- End quote ---

In other words that is a reasonable reflection of reality :(


--- Quote ---The weird part of the story is the slow and clumsy way they do the final filtering, to ensure they have truly identified the creative. The poor suckers really go through hell feeling they have failed. Telling expectional people they are amazing every day is quite destructive, but this seems to swing to the opposite pole.

--- End quote ---

It is a story, a work of fiction.

Asimov set up the situation to enable him to write a story; don't read more into it than that!

Asimov did the same with his three laws of robotics: they are set up as a means of enabling his Susan Calvin stories.

coppice:

--- Quote from: tggzzz on July 08, 2023, 06:54:44 am ---More importantly, the "whole point", ahem, is that there is a difference between those whose
* aspirations/abilities are limited to working on specific examples of existing equipment,
* aspirations/abilities transcend that to being able to apply general principles to new conditionsIn other words, the difference between production/military training and engineering.

--- End quote ---
If you are from the UK, and old enough to have been through the grammar school system, this really resonates. In the 30s and 40s people on the left realised the way to expand opportunity for smart working class kids was to enhance an existing system which developed their inherent creativity. They took older grammar schools, and removed the economic impediments to poorer kids attending them. Then some idiot looked at schools in the US, which were explicitly modelled on a Prussian system for raising mindless military drones. Except in the US is was to produce mindless industrial drones. They thought this was fantastic, for its one size fits all egalitarian style. So the pushed, and got a lot of buy in from the wealthy. They were pissed off that grammar school kids were competing too well with their expensively educated public school offspring. This new idea for schooling the plebs was a perfect response. So, in the late 19060s a broad range of people converted the UK education system to the useless mess it is today. In the end, it has also hurt the public schools. They need to target the same GCSE and A level public exams as the state schools, and these exams have been massively watered down. So, they don't need to push the kids very much. Now, nobody in the UK gets a good education.

tggzzz:

--- Quote from: coppice on July 09, 2023, 07:28:15 pm ---
--- Quote from: tggzzz on July 08, 2023, 06:54:44 am ---More importantly, the "whole point", ahem, is that there is a difference between those whose
* aspirations/abilities are limited to working on specific examples of existing equipment,
* aspirations/abilities transcend that to being able to apply general principles to new conditionsIn other words, the difference between production/military training and engineering.

--- End quote ---
If you are from the UK, and old enough to have been through the grammar school system, this really resonates. In the 30s and 40s people on the left realised the way to expand opportunity for smart working class kids was to enhance an existing system which developed their inherent creativity. They took older grammar schools, and removed the economic impediments to poorer kids attending them. Then some idiot looked at schools in the US, which were explicitly modelled on a Prussian system for raising mindless military drones. Except in the US is was to produce mindless industrial drones. They thought this was fantastic, for its one size fits all egalitarian style. So the pushed, and got a lot of buy in from the wealthy. They were pissed off that grammar school kids were competing too well with their expensively educated public school offspring. This new idea for schooling the plebs was a perfect response. So, in the late 19060s a broad range of people converted the UK education system to the useless mess it is today. In the end, it has also hurt the public schools. They need to target the same GCSE and A level public exams as the state schools, and these exams have been massively watered down. So, they don't need to push the kids very much. Now, nobody in the UK gets a good education.

--- End quote ---

My local rather good grammar school converted after I left.

I'm not sure I buy into those "conspiracies", but they aren't grossly and obviously flawed.

The 60s swept away many things, many for good reasons. Some of the things introduced were grossly flawed, e.g. the Initial Teaching Alphabet.

Even as a kid I thought it nuts to teach kids to read using the ITA, and then re-teach them to use the normal alphabet that they see everywhere. I never had to use the ITA, and would have ignored it anyway since I was reading well before I went to school. One of my first memories (probably <4yo) is asking my father to teach me to read, and he did. Managed the first "Janet and John" book, and gave up on the second after a few pages since it was so damn boring and repetitive. Just went straight on to road/shop signs, books, and The Guardian :)

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