Something I tell my software students a lot when they’re looking for jobs is to remember that a shockingly large number of job descriptions are written by people in HR who have next to zero understanding of the industry, the specific team, or the business need.
All they’ve got to work with is fragments they’ve heard without comprehension, coming to them through a terrible game of corporate telephone.
@inthehands I have bad news for you and your students: the #job-posting pool is full of shallow #recruiters that go far below the already low bar set by the worst #HR departments.
And company #hiring managers turn to these outfits because they don’t have firsthand knowledge about how shitty they are, but they do know that about their own HR.
🏝️ US Tech Cannot Comprehend the Digital Nomad Way of Life - The New Stack
「 digital nomads are NOT “working” in another country, they’re “visiting” another country while “remote working”. Not using the words “visiting” or “remote” when conducting legal inquiries is often the difference between legal or illegal 」
👻 Job boards are still rife with 'ghost jobs'. What's the point? - BBC
「 More than 40% of hiring managers said they list jobs they aren't actively trying to fill to give the impression that the company is growing. A similar share said the job listings are made to motivate employees, while 34% said the jobs are posted to placate overworked staff who may be hoping for additional help to be brought on 」
We’re back with a session on planets around white dwarfs 🪐
Ryan MacDonald reminds us that in a very long time this will be the fate of our sun too. Jupiter and Saturn will probably fine but closer in… nah likely not.
This is basically what we can test by looking at white dwarf planetary systems. Killing planets in this way means there are polluted white dwarfs with planetary material in their stellar atmosphere. But for the ones that survive we can do a study of what could be.
For the last talk of today, we’ve got Tim Cunningham on accreted planetary material determined from #xray observations.
Tim starts with the #exoplanet#HR diagram and points out polluted white dwarfs. Roughly 25-50% of the WD we know show metal pollution. This is expected to be happening when the star dies and kills its planetary system + then accretes the planetary material.
The accretion rates depend on the atmospheric models of WDs. #ExSSV
#AI#GenerativeAI#OpenAI#ChatGPT#RacialBias#HR: "Lately, Tatiana Becker has been flooded with work. As the founder of the boutique US firm NIAH Recruiting, she spends her days sifting through hundreds of resumes, hoping to fill dozens of roles at companies that have hired her to find matching employees.
Companies tend to hire the most at the start of the year, mainly because of hiring budgets that have been set and go into effect in the first quarter. “Everybody came back to work, and it’s been kind of insane,” Becker said in a recent interview. In her professional groups and in forums for human resources and recruiting, everyone is buzzing about the same thing: using new artificial intelligence tools to ease the workload.
In the race to embrace artificial intelligence, some businesses are using a new crop of generative AI products that can help screen and rank candidates for jobs — and some think these tools can even evaluate candidates more fairly than humans. But a Bloomberg analysis found that the best-known generative AI tool systematically produces biases that disadvantage groups based on their names." https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-openai-gpt-hiring-racial-discrimination/
Happy Birthday to Paul D. Hudson aka H.R. (Human Rights), British-American lead singer of the American hardcore punk band Bad Brains, born on this day in 1956, Liverpool, England
"Man muss davon ausgehen, dass es in der #ARD-Programmdirektion Leute gibt, die die Dimension der Proteste nicht einschätzen können oder wollen. Anders scheint das beim #HR zu sein, der am Montag um 20.15 Uhr bei "Hessenschau Extra" 25 Minuten zeigte, "warum die #Hessen jetzt auf die Straße gehen".
... , war das Regionalfernsehen, wie es sein soll. Akteure und Betroffene, vor allem in kleineren Orten, wurden in den Mittelpunkt gestellt. - @altpapier#NoAfDhttps://www.mdr.de/altpapier/das-altpapier-3516.html
#GigEconomy#GigWorkers#HR: "How, then, do gig workers react to being called heroes? Our research untangled some complex emotions around the “hero” label, with gig workers responding to it in unexpected ways. For businesses that want to cash in on the public’s worship of heroes, we found a risk of backlash.
Our recently published study examined how gig workers reacted to the sudden moralization of their jobs. We interviewed Instacart workers during the height of the pandemic, in mid-2020, and again six months later, after the hero narrative died down, for a total of 75 interviews. From those interviews, social media artifacts, and company materials, we determined these workers reacted in three different ways to the hero label — they became Skippers, Stallers, or Strugglers." https://hbr.org/2024/02/why-calling-your-workers-heroes-can-backfire
Want to know how the #US#military helped to undermine Americans' feeling that no health insurance/ruinous costs, zero paid vacation time, zero maternity leave are God given freedoms?
I worked in #HR at one of the outposts of the #empire. One of our jobs was to familiarize US mil and civilian supervisors with the labor laws of the host country.
The effects on 20-something junior US personnel from some backwater state were nothing but stunning.
#AI#HR#Algorithms: "If you’ve worried that candidate-screening algorithms could be standing between you and your dream job, reading Hilke Schellmann’s The Algorithm won’t ease your mind. The investigative reporter and NYU journalism professor’s new book demystifies how HR departments use automation software that not only propagate bias, but fail at the thing they claim to do: find the best candidate for the job.
Schellmann posed as a prospective job hunter to test some of this software, which ranges from résumé screeners and video-game-based tests to personality assessments that analyze facial expressions, vocal intonations, and social media behavior. One tool rated her as a high match for a job even though she spoke nonsense to it in German. A personality assessment algorithm gave her high marks for “steadiness” based on her Twitter use and a low rating based on her LinkedIn profile.
It’s enough to make you want to delete your LinkedIn account and embrace homesteading, but Schellmann has uplifting insights too. In an interview that has been edited for length and clarity, she suggested how society could rein in biased HR technology and offered practical tips for job seekers on how to beat the bots."
I always wonder if the people who write job postings realize that "fast-paced, dynamic environment" sounds like code for "chaotic, messy workplace with loads of pressure". I feel like some of them think it sounds cool, and so they put it in, even when the workplace actually has things under control. But I see it and I think, "Do I even want to apply there?" — and I'm sure I'm not the only one. #jobhunt
"Fun work environment" <- Our CEO or loves talking at the staff during our monthly in-office afternoon tea. You better have a damned good excuse not to attend the "fun"!
"Tasks include report writing" <- The CEO is too dumb to find the sales figures in our CRM system. You'll need to regularly, manually copy and paste them into a pretty PowerPoint slide deck that he'll probably never look at.
"Multitasking" <- We'll make you do the work of three people.
"Fast-paced" "tight deadlines" <- We overload you with tasks with unreasonable deadlines. There's no way you can get this project completed and signed off by everyone before the end of the week. We'll expect you to have it done by the end of the hour.
"Managing offsite teams" <- We outsourced our business processes overseas. You'll have to clean up the mess.
"Staying on top of market trends" <- Our CEO looks at the ways other companies in our industry enshittify their products or gouge their customers and says "let's do that too"!
"Agile work environment" <- You'll be micromanaged using daily standup meetings, JIRA, and kanban boards.
"Engaging with consultants" <- The CEO is being paid a five-figure salary to play Solitaire on his PC. Actual management decisions have been outsourced to KPMG. You have to deal with them.
"Some manual data entry" <- All the data is already in our core business systems. Unfortunately, management decided it was too expensive to pay for a Zappier integration to move it into our e-commerce platform, or for enough IT staff to set it up. So you'll need to input it manually, or else everything breaks. We'll hold you personally accountable for any errors.
"Supporting legacy applications" <- Our critical core business systems were originally written for a VAX machine and a Z80 system running CP/M. The people who wrote them are long dead. There's 40 years of cruft code. None of it was documented. They somehow sort of interface with the obsolete SAP and Oracle systems we picked up through a long-forgotten merger.
Data integration? Well, Anne from admin uses a Visual Basic front end to manually download a spreadsheet, which she then uploads into a Salesforce system that some of our departments switched over to during a failed IT transformation project 10 years ago.
Oh, and some of our backups are on Bernoulli disks in the cupboard. If by chance you see a working OS/2 machine pop up on eBay, make sure you bid for it.
Oh, and if there's any downtime, your job's on the line.
I'm increasingly glad I ended up sticking with perl professionally. Yes, it's not popular. But I'm doing real work on real systems, with no crypto or AI nonsense anywhere in sight. And it's not super easy to hire perl experts these days, so the salaries have gone up. It was a tough decision with some false starts exploring options, but in the end sticking with the language I genuinely enjoy is paying off.
@perigrin@uncanny_kate This goes further up the #career stack. A lot of #recruiters are obvious commodity cogs in the #HR machine. Bottom-feeders. Avoid them too, because they’ll just waste your time and energy winding you up to pursue here-today-gone-tomorrow #jobs.
I’m a lifelong power wheelchair user who lives in the Cincinnati, Ohio area, where there are only two vendors who specialize in complex custom wheelchairs for patients like me: Care Medical – a local independent vendor, and Numotion – a large national vendor. Both vendors are in network with Anthem, but only Numotion is in network with UnitedHealthcare. I would like to share in detail what a negative impact this change in health insurance has had on me and my healthcare.
When my employer offered health insurance through Anthem years ago, I used Care Medical for wheelchair services and repairs were always completed promptly. This has not been the case with UnitedHealthcare and Numotion. Back in early October I started the process to get seating adjustments on my wheelchair and replace a motor that was starting to fail. My Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (PM & R) doctor referred me to a wheelchair seating clinic, who arranged for a Numotion Assistive Technology Professional (ATP) to participate in a seating evaluation with one of the clinic’s Occupational Therapists (OT) on October 3rd. During that appointment they took notes and collectively decided what changes and parts were necessary for the proper fit and function of my wheelchair.
On October 30th I received an automated email from Numotion stating that they were still waiting for documentation from my clinician. This indicated to me that the repair order had not been fully submitted nearly a month after my seating evaluation. I immediately contacted the OT to ensure all paperwork was in order. I received another automated email from Numotion about missing documentation on November 9th. I discovered that Numotion had requested medical documentation from my primary care doctor, instead of the specialist who had referred me for the evaluation. Numotion received the parts in late November, and the service appointment is today – nearly three months after my evaluation appointment. When I tried calling Numotion’s local phone number to let the repair shop know that my mom would be a little late dropping off my chair, I was routed to a call center. The agent told me she would send a note after she tried to call the local repair shop and didn’t get an answer. When I asked for a direct number for the repair shop, she said there isn't one. When my mom arrived, she asked for a local phone number, and they confirmed that they do not have one.
I keep an old wheelchair around in case my current wheelchair needs repairs. It doesn’t fit me as well as my current chair, and I worry about how long it will last, but it works for now in a pinch. Many do not have that luxury and would have no choice but to wait for months without a functioning wheelchair. Care Medical employees have told me that they have tried to get in network with UnitedHealthcare for years without success. This situation has left me to rethink what I and others with disabilities should evaluate when considering an employer.
I realized something today. I think HR departments exist to pretend to offer the same protections to employees as a union would. That is, HR's job is to give the impression you don't need a union while of course not providing the actual protections of one.