Monica

hiring dark pattern

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 21:51:32 GMT

We're hiring, so I've had recent occasion to see a hiring "dark pattern". I don't know how widespread this is outside of the tech industry, but I see it a lot in tech and it needs to stop.

The pattern: asking for "number of years of experience in (insert tool, language, or skill here)".

Jobs are multi-faceted. I'm seeing people who don't know how to choose a number, and just as I see the ones that overshot, I know there must be ones who undershot and were filtered out. I saw a resume recently from someone with a broad role, who listed "N years experience" in something where N was the length of the job, even though the job involved many other things and wasn't primarily about that skill. That's "N years of experience" in the same way that I have "20 years of Java experience". Spoiler alert: I don't.

Recruiters and hiring managers put people in this position: we have this checklist, tell us how many years of each, and we need a number not an explanation. Maybe we're making you fill out a web form and you can't even add a comment or ask questions. In the absence of guidance about primary and secondary skills, people will apply different weighting factors. It's a mess.

I often don't know how to answer either. In the last four years I've gained four years of tech-writing experience, the focus of my job, and four years of git experience, meaning I have all the basics and can untangle a merge conflict (but I've never rebased successfully). Those "four"s don't mean the same thing; I don't spend all day using git. Tech writing is fundamental to my role and I'd have no qualms about fully claiming those four years, but for git I would want to say that I've used it as part of my job for four years. That's different. I don't have the same knowledge that an infrastructure person whose job revolves around maintaining git servers and stuff for the same amount of time has. "How many years of experience?" questions don't allow for that nuance.

People who are trying to be thoughtful and honest run the risk of getting filtered out, and people who count "everything" get filtered in. I wonder how the success rate (meaning "acceptable hire", since you'll never know if you got the "best hire") of this exercise compares to recruiters just not filtering on skill-specific numbers at all (just general experience) and having the hiring team evaluate more people. I'm fortunate enough to be sufficiently "long in the tooth" that I don't need to worry about this gatekeeping -- either you're looking for a top-notch tech writer with all that implies, or you aren't -- but this hurts early-career people where the difference between "2" and "4" can make or break a deal.

As for the Java: I spent years documenting and helping to design Java APIs, wrote some examples, but haven't written anything deep and complicated. Someone with a year or two of full-time actual Java development experience beats me. Would the recruiter be able to tell?

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2020

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 02:31:16 GMT

Somebody on Twitter asked:

What did you learn in 2020 (besides how to make bread)?

I responded there:

To grow food in pots.

To cut men's hair.

To cook more new things.

That my cat loves me being home all the time.

More about community-building.

How to set up a nonprofit foundation.

To cut people w/no morals or human decency out of my life.

And yes, sourdough.

I was up against a character limit there, but I'm not here.

Back at the beginning of the pandemic, when staying at home was just starting to happen, I remember somebody asking: what will you do with this gift of time? I've had that in mind for most of the year. I miss seeing my coworkers, but I gained close to an hour back each work day in not commuting, and I gained a lot of flexibility. My team tries to work mostly normal hours for the sake of collaboration, but everybody recognizes that people have other demands on their attention too. The parents trying to work while their kids are at home attending school via Zoom gave me the opportunity to attend that mid-day (virtual) class or non-work meeting, and the flexibility to tend to things around the house while working. As one small example, sourdough -- it's a two-day process that doesn't require a lot of attention at any one time, but requires availability that wouldn't have been possible were I going to the office every day. Before this year, bread came from a store/bakery or out of a bread machine, only.

Both of us working from home is sometimes frustrating when one or the other of us has meetings, but we're also spending more time together throughout the day and that's very nice. We eat lunch together, every day, in addition to dinner. Sure, this means I'm not making things that I like but he doesn't (that I would have normally made for lunches at the office), but on the other hand, because I'm not limited to things that pack well, we're eating better, I think. Not always healthy, but less crap, more stuff made from scratch. I even grew some of it, which was new to me.

I only cut his hair the once. He held off for a long time back in the spring, thinking it would be possible to see a barber soon, but soon kept moving. He did a lot of it himself; I did the parts he couldn't see or reach. Men's hair technology sure is different from women's.

At the beginning of the year the evil deeds from people who should know better at Stack Exchange were still doing a lot of damage. It wasn't just what they did to me; they did some other nasty, bone-headed things early in 2020 and then throughout the year. A couple of the employees they drove out shared some things publicly after. (Pro tip: don't fire someone who knows about your dirty laundry without securing an NDA.) The folks there are majorly screwed up, and a couple of people I once thought decent folks in bad situations have shown themselves to be lacking in ethics and human decency. I'm well to be rid of their lies and malice.

Frustrating as it was to lose some good communities there, I've spent this year working to build the next generation at Codidact, and I'm very happy with where we are. We're building an open-source platform for Q&A and so much more, learning from those who have come before and building things that serve communities better. While our all-volunteer team is small and that limits us sometimes, we're flexible and responsive and working with our communities, and that shows. We have about a dozen communities up and running on our network now (including Judaism, yay! with some folks from Mi Yodeya), with more to come. Some of them are doing some novel things that weren't possible Somewhere Else. I'm the Community Lead, and while I had a fair bit of experience as a moderator on communities with varying characteristics, this role has allowed me to stretch and learn even more. It turns out this role makes me the most logical person to do "product management" and bug/feature prioritization and a fair bit of QA, too. Cool!

I'm now a board member; The Codidact Foundation was incorporated in November as a non-profit (I just got the confirmation letter from Companies House this week) and we'll now seek charity status. As soon as we can get a bank in pandemic times to let us open an account we'll be able to take donations and presumably get ourselves some better servers. This is all very exciting for me, and it's neat to be working with a worldwide team with quite a mix of backgrounds. Our major contributors include students and software developers and an ambulance dispatcher and a soldier and an accountant, among others.

Don't get me wrong; 2020 has been terrible in many ways. People close to me have died and I couldn't even be with or hug people, just be on Zoom. Friends and one family member are dealing with health challenges. The pandemic has greatly impeded my congregation (and so many others!). Nearly a year of not being able to socialize, go to restaurants, take in entertainment, hold conventions, attend Shabbat services, or do "normal life things" is wearing. Knowing that it's going to be at least many more months is sobering. (I'm going to call it now: I think Pennsic will be either cancelled again or severely hobbled and small.)

I'm glad to have the kind of job I can do from home; many people don't. And something I left off of that list on Twitter: I've learned how to work from home pretty effectively. I'd like some more human contact in three dimensions, but when (let's say "when", not "if") the pandemic is finally under some degree of control, I'll be able to get that from places other than work. I've learned more solidly that I could handle working for a company that's all-remote -- I suspected as much when I applied for such a position a few years back, but now I've seen it. And my employer has learned that remote works too; finally most of our engineering positions are now listed as "anywhere" instead of just the two cities in which we have engineering teams.

On the larger scale, 2020 has been a year of plague and violence and tyranny and unrest and hate and division. In the much smaller scale here at Chez Cellio, there has been good along with the bad, and I'm thankful for them.

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"Blah blah blah."

Tue, 08 Dec 2020 16:21:52 GMT

Today's bit of randomness:

When I was a young programmer I worked for an AI company on a text-categorization project -- for a commercial client, all hush-hush for a while to preserve their competitive advantage and such, apparently really innovative (didn't realize then; I was just writing code to solve a problem, y'know?). Then somebody accidentally published the training dataset. And apparently it's gotten quite a lot of use in the research community, which I was completely unaware of, having never really been that kind of researcher.

For 30+ years there's been a mystery in that dataset that people have noticed, commented on, and apparently never tried to track down...until now. This podcaster got in touch with me and some others last week, and here's the result: Underunderstood: The Case of the Blah Blah Blahs. (36 minutes; no transcript yet but it looks like they're planning one.)

It was neat to hear this trip down memory lane, and also to hear other parts of the story I'd never known about before, including the discussion from a researcher from the "other side" of one of the big arguments in AI in the 80s.

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our legacies are not always what we think they will be

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 03:20:10 GMT

In the mid-80s, in my first full-time position after college, I worked for a now-defunct software company doing artificial intelligence, specifically natural-language processing. The most significant project I worked on while there was a text categorization system. I was the tech lead (this was 1987ish). The client was Reuters, who at the time had literal rooms full of people whose job was to skim news stories coming over the wire, attach categories to them, and send them back out quickly. Our job was to automate that -- or, more realistically, to automate the parts that machines could do and send a much smaller set of "don't know" cases to humans. I'm writing this from memory; it's been more than 30 years and details are fuzzy.

I left that company and went on to do other things. I was vaguely aware that, at some point, the corpus of news stories we used for training data had been released publicly, by agreement between Reuters and my then-employer. I wasn't a researcher, wasn't in the NLP business any more, and lost touch. Technology moves on, and I figured our little project had long since faded into obscurity.

Tonight I got email with a question about that data set. My name is in the README file as one of the original compilers, and somebody tracked me down.

Somebody still cares about that data set.

I Googled it. Our data set was popular for close to a decade, during which time people improved the formatting (SGML, baby!) and cleaned up some other things. It spawned a child -- the original either had, or had acquired, some duplicate entries, and the new one removed them. (The question I got was actually about the child data set.) And now I'm curious about the question I was asked too, because I either don't know or don't remember how it got that way.

Neat!

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another misguided recruiter

Thu, 15 Mar 2018 14:51:21 GMT

Like many others, I get lots of unsolicited email from recruiters who claim to have read my LinkedIn profile and have a great opportunity for me. They're almost always wrong about both. But I usually skim the tech-writing ones when they arrive, to (maybe) learn a little about the state of the field.

The latest one, about a "fast-paced innovative team", started off generic, as most of them do. (Hint to recruiters: if you want me to respond, give me a reason to. I'm not actively looking; you have to show me something interesting.) But the list of responsibilities included "work with architecture and UX teams to understand how best to organize and present the documentation" -- hey, they have a UX team! That's unusual (in a positive way). I kept reading.

Then I got to the requirements, which included:

Experience with Cobol
Strong working knowledge of Microsoft Office

Ha ha, no.

Also, it's in New Jersey and the ad doesn't say anything about remote employees. Bzzt.

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a few short takes

Mon, 08 May 2017 01:17:15 GMT

A friend of ours organized a private showing of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 for 60 or so of us this morning. (Apparently if you show up with enough people and don't take away a prime showing time, some theatres will actually do this. Our showing was at 10:30AM.) We haven't seen the first movie, but we wanted to go for the social aspect at least. Reading the plot synopsis of the first one on Wikipedia was sufficient to be able to follow this one. We probably missed some in-jokes, based on when people were laughing when we weren't, but that's ok. Groot (Groot II? Groot Jr?) was very entertaining, and they had some fun schtick with him in the credits. (Do watch the closing credits.)

Instead of tickets we were given buttons, each of which had one of the characters. I didn't know these characters in advance, so I traded my "blue guy" for a "cute raccoon". My comics-reading friends tolerate me anyway. :-)

In completely other news... one of those "Jewish things" you might occasionally hear about is pidyon haben, the redemption of the firstborn. The idea is that firstborn sons "should" serve in the temple, but God instead assigned that duty to the tribe of Levi. Nonetheless, if a woman's first-born child is a male, the father needs to "redeem" the child by paying a kohein (a priest, a subset of Levi) a few silver coins. There's a ritual for it, which I have never seen.

The torah commands this not just for sons but also for certain first-born livestock. I remember, back when I first learned about this, asking a friend who is a kohein, "so, in principle if I have livestock I can make you take my first-born goat instead of paying you for it?". Funny, but he was reluctant to give me his shipping address after that. But anyway, this is a real thing (pidyon peter chamor), but most of us don't have livestock and never see it. But it's a mitzvah. So I learned today that a local organization has purchased three pregnant donkeys with the specific goal of performing this mitzvah. Two have already given birth to female offspring (and this only applies to males), but there's still one more chance. This sounds neat. (I do not know if the baby donkey is required to be present for the transaction or if it stays on the farm.)

Readers who use source-control systems might be interested in this article about Git usability. The graph of the Git learning curve is spot-on. This is timely for me, as I am in charge of migrating our documentation group from SVN to Git and, in the process, establishing a sane branching model.

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questions for the interviewer (tech writing)

Thu, 04 May 2017 02:01:05 GMT

Somebody on a tech-writing mailing list just asked what kinds of questions we tend to ask interviewers when we're interviewing for jobs. The person had already mentioned, specifically for hardware-related jobs:

Do you test the documentation? How?
How does legal review work (for things like liability)?
Availability of subject-matter experts for reviews?

Here's what I wrote in response:

My experience is in software, which might be different from hardware, but I always want to know:

How early and in what way are writers involved in development? Do writers participate in functional and design reviews? Do we have input into the user interface? Are we part of the team, or do we come in later, take what they've built, and document it?

Can I use the product? As much as I want?

What processes do both the dev and doc teams follow? (If they say "agile" there are more questions.) How is doc reviewed and by whom?

(How) do we make doc improvements that aren't directly tied to new features or bugs? (For example: larger reorganizations, improving indexing, adding runnable examples, tools improvements.)

(How) do you use source control for documentation?

That's off the top of my head, without digging out my notes from my last round of interviews.

So that's not a complete list either, but these are the kinds of things I tend to be thinking about. (I also try to find out if I have access to the source code, but since he was asking about hardware I didn't bring that up.)

I also want to know where the documentation group is placed, organizationally speaking, but I usually learn that indirectly.

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