I'd recommend reading this and the ensuing comment thread, including Shirky's (to my ears less than convincing) response.
One of the better points made by a commenter there:
The problem with your disruption argument here is still, to my mind, that Napster delivered music, and YouTube delivered video. MOOC's and whatever else might deliver education, but that's not what the demand is for. Most of the demand that public universities are filling less and less well, and that Elite institutions continue to deliver effectively if at increasing prices is demand for an avenue to socio-economic prosperity.
I'm extremely skeptical. And you know, it's always supposed to be a nice cost-saving measure for the state school. For some reason, the elite private schools and colleges aren't thinking that fantastic lectures with roaming TAs to facilitate the learning experience are the best option for improving learning in the classroom. And a pass rate of a little less than 20%? Even better! They can pay to take the course again and again.
Here some of our math courses are run like this. Teach yourself in a lab (watch videos and do assignments) with roaming TAs to help you keep moving forward. The TAs are not instructors. Students hate it; they end up preferring my logic class because there's at least a professor, and I'm a lot more responsive than a video lecture.
The magic of the web will disrupt the fuck out of everything. Again. Or not.
Learning styles differ, and for some learning from web lectures is no doubt the optimum or close to it. Personally I learn best in close interaction with other students. The best learning I've had has been arguing in front of a whiteboard with other people just barely coming to grips with the material.
I suppose I should read the essay now.
1: No, that will work great. Elite wealthy people will send their children to the real schools, and those kids won't have to compete with state school grads, because that will have been gutted.
Meanwhile, they try to answer some new questions, questions that the traditional academy--me and my people--often don't even recognize as legitimate, like "How do we spin up 10,000 competent programmers a year, all over the world, at a cost too cheap to meter?"
Again this looks at education through the very narrow and frankly bizarre lens of the programming industry, possibly the only industry in the entire world where employers can't find enough workers despite paying high wages. Again we have warped discourse resulting from the fact that programmers form the infrastructure of the internet, just like how everywhere on the internet there are people who think the average person with a job has some sort of bargaining power with respect to their employer.
2 sounds like it's conflating the "inverted classroom" model, which can (hypothetically) be done well, with the online courses with roaming TAs thing.
That said, I share your skepticism and assume all this will inevitably screw over students.
I've had to think about this a lot in recent months, and I have two very different predictions. The first is that things like, oh say, just for a random example, EdX will create a winner-take-all system, where lectures are given by professors from elite schools and other schools no longer hire professors at all, just adjunct graders, but even the grading might be automated. Efficiency! The second is that we always hope/ fear that some new technology is going to change everything, but we've already had lectures on tape and televised courses and the universities have largely remained the same. Indeed, hundreds of year after the printing press was invented, the lecture itself is still going strong.
It's basically the same except that the video/in-class homework is housed locally and not online. Your roaming TA model would look about the same.
I suspect, however, it's not going to work in the long run. The question is how much of the state university system they destroy before then. This came up in the last legislative section: fire all tenure-track faculty who aren't at research schools, replace us with video lectures from Stanford and Harvard, and hire master's students from the U to grade the papers.
4 gets it right. The end result will be creating cheap tech workers and insulating the elite from everyone else.
They can pay to take the course again and again.
The way Udacity and others are looking at accreditation is to handle things with exams - courses are free but you pay to take a proctored exam which constitutes the whole grade for the course. Students can retake the course an arbitrary number of times until they feel they have mastered the material.
One weakness (easily fixed) of the Udacity courses I'm taking is a lack of additional practice problems and examples. That's really the key to gaining and measuring mastery of the material, especially if you feel you have to make multiple passes over the same topic in order to really get it.
8: Wonderful! My first prediction is coming true.
7.last is a good point. Shirky's background is in print media. Print media lost their source of funding due to the internet. That change, rather than efficiencies or new audiences, is central.
I don't see the same financial change for Universities. I don't care for Shirky much, talks rather than writes.
Well, this thread seems to be going well. Read some recent Krugman columns, who has snapped just a little to what is going on and has been going on for 30+ years now. The world has become a system to funnel productivity gains and profits to the rich. And there is nothing else.
Everything and anything that does not hurt the elite, top 10% 1% .01%, helps the elite and hurts the 99%. You cannot directly help the masses*, because the rentiers will skim any improvements or increase in well-being.
Social reproduction and social capital have become profit centers. Your brain and body are now capital. Everything is capital, and labor qua labor, labor-for-itself, has been subsumed.
*You can I suppose still help individuals or small groups or geographical area, but this will be from a fixed and diminishing pool of resources, is zero-sum, and can only be done at the expense of some other part of the 99%. All net improvements go to rents.
Burn it down and take their stuff.
The second is that we always hope/ fear that some new technology is going to change everything, but we've already had lectures on tape and televised courses and the universities have largely remained the same. Indeed, hundreds of year after the printing press was invented, the lecture itself is still going strong.
This is an argument that I've seen Tim Burke make, and is an important one -- finding something to disrupt the current university model is really difficult; if it were easy it would have happened already.
That said, I think considering two of Shirky's analogies, Napster and open source projects, the second is a better way to think about the process. This isn't a case where simply making lectures available online will tap into massive demand. It might be true (and I don't know) that the process requires (a) cheap bandwidth, (b) a large community of technical people working on open source components to deliver online education (c) rapid technical improvement.
It's a plausible story, though I'm personally somewhat skeptical.
I endorse the recommendation to read the link in 1.
12: I suspect that MOOCs will wind up being very good for re-certifications and things like that, and that traditional universities will create more online courses that will be very similar to the traditional lecture model, and we'll get better at them.
In a lot of places, as one of the commenters notes, the university, even one so lowly such that people without jobs sneer at it, often serves as the cultural center for the larger community. Free public lectures, free outreach classes, theatrical, musical and sports performances, that kind of thing. Not to mention the jobs (for the highly educated and not highly educated.) Maybe this isn't worth preserving due to the cost, but there seem to me to be a lot of small and medium sized towns that would be worse off without the university in them.
For example, here is and example of Burke talking about MOOC
Let me give an example of the problem that's come to my attention in the past week. I'm singling out this company not because they are unique, but because they are an example of a common, recurrent pattern. Lore.com, formerly Coursekit, has started pushing hard for campus adoptions of their product, which is basically a course-management system with a sideline of asynchronous forums oriented towards campus life.
Forgive me my slightly douchebaggish irritation here. I honestly don't think the young folks who are trying to sell Lore really know how many times some of us have been approached since 1999 by companies with almost the same business model and the same strategies for making themselves look like more than they really are. But Lore has it even harder than some of the dot.com start-ups because this is a crowded space now filled with not just long-standing course-management systems but a bunch of big, new MOOC companies like Coursera.
(I'm looking at the thread linked in 1 now.)
@15
At least when last I looked, the quality of the discussion was unusually high for IHE. The comments at that place are usually a cesspit.
The link in 1 totally lost me at the end. Technology is clearly going to replace doctors as we know them.
I hereby volunteer: the next pundit who talks about how MOOCs are going to save higher education some big bucks needs to meet me for drinks at the establishment of his or her choosing, I'll foot the bill, and in return I just ask for the chance to politely and rationally CHEW THEIR FUCKING EARS OFF. And then if they really want they can write an op-ed the next week and pretend they thought of everything I said by themselves and I'll never let on otherwise.
"the very narrow and frankly bizarre lens of the programming industry, possibly the only industry in the entire world where employers can't find enough workers despite paying high wages."
In other words, we need more programmers (and math literate people in general). Which means we need more efficient ways to teach people useful stuff, which is the role Udacity is trying to fill. Our current educational system overproduces some types of education and underproduces others. Online education will let people choose exactly which classes are worth paying for, the same way as Napster let people choose exactly which songs are and are not worth paying for, is the point of the music analogy.
Can anyone recommend a good cheap online course for web programming?
19: I don't know if technology will replace doctors but I took that last bit as an attempt at a rhetorical flourish that fell flat.
replace us with video lectures from Stanford and Harvard
After all, Stanford and Harvard professors are hired based on their teaching skills, right?
From the comments in 1:
No, really, legally Udacity's primary obligation is to its investors. That is the actual rule under corporate law in the United States (the standard set by Delaware): the maximization of shareholder value, as measured by the stock price on a day-to-day basis (or at the IPO). In practice, this usually means the maximization of payout to senior management through the maximization of apparent shareholder value, but, even assuming no gaming of the system, the actual rule is as I have stated. You cannot understand anything about U.S. corporate behavior until you understand this.
I've been reading The Myth Of Shareholder Value, after it was recommended here, and I am glad that I've done so. It isn't particularly well written, but it's nice to have a very straightforward explanation for why the quoted comment is, simply, factually wrong.
24: Yes, of course. It is not the case that being stellar at teaching tends to be taken as shorthand for "not that great a researcher." No, no, they value teaching.
23: I took it as a sign that the author is the type of person who still thinks sacrifice bunting is a good idea.
I wonder the same thing as 8. Online education will turn out to be inferior, but since the state universities are at the mercy of state legislatures, who can be bought by lobbyists, it might not matter.
5 is also an important point. Nothing is like programming. If you want to learn how to communicate with a computer, it's not surprising that communicating with a computer is a good way to do it.
I took a foreign language course last year, and I very deliberately signed up for an in-person course rather than buying Rosetta Stone or something. I knew I would take the course much more seriously if there was an actual authority figure that I would be embarrassed to disappoint by showing up unprepared.
Having seen online courses in various guises over the last ~10 years, my impression is that they are most likely to succeed in areas that fall under the general heading of "continuing professional education".
They generally do very poorly at undergraduate education. Dropout/fail rates are at levels that would never be tolerated in a traditionally taught course.
28: Right now, online education is inferior to and vastly cheaper than the real-life version (like MP3s). As time goes on, it'll become less inferior and ultimately not inferior at all, but still vastly cheaper. This process will be accelerated by online education's open-source nature.
I knew I would take the course much more seriously if there was an actual authority figure that I would be embarrassed to disappoint by showing up unprepared.
To make a (banned) analogy to another favorite unfogged topic, this reminds me of my experience working one-on-one with a trainer at the gym. It's been helpful not only as a motivational tool, but because I needed to learn how to learn the material.
I was in decent shape, but I'd never spent much time in gyms before, and if I had been trying to work on my own, with prepared instructions, I wouldn't have had a sense of what to expect from the learning process, or how to judge progress.
If I had to guess, however, that's an area that online education could eventually be competent at (and which might separate the useful from the not useful providers). I can imagine an online course which placed explicit emphasis on meta-cognition skills, but I think it would look pretty different than most of what's out there.
29: And where it does work efficiently, it does so only for lower-division courses. Even at The School Sneered At By The Jobless In the Audience At My Talk, our upper division courses are relatively small (usually under 25) and taught by professors. Even if you got the dropout rate below 50%, I don't see how the MOOC model works for lab classes or writing intensive seminars where there isn't a large lecture component.
Let's be careful to distinguish between online education and MOOCs. I teach a class online. It's not a MOOC, although there are cost savings.
"I don't see how the MOOC model works for lab classes or writing intensive seminars where there isn't a large lecture component."
If it doesn't, that just means we'll see fewer lab classes and fewer writing intensive seminars without a large lecture component. (Although I don't see why writing advice couldn't be given just as easily online as in person, or why in principle labs couldn't be simulated online.) The basic point here is that the cost of college is growing and growing and eventually it'll be so high that most people will turn to something else.
If it can't be MOOCed it ain't worth teaching!
The basic point here is that the cost of college is growing and growing and eventually it'll be so high that most people will turn to something else.
That may be true, but something in your phrasing reminded me of this post.
... the seemingly singular decision not to rebuild New Orleans is exactly the mark of an empire in decline. It's structural, not singular at all. The abandonment of a great city to time and tide is indeed both symptom and mark of empire on its downhill slide;
Pretty much. With the addition that what can be MOOCed is not a fixed category.
If it can't be MOOCed it ain't worth teaching!
Pretty much.
Would it be more accurate to say, "If it can't be MOOCed it ain't worth requiring as a prerequisite for acquiring a generic credential"? There are lots of things which are worth knowing, required for certain situations, and not a prerequisite for credentials.
(not that I necessarily agree, just trying to see if I could find a less contentious phrasing.)
35: Stanford's lecturing professor is not going to provide online comments for 23,000 students. The problem isn't the online, the problem is that the MOOC model works by providing a lecture with no feedback, which doesn't work when one needs either feedback or something besides a lecture.
You can enroll at my school for $5000 per year. Not cheap, but not out of reach for someone putting herself through school.
or why in principle labs couldn't be simulated online
After all, porn sites have almost entirely replaced actual sex, right?
I'd be happy to see open, online classes reshape higher education, even if it means taking away many of the interesting parts of my job. I don't believe open online classes will change much of anything, though, because they are only good for one of the functions of universities: disseminating knowledge. They are terrible at the main function of universities: policing class boundaries and conferring status. The main purpose of Harvard is to select a group of students every year to be Harvard students, then let the students network with each other and ride a pipeline to the ruling class.
Stanford's lecturing professor is not going to provide online comments for 23,000 students.
That's the key. Online lectures are a step forward in content delivery, but content delivery was never the problem.
If you hire enough people to provide meaningful feedback to 23,000 students, then suddenly you're not saving so much money after all.
The work-around that I've heard of is drafting the students to provide feedback to each other, but at that point I think it's obvious that someone is running a scam.
pwned by 1. I should read the thread.
26: I checked out an intro to statistics course on Coursera taught by an Ivy Leaguer and I was impressed how well it seemed to capture being in a course with a professor who is not good at communicating with TAs and not great at pitching explanations at an intro level.
Seems logical for local colleges to end up using the standard lectures as curricula, then instead of giving lectures they hire people to interact in person with students. Just like they use standard textbooks as curricula now.
Then the small number of brilliant self-motivated autodidacts who exist everywhere in the minds of MOOC fans can just learn from the MOOCs on their own, and everyone else can vaguely try to do that and fail like I did when I bought those used linguistics textbooks 10 years ago, and end up going to their local college.
39: exactly.
41, 42: see the caveat in 38. No reason in principle we couldn't automate feedback, or simulate experiments with known results like the ones you do in AP Chem. Of course we'll never be able to perfectly simulate an experiment with an unknown result, which describes both science and the other thing you mentioned.
less contentious phrasing
If you enroll in my MOOC on satire, the auto-grading software will explain if 36 was serious.
43, 46: and the article, which explicitly singles out Harvard as a school which will NOT be disrupted by MOOCs because of its role as an elite institution/status conferrer.
No reason in principle we couldn't automate feedback
So strong AI is around the corner after all? I'd heard that people were getting pessimistic...
No reason in principle we couldn't automate feedback
Or build a device to test string theory, using black holes!
Similarly, online simulated girlfriends aren't as good as the real thing, but it's only a matter of time before they catch up. All we need is a good online simulated girlfriend open source project.
Unfogged is a small arm of that research project. We've got bickering down to a science -- other aspects remain for future researchers.
If you enroll in my MOOC on satire, the auto-grading software will explain if 36 was serious.
I didn't think you were serious, I though you were trying to get dz to defend a reductio.
I mean, automated GRE essay graders are as good as humans now, right? Sure, we're not going to have software to turn undergraduate writing into Hemingway, but it's not like our current system is doing that. To be disruptive, all MOOCs have to do is be only somewhat worse than what we've already got.
I originally wrote "software to turn undergraduates into Hemingway", but people already think I'm some kind of crazy futurist...
One striking fact that James Heckman mentioned in his long article that Crooked Timber is discussing is that people who only get GEDs do worse career-wise than people with high school diplomas. Interestingly, they do as well on standardized tests as high school graduates that don't go to college, which suggests that high school teaches something that can't be tested.
All we need is a good online simulated girlfriend open source project.
I'm not brave enough to go looking, but I'll bet this already exists.
Or the ability to sit through high school evidences important noncognitive skills that GED-holders may not have.
61 seems right. Unless learning how to hide tobacco use is really a good skill for life.
61 is certainly the conclusion Heckman takes from that result.
(Not that he thinks these non-cognitive skills can't be taught, just that he doesn't think high schools are where or when it happens.)
The work-around that I've heard of is drafting the students to provide feedback to each other, but at that point I think it's obvious that someone is running a scam.
Also known as peer-grading. As far as I know, the results on Coursera have been negative to mixed, with lots of asymmetry - both in terms of raw numbers providing feedback/submitting stuff for feedback and in terms of quality of feedback.
Sure, you could probably design writing assignments with the goal of having them be auto-graded but I think most people would consider that a failure of education, as tests where the autograder is as "good" as a person tend to be poor instruments overall. Maybe in a few years that will be the pinnacle of success.
16 -- It is said that near the time of statehood, one of our towns was given the choice of (a) the state prison or (b) the state ag college. They chose (a). If you're lucky, it's a town you've never heard of.
I posted about this on facebook recently. I'm not an academic, so I'm evaluating from an end-user's perspective: I recently took a Coursera course. It was a great reading list, and the video discussions were not bad, but as a participatory course it was a failure. Who cares what some anonymous and entirely perfunctory peer reviewer says about your paper? As for the forums, would you enjoy discussing Gertrude Stein with Youtube commenters? I didn't. In sum, as an educational experience it reminded me of the way Romper Room used to end, with Miss Flora looking into the camera through her magic mirror and saying, "I see Johnny, and Susie, and Billy, and Mary" etc., and how sad I was that she never ever said my name.
I'm still going to take a couple of other courses, but they are technical in nature--they're substitutes for manuals, not for teachers.
Von Wafer thinks I only feel this way because I'm old.
People need to study hard so they can get a job where their employer provides good benefits, like a food pantry to help their employees who can't pay for their own food for some mysterious reason.
I think an auto-grader might capture Hemingway fairly well. No need to identify adjectives if you use part-of-speech tagging.
A kind of relevant piece on hiring practices at elite financial firms. The upshot is go to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton or don't bother applying. No word on Coursera or Udacity.
A kind of relevant piece on hiring practices at elite financial firms.
East Coasters are so fucking weird.
In sum, as an educational experience it reminded me of the way Romper Room used to end, with Miss Flora looking into the camera through her magic mirror and saying, "I see Johnny, and Susie, and Billy, and Mary" etc., and how sad I was that she never ever said my name.
This made me laugh.
I fail to see the connection between "elite financial firms" and "East Coasters".
She means as compared to the pedigree-blind meritocracy of Stanford-linked VC firms, ned.
Sifu's right, that I'm sure there is parallel behavior in Silicon Valley (which I'm not exposed to much). But I do think there's a strain of fascination with Ivy League schools and New York financial firms that is entirely missing from the west coast.
It's also missing from the parts of the East Coast that aren't New York financial firms.
My interest in NY financial firms has to do with the fact that they hold the economy by the balls and recently ran it off a cliff.
I've recounted before my own struggles with this as a hiring person. My field isn't rocket science -- indeed, as I understand it, even rocket science isn't rocket science -- and anyone with a decent command of the language, and elementary (I do mean elementary) logic can do the work just fine. As far as producing the actual work product, there's no difference at all between grads of Stony Brook (or even Sam Houston State) and Harvard. But the work product is the very easiest part. The hardest part is getting customers in the door and parting with their cash (in ever larger bundles) which isn't at all a matter of skill at producing the work product or how well they did in learning the material in school, but is nearly completely about networking -- either now, at school, or, better yet, through genetics.
These hiring practices are a function of (a) supply and demand [you don't actually need to loosen your filters to find enough people] (b) a self-reinforcing obsession with pedigree. Management consultants and I-bankers make money from their elite status (they don't compete on price) and they hire from a particular smart/hard-working/ambitious/status-obsessed culture that replicates itself.
But I do think there's a strain of fascination with Ivy League schools and New York financial firms that is entirely missing from the west coast.
You're high. Or, more likely, we inhabit very different vocational worlds.
networking -- either now, at school, or, better yet, through genetics.
IF YOU CAN THINK OF A BETTER WAY TO EXCHANGE LONG PROTEIN STRINGS WE'D LIKE TO SEE YOUR RESUME
Actually, I'm not sure why I'm discounting the possibility that you're high. This is California, after all.
It does seem true that in Northern California there is more obsession with the big VC firms than with Wall Street. But the big VC firms are obviously part of big finance too. They use Wall Street to do the cashing out anyway.
No, Megan is right, or used to be right. Californians even in traditionally elitist industries like law or finance used to not care nearly as much about attending/getting their kids into elite Ivy League universities because we had a world beating kick ass public university system that was just as good or better, also with better weather and way cheaper.
That's changed somewhat recently for a number of reasons. Also Silicon Valley venture capitalists are some of the most loathsome people on earth. Also also Ivy League credentialism is strongest in fields that require somewhat smart people to basically come up with inane bullshit to deceive others, namely law, banking, and management consultancy.
I started the Udacity basic programming course so I could learn how to talk to all of you assholes, and it does seem way way better than the intro math/science classes I vaguely remember from high school. I don't know why or how that matters.
One nice thing about Hollywood is that it still retains a large degree of "you can take your Harvard degree and wipe your ass with it and bring me my fucking coffee."
87: "and then maybe you'll get a job as a writer on the Simpsons. No, no, I'm just kidding. You definitely will. But get the fucking coffee."
I agree with Megan too. Having gone to law school on the East Coast and trying to get jobs around Boston vs. Silicon Valley, it was much easier for me to get hired in Silicon Valley because it's more important that you appear smart in an interview than the pedigree of your school.
I'm pretty surprised, though, at how hard it is to get an in-house patent job in Silicon Valley without an EE or CS degree. I thought my patents with well-known companies would stand on their merits, but I think my chemistry degree is holding me back.
So I'm going to try getting an online degree from a well-known state school in CS.
88 -- yes, yes, but that particular comedy cartel is way way more the exception than the rule, even now.
Silicon Valley by-and-large doesn't give a fuck about pedigree, or even degrees, particularly. Sort of the opposite in some circumstances. I was talking specifically about big-time VC firms (both when they're hiring and to a lesser degree when they're thinking about funding).
At the risk of shattering the analogy ban that Shirky has already bloodied, the main difference between music and education is that people actually want music. They may all want different kinds of music, but everyone wants some kind of music, even if it's lowest common denominator stuff.
On the other hand, only a very small subset of people, even a very small subset of people with bachelor's degrees, actually wants education. They want what education buys you, but they don't want the education itself. And the lowest common denominator? It doesn't exist. It would be as if there were a class on People magazine.
Silicon Valley by-and-large doesn't give a fuck about pedigree, or even degrees, particularly.
Sadly, becoming less and less true. (G/oo/gle, for one, has for a long time had a very bad reputation in this regard.)
93: I know. It is still way better in that regard than Hollywood.
95: all the anecdotes.
Or I gloolgled it.
No, anecdotes.
70 &c: I already posted this at the other place, but a somewhat newer, and non-gated, article (in ASR, no less) based on what I take to be the same research is available here: ... I'd read it, but I've got a job interview later today, and I'd rather not show up with my face all blotchy from crying.
85.1 -- It becomes self-reinforcing. If the local sons and daughters of privilege are going to UC (or any of the lesser and yet still somehow respectable schools or junior universities on that side) there's at least a decent chance that a grad from one of those schools is going to be one, be married to one, or know one well enough to get the call when the enterprise of privilege needs a lawyer/consultant, etc.
I used to say to young associates at my old place '10 years from now, you're going to need someone with several million dollars worth of trouble, and plenty of cash lying around, to call *you* on the phone and ask you to be their lawyer. Do you know that person today? If not, how do you plan to meet him or her?'
Why can't they need a bunch of people who just need a will and a trust and a few hours of advice?
OT (politics): if this is true, it's pretty interesting. Long story short, it appears that Americans don't become more conservative as they age. Our sense that this is true is largely based on a single generational cohort: the Reagan Democrats.
The link in 98 makes *me* weep and I'm not currently lookkng for a job. The Mandarin exam system begins to look good. Or, possibly, humans are such shallow fools that we actually do only work well when perfectly assorted by jockishness and family background, in which case leaving it to the cockroaches looks good.
100 -- You'd need a pretty big bunch of people to fill up the 2,000 hours you need to bill. Or, more correctly, given the timing, the 1,500 hours you need to bill and the 2,000 hours each of your two associates need to bill, and the 1,500 hours your paralegal needs to bill. My old outfit has a department for this kind of thing. You can make a living even at a big firm if you have enough people with enough property and other complications that they need this kind of service. I.e. really rich people. If there was only some way one could come in contact with them . . .
Can the guy who went to Sac State and UOP Law working out of a storefront charging a flat fee of $500 do as good a job? For 99% of us, yes. That same guy would do as good a job for the other 1% working in a big downtown SF firm and charging $600/hr, taking the time (and gaining the experience) to work through the various issues. The question is whether he's met and charmed enough of the 1% to make a go of it. And the answer might be yes, if enough of the 1% are circulating through the firm on other business . . .
used to say to young associates at my old place '10 years from now, you're going to need someone with several million dollars worth of trouble, and plenty of cash lying around, to call *you* on the phone and ask you to be their lawyer. Do you know that person today? If not, how do you plan to meet him or her?'
"Post at Unfogged!"
I am cautiously curious whether having all (?) lawyers aiming to guard the rich is going to make legal services available to the not-rich worse. Assuming a temporarily fixed rich population, do some competent lawyers figure they've lost the hunt and settle into a storefront? Or do they burn out trying for the rich before drunkenly pretending to serve our petty interests?
[D]o some competent lawyers figure they've lost the hunt and settle into a storefront? Or do they burn out trying for the rich before drunkenly pretending to serve our petty interests?
Door #2! #2!
There are certainly people who seek to be paid by rich opponents.
61
This was my immediate reaction to 59 as well.
This is turning into the "Don't go to law school." thread.
Maybe MOOCs can replace law school. My impression is that law school is all large lecture courses anyway. What would the difference be if they were all replaced by MOOCs?
Clay Shirky kinda loses me at the point he asserts that the music industry pre-napster didn't let you buy singles.
Nobody ever bought a cassette single that I ever heard of.
I did. But cassette singles weren't quite as popular as their vinyl counterparts.
That's probably a pretty cool essay to write: how does the most notorious form of music distribution get erased in that narrative? I mean, of course if you wanted the three best tracks off an Alanis Morissette album you could get them: they were the heavily promoted singles...
I pretty much never bought music in the pre-Napster era. Mostly because I've never cared that much about music. But also because the songs I would have bought weren't released as singles and I didn't want albums.
Oddly, when I finally started doing a little music buying, I shifted from buying songs individually to buying albums and then just never listening to the ones I didn't want. That's partly a function of time and pricing - once you're trying to decide whether to buy more than half of an album and there's a slight discount on the album vs. the per-song rate, it's easier to just buy the damn thing instead of trying to guess what you'll like from samples.
`I don't want singles but I don't want to buy albums' is not, I might venture, the way most people buy music.
A friend was telling me today how he thought about buying that album by that horrible band (Fun! or Fun. or what have you, with the Civil War video) but decided not to because the lyrics to "We Are Young" suggest that the singer has battered his girlfriend in the past and wonders why it's such a big deal. My though was, "Why buy the album when that fucking song is on the radio 20 times a day?"
This was actually in the context of a little impromptu focus group I conducted that lent support to my theory that kids who go to fancy law schools aren't entirely representative of their age cohort in having sadly undistinguished taste in music. They (the kids who end up at fancy law schools) are too busy to care much about music beyond what's offered to them, and/or they are more likely to devine themselves as mainstream or conformist as teenagers.
117: I just like to talk about myself in comments. But I'd have bought a few individual songs had they been singles. Probably.
There should probably be a German word for "Internet enthusiast pundit who writes about the music business without knowing the first thing about it."
I really would like to know where that idea comes from; it seems to have become a idee fixe on the part of a certain kind of thinker.
Hey Halford I ever tell you two of the original Napster servers were named for me?
Good Christ let me love my enemies.
Although frankly at this point talking about the pre-Napsger music business is like talking about Anglo-Saxon England. Done, gone, and buried with treasures in ships.
Eh I kinda think that there's more continuity there than is substantially allowed for in the predominant narrative.
I never used Napster even once. I just kept taping off the radio right until I stopped caring enough to bother with that.
127 -- about 85% of people were laid off and there's way less money. Other than that I now think it's a nicely sustainable, if much smaller, business for the future, though the glory days of US popular music are probably gone.
I mean, there's more, better music. But in a corporate sense, you understand.
Actually Napster pretty much snuck up on the people who made Napster, too.
I should mention, by the way, how much I appreciate the post title.
I mean, there's more, better music.
I'd be inclined to dispute that, personally. But I don't think that's a helpful response since I don't think the changes in the music business are what have caused a reduction in the music that I like (and, honestly, don't have a good explanation other than, "things change, tastes change, some eras will be more to my tastes than others.")
Even you can't possibly say "more better" new music with a remotely straight face because it just ain't so. Whether that's due to commercial or other cultural trends is another story (I'm a Marxist here) but Jesus Christ look at this year's top 25 album lists.
127: you are right, was just going for the easy Anglo-Saxon joke.
I'd be inclined to dispute that, personally.
It's inherently unrefutable, which makes it an inherently unfair argument for me to make. So, not to worry.
Even you can't possibly say "more better" new music with a remotely straight face because it just ain't so.
Oh, I can and do, yeah. Definitely. But really we aren't going to make any progress because this:
look at this year's top 25 album lists
is no way to make the counter-argument. To a first approximation, none of the music I like has ever made it to a top 25 album list, and that's definitely not the music I am talking about. I count the destruction of the weird, hegemonic, sixties-holdover rockist music industry filtering system a real boon.
So, yeah, really no way we're going to do anything but talk past each other on this topic.
So, great pop-commercial music (Christagu's semi-popular music, and pure pop) sucks, but weirdo electronic music for tiny populations who like that stuff, and which was available before, is OK (taking your word for it). Whooooo, and I'm pretty comfortable with the assertion that the great era for American pop music is mostly over.
I do like being able to get almost whatever album I want on Spotify, so that's nice for everyone.
136.last to 137.1.
I haven't used spotify because they wanted me to use my facebook login. Hell with that, you know? I value my privacy.
Or I dunno maybe Tweety is a closet fan of commercial polished country and Gangnam Style.
Country is terrible. I found Gangnam style kind of charming-but-derivative the first forty or so times I heard it.
Which actually would be awesome. Tweety, I will take you to a Tim McGraw concert coming up in one of your former locations, if you'd like.
Well maybe the concert could still be fun in a hate-sex kind of way.
So the lessons of the thread are: (1) don't go to law school, and (2) don't play in bands.
Got it.
I did go to Toby Keith's bar in Vegas once. It was kind of hilariously fun. They were playing the Beastie Boys, though, so of course I couldn't enjoy that because I knew the Dust Brothers just cold stole all those samples.
The only time the most popular music in America was also good was in your teens and twenties, Halford. It is not the natural state of things. People who complain about how the popular music is not the good music sound like they're complaining about how Coors Lite is not the best beer. Yes, you are correct.
I haven't used spotify because they wanted me to use my facebook login. Hell with that, you know? I value my privacy.
You can create accounts in their system again without having to use your FB credentials, FWIW.
The Golden Age of Coors was clearly when you had to hire Burd Reynolds to smuggle it across the plains for you.
"Burt". "Burd" Reynolds is a chimera, and cursed by nature.
Also, it's okay. We won't tell anyone you listened to the entirety of Damn Yankees' catalog.
I like that one Lady Antebellum song where they discuss how fucking weird their name is in forthright and direct terms.
I knew the Dust Brothers just cold stole all those samples.
So *that's* what they were doing before the whole Big Beat thing!
I was so confused by the proliferation of Dust Brothers in the '90s. Were there Dust Quadruplets? Mystifying.
The Dust Quints made a lot of money but it was all stolen by their manager. Then they split into two pairs of Brothers and Dusty Baker.
Also, I just finished reading this book (which someone here -- probably NickS? -- recommended, so thanks!). Dude's kind of a terrible writer, but one thing he communicates loud and clear just how useless, evil, and dysfunctional the pre-Napster music industry was. Reading that Steve Albini essay about album production cost breakdowns is probably a better way of getting that info, though.
Dionne Quintuplets never recorded an album.
145 -- come on bro I defy you to defend this year in terms of pop or Christagu's semi-pop. Actually I'd honestly like to see a defense.
Holy fuck we lost to the Cavs. Time to kill everyone and everything.
Also also, fuck whatever rightsholder decided to pull the Alpha Team's "Speed" singles off Spotify. I've been looking for a legit way to listen to that stuff for years, assholes!
154: but... but... Tales From Topographic Oceans!
143: and don't let halford take you to any concerts. And don't date large animal vets or equestrians, because their expectations...
In addition to being one of many nicknames for my enormous penis, it's a reference to an old timey rock critic who had a phrase "semi-popular" music for stuff that's not quite pop but is what rock critics write about.
It's ok, Stanley. I'm sure you'll be able to find work with Pun and Bradstreet.
but Jesus Christ look at this year's top 25 album lists
!?!
Ok nerds, mount a defense if this year in pop or semi pop music. I say difficult to impossible.
First tell me about this mystical Christ-agu.
Christagu is like the Grauniad, maybe.
Anyhow, top 25 albums is too broad. For a real challenge mount a defense of this year's top 25 triple-gatefold rock concept albums about hobbits.
There's so much fantastic music being made right now that's so much easier to find and hear than ever before that I can't even begin to understand your argument, Halford. Also, much less genre straightjacketing and way more cross-pollination. This is a goddamned awesome time to be a music fan. I wouldn't trade it for any previous era.
Apparently, North Korea just launched a rocket. Or maybe the Red Dawn remake has the world's best advertising people.
Ok nerds, mount a defense if this year in pop or semi pop music. I say difficult to impossible.
I don't think I've bought many albums this year, for one reason or another. But there have been at least a couple I've liked quite a bit-- the new Dirty Projectors album, the David Byrne / St Vincent collaboration... Are those semi-pop, whatever that means?
More to the point, as a consumer of music, the number of new albums I want to listen to has, on average, only increased in the post-Napster era. Partly that's just a function of my tastes changing over time (I was really young pre-Napster, after all), but it's hard for me to imagine a serious argument that there's less good music being made now than in the 90s.
171 -- give me the list. Also for someone who largely brings love for journeymen musicians from the 70s and their funk bands I'm ... confused. I mean if you mean it's easier to get old music for cheap I agree but compared to 1965-75 or even 1990-1995 we appear to be in total new music morass.
I was in a sandwich shop at lunchtime, and the studio version of Freebird came on. I was the only one in the place that was alive when it was released. Pretty pathetic.
174: apostropher posts funk mixes here because us oldsters dig 'em, but his music tastes are much vaster and more heterogeneous than all that.
I wouldn't trade it for any previous era.
Interesting! I was with you til this sentence. Then I started thinking about what it would have been like to have been a music fan in 1969-1974 (or so). Still, you're probably right.
I was really young pre-Napster, after all
Oh, good grief. (Is that allusion lost on you, my child?)
Most people I've seen have been talking about either (a) the eminently mediocre Japandroids or a super mediocre but fun r+b album as the best of the year. I mean come fucking on.
175: Maybe most old people don't eat sandwiches.
174: New, awesome music I've discovered this year that came out in the past two years: Killer Mike. Daphni. Icona Pop. First Aid Kit. Purity Ring. The Naked And Famous. Two Door Cinema Club. (You could probably generalize this to "anything on Kitsuné".) Cut Copy. Grimes. Hot Chip.
And I could keep going! Seriously, this is a fucking amazing time to be listening to music.
To be fair to Halford, Hot Chip and Cut Copy are like so five years ago.
Shorter Halford: De gustibus est disputandum, motherfuckers!
Look, the mid-aughts were a dark time for me music-wise, okay? Don't judge.
||
As if the music industry hasn't suffered enough, no more masturbating to Ravi Shankar.
|>
I was trying to look up how many albums I have from different years but my MacBook is doing its little spinny wheel of death thing. This is happening a lot lately, for no apparent reason. Sometimes just opening Firefox shuts everything down for 15 minutes.
186: I find that if I leave Firefox open too long that starts to happen. My theory (for a couple of reasons) is a memory leak with Flash.
186, 187: Firefox is a total fucking memory hog, always has been on the Mac. I usually have to force-close it at least once a day.
I have trouble with a couple of other things that use either flash or Adobe AIR, and if I leave firefox running with just flash-free pages it doesn't seem to happen. But yeah, it's terrible.
188: Gee, that's funny. My netbook and desktop (each of which was about $300) run Firefox just fine.
Looks like I have too much confused or absent metadata to easily compare things by year. But in the years just around the time Napster was functioning, I'm not seeing a lot of albums that stand out? Internal Wrangler, 69 Love Songs, Mass Romantic... not a lot else. And I think I was putting more effort into trying things out back then. My taste is boring, but I suspect I'm not the only one who could identify more albums that stand out in 2010-2011 than 2000-2001.
181 -- look, much love, but I think too much time in the Bay or something is going to your head. Purity Ring as a great band?
Halford is full of shit. You know what I am currently listening to? Doo-wop 1958-62. You think the kids in LA heard all the Philadelphia street corner groups? Distribution and marketing is irrelevant to quality.
It's like pining for the good ole days when there were only three networks.
Kids gonna make music and some it will be terrific and most of it you will never hear. Kids are making great music right now, cause it's fucking fun.
185:And here I just watched the Apu trilogy. Ravi Shankar did that soundtrack for free, and Ray came up with a grant from the Bengali gov't to finish the first one. Most of the actors were amateurs. There will always be enough money, if we can break the middlemen, and the system that pays actors 20 million.
Halford would make Pather Panchali impossible if he could. Or Open City. Or Breathless
Raga Parameshwari 44 minutes morning raga. Full Alap. Either this or Jogeshwari in the earliest 80s on a classical label.
I admit 2000-2001 wasn't particularly awesome either and also Jesus Christ young nerd just shut the fuck up and build me a goddamm death ray.
Yes everyone says on principle the kids these days are making awesome music but it turns out these days that the kids seem to be (mostly) lame-os who aren't.
House of Balloons by the Weeknd is so good to have sex to that it almost makes other music obsolete (for having sex to).
Get a PC!
I am mildly curious about how Linux now compares to the last time I seriously used it (2004?). But probably not enough to get a PC. (I won't use Windows. Too much of a pain to install and compile many things on a non-Unix system.)
Okay, it is almost my bedtime, so I think I can say it: it's Christgau!
194.last: Do I think they're going to go down in history as the greatest band of this era? No way. But I still find myself listening to that album over and over and over again.
199: I mean if you want an easier solution uninstall the flash plugin in library/whereveritis and use chrome for your main browser.
I would do that but Firefox is the least useful browser for testing and thus the best browser to not have to focus on constantly wiping out my history by accident. Plus it's where all my unfogged-specific greasemonkey scripts are installed.
I was trying to hint at that in 169.
199: Honestly, it's been months since I've used Ubuntu - I need to work on an alternative to dual-booting - but I found it to be pretty fast for my not really intensive computing. Apparently, the new version has some annoying intrusive Amazon search result integration.
203: I was trying to be reasonably obvious in 161 and 168. Gloolgle even autocorrects it. I hold that there is still a remote possibility that Halford knows an even more influential secret rock critic known as "Christagu".
I just looked up US box office for 1955. Top US Grossing Films
1) Lady and the Tramp
2) Mister Roberts
3) Land of the Pharoahs (fun movie, but really?)
3) Pather Panchali what?
4) Rififi
5) Lola Montes
6) Le Amiche
Oh for God's sakes there aren't 1000 Americans who have heard of that fucking movie, let alone saw it in 1955
I will never trust IMDB again.
someone who largely brings love for journeymen musicians from the 70s and their funk bands
Last funk mix was May 2010. Eight other mixes since then, almost entirely of music released in the past couple of years. Take your pick, dawg.
I've forgotten what it was about Chrome that made me grumpy when I first played with it. I think one issue was that I couldn't figure out how to get it to stop opening PDFs in the browser and open them in Preview instead. Another was maybe that it didn't play nicely with sites using MathML?
52
So strong AI is around the corner after all? I'd heard that people were getting pessimistic...
You don't need strong AI to automate feedback. You just need to give the problems to a large test panel, figure out the most common errors, and modify your program to recognize them and give appropriate feedback. This could also be done incrementally. Record all student interaction, look through the logs for places where students are getting hung up and modify the program appropriately.
102
The link in 98 makes *me* weep and I'm not currently lookkng for a job. ...
I just read the abstract but what's the big deal? Of course employers are usually looking for people who will fit it.
@210
In the dystopian future, humanity won't be oppressed by sentient military machines that evolved from Skynet, but by sentient pedants that evolved from MOOC grading software.
How do we get an alternate treatment of The Terminator out of this?
I stayed out of the music thread because, as Sifu said, you can't prove anything. But, since my musical center of gravity remains the 70s I wanted to remind people just how much good music was coming out at that point. [Note, it's unfair to make a comparison between an era decades ago and now because there's been more time to identify the good stuff. We can say now that there were dozens of classic albums being released but at the time nobody would have heard all of them. Similarly whatever classics are being released right now any given person will only have heard or heard of a small sample of them.] The giants of the 60s are legendary, but it always amazes me how much great work was being done is so many different genres in the 70s: pop, singer-songwriter, country, soul, funk, punk, reggae, etc . . .
So taking theses lists for 1976 and 1977 as a starting point here are albums that I would pick out as favorites (in no particular order).
1976
Ramones - Ramones
Blondie - Blondie
Guy Clark - Texas Cookin'
Steely Dan - The Royal Scam
The Modern Lovers - The Modern Lovers
Joni Mitchell - Hejira
Warren Zevon - Warren Zevon
Tom Waits - Small Change
Bootsy Collins - Stretchin' Out in Bootsy's Rubber Band
John Hartford - Mark Twang
Burning Spear - Man in the Hills
[Leaving off Stevie Wonder & Joan Armatrading because I've never liked them quite as much as I should and David Bowie because I didn't need to have him on both lists and Low is better]
1977
David Bowie - Low
David Bowie - Heroes
Elvis Costello - My Aim Is True
Steely Dan - Aja
Talking Heads - Talking Heads: 77
Brian Eno - Before and After Science
Wire - Pink Flag
Peter Tosh - Equal Rights
Parliament - Funkentelechy Vs. the Placebo Syndrome
The Clash - The Clash [UK]
Ian Dury - New Boots and Panties!!
The Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols
[Leaving off Rumours among others]
Of course employers are usually looking for people who will fit it.
From a heartless, utilitarian standpoint, this is annoying because they aren't hiring the most competent people to do the work. As a citizen who wants the social contract to work, I'm unhappy that people who have invested in skill don't get hired because they didn't have the right hobbies. And, of course, most of the hobbies mentioned are mostly open to the rich, so it's not a random deformation of meritocracy.
212.2: Steampunk reboot into an automated Anglo-Han Mandarinate *with bugs in it*. Steampunk optional, unless we can get Brigitte Lin.
Terry Pratchett writes the screenplay, Paul Verhoeven directs.
From a heartless, utilitarian standpoint, this is annoying because they aren't hiring the most competent people to do the work.
What percentage of the time would you think hiring decisions should attempt to maximize -- find the best possible available person for the work, and what percentage should they satisfice -- find a qualified person with the least amount of effort?
I don't have a good sense, personally, but it's an important question.
Additional thought: you would expect that the hiring process for academics would be a situation where it would make sense for institutions to invest energy in maximizing -- academics tend to stay in jobs for a long time, they have a lot of discretion in their work and tend to be highly differentiated (compared to many pools of potential employees).
And yet, academic hiring is famously a mess. Would you say that academic institutions don't put enough care into hiring, or that they are just doing a bad job of translating effort into a functional process?
Or is it just a stupid question?
214 -- I hear you. Assume, though, that you're faced with 17, or 57, candidates who are all fully competent to perform the work. And with respect to competence, the top 5 candidates are indistinguishable. I think this is actually pretty common in a high end professional setting.
You check yourself to make sure you're not adversely applying bias based on protected categories. Then what?
217: I think a lot of care goes into it, but most academics are at least somewhat incompetent and confuse "has precisely my interests" with "is good", leading to lots of infighting.
Ask me how our postdoc hiring is going!
No, Moby, that's the physicist version of "Pull my finger"! Stop!
Too late.
Academic hiring in the sciences is a mess *because* it is attempting to maximize. You can usually only hire one candidate per year who will be with you for at least 5 years and possibly for life and costs a tremendous amount of money just to have them walk in the front door.
So everyone wants not just a good candidate, but the best candidate, but people are insecure about who the best candidate is, so they look at who other schools are hiring, so every school goes after the same "best" candidate and sits around and waits while he/she decides. Then every school that wasn't picked goes to the next one on their list and begs them to say yes until everyone has given up.
218.2 --
(a) Roll dice, pouring a small libation to Chance and Fortune beforehand; or
(b) think Hey, we don't have anyone who knows about boofratzin, let's fill that in. We're all civil adults and have eleven points in twelve in common because of our professional training, we'll get along in the airport.
I spent thirty years playing this from the outside, paying more attention than I wanted to military history and cars and electronic music and anime in order to fit into tech geeks' non-tech conversations. Turns out a fraction of this was well worth knowing. And hey, so was a lot of the stuff that wasn't fashionable, but I had to talk about that with other people.
There are two ways to use the Venn diagram between people: insist on a fit in all the circles, or use any overlap as a base and explore from there.
217: I think a lot of care goes into it, but most academics are at least somewhat incompetent and confuse "has precisely my interests" with "is good", leading to lots of infighting.
That makes sense.
I was just struck by the goal that clew described, "hiring the most competent people to do the work" and thinking about what it would take to achieve that.
No, obviously there's a lot of low-hanging fruit, cases where just getting people to not be a dumbass would do a lot to achieve better utilitarian maximization. But once you get past that it gets tricky.
Proposition: the best way to achieve good matching of worker to job is to have large organizations that offer many opportunities for people to make lateral moves within the organization.
Argument for: hiring somebody in cases where there is no prior knowledge between the person and the hiring organization is difficult because both parties lack important information. It seems difficult to have any confidence that you could maximize the fit in that situation. Increasing the number of highers that are lateral transfers creates more cases in which both the organization and person have more complete knowledge.
Argument against: (1) Empirically this seems false; large organizations to not display any particular ability to maximize employee/job fit. (2) Potential moves are frequently going to be complicated by the question of whether they are actually a move up or down in the corporate hierarchy.
So what situation would be best for being able to (eventually) sort people into the best fits for their skills? Expectations of rapid turnover, so that imperfect sorting can be iterated more frequently (which sounds horrible to me)? I don't know.
I had an academic-style interview last week and they must be putting a ton of resources into that process. Travel costs, meals, whole day of interviews. I was kind of shocked there was no phone/preliminary interview. Seems like a big risk if someone shows up and breaks all the windows.
IIRC, the original article involved hirers ignoring markers of competence in favor of social similarity, so we've come a bit afield. Still, I do not like the rent-seekingness of making social similarity a requirement for getting a good job. We *know* how this fails, because we make endless jokes about corporate or governmental bureaucratic incompetence in which idiots are shielded by being such a nice guy.
Somewhere recently... NYT?... was an article on the US Army no longer demoting or even removing incompetent commanders. If true, worrying.
We're all civil adults and have eleven points in twelve in common because of our professional training, we'll get along in the airport.
Interestingly I feel like I'm the weirdo in my current job. A bunch of the people in the company (which is very small) went to HS together. Despite the fact that we have a lot in common (for example, I went to the same HS a couple years later), it took me a while to stop feeling like I was the outsider in a group of friends.
Having gotten to the point of feeling comfortable it's a good fit, and don't mind being the outlier in other ways (a little more geeky, a lot more introverted, etc . . .) but it took years of making a conscious effort to feel like I wasn't missing out on a lot of informal communication.
IIRC, the original article involved hirers ignoring markers of competence in favor of social similarity, so we've come a bit afield.
Yes, I was trying to acknowledge that in 226.3. I was going off on a tangent.
Well, the question of how we would run a hiring meritocracy is pretty good, too. I think we need a tight labor market for any mechanism to work -- without one, facing the 'turnover till you stick' is just too scary for workers, so we clump up in other groups; and burning pretty-good workers out and getting new ones is irresistible for employers.
The article's not surprisingly, exactly, but it was notable for two reasons. First, the recruiters are extremely candid with the author about what they're doing. Second, the author does a nice job about showing how similarity affects evaluations in three different ways: "organizational fit" (which is explicitly and formally made a criterion, and operationalized as "we're a sporty/fratty [or egghead/intellectual, or scrappy] firm"), cognitive biasing (an interviewer will genuinely perceive an interviewee's qualifications as stronger if they're culturally similar), and affective response ("getting excited about / championing a candidate", often necessary for the final cut).
Another interesting bit, and this goes to (and cuts against) CharleyCarp's talk about the importance of Being The Right Sort for getting clients, is that in the article, "client skills" (presentation, demeanor, etc.) were treated entirely separately from "fit", and were apparently seen as something that could be taught. "Fit" was an entirely internal matter: the "airport" test Clew mentions, "can I stand working across the table from this person on a brief at 3am?", &c. The positions with the most client-facing responsibilities, consultants, placed the least weight on fit; those with the least client contact (big-law associates), placed the most weight (I-bankers were in the middle).
I've got more to say about why I found it so demoralizing and disturbing, but I need to do my edx compsci problem set now (back to the OP topic!).
It will surprise no one that I favor random lot as a way to select workers when faced with a pool of highly-qualified candidates.
Are you in that finish-by-mid-april-at-your-own-pace course? I've been thinking about signing up for that.
No, the MIT-based 6.00x intro to CS one; I think it finishes soon. It's not at all at-your-own-pace--weekly problem sets that won't grade after the deadline, 3-day windows for midterms, which is the only reason I've stuck with it, I think.
235: That's the way CS101 was when I took it at Udacity. Now everything is self-paced and other things keep getting in the way, Not important things, mind you.
CharleyCarp's talk about the importance of Being The Right Sort for getting clients
Charley, if I understood him correctly (and I'm pretty sure I did) wasn't talking about client skills, he was talking about client connections. You can teach someone how to charm people across a restaurant table. You can't teach them to have an uncle who hires lawyers for a large company, or a collection of frat brothers in similar positions. (A determined and charming person can collect the right kind of friends and acquaintances, but it takes decades, and should start in college at the very latest).
That's cold-blooded and kind of awful to think about, but realistic for lawyers -- the kid with a rich uncle and a whole lot of frat brothers is guaranteed a more profitable hire, if he can do the work at all, than Joe OrderOfTheCoif who pulled himself out of the projects and socializes with his working-class buddies.
This is kind of
Ah, that one looked good but I knew the schedule wouldn't work for me.
BigLaw ninjas are preventing LB from telling all?
No, editing flaws are drifting from my paid work to my more important blog-commenting.
Charley, if I understood him correctly (and I'm pretty sure I did) wasn't talking about client skills, he was talking about client connections.
You're right, and I shouldn't have said that it was exactly on point. But I did think it was interesting that the 'client connections' stuff wasn't mentioned at all, especially since I'd just read CC's comments before I read the article. I was a bit puzzled by that. I think my guess was that they're not really hiring for partner at all, or managing director, or whatever the consultancy equivalent is; they're hiring entry levels, knowing the overwhelming majority will be gone in 4 years. And so your connections are irrelevant; the connections come into play at the more senior level. (And so maybe it helps determine who does make it to that senior level, but it doesn't factor into the entry hire much.)
Or not! This is pure speculation. But if it did, it seems a glaring omission for the author not to mention it (and I got the impression she did the participant observation part of the research at a law firm).
And so your connections are irrelevant; the connections come into play at the more senior level. (And so maybe it helps determine who does make it to that senior level, but it doesn't factor into the entry hire much.)
I honestly don't know. I never got the sense during law firm hiring that I was being evaluated for my rainmaking potential rather than my academic pedigree, but OTOH a normally gregarious person would probably have come out of my alma mater with a fairly influential list of buddies, so I might have met standards on that front. (I would not be a normally gregarious person.) Certainly it's an issue at the partnership stage most places.
This article may not make complete sense if you don't know the Canadian backstory, but I thought the parable on inequality and meritocracy was pretty well done. Appropriate for an analogy unban thread.
I don't know any successful lawyer who gets significant business from college buddies and the like. I did have one younger colleague who brought in one OK case that way, but the top-level successful people I've seen have done it through being really really good at what they do, having an opportunity or to at a large firm, and then relying on self-promotion to build up a reputation.
Aggh. Posted too soon. "having an opportunity or to at a large firm" meant "having an opportunity to work for a major client with repeat business, and doing a really really noticeably good job for that client."
Personally, I'd prefer a world in which I could develop business through bro-style connections and shared leisure activities instead of demonstrating extreme competence over many years, but that doesn't really seem to be the case, AFAICT.
And I should say the relevant "reputation" and "self-promotion" are primarily among other lawyers, who are ultimately the referral points for most business (whether as GCs or otherwise).
244 -- You're in a different market, I think.
Relatives are much more important than "buddies" that's for sure. Although advantage of elite schools in that a higher percentage of buddies end up in GC positions at big outfits than say my classmates: 20 years out, many are in the public sector, and plenty of others at smaller outfits.
I was kind of surprised by the interviewers in that article who seemed so focused on their own comfort, and so little concerned about long term viability. I suppose in a hugely leveraged big turnover environment, how good a companion some young lawyer is when you get sent to Kansas City for a month long trial might mean more than how well they'll do at making you money in your old age.
246(b) is assumed. Necessary but not sufficient.
I want a world where I can put in 25 hours a week and be paid my current salary.
Doing my current work, more or less.
If you can invite me into that world along with you I'll buy you a pony.
242 -- If you'd had some sort of obvious rainmaking attribute -- an uncle running a Fortune 100 firm -- they'd certainly have cared about that.
248.1 -- could be. I was actually expecting to find more social-connection-generated business than seems to be the case IME. Except for sometimes shared social connection among lawyers, like people who started off as associates at some firm or at the USAO, but that seems to be more about professional reputation than strictly social connections.
Anyhow, if you have a multi-million dollar case and would like a somewhat competent attorney to handle it, think of me.
214
From a heartless, utilitarian standpoint, this is annoying because they aren't hiring the most competent people to do the work. As a citizen who wants the social contract to work, I'm unhappy that people who have invested in skill don't get hired because they didn't have the right hobbies. And, of course, most of the hobbies mentioned are mostly open to the rich, so it's not a random deformation of meritocracy.
Being able to fit in (which is what I intended to write in 211) is an important qualification for most jobs. It often doesn't matter how "competent" you are if you can't get along with or even communicate easily with your co-workers.
And "invested in skill" can mean acquired meaningless credentials which employers are quite justified in ignoring.
And if you are going to complain about this sort of thing elite colleges which use all sorts of admissions criteria other than academic merit would seem a more justified target.
255: Yes. How do I become one of those tenured professors?
Most people can communicate and collaborate with people who didn't have the same hobbies in early adulthood, James. It's how we formed nations. In some cases, friendships. Also, the elite colleges are often important because they're gatekeepers for 'fit' hiring practices. Fix the latter and the former loses teeth.
I am meditating on the possibility that no elite US institution can currently do what it claims to be doing, because of rent-seeking courtiership, so perhaps it only temporarily matters who gets the good seats on the way down. That was an interesting bit in the thread on late Roman history -- we don't have evidence, if I read it right, that the well-connected at the end of the Empire survived to be the ancestors of the up-and-coming in the pre-Plague civilizations.
On the law front, Lee and I saw a lawyer and signed our wills, powers of attorney, and the creation of a trust that would provide for Mara if we both died. I don't know if it's like this for martied couples, but it was actually sort of romantic and we left feeling alittle giddy about having this kind of legal recognition.
We found this lawyer through the lawyer who did our adoption and co-parenting agreement work a year ago, because we asked her for someone with more experience with couples like us. He's gay and lives around the corner from us, so we could have run into him some other way. I'm more excited about having a new pal in the neighborhood than about knowing there's an excellent and politically active gay lawyer in the neighborhood, but the whole thing has been very reassuring, though not cheap.
258
Most people can communicate and collaborate with people who didn't have the same hobbies in early adulthood, James ...
Doesn't mean they don't do it better with people who aren't too different from themselves.
OT: Just had a long conversation with a guy who may not be sane. Is it polite to ask the bartender, who at least knew his name, if the guy was sane?
My prior firm was exactly what Halford describes in 244/245. No one cared who any associate knew on day 1; the cared that you'd be able to impress their current clients enough that some of those clients might start calling you directly by year 10.
My current firm is much closer to what Halford describes in 246--a huge amount of the client generation comes through bro-style connections and shared leisure activities, instead of demonstrated competence. So much so that this filters all the way down to hiring: we hire incompetent clowns who know the right people in this small town, or whose families are wealthy (but I repeat myself), and then we hire enough competent people to do the actual legal work the clowns generate. (You can guess which of the two groups are more highly compensated.)
I think a lot of the difference has to do with the sophistication of the clients themselves--many of our clients are essentially moneyed rubes, who can't even begin to tell good legal work from bad, so they just hire who they know. Whereas most of the clients at my prior firm were highly sophisticated and demanded the same.
I want a world where I can put in 25 hours a week and be paid my current salary.
This is what I want, too, except I'd like twice my current salary.
I'd like to know needy, unsophisticated rich people and I'll take care of the rest.
But elp, if all that's going to happen 10 years down the line is that the same people are calling, but now they're calling you instead, how's that working out? Either you're getting part (all?) of the credit for new matters, in which the person who's client it was is getting less -- which you each care about,* but the enterprise only cares that it's not getting any more money -- or you're not getting any of the credit, just responsibility.
Assuming you went to a big deal law school, no one has to care who you knew on day one. You'd be part of a network of privilege in any event, a network just waiting for you to grow into using it.
* The older person perceives this as you reaching into his/her pocket and taking money out. Maybe this is OK, maybe it isn't. Maybe how the older person feels about it changes from day to day.
I've considered trying to exploit whole bunches of poor people for small amounts each and I decided I can't make the numbers work. I need rich people to exploit.
(And the other people in the network to grow into patronage dispensers.)
Urple, once you know the moneyed rubes well enough to keep a stream going, couldn't you work 25 hours per week, charge 60% your current rate, and still have a pretty good life?
Then he could finally take the time to find an answer to what happened to his toilet. I'm still curious.
You check yourself to make sure you're not adversely applying bias based on protected categories. Then what?
Random lot all the way. Is there seriously another answer?
Btw, X., I was able to halve the running time of your code, but only by modifying parts of it you said weren't relevant.
huh. I'm not sure what to think about that.
Hint: You were wrong about which parts were relevant.
possible, sure. but by not relevant I meant, "not the functions/classes we were submitting in that section"; I believe the grader was using its own versions of the rest. and also, it's hard to believe a factor of two would have made the difference. so I'm still puzzled.
261: "Sane? Let's just say that guy's the one who's always talking to mysterious 'friends' on the Internet who are constantly delighted by his witty quips, even though he doesn't really mingle here.... Oh. Wait. Well, this is awkward."
neb is hiding the evidence! Something about sodaDensity.
Urple, once you know the moneyed rubes well enough to keep a stream going, couldn't you work 25 hours per week, charge 60% your current rate, and still have a pretty good life?
You've got me confused with someone named elpru. I'd never call my clients "rubes" in a public forum.
Excepting the part about charging 60% of my current rate, which I'm not even sure why that's in there, this isn't a bad plan.
216
What percentage of the time would you think hiring decisions should attempt to maximize -- find the best possible available person for the work, and what percentage should they satisfice -- find a qualified person with the least amount of effort?
You should always be trying to hire the best person, it is just a question of how much you should work at it. This depends on how much you have to gain from a better hire and on how well you are able to evaluate candidates. You should expend extra effort when the expected gain exceeds the cost. The optimum level of effort will vary continuously with circumstances. And there are complicated legal constraints.
218
I hear you. Assume, though, that you're faced with 17, or 57, candidates who are all fully competent to perform the work. And with respect to competence, the top 5 candidates are indistinguishable. I think this is actually pretty common in a high end professional setting.
So why doesn't this mean you are paying too much?
And are the top candidates really indistinguishable? I would expect them to have different strengths and weaknesses so it might not be clear who is better but they wouldn't be all identical.
And are the top candidates really indistinguishable? I would expect them to have different strengths and weaknesses so it might not be clear who is better but they wouldn't be all identical.
That pretty well describes hiring in academic science, except for "different strengths and weaknesses" substitute "different techniques and/or experimental model systems".
I have no idea who the other 4 people who interviewed for the position I landed were, but I'm certain that they were all equally well qualified (based on my subsequent experience on hiring committees, they were probably more qualified. After seeing the CVs of our candidates, it seems like a miracle that I got a job).
Once things reach the interview stage, it comes down to mysterious factors like "fit". Also, whether your particular technique/system is hot that year.
The obsession with "fit" is one of the worst parts of academic hiring.
I don't know what "fit" means at other institutions, but here it means "are you difficult and obnoxious in situations where we need everyone to have a cooperative frame of mine?" and I endorse it as a criterion.
Not all situations are appropriate for cooperativity, obviously - some need to be debated and hashed out. But I generally agree with the mood of the school on which is which.
"are you difficult and obnoxious in situations where we need everyone to have a cooperative frame of mine?"
That's me. Can I have a job? Now.
216: You should always be trying to hire the best person, it is just a question of how much you should work at it
99% of the time this only true in the most cliched way. This is where the world of racist fuckpigs overlaps the world of the rigid procedural meritocracists and both should be taken out and shot before their iniquitous practices infect any more of the world.
Everyone should marry the best spouse.
286
... before their iniquitous practices infect any more of the world.
Trying to hire the best candidate is an iniquitous practice? Hiring based on connections and/or kickbacks as in most of the world is better?
Also I would like to say that we are emphatically not obsessed with getting the best candidate. We are obsessed with getting:
1. a quality teacher
2. who really, actually wants to work in SadTown for peanuts
We have endless conversations trying to parse out whether someone is just wallpapering the country with applications or actually wants to sacrifice their research to just the summer months.
286: Trying to hire the best candidate is an iniquitous practice? Hiring based on connections and/or kickbacks as in most of the world is better?
Yes, in part because its proponents tend to be the kind of intellectually dishonest jerks who indulge in fatuous rhetorical strategies like the fallacy of the excluded middle.
"are you difficult and obnoxious in situations where we need everyone to have a cooperative frame of mine?"
How reliably do you feel you are able to evaluate this in an interview?
How reliably do you feel you are able to evaluate this in an interview?
Physical violence is a dead give away.
I wasn't confusing you with elp, Urple. She can charge whatever she likes no matter what the setting. You'd have to discount to steal away clients, although you'd call it passing along your savings on overhead.
285: fat chance, JP. I've already got the best spouse.
289: Not very. But by the time people apply for tenure, you have a lot more to go on. (Granted, people do occasionally change drastically after tenure is granted.)
During job applications, "fit" tends to mean "do they genuinely want to be at an institution like this (in the middle of nowhere, teaching too much for too little.)"
279 -- In my field, the materiality of differences in abilities with respect to the work product is very low. I would expect a great many people to be virtually indistinguishable with respect to how well they can do any of the component tasks, or think through which tasks need to be done and which order. We like to act like we're playing live poker, but a whole bunch of what we are doing is a lot more like machine poker, to violate the ban fairly blatantly.
Granted, people do occasionally change drastically after tenure is granted.
Is there any other reason to try for tenure?
I wouldn't call taking 30% longer to grade everything a drastic change.
Also,
Is there any other reason to try for tenure?
I think you get fired otherwise.
This seems relevant to this discussion.
Best bit of advice:
Express no interest in the department, school, or community. Find things to complain about. Make it clear that you will not teach any courses before 10:00 am or after 3:00 am and that you will only teach 2 days a week. Explain your demands by saying how much you truly hate teaching and how you will be busy commuting to more interesting places.
282: I'm fine with valuing "collegiality" as a criterion. But "fit" often comes to mean "do you remind me of my younger self", and it's astonishing how often the young white straight guy just happens to be the better fit in philosophy. I also think it's very hard to predict whether someone else will be happy, and I'm not entirely sure how much it matters; most people are pretty adaptable and will bloom where they're planted. I'm not happy with my job, but I'm reasonably content, and performing at a very high level.
294
In my field, the materiality of differences in abilities with respect to the work product is very low. I would expect a great many people to be virtually indistinguishable with respect to how well they can do any of the component tasks, or think through which tasks need to be done and which order. We like to act like we're playing live poker, but a whole bunch of what we are doing is a lot more like machine poker, to violate the ban fairly blatantly.
That is certainly not the case with my current job. It might not be easy to rank us but it isn't because we are all the same.
284 288
You seem a little overwrought. I guess liberals just don't like ranking people.
Lazy evaluation is often more appropriate.
299: I, for one, wouldn't want to teach after 3 am.
There is no "best candidate", meaning the candidate who will do the job the best, for most jobs, JBS. There's a several-hundred-way tie for first. The actual best candidate is the one (or one of the ones) who will do the job willingly, who isn't an asshole, and will not be always seeking to leave for a job he likes better. As heebie says in 287/293.
307
There is no "best candidate", meaning the candidate who will do the job the best, for most jobs, JBS. There's a several-hundred-way tie for first. ...
This is nonsense, for one thing most jobs don't even have several hundred applicants.
This is nonsense, for one thing most jobs don't even have several hundred applicants.
They do at the high-end the article was talking about (and to the extent they don't, it's because everyone knows your resume will go in the trash unless you make the unofficial first cut of having gone to the right schools already).
And it can get pretty brutal at the low end, too.
When a frustrated job-seeker, trying to see how things looked from the other side of the table, posted a fake ad for an administrative assistant to the NYC craigslist ($12-13/hr, with benefits, 'Previous experience in an office setting preferred, but will train the right candidate'), he was deluged with 650 applicants in the 24 hours before he took the ad down, horrified.
The last three times we've searched: 400+ applicants, just shy of 300 applicants, and approximately 50 applicants. For that last one, the people running the search cast the job in incredibly narrow terms, and they were already looking to hire in a field that isn't glutted with job-seekers.
310
The last three times we've searched: 400+ applicants, just shy of 300 applicants, and approximately 50 applicants. For that last one, the people running the search cast the job in incredibly narrow terms, and they were already looking to hire in a field that isn't glutted with job-seekers.
And did you think the top couple of hundred candidates were all absolutely equally qualified?
Last time I applied for a short term post-doc/research-fellowship post, maybe 3+ years ago, they had a little under 200 applicants for what was a fairly narrowly defined, fixed term post on a not particularly high salary.
I'd guess virtually all of those applicants had: a good 1st class or upper 2nd undergraduate degree from a decent institution, probably a masters and certainly a doctoral degree, again from a good institution, some teaching experience, some published work, or evidence of potential for producing publishable work, relevant research interests in the area of the post-doc, and referees willing to write on their behalf. Now it may be that a couple of those people will stand out as really outstanding (maybe several really good published papers in top journals), and a couple as marginal, but the vast bulk of the rest are going to be more or less the same.
Institutions hiring then come up with all kinds of bullshit ways to thin the pile.
Hiring based on connections
Still a massive part of the process.
312
I'd guess virtually all of those applicants had: a good 1st class or upper 2nd undergraduate degree from a decent institution, probably a masters and certainly a doctoral degree, again from a good institution, some teaching experience, some published work, or evidence of potential for producing publishable work, relevant research interests in the area of the post-doc, and referees willing to write on their behalf. Now it may be that a couple of those people will stand out as really outstanding (maybe several really good published papers in top journals), and a couple as marginal, but the vast bulk of the rest are going to be more or less the same.
Obviously if you have several hundred candidates the difference between adjacent candidates in the middle of the range is likely to be small. But I would expect more distinct differences between say the 25th and 75th percentiles. And the claim I was disputing was about the top candidates not the middle. Also there are two separate issues here, how different the candidates actually are and how good hiring institutions are at evaluating them.
Thinking about myself and my current job, if I was a little smarter I would be a little bit better at the job and if I was a little dumber I would be a little bit worse. Similarly for other changes in my personal characteristics and life history. The same will be true for my co-workers (who generally have different strengths and weaknesses). The idea that nevertheless we are all equally good at our job makes no sense to me.
Perhaps the top candidates would be all about the same if they were all extremely over qualified for a routine job (in which it is not really possible to excel) but otherwise I don't see it.
The obvious solution is to develop as wide-ranging and independent a set of objective measures of job performance as possible, and administer them to all current and potential employees. Then a factor analysis can be performed across all of these tests, revealing the underlying trait for successful job performance. This factor -- call it j -- will obviously be strongly heritable, so once candidate genes are found prospective candidates will simply be asked to submit to a pre-hiring genetic screening for job fitness.
313 is why we can't have nice things.
Although 314 is indeed very nice.
will not be always seeking to leave for a job he likes better
On this point, I recently learned that a large local employer has been hiring people who pretend to be recruiters, and who call people within the organization saying they want to discuss a potential job opening in the field. Anyone who entertains the conversation with so much as a "yes, I'd like to know more about the opportunity" gets canned.
This is supposed to "encourage employee loyalty". (My anecdotal reports suggest it is having quite signficantly the opposite effect.) I've never heard of anything like this before and was frankly horrified. Is this a common practice?
Some things are nicer than other things, but it's hard to rank all the things in terms of niceness.
316: It sounds like the "hire someone to hit on your spouse to see if you have good marriage" approach transferred into the business world.
314
... prospective candidates will simply be asked to submit to a pre-hiring genetic screening for job fitness.
Genetic screens in a hiring context are illegal. One of many laws intended to make it hard for employers to hire the best workers.
But "fit" often comes to mean "do you remind me of my younger self", and it's astonishing how often the young white straight guy just happens to be the better fit in philosophy.
Yes, this sucks.
Another side of "fit" is "does this person's set of competences, interests, and priorities seem like they will actually slot into the department in a maximally productive/complementary way?" This should ideally, I guess, be managed through the framing of the search, but somehow it rarely manages to.
One of many laws intended to make it hard for employers to hire the best workers.
Yes, that can't be a side effect, it was clearly the intent.
316: The circus business is very competitive!
299: This seems relevant to this discussion.
Articles like that piss me off. Hoho, those stupid, entitled graduate students! Don't realize they have to express interest in the hiring school, don't realize they can't wear sweatpants to their job talk! I don't doubt the guy that those things actually happened. But they're not the reasons that job seekers I know aren't getting entry-level academic jobs.
Oh, James. I'm sure you knew that I was making fun of you but you still played along. You're so giving.
Articles like that piss me off.
Boy howdy.
@323
I seem to be on a roll with pissing commenters off lately.
I took the linked post as someone just venting on their blog in a "the crazy stuff I see in my job" way. Obviously the problems with the employment outlook for graduate students are huge and structural and have very little to do with what they wear at the campus visit.
More generally re: the discussion above, the idea that there is some clear metric for "best" candidate in an academic job search (probably in other areas as well, but academia is what I'm familiar with) is silly.
It's not like you're hiring someone to make widgets and you can just count how many widgets per hour they can make.
At least in science, you can't even safely rely on prior productivity as an indicator (unless they've done nothing or close to it). The aptitudes that lead to being very productive in the context of an established research lab with lots of resources don't necessarily carry over into what's needed to establish your own independent group.
This is why whinging complaints about diversity initiatives & etc. are unconvincing. They rely on the idea that there was some beautiful, objective meritocracy that is being corrupted.
The aptitudes that lead to being very productive in the context of an established research lab with lots of resources don't necessarily carry over into what's needed to establish your own independent group.
Labbist.
Labbist
So now I've pissed essear off as well. Definitely on a roll!
Actually, I'd be interested to hear about how recruitment decisions are made for theory positions. I'm assuming it's pretty different from the process for more lab oriented hires.
It's not just that there are theorists; almost none of the experimentalists I know have their own lab either, or if they do it plays a minor role in their work, since that's conducted at CERN or in a mine somewhere or on a satellite or whatever.
||
One of my friends who is a prominent local DJ, and who has good politics, but is not really an activist, is backing out of a show on principle, due to misogynist behavior by the person putting it together. Just ripple in the grand scheme of things, but it still makes me feel proud to know her and more hopeful about people in general.
||>
We had 400 applicants for our four-ish open postdoc positions. I would say about 350 of them just obviously didn't make the cut. The number of people doing interesting research just isn't very large. At the top of the list, though, I had 20-odd people I found hard to rank.
One thing I hadn't really anticipated is that European grad students seem to be at a real disadvantage when applying for a first postdoc, because their PhD is shorter and they usually haven't published many papers. (In some cases, we had applications from people who had published no papers at all, but had letters promising they would have interesting publications soon. Those people don't stand a chance at getting a postdoc job at a good US institution.)
re: 333
Yeah. I'd guess in my peer group finishing up an about to go on the job market, most of us had a couple of conference papers at reasonably reputable conferences and maybe one publication. A few had several publications. Maybe one or two out of twenty had publications in the bigger journals, most of the rest in conference proceedings or smaller, less prestigious journals. But a good half, I'd guess, had none at all.
Not the same in all disciplines, though. A friend who is a psychologist/linguist had loads of publications. Admittedly she's at the far end of the bell-curve, and is a full professor at a European university (and not yet 40), but it seemed that her peer group had more publications than the humanities people I knew.
@333
Does "deposited in the Arxiv" serve for "published" in this context?
I keep hearing that the Arxiv has basically replaced print journals in HEP and related areas, but maybe that's only for people who already have positions.
334: My impression (and it's only that, I haven't quantified things carefully) is that in the applications we got this year the UK, Germany, and Italy are closer to US rates of publications than Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and France. (It's really weird how research culture interacts with national culture. We can always count on Germans to have produced reams of careful, correct, thorough calculations, although it's often unclear *why* they were calculating the thing in question....)
So, in the hiring decisions in which I have participated -- which do not include hiring for teaching or lab positions at universities -- some objective measure of "competence" is pretty far down the list of things we were looking for. Of course, I quietly gave all the preference I could to people of color, women and queer people, but as far as the stuff I could quote to HR, we were looking for "stick" -- i.e. not jumping ship after 12 months; positive attitude; ability to do the job without getting bored; good self-presentation; and some other intangibles. The best person I ever interviewed, the one who had an amazing resume, was vastly more poised than all the other candidates, seemed extremely intelligent and grew up in the same neighborhood I did, turned out to be one of my worst hires ever. I'm sure most hiring managers or people who've sat on a lot of hiring committees have a similar story. I took a class once with a PhD. candidate who was ABD, had extensive teaching experience and a real verve for it, had worked in the underlying industry and so had practical knowledge that very few grad students would possess, and who was very well-liked in the department. And for whatever reason he just completely flaked on defending his dissertation, was fired, moved out of the country and now seems to have landed on his feet with a professorship at a decent university.
Somebody should write a book about people someday -- they're peculiar.
When I've been hiring for the sort of techie roles I look after, I've tended [assuming a certain baseline of competence] to look more for evidence of good social skills, ability to follow instruction, and some sign that people are willing to learn stuff. I've been let down on that last a few times, sadly. As very few people are really all that active in that way, self-presentation bullshit to the contrary.
References really help on that stuff.
Somebody should write a book about people someday
What a ridiculous idea!
"People are people so why should it be, I get low correlations in sociology."
326
This is why whinging complaints about diversity initiatives & etc. are unconvincing. They rely on the idea that there was some beautiful, objective meritocracy that is being corrupted
Like I said liberals just don't like ranking people.
332
We had 400 applicants for our four-ish open postdoc positions. I would say about 350 of them just obviously didn't make the cut. The number of people doing interesting research just isn't very large. At the top of the list, though, I had 20-odd people I found hard to rank.
How much of the difficulty to you think is genuine uncertainty as opposed to the limited information you had to work with?