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Pryde

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Especially as most businesses aren't going to have an automatic way to do this easily...

I find myself surprised by the idea that, in most cases, any business is not used some form of automated solution for resume filtering. In that case, it seems like automated rejection responses should be a capability provided by that solution. I can't recall the last time I went through an application process that wasn't clearly provided to the company I was applying for by a third-party company, though I'll grant that the companies to which I might apply are likely not those to which you are referring.

  Location: Missouri, USA
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  Technologies: C#, .NET/.NET Framework, SQL Server and MSSQL, Git, Jira, Bitbucket
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I'm an early-career software developer with 4 years of professional experience. I've worked mainly on backend applications and .NET WebAPIs, but would be interested in moving to a more full-stack role. I am passionate about seeing the impact my work makes on the end-user, and believe wholeheartedly that the development lifecycle works best when engineers are in regular contact with those users.

I'm looking for a place with a strong culture of ownership, and somewhere to really focus on growing my technical skills and get exposed to the long-term impacts of technical and architectural decisions in a given business domain.

Thanks for taking the time to read this over!

I disagree with this, at least as a blanket statement. Plenty of workplaces are a deeply negative factor in people's lives.

If what you're saying is really more along the lines of "having a project and way to spend the time is a net positive", then I completely agree, but I don't think that has to be tightly coupled to work (as in employment) per se.

I would imagine it's some combination of network effect for the readers (it's where the content is), and ease-of-use for creators. I've never published on Medium, so I can't actually speak to ease, but that seems the most reasonable explanation to me.

I also do not care for Medium, but for a lot of things it's where I can find information, so I put up with it as much as I have to.

Hey, thanks for engaging and no worries, nothing in your comment struck me as condescending.

I see your point here, and will grant that I've been fortunate to not have been in a situation in which I've had to consider anything approaching a "bad deed". Most of my thoughts on the subject are purely hypothetical, and informed by conversations with my dad, who has Seen Some Shit.

Looking back on the 2 times I can think of where I have considered striking someone to cause harm (both in middle and high school, a bully and a fight respectively), it seems to me that there is an element of considering consequences, but in neither circumstance were those consequences external. In both cases, it was very much a question of "am I going to feel bad about this later?", which prompted the question of justification rather than punishment. Perhaps at a certain level this is the same thing, but it seems at least qualitatively different to me, a kind of fear of my own judgment rather than that of another person. Would you generally consider this to be the same process, or not?

In either case, I can only wholeheartedly agree that perceiving oneself as incapable of evil is a Bad Idea. It seems dangerous to me for much the same reason you laid out, and I will occasionally attempt to engage in the kind of introspection necessary to grapple with what I might be capable of in a similar situation. I'm hesitant to say I'm incapable (psychologically) of doing something terrible in a similar situation, and my previous comment was from the reductionist point of view of a spherical murderer in a vacuum, as it were. Were I in that father's position, I know that I would feel _justified_ in taking that kind of action, which may prompt me to seek the opportunity, which is again where I see a slight difference from being prohibited solely by the fear of consequences, if that makes sense.

Again, thanks for taking the time to respond!

Speaking solely to your first paragraph here, I've seen this sentiment expressed before, and it always strikes me as off in some way. I've not committed a lot of thought to the topic until recently, so apologies if my thoughts here are muddled or unclear.

I can pretty easily convince myself that a lot of what I'll call "smaller" bad deeds are primarily deterred by the threat of consequences: I never shoplifted a candy bar because it wasn't worth the perceived consequences. But I have a substantially harder time convincing myself that most people don't commit "grander" crimes largely because of a similar fear. Taking murder as the example and myself as a case study, I cannot fathom committing a murder because it feels wrong, there is a part of my mind that recoils at just the thought of it. Is that because the potential consequences of that act are ingrained into my psyche, or is there another reason? I'm inclined toward the latter, certainly. Not to mention that punishments geared toward deterrence often seem to not prevent murder from occurring.

I don't have any grand insights here, just sharing my observations on the topic, as it's come up surprisingly often recently in my experience on the internet.

Yeah, I generally agree with you. Mostly just exploring thoughts here, the gp comment prompted a kinda unexpected re-examining of my hitherto un-examined ideas on the ethical basis of the advice in the post. I'd generally consider myself something of a utilitarian/consequentialist, and would normally accept the premise that apologizing in front of the Twitter mob would at best do nothing positive, but for whatever reason my brain wants me to say "apologizing is right, and consequences be damned"

Fortunately I've never found myself in a position of sufficient power/responsibility to have to offer an apology to a group. Is there a balance to be struck between the difficulty the apologizer will undoubtedly face from rage mobs and the consolation some members of the wronged group may feel from the apologizer acknowledging wrongdoing and committing to do better in the future? I don't know that I could blame someone for avoiding a public apology, with the current nature of online harassment, but I think that's a question anyone who finds themselves in such a position should at least ask themselves. And of course, if everyone also adhered to the "What should I do when I see someone else is making a mistake?" section, then the world would be perfect and conflicts would be much more easily resolved.

Is there anywhere you know of with more details regarding those Grayshift boxes, or do we not publicly know much about them?

Surely with regards to outcomes, there's a good argument to be made that one shouldn't admit guilt. But from a more, idk idealistic perspective, the world would be a better place if everyone promptly admitted fault and committed to doing better? I personally quite liked the advice given, and wish I had held myself to it more often in the past.

I think there's definitely some truth to what you're saying, but I also wonder how much this is a problem offline, I've not encountered it heavily, but I'm also not a particularly online person.

Going from the context of the comment, I believe parent meant something along the lines of:

"we need a measured response instead of a purely reactionary response which will just make things work"

At least, that was my first impression, definitely could be interpreting the comment incorrectly.

From https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html#offline:

Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system, because above a certain threshold the fossil fuel energy used for producing and replacing the batteries is higher than the fossil fuel energy saved by the solar panels.

Looks like it's a messaging thing, mostly to show that such a website can be done. They discuss energy usage wrt environmental impact a lot on that page.

EDIT: that is to say, it's definitely engineered to shut down, rather than to stay up

In my case at least, I'm often just not motivated to meet a given standard of excellence in my work, at least when doing work that I'd be paid for. Frankly, I'm often content with "works well enough and without breaking issues" at work. At 22 I'm just starting my career, and I'd like to find a way to mitigate that trait in the future.

As far as what type of work I enjoy and/or am successful at, I'm honestly not sure. I haven't enjoyed any work to a high degree since leaving university. So far at least, I've been fairly successful in my work as a software developer for an insurance tech company.

So this sort of program would weed out individuals that couldn't hack it in the corporate environment, thereby mitigating the negative effects of those traits listed earlier to the business, which is obviously a good idea. But from personal experience as a person who would probably score fairly low on conscientiousness, I've found that such programs don't encourage that trait in me. At the risk of trying to turn this into an advice thread, what would you recommend for an individual in that circumstance?

Do you, as a manager at least, have any ideas on how to address that inequality? Obviously the ideal measure would be at least to improve education among those populations, but given that at least some portion of that damage is done by the time an individual enters the workplace, is there any way to mitigate those factors at that point?

Interesting. I don't have access to the full paper, but it appears that the individuals in that study were 28 when the research was conducted. I'll definitely be searching for recent studies conducted on the same cohort when I get the chance, but I do wonder if that correlation holds steady-ish over time, and also if it will be replicated with cohorts of a later generation as other economic climates develop.

I appreciate the information!

I've got to be honest, I initially reacted to this kind of emotionally, thinking that of course external circumstances don't have any bearing on intrinsic merit. I definitely have a bias toward thinking that everyone is more or less equal and that modern workplaces often enshrine a kind of cultural bias towards using inconsequential factors as proxies for merit.

That being said, it's been my impression for a while that IQ scores at least are mostly irrelevant, and not well correlated with economic performance. Is that a mistaken impression? I fully agree with the rest of the factors you bring up as positive influences, it's just the connection to IQ that I have a concern with.

I would argue, also, that the "equal competence" premise could be better stated as "that we all have an approximately equal potential for competence". I'm curious if you think this alternate premise would also be bad for business and society?

Thanks for prompting me to challenge my own assumptions and biases, btw