Posts by Bart Janssen
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Just a side comment. These tests typically present as binary questions ... they aren't. Each individual question is binary but the output depends on the accumulation of multiple questions. They can actually be informative.
However, never (IMO) more informative than the opinion of a good manager who has genuine personal contact.
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to wasabicube,
It’s also worth noting that most people’s ability to judge character is much worse than they credit themselves, especially in interview situations.
This is very true. It took us several years and several disasters before we learnt which questions were most useful to determine if someone would be a disaster in the lab or not. You might think that measuring how bright or how much knowledge candidates had was most important in science but in reality building a team that are willing to work together is much more important. My partner and I are now pretty good at picking good ones, good enough that we have frequently face-palmed some of our colleagues choices and then been proven right months later.
A big part of our interview process is the debrief afterwards where we compare notes and opinions and double and triple check ourselves. So we never rely on one persons judgement any more.
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Andre Alessi,
how great the CEO and each of the members of the leadership team actually were
See this is the kind of stuff you'd hope boards of directors would be looking for, rather than yet another risk benefit analysis and a new projection of fantasyland growth.
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Psychometric testing seems to be being used by managers to avoid doing their own job. There are very good managers out there, but they are good because they communicate with and know their staff. There are also crap shysters wearing suits who use tests like this to pretend they've done their job as a manager.
Where they can be useful however is as a tool to look at yourself. The very fact that you know your answer to a given question could change depending on circumstance tells you something about yourself. You can use them to identify issues where you are naturally comfortable or uncomfortable, not whether you are good at such tasks, because you can easily be good at something you are uncomfortable with given sufficient effort and bad at something with which you are comfortable.
But it is so easy to game the test, even when they use multiple related questions to "detect deceptive answers". Why any manager worth her salt would rely on such a test is beyond me.
Perhaps their greatest value is in identifying managers who should be made redundent.
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Hard News: Game Lorde, in reply to aaron bru,
so what went wrong here?
I don't think anything went "wrong". From what I've seen and read it was a good concert. She had high moments and a couple of slips but it didn't seem like anything went wrong. I think though that some folks wanted perfection and instead they got a real human being. But most of what I've seen has been really positive and folks really enjoyed themselves.
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Hard News: Game Lorde, in reply to Russell Brown,
It’s clearly not hard to get Lorde stems.
Ok stupid noob question - How do folks take a song from Lorde and put a new music score/arrangement underneath? What are "stems"?
Some of the remixes have been really amazing but surely unless you have the original vocal tracks as they were recorded separate from the backing it must be complicated, is there just some software that pulls apart music?
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Hard News: Game Lorde, in reply to Alan Perrott,
the label has played hide and seek
The story we have been told is that she wanted to remain hidden ... at least until her music had spoken first.
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Hard News: Game Lorde, in reply to Danielle,
Sigh.
I'm an old fuddy duddy - you have a problem with that?
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Hard News: Game Lorde, in reply to Don Christie,
laudable (geddit) use of the Internet
I suspect that her use of the internet is just obvious and natural to her. From what I've read she is embedded in a very different culture of connectedness and sharing than the world I grew up in.
And I too will buy the actual CD.
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Hard News: Game Lorde, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
painfully serious
Far from it for me. I just enjoy the music and being able to hear a good interesting voice with clearly enunciated words that have some story to tell. No it isn't a wall of sound nor a complex sophisticated orchestral piece. But it isn't some bloke shouting over a badly played guitar or some girl whining the same three words 27 times over a drum machine and some sampled song from the 70's.
In short it's pop music I actually want to hear. And I don't really want to hear many teen pop stars so yes she's different for me.
That she's 16 and that she has gained world-wide attention and priase is as exciting for me as seeing an althlete perform well on the world stage or seeing a colleague publish in a top tier journal.
I think it's worth being excited for her.