Nobody Cares: Technology-only Edition

[Khamon]

Our campus was infected with the cutezy Bonzi Buddy ape-like companion spyware crapola that one nursing instructor found amusing and recommended to everyone that had one of those newfangled computaire thingies sitting on their desks.

Gosh that seems a lifetime ago. I suppose it was. This has been a fascinating career track from mainframes to wireless handhelds.

 

[Noodles]

Our campus was infected with the cutezy Bonzi Buddy ape-like companion spyware crapola that one nursing instructor found amusing and recommended to everyone that had one of those newfangled computaire thingies sitting on their desks.

Gosh that seems a lifetime ago. I suppose it was. This has been a fascinating career track from mainframes to wireless handhelds.

I mean, Bonzi sort of still exists, he is just now named Cortana/Suri/Alexa and can shut off your lights, turn up the heat and lock the doors on you when it gets hungry.

 

[Fionalein]

Main reason for me to boycott search enginess back in the day. If it tried installing a toolbar it got onto the "shady engine" blacklist.

 

[Khamon]

Gopher was the first search engine protocol tool we learned to use in College. Veronica actually made Gopher fully searchable a couple of years later IIRC. Then I remember adding websites to Infoseek in the hmm mid-nineties was it? Forever ago that's how long it was.

 

[Free]

Gopher was the first search engine protocol tool we learned to use in College. Veronica actually made Gopher fully searchable a couple of years later IIRC. Then I remember adding websites to Infoseek in the hmm mid-nineties was it? Forever ago that's how long it was.

I briefly used (used? More like played with...) a combination of Gopher and WAIS for a project at BU I volunteered some of my time for. Until the project's coordinator found out I was *only* 15 and nixed my involvement (I found out about it on a Boston BBS; I'm still not sure why my age mattered)...

Also, the following might be an interesting read for the old internet nerds here:

Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher in the Battle for Protocol Mind Share

ils.unc.edu

 

[Khamon]

I don't know why your age mattered either. Most people were welcoming of anyone with the curiosity and skillz to make valid contributions. Even The Most Sacred Relic of the IBM let us work on actual project teams as teenage Explorers.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Gopher was the first search engine protocol tool we learned to use in College. Veronica actually made Gopher fully searchable a couple of years later IIRC. Then I remember adding websites to Infoseek in the hmm mid-nineties was it? Forever ago that's how long it was.

I briefly used (used? More like played with...) a combination of Gopher and WAIS for a project at BU I volunteered some of my time for. Until the project's coordinator found out I was *only* 15 and nixed my involvement (I found out about it on a Boston BBS; I'm still not sure why my age mattered)...

Also, the following might be an interesting read for the old internet nerds here:

Where Have all the Gophers Gone? Why the Web beat Gopher in the Battle for Protocol Mind Share

ils.unc.edu

For those with a gopher client or gopher supporting web browser of some kind (like OverbiteNX or Lynx):

gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/

for those without:

gopher.floodgap.com

gopher.floodgap.com

I know the owner from when I used to visit comp.sys.cbm, of which he was a regular.

 

[bubblesort]

Sometimes I wonder about what the world would look like if Gopher VR beat out the World Wide Web in the 90s. Maybe we would be sitting around today talking about the WWW like we talk about VR. We might be saying something like, "The 2D web is nice. It seems like it should be compelling, but I mean... it's just not ready for prime time yet. It's ugly, it's too hard to navigate, and it's full of nothing but trolls and porn. Who wants to put up with that?"

GopherVR - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Free]

Gopher VR

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

 

[Noodles]

Sometimes I wonder about what the world would look like if Gopher VR beat out the World Wide Web in the 90s. Maybe we would be sitting around today talking about the WWW like we talk about VR. We might be saying something like, "The 2D web is nice. It seems like it should be compelling, but I mean... it's just not ready for prime time yet. It's ugly, it's too hard to navigate, and it's full of nothing but trolls and porn. Who wants to put up with that?"

GopherVR - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Meh, people would have found a way to have porn in that 3D Gopher VR.

 

[Free]

Who woulda thunk it?

Automated hiring software is mistakenly rejecting millions of viable job candidates

Automated software relies on overly-simplistic criteria

www.theverge.com

 

[Noodles]

Who woulda thunk it?

Automated hiring software is mistakenly rejecting millions of viable job candidates

Automated software relies on overly-simplistic criteria

www.theverge.com

More specific examples cited by one of the study’s author, Joseph Miller, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal include hospitals who only accepted candidates with experience in “computer programming” on their CV, when all they needed were workers to enter patient data into a computer. Or, a company that rejected applicants for a retail clerk position if they didn’t list “floor-buffing” as one of their skills, even when candidates’ resumes matched every other desired criteria.

I feel like this is the biggest likely issue. I have not been looking for a job in ages, but whenever I see job ads, they always feel full of weird buzz words that come off like an HR person, who has no idea what the job itself actually involves, trying to sell a product to a sucker manager who is impressed by meaningless buzzwords they were fed by some con artist "consultant".

Basically, they feel like either terms no one doing the job actually ever uses or terms that are just "term of the week" for some 20 year old technology that most people who could do the job could handle. Like the other day on Reddit there was an argument about how "cloud computing" really isn't anything new or special with a bunch of people basically insisting that EC2 is magic and special even though it's not really any funamentally different than old tech other than being more modular.

This is mostly for tech jobs, but I imagine it's the same for other jobs. Like the examples given really.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Basically, they feel like either terms no one doing the job actually ever uses or terms that are just "term of the week" for some 20 year old technology that most people who could do the job could handle.

I think it's also maybe a case of mistaken expectations of the candidate-screening technology that the employers have. We're used to "intelligent" and algorithmically-driven applications that can take something you ask for and search not just for exact matches, but stuff that's similar to that, or related to that. just in case your search might have been too specific or you used terms that were too obscure. I think people may be conditioned into thinking that's just baseline tech these days; so when the job-matching service has a field that says "what kind of skills do you require?" and the hiring manager puts in something like "floor-buffing", he might be expecting some algorithm to see that and say "okay, he's looking for people who have experience doing light janitorial tasks"; but he's wrong, he's just told the system that a candidate resume must have that exact term, probably exactly the way he spelled it even, or the candidate should be rejected.

 

[Ashiri]

and the hiring manager puts in something like "floor-buffing", he might be expecting some algorithm to see that and say "okay, he's looking for people who have experience doing light janitorial tasks";

Hiring manager needs to spend some time being a janitor, preferably not using a floor buffer as I'm sure he'd screw that up big time.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Hiring manager needs to spend some time being a janitor, preferably not using a floor buffer as I'm sure he'd screw that up big time.

Although, there's a chance it's not the hiring manager's fault though.....if the companies that are offering this tech are dishonestly marketing their system as using "algorithms" or "intelligently matching" candidates for the job. Which, honestly, I could easily imagine.

When I first started looking for jobs as an adult, even like completely unskilled retail cashier jobs were using this outrageously long and stupid "personality quiz", which basically asked the same like 25 questions but in five different ways and it took a damn hour to fill out; and the questions were crap like "if your brother got run over by a truck and you needed $100 for the doctor and you were 100% sure you could have it back the next day, would you steal it from the register?" And you're thinking well duh, obviously you have to answer this one "no", but you also in the back of your mind can't help but wonder if the designers of the test have decided you're an untrustworthy liar if you say no to this.

But yeah, these "personality tests" are complete garbage. The outfits that make the tests market them as some kind of deeply effective methods for figuring out an applicant's values, strengths, and weaknesses, but's it's pseudoscientific BS, the weights and values the test assigns to answers are just the random opinions of the authors. But a LOT of companies literally buy the BS, and pay to use these tests in their hiring process. And it's just true that a whole lot of perfectly normal people lost some job opportunities because a bogus personality test claimed they weren't a "good fit".

 

[Noodles]

Although, there's a chance it's not the hiring manager's fault though.....if the companies that are offering this tech are dishonestly marketing their system as using "algorithms" or "intelligently matching" candidates for the job. Which, honestly, I could easily imagine.

The Marketing: We use a sophisticated state of the art clue block chain based alorythm to match the perfect candidate.

The Code: if(resume-string contains "job_skill_term") { return "Yes"; } else { return "Delete";}


PS, the quotes around job_skill_term were a mistake but I am leaving it because it makes it more amusing since it will basically always return "Delete".

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]