
How to Beat the Bots - SimplyUseless
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/opinion/thomas-friedman-how-to-beat-the-bots.html
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com2kid
The misleading or unneeded credentials on job postings is a huge problem.

I've seen job posts for social media managers that ask for an MBA. I've seen
jobs for blog post editors that ask for an MBA.

Actually I think ever job that isn't Software Engineer might very now ask for
an MBA.

FWIW my Fiancée specializes in researching technology and social trends in the
Asia Pacific (APAC) market. She's authored multiple industry leading reports
on the region, and has collected some really great work experience.

Any company that wants to launch or move into the APAC market should be eager
to talk to her (and based on China's growing GDP I'd advise looking in that
direction!), but every job she applies for wants an MBA, and she cannot get
past resume screening.

Of course skills listing in technical job postings for non-Tech companies have
a similar problem. Whenever you have someone who is not within an industry
filtering resumes (or even worse, you are trying to make a machine do it),
problems like this start to appear.

Oddly enough the increasing use of useless machine resume filters have made
head hunters all the more valuable. I hand them a job description that
explicitly says "has 2 out of these 7 skills" and I give some very broad
skills. E.g. if I am hiring for an embedded engineer, I'll include skills like
"worked on portable games such as GBA or Nintendo DS".

This has ended up solving 90% of my recruiting problem.

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88e282102ae2e5b
> We need to be making much better use of the federal government’s labor
> market data and that of websites like Monster.com, HireArt.com and LinkedIn,
> and even consider creating skill equivalents of the Obamacare health
> exchanges. Online talent platforms — that can link everyone’s C.V. with
> every job opening, with the skills needed for that job, with the online and
> campus-based schools offering those skills with data showing which schools
> do it best — create more employment, more relevant skills and the right
> education for them.

So the solution to high unemployment is...slightly better search options on
job sites? Are there really so many people who are unable to find work in
their chosen field because they're physically incapable of finding listed
openings?

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danso
> _Adds Auguste: “We can use technology to do more than automate tasks. We can
> use it to accelerate learning, optimize talent, and guide people into better
> jobs and careers.”_

IMO, this phrasing is slightly misleading...the primary use of computational
technology (well, most machinery, actually) is to automate things. And we
should not forget that, and we should use that to the best of our advantage.

What use of computers _doesn 't_ involve some kind of automation at its heart?
One of the earliest private sector uses of computers was to arrange airline
seating; something that was such a monumental and tedious task to do by hand
(and by phone) that the airlines that won the battle for building a
computerized system had a huge advantage over their rivals. Google is
basically the automation of counting links (and other "signals") and
evaluations of the resulting graph. Facebook started out by automating the
connection of faces and biographical information to identities of your fellow
students and then later, your entire social network -- in a fashion much more
efficient and navigable than a comparable rolodex. Its newsfeed is an
automated collection and curation of timestamped events and posts and profile
diffs...again, something you could've done manually on Myspace by visiting all
of your friends' pages and manually noting down updated info...and this is
partially the reason why Facebook is huge and Myspace is largely dead. And the
latest crop of startups, like Uber: the automation of connecting driver to
passenger, including handling the financial transaction and geocoordination of
a trip.

I think thinking of computational technology as nothing more as automation
(this includes the design of intellectual tasks so that they can be offloaded
to a machine, even something as simple as a todo list or the sort/filter
function of a spreadsheet) is perfectly fine, because that means humans still
wield the ability to _think_ of the ways to apply computational work and how
to scale and control it...something that we're a long ways of automating at a
higher level (i.e. SkyNet).

It never fails to surprise me when teaching people something as basic as
routine web scraping, of something like Craigslist listings. Technically, it's
just a loop and some string parsing and HTTP requests...but the number of ways
that someone can make that task _their own_ \-- such as deciding how many
pages to go, or how frequently to do the search, or the ways to join the
results of different search terms, or, later, how to automate the joining of
one data source to another -- even simple programming assignments can have a
near infinite number of permutations personal to the individual programmer.

In the OP's quote, all of those things that he mentions as being not-just-
automation: "accelerate learning" and "optimize talent" \-- those all have
automation at their core...such as the delivery of content via Khan Academy,
or the automated grading of Codecademy. And using technology "to guide people
into better jobs and careers"...that's a job board...and Craigslist would
never have become successful if Craig Newmark, instead of eventually writing
the necessary automation programs, continued to hand-collate interesting links
by hand to email his friends.

