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Why a Psychologist Might Be at Your Next Interview (usnews.com)
4 points by haidut on June 19, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments



How much good the psychologist actually does in the hiring process is very iffy. Many theories of personality testing have no validation at all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/books/review/10SATELL.html

http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html

http://forums.randi.org/archive/index.php/t-42351.html

The risk for someone who desires to be hired is that a bogus test may screen out an eager job-seeker. And the risk for the employer is that an unvalidated test may select less competent and less motivated employees than other hiring processes.


Psychologists know nothing about code, so they'd be of limited use when interviewing coders. But, I'd be curious as to what they actually can ascertain about coders.


Listen, just completely off topic, but something has been bothering me for a long time.

What the hell is going on with the light-gray-on-white formats everywhere? When did this start? And why? Who is responsible for this? Every single book, repeat, EVERY SINGLE BOOK, going back 100s of years, uses black [1] text on white or cream paper. There's no light gray in the world of books. This is a consensus formed by centuries of production and consumption.

Now, it's easy for me to go CSS -> Disable Styles -> All Styles, and so get readable text, but the average person is just left to suffer. It's not an isolated problem. It's like every website is doing this lately. What's going on?

[1] Really, dark purple.




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