Archive for the 'HR' category

I am leaving France for a photo trip to Nepal. Why did my colleagues pay a part of that trip?

When you’re a company big on data crunching, when you have a file, you can’t help it: You must explore it and draw conclusions. This is what Google is doing with its Human Resource files. They use algorithms to identify more easily people ready for a promotion, for an additional review, or people on the verge of quitting.

This is probably quite feasible supposing that you have enough data and enough CPU/database power. Google has it all (and plenty of power for sure).

I am not quite sure if this undeniable technical step forward is really good news for individual liberties.

Source: The Wall Street Journal.

You may not have the time and money to go to University lectures. But there are other open options that the Internet is now offering. Many universities and famous institutions provide free online lectures. Let’s browse a few of the best ones I could find:

• Collège de France : the most famous French scientific institution has free-access lectures all year long. Most of them are available online too (from Mathematics to Philosophy through Archeology).
• The MIT publishes a number of lectures in video-on-demand (and has a large web site named OpenCourseWare).
• OpenYale is presenting seven free introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University.
• Courses of all levels from the Washington University (introductory, undergraduate, graduate).
• PodCasts from UC San Diego
• Lectures from Vanderbilt.
• Computer and Computer Graphics, from University of British Columbia or from Virginia U.
• Webcasts from Oxford Internet Institute.
• Webcasts from Rice University.
• Podcasts from York College (NYC).
• Harvard at Home.

I could also advise you to check the Lecturefox Blog with a lot of information about these free lectures.

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Do you happen to know that 5% of all male population is actually affected by some form of color-blindness (females are much less prone to it). It means that plenty of activities that tend to rely on color identification by the user is significantly flawed for about 2-3% of the user population. This can become a real issue for companies willing to support equal employment opportunities for all.

In software, if this was not reason enough to think seriously about it, we should also think about the impact of printing onto black & white printers (they are color-blind too and this affect 100% of B&W printer users). Most of the problems could be alleviated by following some simple rules that should be part of any software requirements.

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On a Friday afternoon like today, in the office, you said that you would kill yourself if you were invited in yet another meeting. Unfortunately, the boss invited you to another meeting in 5 minutes. To be true to our word, you have 5 minutes to kill yourself.

This is the task assigned to you in this tim-waster of a game. Isn’t it nice for a Friday 13th?

Whatever the skills you use in your professional life, the pre-hiring interview is a needed step that the candidate engineer will have to go through. They prepare themselves as much as they ca. But the hiring people usually are relying more on their habits or experience and they do not prepare interviews too much (with the usual exception of Human Ressources personnel).

But Engineers also meet the candidates (the opinion of Human Ressources cannot be enough when hiring for a highly technical position). After a few years, you collect a few ideas and questions that could be asked to the candidates in order to build an impression about the adequation between the position and the various candidates. Here is the output of my own experience in hiring for technical engineering positions.

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A man living near Johannesburg (South Africa) was recently fined by a court for a bizarre reason: He stole a pregnancy certificate and forged it to get seven days off work.

Apparently, he did not think that somebody would notice the ‘difficulty’ a man would have to become pregnant.

Source: BBC news.

the other day, I was talking with Frank about exceptional software programmers able to influence notably a whole company by their own activity or impossibly better than the rest of the programming crowd. This person is the one you need to hire when you have an exceptional entrepreneurial project or the one you want to identify, protect and feed while waiting for such a project. Weirdly, I just read a random article that gives a more detailed description of the phenomenon and gives it a name: The Free electron.

Worth reading. Worth keeping.