Re: This is Not America

On 25/09/2024 5:12 am, john larkin wrote:

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 14:57:09 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:
 

On 9/23/2024 10:51 PM, Bill Sloman wrote:
>

We just fired a PhD. Great theorist, no common sense.

>
Didn't have enough sense to flatter John Larkin as fulsomely as he
should have done. Or maybe a bad case intellectual integrity.
>

>
If someone want a "great theorist" who can also sling solder and knows
their way around a bench that seems like something to be resolved at the
interview stage, not however many months or years later.
>
But yeah everyone I know myself included has been turned down for
positions where despite being very familiar with the potential
employer's actual problem they prefer to discuss some other random thing
not significantly related to the job description as written, up to and
including sports or what my relationship with my mother is like
(seriously.)
>
I optimistically chalk it up to "cultural differences" but I do prefer
employers do that sorting at the interview stage.

 It's a fact that you don't really know a person until you work with
them.
 Designing things is a mix of technology and personality. It's hard to
interview for both.
 In my last case, the person wanted to do fancy complex slow expensive
stuff to solve simple problems.

Some bosses do make that complaint a lot. They also resist any suggestion that the problem is any more complicated than they originally thought, and don't want to sit through a tedious explanation of what is actually going on.
The late Ian Crutwell of Cambridge Instruments was remarkably clever, but really didn't want to know that the - much better - lanthenum boride electron source that we'd put into the electron beam microfabricator emitted a fairly tight cone of electrons, so we had to had add a double deflection system to the electron gun to make sure that the beam was pointed in the right direction as well as pointed at the right place.
We did it anyway, and when every column started reliably delivering the 20uA of beam current we needed, Ian forgave us.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney