June 9, 2015 at 9:36 pm
TomThomson (6/9/2015)
Jeff Moden (6/9/2015)
Eric M Russell (6/9/2015)
Jeff Moden (6/8/2015)
...I also won't work for a company that does intelligence or personality testing. Again, it has been a powerful indicator to me as to what the culture of the company will be.
...
Is that the same type of company where one shows up for an interview and there are like 20 other candidates locked in separate rooms answering bubble fill questions like:
"You can't cook an omelet without breaking a few eggs."
- strongly agree
- somehat agree
- somewhat disagree
- strongly disagree
Five hours and 500 questions later, the candidate finally ends up in a face to face interview with one guy who has no managment role in IT and seems to have prepared his questions based on another person's resume.
At the end of the day, the candidate is left feeling as if the company has wasted his time.
Yep. That pretty much describes it. Those and a couple hundred "what's the next pattern" bubble questions, which anyone can be taught to pass in about 5 minutes without knowing anything about programming or SQL Server. I won't even bother with such a company because, from personal experience, it's a very powerful indication of the bureaucracy and how people are going to be in the company.
I suspect that if you ask scientists who have looked seriously at personality testing they'll tell you that anyone who uses a set of 500 meaningless multiple-choice questions for personality testing to determine suitability of senior STEM employees is a charalatan. I've seen claims that proper question design can make these things work, and (along with come colleagues) I've demonstrated that many of the questionnaires which claim they have proper question design can easily be gamed, provided they are aiming to determine something that's a relvant aspect of personality for such jobs. I don't object to personality testing when it's done effectively, by people who know what they are doing, but I wouldn't trust the average person in an HR department to have a clue how to do it or how to tell a charlatan from a competent person.
Oddly enough, I do personality testing myself when interviewing - and you do too, although perhaps you don't realize it.
The first thing I want to know is whether the applicant has lied in his CV/resumé or elsewhere in his application, exaggerating his knowledge, skills, and experience in an unreasonable manner. So if someone claims 18 years of experience as a DBA in MS SQL Server including all versions from 6.5 to 2014 inclusive, expertise in writing T-SQL queries, disaster recovery, tuning, schema design including normalistion and choice of indexes, and security I will want to ask some questions that tell me whether he is lying - for example, I might start by asking him how to get the current date and time in T-SQL, and follow up by asking what data types are avialble in T-SQL to represent dates, times, and combinations of date and time and how that's changed over the years, maybe something about what are the advantages of a CTE over a subquery, and a few more fairly trivial SQL questions. The object of these questions is to discover quickly whether this is someone who goes in for out-and-out lying so that I can't rely on anything in his CV. If he's not an out-and-out liar I can ask some less trivial questions about SQL, about disaster recovery, about permissions, and so on, and maybe go on to questions aimed at discovering whether he made significant contributions to the things he claims to have done or was just a tea boy or a technical clerk or something equally junior who didn't contribute much at all. That's still trying to discover whether his CV is designed to mislead, contains unreasonable exaggeration of his knowedge, experience, or track record, so it's still testing "is he truthful or is he dishonest?". Only when that issue has been eliminated will I move on to questions which try to discover more about the depth and breadth of knowledge and experience of a genuinely competent and experienced DBA than can be deduced from a 2 page CV and assess what he can contribute to my team and what is his likely value to the company.
Everything mentioned in the forgoing paragraph except the last sentence is personality testing, as it's testing for truthfulness. It's also what people have told me is the best method of personality testing for engineers/scientists (including software and hardware developers and DBAs).
The multiple answer question set can be made effective for some jobs, but not for highly technical jobs.
Exactly. In fact, your first question and my first question are the same and I absolutely am testing/watching for personality and ethics during the entire interview. It's amazing what you can derive through simple conversation while they usually thing that it's only a technical interview.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
June 11, 2015 at 12:06 pm
I'm a bit late to this conversation, but here's my opinion on 'publishing' salaries.
I don't believe anyone needs to know how much I make; that said....
I am okay with publishing job titles and the salary range per title. But it also needs to include the requirements to attain that job title.
I do discuss salary in interviews. Why? I know how much I need to pay my bills an live off of. I want to make sure the pay will equal that amount or exceed it. I won't waste my time or the company's time interviewing for a job I can't take because of the salary.
I have worked in the military (20 years Air Force), DoD, and civilian (private company).
While you could guess my pay rate in the military, you would have to know my grade (easy to figure out) and how many years I've been in that grade (not so easy). So you would know the 'range' of my salary, but not the exact figure.
DoD civilian is the same way (my wife was DoD civilian for 19 years). Salary is pay grade plus time in grade. You can figure out the range of pay, but unless you know the person's time in grade it will only be an estimate. And it isn't easy to determine a civilian's pay grade.
Civilian (private) job....only my manager and director (and I) know how much I make. Would there be issues if everyone knew everyone's salary? I don't know as I have never seen it happen. Would I care if everyone knew how much I make? Not if I knew everyone else's at the same time. If I don't like how my salary compares, I can always take it up with my manager or his boss. Could there be in-fighting over pay discrepancies? Of course. But the bosses should take it in stride and require people to support their belief they should be paid more - and the bosses should be required to support why the discrepancies exist.
-SQLBill
June 18, 2015 at 8:42 am
David.Poole (6/7/2015)
<edit>
I can think of three occasions where revealing the salary has caused immense damage. In two cases under performing individuals were being paid more than the highest performing individual in their respective fields. Good staff left when that came to light.
In another cases a high performing individual found out that they were paid far less than their peers and in some cases the people they were paid to manage. No one likes to be played for a mug and especially when they have their nose publicly rubbed in it by broadcasting salaries.
You could argue that the imbalance should never have existed but life isn't fair, get over it.
Aye, but to put it another way - for the sake of argument - "salary confidentiality is desirable as it enables people to cover up incompetent management". I do appreciate you'd never explicitly argue that to be the case, but this is largely what most of the arguments have boiled down to. And paying muppets more than good and highly productive staff is incompetent management, pure and simple and a significant risk. If you do this, you're going to get caught out eventually.
If you prefer a more rightwing argument against it, it's a form of market distortion, which is bad in and of itself, well, because.
I'm a DBA.
I'm not paid to solve problems. I'm paid to prevent them.
August 27, 2019 at 1:25 pm
If you are an employee of the US federal government, then your salary history is public information.
Search Federal Employee Salaries
https://www.fedsdatacenter.com
7,040,119 entries
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
August 27, 2019 at 3:04 pm
Well this is definately a controversial topic. I work in law enforcement where all positions are part of a Union even those in management which was really weird notion for me when I first joined. Especially when, in all my previous positions IT were specifically excluded from unions (usually along with HR positions). Anyway, because of the union job salaries are non negotioable and everybody can see all salaries in the company by simply looking at the collective bargaining agreement. You know what...I kinda like it. There are no wage gaps, no hard feelings between employees and you know exactly what you can expect.
August 27, 2019 at 6:43 pm
If you are an employee of the US federal government, then your salary history is public information.
Search Federal Employee Salaries
https://www.fedsdatacenter.com
7,040,119 entries
Heh... just one of the many reasons why I won't be a Federal or State employee. 😉
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
August 27, 2019 at 6:48 pm
Eric M Russell wrote:If you are an employee of the US federal government, then your salary history is public information.
Search Federal Employee Salaries
https://www.fedsdatacenter.com
7,040,119 entries
Heh... just one of the many reasons why I won't be a Federal or State employee. 😉
Ok I give up, what are you trying to hide?
August 27, 2019 at 6:55 pm
Jeff Moden wrote:Eric M Russell wrote:If you are an employee of the US federal government, then your salary history is public information.
Search Federal Employee Salaries
https://www.fedsdatacenter.com
7,040,119 entries
Heh... just one of the many reasons why I won't be a Federal or State employee. 😉
Ok I give up, what are you trying to hide?
Why does he have to be hiding anything? There are people I will tell what I am making and there are people I won't tell. It comes down to a need to know.
August 27, 2019 at 7:00 pm
Jeff Moden wrote:Eric M Russell wrote:If you are an employee of the US federal government, then your salary history is public information.
Search Federal Employee Salaries
https://www.fedsdatacenter.com
7,040,119 entries
Heh... just one of the many reasons why I won't be a Federal or State employee. 😉
Ok I give up, what are you trying to hide?
My salary... which is no one else's bloody business. 😉
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
August 27, 2019 at 7:04 pm
x wrote:Jeff Moden wrote:Eric M Russell wrote:If you are an employee of the US federal government, then your salary history is public information.
Search Federal Employee Salaries
https://www.fedsdatacenter.com
7,040,119 entries
Heh... just one of the many reasons why I won't be a Federal or State employee. 😉
Ok I give up, what are you trying to hide?
Why does he have to be hiding anything? There are people I will tell what I am making and there are people I won't tell. It comes down to a need to know.
Well I know, but he seems really disturbed about the federal policy (or for that matter, state policies like I used to work under). These are actually fairly routine policies. I'm interested in the psychology behind his (and your) phobia.
edit: I'm not saying to disclose it on the web, but would it really be all that difficult to work somewhere that requires this disclosure? What are the downsides?
Hey, I'm not saying that you guys can necessarily articulate your fears, I was just posting on the off chance that maybe you could. Just curious 🙂
August 27, 2019 at 7:44 pm
Lynn Pettis wrote:x wrote:Jeff Moden wrote:Eric M Russell wrote:If you are an employee of the US federal government, then your salary history is public information.
Search Federal Employee Salaries
https://www.fedsdatacenter.com
7,040,119 entries
Heh... just one of the many reasons why I won't be a Federal or State employee. 😉
Ok I give up, what are you trying to hide?
Why does he have to be hiding anything? There are people I will tell what I am making and there are people I won't tell. It comes down to a need to know.
Well I know, but he seems really disturbed about the federal policy (or for that matter, state policies like I used to work under). These are actually fairly routine policies. I'm interested in the psychology behind his (and your) phobia.
edit: I'm not saying to disclose it on the web, but would it really be all that difficult to work somewhere that requires this disclosure? What are the downsides?
Hey, I'm not saying that you guys can necessarily articulate your fears, I was just posting on the off chance that maybe you could. Just curious 🙂
Are you saying you have a right to know how much I make? Sorry, but I agree with Jeff on this. It is my business and the business of the company I for which I work. My supervisor has no idea how much I make nor do I know how much he makes. Neither of us as a need to know what either of us make.
I worked for the military and a government employer. There I understand that our salaries were public knowledge, at least a salary range. My exact salary wasn't publicly known as far as I know (seems that may not be completely true based on earlier comments).
And it isn't a phobia.
August 27, 2019 at 8:05 pm
x wrote:Lynn Pettis wrote:x wrote:Jeff Moden wrote:Eric M Russell wrote:If you are an employee of the US federal government, then your salary history is public information.
Search Federal Employee Salaries
https://www.fedsdatacenter.com
7,040,119 entries
Heh... just one of the many reasons why I won't be a Federal or State employee. 😉
Ok I give up, what are you trying to hide?
Why does he have to be hiding anything? There are people I will tell what I am making and there are people I won't tell. It comes down to a need to know.
Well I know, but he seems really disturbed about the federal policy (or for that matter, state policies like I used to work under). These are actually fairly routine policies. I'm interested in the psychology behind his (and your) phobia.
edit: I'm not saying to disclose it on the web, but would it really be all that difficult to work somewhere that requires this disclosure? What are the downsides?
Hey, I'm not saying that you guys can necessarily articulate your fears, I was just posting on the off chance that maybe you could. Just curious 🙂
Are you saying you have a right to know how much I make? Sorry, but I agree with Jeff on this. It is my business and the business of the company I for which I work. My supervisor has no idea how much I make nor do I know how much he makes. Neither of us as a need to know what either of us make.
I worked for the military and a government employer. There I understand that our salaries were public knowledge, at least a salary range. My exact salary wasn't publicly known as far as I know (seems that may not be completely true based on earlier comments).
And it isn't a phobia.
I'm not saying that *I* have a right to know anything, but I did offer up some curiosity on the *why's* of Jeff's (and your) opinion on the editorial topic. I'm not saying I *deserve* answers either, heh actually any steadfast resistance to even that level of introspection is pretty instructive in itself. So its all good here!
Thanks for your comments!
August 27, 2019 at 8:12 pm
Lynn Pettis wrote:x wrote:Lynn Pettis wrote:x wrote:Jeff Moden wrote:Eric M Russell wrote:If you are an employee of the US federal government, then your salary history is public information.
Search Federal Employee Salaries
https://www.fedsdatacenter.com
7,040,119 entries
Heh... just one of the many reasons why I won't be a Federal or State employee. 😉
Ok I give up, what are you trying to hide?
Why does he have to be hiding anything? There are people I will tell what I am making and there are people I won't tell. It comes down to a need to know.
Well I know, but he seems really disturbed about the federal policy (or for that matter, state policies like I used to work under). These are actually fairly routine policies. I'm interested in the psychology behind his (and your) phobia.
edit: I'm not saying to disclose it on the web, but would it really be all that difficult to work somewhere that requires this disclosure? What are the downsides?
Hey, I'm not saying that you guys can necessarily articulate your fears, I was just posting on the off chance that maybe you could. Just curious 🙂
Are you saying you have a right to know how much I make? Sorry, but I agree with Jeff on this. It is my business and the business of the company I for which I work. My supervisor has no idea how much I make nor do I know how much he makes. Neither of us as a need to know what either of us make.
I worked for the military and a government employer. There I understand that our salaries were public knowledge, at least a salary range. My exact salary wasn't publicly known as far as I know (seems that may not be completely true based on earlier comments).
And it isn't a phobia.
I'm not saying that *I* have a right to know anything, but I did offer up some curiosity on the *why's* of Jeff's (and your) opinion on the editorial topic. I'm not saying I *deserve* answers either, heh actually any steadfast resistance to even that level of introspection is pretty instructive in itself. So its all good here!
Thanks for your comments!
You want a why, here is it is in a nut shell. Personal Privacy.
August 27, 2019 at 8:56 pm
Canada has something similar.
".. Information on all public sector employees who were paid $100,000 or more in 2018 and are subject to the Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act .."
https://www.ontario.ca/page/public-sector-salary-disclosure-2018-all-sectors-and-seconded-employees
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
August 27, 2019 at 9:46 pm
x wrote:Lynn Pettis wrote:x wrote:Lynn Pettis wrote:x wrote:Jeff Moden wrote:Eric M Russell wrote:If you are an employee of the US federal government, then your salary history is public information.
Search Federal Employee Salaries
https://www.fedsdatacenter.com
7,040,119 entries
Heh... just one of the many reasons why I won't be a Federal or State employee. 😉
Ok I give up, what are you trying to hide?
Why does he have to be hiding anything? There are people I will tell what I am making and there are people I won't tell. It comes down to a need to know.
Well I know, but he seems really disturbed about the federal policy (or for that matter, state policies like I used to work under). These are actually fairly routine policies. I'm interested in the psychology behind his (and your) phobia.
edit: I'm not saying to disclose it on the web, but would it really be all that difficult to work somewhere that requires this disclosure? What are the downsides?
Hey, I'm not saying that you guys can necessarily articulate your fears, I was just posting on the off chance that maybe you could. Just curious 🙂
Are you saying you have a right to know how much I make? Sorry, but I agree with Jeff on this. It is my business and the business of the company I for which I work. My supervisor has no idea how much I make nor do I know how much he makes. Neither of us as a need to know what either of us make.
I worked for the military and a government employer. There I understand that our salaries were public knowledge, at least a salary range. My exact salary wasn't publicly known as far as I know (seems that may not be completely true based on earlier comments).
And it isn't a phobia.
I'm not saying that *I* have a right to know anything, but I did offer up some curiosity on the *why's* of Jeff's (and your) opinion on the editorial topic. I'm not saying I *deserve* answers either, heh actually any steadfast resistance to even that level of introspection is pretty instructive in itself. So its all good here!
Thanks for your comments!
You want a why, here is it is in a nut shell. Personal Privacy.
Precisely. And, oddly enough, the questions about this are coming from someone that uses the letter "X" for a user name on this forum.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
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