[FRIAM] !RE: A million tech jobs unfilled

[glen ☣]

I don't think the indirectness causes the debilitation of polymaths, in these organizations.  I think it's the opposite, indirection facilitates polymaths.  But I do agree with the idea that it's a balance (sweet spot) in a reduced space (direct vs indirect).  What the buzzwords do (like mathematics) is allow a purely syntactical rigor, absent the meaning of the symbols.  So, while the polymath might deeply grok the meaning of, say, "Neo4j" as one example in a large space.  The person who cites exactly the symbol "Neo4j" as a thing they know shows a better syntactic match, regardless of whether they know what it means.  It's the ability to _directly_ misappropriate the overly rigorous syntax that causes the problem.  If we disallowed the buzzwords and relied on standard English, the meanings would have to be maintained, be transitive across layers.

Indirectness (many layers between the hiring manager and the candidate) in both syntax and semantics would (I think) heavily favor the polymath.



On 03/15/2017 05:14 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> I'm sure I'm dragging the topic (yet) further astray here...
> 
> It seems like the underlying pattern is sort of a dynamic balance in an abstract system space.
> 
> Firstly, I appreciate Glen's acute description of corporations... it IS worth noting that they always exist within the charter of a government, though it is curious what it means to be an "international" corporation.   It seems that many take advantage of the seams between different governments, and as we know anecdotally, there are entire nations which exist somewhat significantly for the purpose of providing a base for these type of wily? corporations?
> 
> I'm curious if there is a "taxonomy of organizations" out there somewhere... and by "organization" I limit that to organizations of human beings and their artifacts, not herds of animals, groves of trees, colonies of symbiotic creatures, or ice floes, etc. Where does a church fit in?  Seems like the Holy Roman Catholic church, while located within the boundaries of Italy and supported (how?) by the Swiss guard, represents a fully extra-governmental organization.   Multinational corporations may also fit that model in some sense?   Multinational NGOs?  Red Cross, Amnesty International, Doctors without Borders?   What about street gangs or motorcycle gangs (are they that different?).   Drug Cartels? Large cooperatives?
> 
> In the case of he workplace and the concept of an HR department. The general principle of adding an extra degree of freedom in a system to make problems more tractable would seem to show one of it's downsides here.  That extra level of indirection can yield the kinds of problems we have been citing here... mostly of disconnection between the goals of the sub-organization (individual, team, project, division, etc.) and the policies and practices in head hunting, interviewing, hiring.
> 
> I do believe that complex human organizations do take  on a bit of a proto-organism status and do begin to do things like grow and organize themselves entirely around the principle of self-coherence, perpetuation, growth, even sometimes propagation.

-- 
☣ glen