anagast
(ε)
No bio...
User ID: 230
anagast
(ε)
11mo ago
I've been reading up on the same, spurred by Palladium's recent piece on a related topic.
The 1991 CRA lists the goal "to codify the concepts of business necessity", but it doesn't actually do anything to define that term. The most common legal theory I can find is "No Alternatives", which states that you can use an aptitude test as long as there's no alternative that would have less disparate impact. The actual implementation seems to be a hedge magic of best-practices, derived through the flailing of HR departments reacting to lawsuits. Critically, the burden of proof is on the business -- if you're causing a "disparate impact", you're guilty by default unless you can prove the necessity.
So, there could be room for the courts to clearly spell out a way of proving business necessity. If I were a lawyer I'd go digging for court cases where such a proof has been successful.
If you're smart enough [...] you'd be able to do magic
From an empirical perspective, this has mostly turned out to be true. Telephones, horseless carriages, haber-bosch fertilizer, insert here the same feelgood rant you've heard a thousand times. Maybe rationalists would be very different if technological progress were slowed 10x or 100x.
It's hard to predict exactly what form the magic will take, but very predictable that something about the future will feel like magic to us moderns. Probably most spaces don't have a hairline crack shortcut through the manifold -- but it only takes one.
How do you secure your position as the world makes an important technological transition? If you're politically savvy, you'll be as fine as anyone else. For the rest of us, the best bet is to be one of the builders, and that's best accomplished by neurotic high-IQ systematization. Unless you have a better suggestion?
I do feel uncertain, seeing that QC has been through all this and decided to do something else instead. He's smart, maybe he knows something I don't? My current best bet is that he's a tragic case of someone who wandered off the true path, lured by the siren song of postrat woo. But I do sometimes wonder if he's made some Kegan step that I've failed to comprehend.
Were you expecting it would be easy? Scaling from "do it yourself" to "get your team to do it" is a rare skill.
From their perspective, you are scope creeping. You're asking them to take on more work, and it's not the kind of visible high-impact work that leads to increased compensation or political power. You might solve this by figuring out how to reward the work more, or by increasing the amount of coercion applied to the sysadmins, but it's unlikely the problem is resolved without one or the other.
Yeah, intelligence is in short supply. You can try to find some magic pixie dust that lets you hire better, or you can figure out how to factor the work such that it can be productively resolved a few rungs down the IQ ladder. PM types tend to be responsive to systematization -- "I did the X process for Y client and now we're Z% of the way through the flowchart" sounds better than "I did some bespoke work for Y client", even if it's the same work. And IME once you set up the bare bones of a structure, they'll be quick to pick it up and fully develop the process.
If this harms productivity, then you have a politically cheap justification to ask him to change. If it doesn't harm productivity, then who cares? Let him be an asshole.
Yeah, can't help you there. The US government effectively mandates that you hire unqualified people. If it's any consolation, your competitors are required to do the same.
More options
Context Copy link