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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26877 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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The other famous case recently was teachers in NYC schools. They proved that the test was fine to one judge and then lost on appeal and had to shell out $2 billion.

What was their test like?

It seems trivially obvious that a high school math teacher should have to pass a math test slightly higher than whatever they'll be teaching. Or that a bank employee should be able to do whatever kind of math they might use for their job.

It seems unlikely that the extra friction and expense of requiring kindergarten teachers who can pass even Algebra II is worth it, as long as they're literate, patient, enforce social norms, and willing to stick with the phonics and counting curriculum. I vaguely remember having to pass an algebra test as an adult, some years after taking the course, in order to continue teaching a subject that involved no algebra at all, but a lot of enforcement of social norms and some design stuff. It seemed a little silly, and I do think I would have been pretty pissed if I had failed and needed to both re-learn algebra and pay a fee to re-take the test.

Seems sort of similar to the kinds of friction you get in big companies. Google has teams that require very in-demand skills and teams that require very out-of-demand skills, but front or back, iOS or Android, C++ or JavaScript, everyone gets paid on the same ladder and has to pass the same interview.

Google actually has a separate SWE-Front End position with different interviews. This is not because Google's interview process is good (it's not), but because the market puts some limits on corporate idiocy.

IIRC, most of the interviews were the same for front end SWEs, but they swapped out the system design interview for a frontend interview.

Yeah that's fair. IME out-of-college interviews tend to be very general, algorithms/data structures stuff (e.g. I did a general interview, and was offered a spot on a computer vision team and on a software engineering team). But if you're hiring somebody with industry experience, especially at a senior level (L5), questions will be geared more to their specialty. The pay scale is still the same though, afaik.

It seems unlikely that the extra friction and expense of requiring kindergarten teachers who can pass even Algebra II is worth it, as long as they're literate, patient, enforce social norms, and willing to stick with the phonics and counting curriculum.

The current system of requiring a college degree with an education specialization is also extra friction and expense compared to the previous system of letting school officials hire 16 year old girls and use their judgement to pick which ones would be any good at it.

It seems trivially obvious that a high school math teacher should have to pass a math test slightly higher than whatever they'll be teaching.

Yes, but then they didn't have anywhere near enough black or hispanic teachers, which was not an acceptable outcome in that culture.

The tests weren't made public to protect trade secrets of the testing company unfortunately so I'm not sure.

I agree it might seem silly but I don't think that it would be racist or that you should get a $2 million pay out like in this case.

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