Laura has a glossary on her site. I like this idea, I’m a logophile prone to invention or mutation of words. I’ve also got a lot of knowledge about some whacked-out stuff. I figure that instead of making people google the whacked-out ideas I have I will let them look in the glossary (retired) as a short cut.

Time to change the layout. Be patient. I stole a wallpaper from this site. This gets me back in deciphering the Moveable Type template method. …other links will be added back in later….

I have some real qualms about hiring in the technical professions.

What does it say about this industry that it interviews people by asking them to code contrived, arbitrary gimmick questions like the following on a whiteboard:

Given a 10 by 10 array of letter tiles with Scrabble &tm; values, what’s the highest-valued word we can generate from seven touching tiles"

while those who pass this winnowing blade, after hire, are the ones that are storing passwords in an unencrypted state.

There’s a cynical calculus in filtering for false positives in this fashion. I think that this process is prone to the “like me” bias and is rejecting many people who don’t match the dominant paradigm. It’s probably also part of what keeps the sector so non-diverse.

I think there’s a better way and it involves transparency and clarity.

While I’m not hiring for an engineering team, the idea of being more clear and transparent has a lot of resonance for my team which still has a strong technical component. I’m trying this out for my next hire at The Flatiron School.

I think if we transparently offer the following, we’ll set a groundwork of productive, fruitful discussions and ensure respect and humanity throughout the entire process.

1. Tell what you expect
2. Expect what you tell
3. Tell them what to expect

More on this after the jump.

The content in /posts is per se rooted in time, things I said in the past were rooted to their time and moment (commentary on the game show “The Apprentice,” seems woefully anodyne in the early aughts, but today…no). Each “post” can be taken as a message in a bottle and feels “closed” once published.

Yet there are also things that aren’t really rooted in time. They’re things that might need to grow over time or that I might revisit. Ideas like:

• Most influential albums of 1994
• Favorite poets
• What Infinite Jest means
• The generation-defining books of my lifetime

To that end, I have created https://stevengharms.com/longform/. As my first “long-form” post, I’ve added a collection of my favorite poems by the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats.