Victim of LinkedIn Logic Malfunction?

People have been congratulating me on my new job. I’m very grateful for the messages of goodwill. The only problem is, I haven’t actually got a new job!

People appear to have been responding to messages generated by LinkedIn. These tell my contacts that I have a new job and suggest they congratulate me (using the button provided). Some of my contacts have even re-checked my LinkedIn profile, presumably to see what my new job actually was.

The cause of this misfiring of LinkedIn messages was no doubt the fact that I had added some additional details to my LinkedIn profile.

I added details of a second current part-time “job” which I rather grandiosely described as “Rental Property Manager (Private)”. I thought this would be useful in rounding out my profile with the different and valuable experience I had gained through renting out houses for the last six years.

I entered the start date (the year 2007) and left the end date blank (as this continues to this day).

LinkedIn must run some routine processes against its “back-end” databases which look for particular features and then generate electronic junk mail (sorry, I should say “generate carefully targeted communications of great interest and value”).

The logic LinkedIn is applying must ignore the start date of a newly entered job and focus solely on the fact that there is no end date.

i.e. if it is  a “current” job and it is newly entered, it must be a “new job”

Hence LinkedIn thinks something which started six years ago is “new”.

Here’s the rub: If I happen to be looking for a new job, I might want to enhance my profile on LinkedIn by adding additional details of my experience. Surely that would seem sensible. But if, as a result,  LinkedIn erroneously congratulates me on having found a new job, then all my contacts will assume the search is over and stop keeping an eye out for me!

Edgar Bolton. 2013

Why is my Speedometer 'faster' than my Sat Nav?

I have had a Sat Nav for over a year now. It is one of the best gadgets I have ever purchased. The amount of time I spend lost in cities has almost reduced to almost zero. I confidently navigate complex motorway interconnections. I find remote destinations.

One of the many features the Sat Nav helpfully provides me with is a measure of my current speed.

I have noticed that the speed the Sat Nav thinks I am travelling at is slower than the speed that the car dashboard speedometer thinks I am travelling at. I have been wondering why this is.

The Sat Nav measures speed by recording the time it takes to travel between fixed points calibrated by satellites. This should be fairly reliable (except on steep hills, when the distance actually travelled will  be further than the Sat Nav thinks, so the real speed will be greater).

The speedometer measures the speed of rotation of the wheels. In order to assess actual speed, it must make assumptions about how big the wheels are. If these assumptions are wrong then its calculation of speed will be wrong.  

Car manufacturers tend to 'play safe' by calibrating speedometers high. This also means that the number of miles "on the clock" will be higher than the number of miles actually travelled, and fuel efficiency calculations will appear more favourable.

Furthermore, as the car tyres wear down there will be a gradual increase in the speed that the speedometer calculates. This is because the distance actually travelled per rotation becomes less as the tyre wears.

How important is this difference?

Well, my Sat Nav currently measures 67 mph when my speedometer displays 70 mph. So if I am holding my speed, according to the Speedometer,  at 70 mph on long motorway stretches, it is actually taking me 5 minutes longer than I am expecting for every 100 miles travelled.

That may not seem much in itself, but over the course of a year, this could equate to the equivalent of a whole working day. Over 25 years that is roughly a working month of your life wasted.

So that's two good reasons why changing worn tyres could actually help you live longer!


Edgar Bolton. 2013

LinkedIn versus Facebook

Both LinkedIn and Facebook are frequently described as Social Media sites. I subscribe to both, although I use them in somewhat different ways. I've noticed that quite a lot of people I know also use both sites too. I am intrigued by the contrast between the differing versions of ourselves which we project.

On LinkedIn, many of us  attempt to marshal our very finest corporate vocabulary. Sometimes the resulting stack of superlatives would  make even the most brass necked of candidates on The Apprentice cringe.

On Facebook, we seem to strive to project a version of ourselves as very interesting, humourous, fun-loving people with very, very busy lives.

All these images of ourselves are to some extent works of fiction - deliberate projections of something we want to be, or want to be seen as.

The acid test for consistency would be to be able to swap your profile pictures between Facebook and LinkedIn and not feel even a slight increase in anxiety levels!

Anybody willing to take the challenge?

Edgar Bolton. 2013

Meets tight deadlines at a single bound

One requirement that seems almost to write itself into all unsuspecting Job Descriptions is "The Ability to Meet Tight Deadlines"

Unsurprisingly, in response, candidates for jobs are universally compelled to guarantee that they can do this. Some probably can.

But why should a job require people to be facing tight deadlines routinely? Yes, some jobs, such as ambulance driver, really do require things to be done quickly at short notice. Yes, most jobs would expect occasionally to have urgent situations requiring 'all hands on deck'. Reasonable people respond positively to occasional short term crises where they work. It would seem unnecessary to have to contract them to do so.

For it be necessary to specify that an essential and every day aspect of a job is meeting tight deadlines suggests that there may actually be a serious problem in the workplace. 

Is the author of the Job Description really admitting that they are incapable of managing workflow?  Or worse, that they cannot be bothered to manage workflow?

Actually achieving deadlines at short notice does not necessarily benefit the person concerned. In fact, it can have serious disadvantages in that it can train the person's manager to present requests at short notice increasingly. 

In order to train your manager to manage their own workflow better, it may be beneficial to fail to meet tight deadlines. But this approach obviously has high risk. A better solution might be to develop a 'deadline audit tool' which would be used whenever an agreed threshold of 'deadline tightness' was reached. 

Such a tool employed routinely across an organisation would expose, and thereby quickly eliminate, the problems in workflow management. For example, those situations where a task presented to one person with a "by tomorrow without fail" timescale had actually been sitting on the another's desk for the previous six weeks. 

Edgar Bolton. 2013

Why do we measure experience in years?

Many years ago a friend and I were discussing a rather pompous mutual acquaintance who was always referring to the fact that he had thirty years experience in (whatever it was - I forget).

My friend asked "Has he got 30 years experience or has he got one year's experience 30 times?"

Once I had got over my initial envy at not being the originator of this amusing insight, I started thinking. Recruitment processes typically ask for, say, five years experience in a particular area. But most people recognise that learning does not simply increase proportionally with time. The ubiquitous "steep learning curve" that many of us anticipate travelling up indicates this: 

The amount we learn in the last of five years is unlikely be the same as we learn in the first of five years. It is probably going to be considerably less. Certainly from my own experience, I would estimate I learn most in the first 3-6 months.

So what does "five years experience" really mean? And how many years is it before the increasing number starts to have a negative connotation? Is five years in the same role two years too many?

Edgar Bolton 2013

“Lessons have been learned”

The short statement “lessons have been learned” is capable of a multitude of uses. It is particularly useful when people want to create the impression of an apology or acknowledgement without actually apologising or admitting anything.

Delivered with the merest hint  of contrition, the statement sounds like an acknowledgement of responsibility for something that has been done badly.

Be careful not to get taken in by this. The choice of language may be very deliberate. The only lesson the person speaking might actually have learned is “next time don’t get caught!”

If you find yourself in a situation where somebody comes out with the statement “Lessons have been learned”, it may be worth asking them “What lessons have been learned, by whom, and how were these lessons disseminated?”

Edgar Bolton. 2013

What is a Green Herring?

A "red herring" is a false trail, an idea which turns out to be not relevant to the question being pursued.

The opposite of a "red herring" is a "green herring".

A "green herring" is something encountered which does not seem relevant but which turns out to be useful later.

Edgar Bolton. 2013