Can Algorithms Make Job-Hunting Suck Less?

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Dave Slater got his tech start-up job the old-fashioned way. Slater was at the Burning Man music festival. As he directed the assembly of an “art car” from cast-off materials, a woman approached him. She’d admired his management of the group effort, she said, and wondered what he did for a living.

Fast-forward a few months and the questioner is now Slater’s boss at Sourcery, a tech start-up she founded.

Out with the old

For generations, the saying “it’s who you know, not what you know,” has applied to job searching. And the adage isn’t wrong: labor economists say that at least one third of all jobs are found through family and friends.

But some Silicon Valley companies claim they can take the subjectivity out of the process, and improve outcomes for both individuals and hiring organizations with new platforms and algorithms.

My 2015 in books : A self-indulgent year in review

I guess I read a lot in 2015, due to some combination of having the time and needing the sanity. This is a list of some books I got a lot out of, ordered approximately by when I read them.

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion)

I read this classic collection of essays while visiting California. I ended up moving here, although I wouldn't draw a causal connection. Didion's work conveyed 1960's California to the rest of the country with the clarity of a bizarre dream (or something like that; let Louis Menand tell it). Hers is a California defined by its origin stories -- both real and imagined.

Excerpt that I guess I bookmarked at the time:

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. I t was a matter of mis-placed self-respect.

The Elementary Particles (Michel Houellebecq)

I guess one thing I learned this year is that weird, reactionary French intellectuals can be just as fun as weird, progressive French intellectuals. The fun is in the French-ness and the intellectualism. Houellebecq has a particular diagnosis of what's wrong with modern life, one that I think will resonate emotionally with many who live it, even if his implied prescription seems worse than the disease. (In this, his first book, that disease is not Islam. The links between his earlier and later works are explored in the Adam Gopnik piece that introduced me to the book.)