BrookeTAllen
Joined 11 years ago
Karma
192
Submissions
31
Member since
Jan 8
For more see: BrookeAllen.com.
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
Alex is a chatbot implemented in ChatGPT-4o. These are her thoughts on GPT-5. What does your chatbot think about what she thinks?
Comment · 7 years ago
My dad taught me something when I was 16 that I didn't understand until I was 41.
Comment · 9 years ago
In February, 2014, I shut down a business I'd built and run for 18 years. I took my staff to a Startup Weekend to show them what entrepreneurship looks like, and I wrote about it in Quartz: http://qz.com/173080/why-i-forced-my-staff-to-attend-startup...
Someone told me that he thought that only four of the people presenting showed any passion; I was one, and two of the others were employees of mine. (BTW, one of them - my youngest employee - won the weekend and has just recently graduated from Y-Combinator).
That got me thinking about what passion really is, and I've concluded that it isn't good enough merely to "like" something. There needs to be something about the status quo that you dislike so much that you're willing to work at addressing it, even when sometimes the work is so hard you hate every second.
Thoughts please..
Comment · 11 years ago
This came out of a game design class on Thursday night (10/29). How many ideas can you folks generate by Halloween night? Feel free to re-post this elsewhere.
Comment · 11 years ago
I like helping people a lot but not so much if they are only trying to help themselves.
In 2004 I changed how I hire people and you folks discussed that (see: http://www.slideshare.net/BrookeAllen1/brooke-allen-has-a-be...)
Since then I've become more public about how the job market is broken and how it might get fixed.
A year ago when I retired from Wall Street finding ways of improving the market for work has become a major passion project of mine. I have connected with many people and helped them change how they hire or helped them with an article or blog post they are writing.
But one downside is that I often get requests from total strangers to help them get a job and - to be frank - I find these requests a imposition.
I did not understand why I felt this way until reading this piece by Nick Corcodilos.
Brooke (BrookeAllen.com)
Comment · 11 years ago
I agree that nobody should take me too seriously. I often take myself too seriously and it is exhausting and thankless work.
On the other hand, I disagree with your assertion that I made people take a course as part of a hiring process. I simply said that I’d hire someone if they knew some things and 27 of my candidates who didn’t know those things asked if I would teach them for fee. I agreed to offer a three-week course on condition they wanted to learn for its own sake and that they were NOT doing it to get a job because I wasn’t guaranteeing anyone would get hired and, besides, the chance any one person would get hired was perhaps 4%. In the end a bunch of them proved to be superb and I hired two instead of one as I’d originally hoped. And I got a few others jobs elsewhere. I didn’t have to do that, but I did. And they didn’t have to learn what they did, but they did.
You can accuse me of being biased in favor of people who like learning things for its own sake and who know how to do the job I need done. But if you are going to accuse people of forcing time-consuming education on candidates then I’d hope you’ll spend time going after employers who force you to have an irrelevant degree from a costly university before they will even let your resume past some idiotic filter.
Comment · 11 years ago
BROOKE HERE (the guy from the article).
Some thoughts on this discussion…
ON PREJUDICES: Often I don’t get what I want because other people have inaccurate judgments concerning me. But what can I expect; who has the time to really do due diligence. And who am I to judge their judgments of me? If I were a judge at court I’d have to recuse myself because I am way too close to my own case.
This is not to say prejudice doesn’t exist. It does. And it is not to say it isn’t harmful. It is. Prejudice harms us all and the prejudices that harm me the most are my own; they keep me from being all I can be.
When I overlook good candidates because I judge them on irrelevant characteristics then I am constraining my options and that does me no good. Although it would be wonderful if the world was perfect I’ve found it most fruitful to concentrate on the problems closest to me and interestingly they usually involve something about me I could improve upon or resign myself to. I’m happier and more productive when I spend so much time trying to be part of a solution (and not the precipitate) that I don’t have time left over to theorize about what people beyond my influence should be doing.
ON MENTAL DISABILITIES: If you spend any time with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders I’m sure you can find yourself and everyone you know in there. It seems to me that strengths and weaknesses of the mind should be considered only if relevant just as with things in the physical realm. I’m not sure where to draw the line, however I rue the day when sociopaths cannot be discriminated against. In any event, I’ve concluded that life is a terminal spectrum disorder we just have to deal with as best as we can (until we don’t have to any more).
ON SELF-DISCLOSURE: As a practical matter, if you have an obvious disability the best time to bring it up is right before it becomes obvious. For example, if you have a stutter and you ask for forbearance at the beginning of an interview then you can win people’s hearts and they will be rooting for you. But if you don’t then often they cannot wait for the conversation to end. If your disability is not obvious but might require accommodation later on then probably the best time to disclose it is after you get a job offer and before you accept.
If you choose to go public with your issues and make them a cause célèbre then in order to win broad support it will need to be clear that you are doing it for the benefit of people in your circumstances and not just as cover for your own failings. Even then, the recognition you deserve might only come posthumously, but that is irrelevant unless it is recognition that you seek.
PEOPLE I’D LOVE TO HEAR FROM: Although this discussion is interesting I wonder if any of you out there would like my help improving how you hire people. If so, please contact me.
I am retired and don’t need to do this, but I want to. If you are stinking rich I can be expensive and if you’re sincerely broke then I can be free. Either way, you have to tell me who you are. I’m at BrookeAllen.com.