Z1515M8147

In systems engineering, negative feedback is viewed as one form of 'unexpressed system requirement' for that stakeholder. Surprise negative feedback can be even better, as it may be a sign that your system has a stakeholder you weren't even aware of but which you now are.

This approach is covered extensively in the book 'Getting to Yes And: The Art Of Business Improv' by Bob Kulhan, which is one of the few books I would consider a must read for anyone interested in technical leadership.

In some countries, employment law has driven us to this, and it's widely seen as optimisation and culmination of what we know about employment best practice.

Some UK examples..

No longer does anyone bother getting letters from past employers as references, since none of the information in the reference can be verified as true or false employers cannot legally form a judgement based on this. Consequently all an employer is allowed to say is 'yes, they worked here, regards, x'.

Another example, every candidate at interview must be asked the same 'opening' questions, otherwise a failed candidate could bring legal action because they were not given the same opportunity as other interviewees. Candidates are also legally allowed to ask to see interviewer's notes (even during the interview) so interviewers should not be writing anything besides 'scores' for interviewee competancies, unless they want to get into legal trouble.

Competancy is assessed at interview, not at sift. The sift simply identifies that candidate meets the minimum possible spec for the role and can be interviewed. They may end up well exceeding the job spec after competancy based interview.

I hire on anonymized data. I can tell you that it works well. The only flaw is that if your pool of application sifters is not diverse, bias will start to creep back in. For instance, in a group of several application sifters of a single gender who are collectively deciding which applications to progress to interview stage, one may frequently encounter presumptions of gender and age of the applicants due to implicit bias by the sifters.

The organisation must have a very respectful culture in which colleagues feel comfortable calling out others on their biases when this happens.

For thia reason I hire based on anonymized data that also discards all place name locations and institutions. The result is quite effective, as you are presented with an applications that show only the bare bones of someone's experiences without context that might bias you.

I hire with anonymous data. I would look at a statement like '25 years experience' on a CV and completely ignore it, as I have no idea how competant the candidate is based on this. I would look for the key technical words and impact statements in the CV to show depth of experience rather than general statements like this.

The best way out of unconscious incompetence is having a mentor, but knowing to get a mentor is often a test of your ego, which can be the hardest part to overcome.

From what I can tell of the latest release trailers it looks to me like the bulk of Laz's work is still in there despite it having 10 years more dev since I played it, a majority being after Laz handed it over to the community, so I would be cautiously optimistic that it's still the transformative mod it once was!

I'm also tempted to reinstall it!