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Peven Stan posted:As far as I can tell public sector employees at most state universities can look up their colleagues' salaries for years and there hasn't been much kidney stabbing as a result of that. Generally speaking university jobs are also highly likely to be unionized and have all sorts of ironclad contracts to make sure that people actually get paid what they're worth. It's part of why the right hates on teachers' and professors' unions so much. Hidden, "merit-based" pay allows for all sorts of behind-the-scenes fuckery to go on and hides information from employees, who may not have even the slightest clue what they're actually worth. Employees won't even know what avenues they have to get more money if they want it and may not even know what's required to get promoted. If the job and pay structure are laid out then the information is public. Transparency also reduces nepotism, which is rampant in America. It doesn't matter how skilled you are if the owner's nephew needs a job and he owes his brother a favor and there is one position open. Perhaps the biggest irony here, though, is that the extremely rich are expecting everybody else to produce more for longer hours and lower pay, which just pisses everybody off. One of the most successful businessmen I know actually pays the ever loving poo poo out of his employees and everything he touches turns to gold. I'm talking like he goes out to look for how much a person in X position with Y experience makes, finds the highest amount they're usually paid, then looks at them and says "I'll give you 25% more than that." He gets very talented, motivated people that get him freaking results in everything they do. Some people say he's being stupid because he isn't maximizing his profits but really, part of the reason he's so successful is because his employees know they're very well taken care of.
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Apr 19, 2014 02:24
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shrike82 posted:Only if you're in the tiny minority of academics with tenure. That's a reflection of the general U.S. labor market, sadly, which is also damaging the quality of education. Many colleges are hiring part-time professors that don't get unionized, tenured, paid, or provided benefits. Which is, of course, making education suck more and leading to weird things like a student having their gas pumped by one of their professors. No, I'm not making that up, I briefly dated a woman who was a part-time English professor with an advanced degree that made so little money teaching in a freaking college that she had to pump gas full time on top of it to not starve.
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Apr 19, 2014 02:31
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Branman posted:For some reason people in D&D think that the only valid way to land a job is to submit anonymous applications online. Finding jobs through networking isn't a problem that needs to be stamped out. The problem is that networking takes time and travelling. Networks aren't built overnight and, in some cases, a person with a network will be faced with a situation where nobody they know knows somebody that is looking. Sometimes your bank account is empty, your unemployment just ran out, and you need a job right goddamned now, which leads to just spamming applications and resumes to anyone you can think of. It isn't that finding jobs through networking is bad in and of itself it's that some people don't have the time or resources to go that route. It should also not be the only way to find a job. Having a job should not be the sole providence of "well I knew a guy..."
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Apr 19, 2014 16:17
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Jarmak posted:Are you under the impression the totality of networking is when your dad play's golf with the CEO of some company that will give you a job as a favor or something? So what do you do if you're 20 years old, don't have 15 years of networks to fall back on, have no marketable skills, and nobody is hiring?
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Apr 19, 2014 16:54
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One of the major problems with things like aptitude testing is that tests can be deliberately made culture-specific. One of the complaints about standardized testing in general is that they tend to favor one culture or another, especially in the case of "writing tests." America is a nation of over 300 million people with a poo poo load of different dialects, some of which are dramatically different than standard American English. America also has a poo poo load of people (I forget the number) that learned English as a second language and don't speak it all that well, which would harm their score on a standardized test. This does not make them bad workers or serve as an indicator of how much skill and knowledge they have but would serve to allow employers to discriminate against them. Carla de Salva-Ruiz, who has a master's degree but didn't learn English until she was 22 and still isn't that great at it, could be an amazing, productive worker with every skill you could want but if somebody stacks the test against her she isn't getting the job.
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Apr 21, 2014 06:26
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shrike82 posted:I think we're in agreement then. The American employment system actually most strongly benefits liars in quite a lot of ways. Bottom-rung, unskilled labor jobs often have little personality test questionnaires as a requirement to even get to a proper interview. They have questions like "have you ever stolen anything?" or what have you. Generally speaking, those are more or less useless for their intended purpose as the people who do the best on them read the questions and give them the answer they want rather than the honest one. Then once you get to the interview the best bullshitter is the one most likely to get the job. PT6A posted:I think the cultural difference in question is that the Americans were lying, not that North Americans have a vastly different outlook on what bilingualism is. I think it's more likely that you have a lot of resumes coming from people that studied a bit of Japanese because they like to watch anime but having never actually being confronted with, you know, speaking actual Japanese think they're more proficient than they are.
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Apr 21, 2014 07:49
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PT6A posted:Training is different from education, and, yes, to the extent that education can be measured on a pre-employment standardized aptitude test, it's probably got very little to do with job qualification. What's the point of having diplomas and degrees if we don't trust them to mean anything? People go to school for years to get these qualifications, be it a high school diploma or a university degree, so maybe we should take them (possibly in combination with transcripts) as sufficient evidence of general education, and restrict pre-employment testing to more detailed things as I described earlier. Because, let's face it, diplomas do, in fact, mean gently caress all right now. It matters, kind of, if you manage to get one from the "right" school but diploma mills are so damned common that it's hard to tell. For-profit education is also becoming increasingly common, which further fucks things up. If you're willing to shell out the cash you can park in college however long it takes to get a degree.
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Apr 21, 2014 19:57
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