found drama

Manufacturing the Talent Shortage:

By Dimas Guardado, writing for Model View Culture. (Which, if you’re not making it a regular habit of reading the posts at Model View Culture, then you should get into that habit.)

This piece, combined with Carlos Bueno’s Refactoring the Mirrortocracy (which Guardado cites) should be required reading for anyone doing recruiting, interviewing, and/or hiring these days.

These two posts have been sitting as pinned tabs in my Chrome for a couple weeks while I figured out what to do or say about them. Ultimately I decided that there was no single pull-quote to lean on. But they’ve both got a good underlying thesis about the misuse of privilege among people (yes, mostly men) in engineering organizations and especially in start-ups. For what it’s worth, the conclusion that it led me to? That phrases like “we value passion and aptitude” are code for “we have no idea how to mentor people”.