[lbo-talk] More "school reform" nonsense

Matt lbo4 at beyondzero.net
Wed May 26 14:28:10 PDT 2010


On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 04:07:00PM -0400, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> i'd love it if people stopped talking about teachers and talked,
> instead, about weeding technical writers, airline attendants,
> cashiers, network engineers, snowplow drivers, etc.

Hey now! Jordan asked that straight away. And that was kinda my point in my last post.

We "weed out" the bad workers by using a rating system that must match a Normal distribution, per department. It was probably invented by some HR Ph.d academic who took a stat class. :-/

So outliers are a 1 (please quit) or a 5 (we love you). Most people are of course 3s.

There's some ad hoc bullshit used to "calculate" the rating but everyone knows it is really this:

1: You are my giant pain the ass. Please quit so we don't have to fill out the paperwork to fire you.

2: If the guy who got the 1 quits, we may want you to quit. But chances are I and my boss don't give enough of a shit to fill out the paperwork on you.

3: You keep coming in, we keep paying you.

4: That was some top notch ass kissing you did this year. Congrats!

5: You tell me whatever I wants to hear, regardless of how wrong it may be. You probably smell nice and pretend to enjoy spending your free time with me and the other managers at the "parties" and "picnics" we tell you are optional.

No one believes it has anything to do with performance. Yet being a 4 or a 5 more than one time is really important to some people.

Matt

-- GnuPG Key ID: 0xC33BD882 aim/google/MSN/yahoo: beyondzero123

Ignorance is the mother of devotion.

-Robert Burton



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list