Were we the Artisans of Old?

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Israelis love American salad here. I don't like bread in the salad myself. When I first arrived here, I used to laugh about how small they cut the vegetables in the Middle East. They chop them! It's opposite in South America, we cut them very big, like the Greek. But now I've fallen inlove with Lebanese food, it's become a special interest and I'm trying to learn as much as I can. My ex husband ate in south Lebanon during the war, he said their food is the best, and the Lebanese women brought it in huge round platters, bigger than a coffee table! We're not allowed to cross the border, though.

Please could you discuss this wonderful food in a new topic. Much as I love Middle Eastern food, this topic is too important to let drop. A small digression is OK, but the thread is being lost here.

I was discussing the problem of students and respect with regard to knowledge and experience of teachers. There are several issues that have turned this around, and this has nothing to do with the students themselves:

1. The students are encouraged to complain about their teachers, and this usually happens because they think their work is better than it is, so when their egos are hurt when they fail or get low marks, they blame the teacher. And so standards drop.

2. Management encourages students to complain so that staff feel victimised, and it is another method of intimidation and threat by management.

3. Students are called customers, and that is not the true relation between students and teachers. The term student had been replaced firstly by the word 'learner', which is actually more Germanic in origin. What is wrong with the word 'student'?

4. Experienced teachers are being made to prove themselves to head teachers who are often younger than themselves, and have not spent the time in industry.

5. An irony is that although qualifications have become higher over the years, there are less face to face hours for the student to obtain these qualifications.

6. Because students have computers in certain classes, they are tempted to pursue whatever they want on screen. Take my computer classes for instance. All the computers are in a ring around the room, facing the walls, so students by default, have their back to me. The only thing I can do is to take over their screens for attention. I dislike doing this, and you can well imagine why, but I have to.

Well, after spending almost 2 months in 'how to get a job' classes...

The push for HR is to be able to quantify people according to 'fit'. Do the psychological characteristics of the candidate meet the Myers-Briggs profile (Analytical Thinker, for example)
They mainly want to know how you react in certain situations, so they can see if this fits the 'profile' they have for interviewing.

Strangely enough, what seems to be spurring this is the mechanization of applications; you go to a site, submit a resume, then don't hear anything back because your 'buzzword bingo' (putting enough of the adverbs from the posting in your resume) score isn't high enough. There's a scanner at the other end that sorts your resume according to their own, arbitrary settings. A lot of times, you don't even know if a human being has even seen it.

So the other thing they pound into you about looking for work now (besides hiding how old you are), is 'networking with people'. It's all popularity contest; who do you know, how do you get in to a company, unless you have 'someone on the inside'?

The 'skills' are now measured (at least in my field) are now measured by expensive certifications; perhaps this is the Western concept of 'mastery' (actually it's both; that, and a way to extract thousands from people who want a job). It's also about how many letters you can put after your name...

pakled, seems we're on the same program, because you described EXACTLY what they've taught us too. And funny, I'm on the other end of the world.

Here in Europe it's the same story.

pakled said it with the exact same words that we were told in the workshops and personal meetings. Things like "quantify people according to fit"

FIT has become the key trait to have. They call it the third circle, and it's 90% of the importance. The other 2 circles are called Motivation and Skills+Experience+Talents (10% both together). They claim that anyone can acquire the 2nd circle (skills, experience and talents) - which is BS, of course. Continuing with my Michelangelo analogy, do you imagine what trascendence the Sistine Chapel would have if it had been painted, instead of by Michelangelo, by just any other child who had happened to enter the Master's workshop that day, but who fulfilled the FIT requirement better than Michelangelo, say, wore cooler sneakers and had more contacts in his Facebook account?

I think employers have gone crazy...

I begin to wonder if all this employee scanning, filtering and fitting isn't just a kinda mythical ritual?

When I say "myth" I mean it in the sense that it is a culturally well known story or script, a way or context into which one can communicate confidently within a known jargon, known behaviour, and known internal logic. That this myth has nothing to do with reality is the whole point: Reality is to scary.

So this scanning, filtering and fitting is just a mythical ritual done to hide the fact that most employers/managers don't have a clue about what is really required for the job, don't have a clue what they should be managing to begin with and are actually in a state of abject fear that someone higher up might figure out that they are really just faking it all the way.

Mythical thinking is never about real facts but about good facts: Facts which fit within the myth, adhere to the myth and support the myth. Never let reality get in the way of a good myth

And naturally the worst thing anyone can do is calling it a myth, second worst things anyone can do is pointing out conflicting real data, and third is not playing by the right script.

I couldn't agree more, Meta. In my last job, I lasted 2 years. During those 2 years, I had 5 different direct managers.

1. Chose me, was demoted immediately after, then laid off (eventually they admitted he was fired)
2. Came from another dept and had not the faintest idea what our dept did nor ever agreed to learn. Did tons and tons of recruiting and letting-goes. Was fired a year later.
3. Came from another company and told us first thing she has no idea what the dept does and will take her long to learn.
4. (Added supervisor) No idea how to manage people, learned the job from me. Highly influential in the hirings and firings.
5. Since 1 and 2 were gone and 3 and 4 had no clue what they were doing, a higher boss (who has no idea of what our dept. does because he's quite new himself) eventually took the reigns of the firings and hirings. Laid me off / fired me.

NOW THIS WEEK THE CEO WAS FIRED TOO.

LOLOLOLOL

I am not surprised in the least that this virus has spread to just about every country in the world. It is all to do with the force of economic rationalism, and its attendant ‘philosophies’ which started during the Thatcher/Reagan years. Now just about every country has to kowtow to these trade agreements, and embedded in these are all the so called productivity improvements. This is achieved by disempowering and intimidating staff, devaluing labour, making people afraid of losing their jobs and cutting down long fought for working conditions.

I am not surprised in the least that this virus has spread to just about every country in the world. It is all to do with the force of economic rationalism, and its attendant ‘philosophies’ which started during the Thatcher/Reagan years. Now just about every country has to kowtow to these trade agreements, and embedded in these are all the so called productivity improvements. This is achieved by disempowering and intimidating staff, devaluing labour, making people afraid of losing their jobs and cutting down long fought for working conditions.

I am not surprised in the least that this virus has spread to just about every country in the world. It is all to do with the force of economic rationalism, and its attendant ‘philosophies’ which started during the Thatcher/Reagan years. Now just about every country has to kowtow to these trade agreements, and embedded in these are all the so called productivity improvements. This is achieved by disempowering and intimidating staff, devaluing labour, making people afraid of losing their jobs and cutting down long fought for working conditions.

On the contrary, it's much easier to keep one's job when professionalism is devalued and only social savvy is important. Most people are better at the social game than at professional level and hard work. (It's only a problem for us Aspies)

Which brings us to Upton Sinclair's adage: "When a man's paycheck depends on his not understanding something, you can depend upon his not understanding it."

Which means that anyone who's paycheck depends on this mythical ritual will happily continue to perform said ritual...

It does look like a cargo cult to me however, but then again, I can't play their game.

It's a fashion. Businesses have fashions, just like anything else. 10 years ago, it was 'Quality Control', then it was 'Lean Sigma', then it's 'Project Management Professionals', now it's 'fit'.

Everybody's looking for an 'easy' answer, and figure if it's 'working' for other people, why not them? Until the next fashion comes along, and we have to figure out how to squash ourselves into that 'paradigm'...