Posts by Rich Lock
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Hard News: Friday Music: History, motherfuckers, in reply to Russell Brown,
I’d read your music blog Danielle, I’m sure it would piss me off far less often than Sweetman’s.
I’d read that!
It's a shame we don't know someone with an existing platform and an existing audience who already know Danielle and her writings who could host it.
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Hard News: Game Lorde, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Was totes about to make a “Whatevs, The Beatles weren’t even that good” joke, but dude: Wrong room.
Huh. I thought she was talking about Black Sabbath.
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Ross Mason,
In moments of crisis, pulling out a Bible can provide our service men and women with reassurance and strength
It would depend on how absorbent the pages are, surely?
ETA: beaten by Martin. Although I read a story from a PoW in Korea who was asked if his bible provided comfort when he was in the camp. Yes, he said. Charcoal from the pages helped bung him and his mates up when they all had dysentry.
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Ben Austin,
Just remembered an interview I had in London just over a year ago when we first came back. First interview was the two line managers I'd be reporting to and went really well - got on well with them, good vibe.
Subsequent second interview got HR involved. We spent the first half-hour (literally) talking about a discrepancy between my LinkedIn profile and the CV I sent them. Which related the schools I listed as attending 25 years ago (I changed schools at sixth form and merged them on my CV as I got some qualifications at one and some at another). Half an hour. I wasn't in the best frame of mind at the end of that.
Didn't get offered the job.
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Ben Austin,
I can’t imagine many people would, without any sort of similar spur, one day decide to implement a complex, no doubt expensive vetting system without something lurking behind that.
When I moved to NZ around 10 years ago, I had to adjust my head fairly considerably: in the UK, I was used to dealing with HR departments as a first step in any interview process for my type of role (graduate professional engineer), with usually a second subsequent interview with more HR and line managers who you'd be reporting to. I interviewed for a lot of jobs in the UK before I got my first graduate role, and I got a lot of experience at playing HR games. I wasn't very good at these when I started, and learned from my mistakes after each one (fail better!).
A lot of the NZ firms I interviewed with tended to be a lot smaller, you'd interview in a fairly unstructured manner with the manager (who was also often the owner) who would size you up and see if he liked the look of you. A few of the bigger corporates were more HR-focussed, but not like the UK was. That required a considerable adjustment in approach.
I think it's a function of size and internal empire building. A company gets to a certain size and suddenly needs a more personnel-focussed administrator. Gets to a size after that and it's a department. A size after that and suddenly it's it's own little internal empire that spends a not insignificant portion of it's resource justifying it's existence (usually unwittingly - no single snowflake ever blames itself for the avalanche) by implementing new systems, training it's members in those systems, etc etc.
TL;DR - It's an organically evolving parasite.
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to B Jones,
I think it selects for people who are ok with putting their employer’s interests ahead of the normal rules of interpersonal interaction.
I had something of an epiphany a year or two ago when I realised that the function of HR was not to act in any way whatsoever in the interests of the employee, but rather to act as an enforcement arm for management to prevent uppity employees from any sort of boat-rocking.
'They're just questions, Mr Lock. Perhaps you'd like to tell me about you mother'
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Interesting post.
I assume the pre-vid video ads on YouTube get a different rate (for artist and host) to the static pop-ups?
Seems to me there’s a few ways artists and YouTube management could get together to finesse this to the advantage of both parties (although not necessarily to the advertiser). I tend to listen to a lot of music on YouTube, mostly because it’s very easily accessible and there’s a certain mental inertia in switching over to Soundcloud or whatever. Usually I play it in the background while I do something else. Judging by the upload patterns of users, I’ll confidently say I’m not the only one who uses it in this way – there’s thousands of music uploads with no video, just a single still image: single tracks, full albums, DJ mixes, etc. There’s also thousands of user-generated playlists where the single vid track automatically jumps to the next one (sometimes with a vid ad in between, sometimes not).
Now, presumably a single 3-4 min track will currently attract the same ad rate as a 1-hour album for the pop-up? But the pop-up only appears once. It would be easily technically possible on a non-video image track to have multiple pop-ups appearing at intervals, or multiple pop-ups at once. Users already generate something similar for thier own on-screen comments with links. On a non-video track it’s minimally invasive, and if it’s part of a playlist and on in the background, the user possibly won’t even notice them as the tracks play sequentially. It does sound a little counter-intuitive, but so did the million dollar homepage (admittedly that had the advantage of novelty at the time of launch, and it’s copycats are struggling, but on YouTube you won’t need thousands of click-throughs on a single link on a single image to make it viable).
On a side note, the most annoying thing about music playlists on YouTube is when a playlist in the background does get interrupted by an overly intrusive ad. Note to advertisers: music fans are not homogeonous. This is annoying: “oh hai, I see you like music! Slayer! Cool! Would you like to listent to some Justin Bieber? How about some Katy Perry? No? One Direction then!” Sort your algorithms.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Oh good: World War III
Cold War II, perhaps. Superpowers flex and glare at each other while grinding their proxies to bloody dust in the middle.
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Southerly: My Life As a Palm Tree, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Would that have been Nunhead Cemetery by any chance
Close, but your cigar is withheld on this occasion. And not just because those things are deadly. Deadly, I tells ya! Our nanny state overladies frown severely on such pleasures!