Octopodial Chrome

It’s an open secret that the position-filling business is badly broken. The employer doesn’t have any real confidence that the selected candidate is a good fit; the employee doesn’t have any real confidence that the selected employer is a good fit; instead the employee assuages the employer with a thesaurus-generated resumé and the employer assuages the employee with money. This is just dumb.

Jason Freedman suggests an alternative that just could work: being on potential hires as short-term contractors. Both parties can then get some experience working with one another and see if the position is a good fit. And if it’s not, the psychological cost of severing the relationship is much lower than even with probationary periods.

It’s probable that HR departments would have to refashion themselves to do this, especially in larger corporations, but that’s their job.

I wonder if anyone can think of downsides of this idea. The only one which comes to my mind is that current law assumes too much about people being long-term employees (e.g. with the way health insurance is taxed). But that can be changed, and probably should anyway.

Caught a reference to this on a blog today:

My Love is of a birth as rare
As ’tis, for object, strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair,
Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble hope could ne’er have flown,
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixed;
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.

For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect loves, nor lets them close;
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic power depose.

And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant poles have placed,
[Though Love’s whole world on us doth wheel],
Not by themselves to be embraced,

Unless the giddy heaven fall,
And earth some new convulsion tear.
And, us to join, the world should all
Be cramp’d into a planisphere.

As lines, so love’s oblique, may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But ours, so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.

Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars.

—Andrew Marvell, 1892

I particularly like the seventh stanza.