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Post by PhantomWolf on Jun 28, 2007 16:47:10 GMT -4
Another reason to avoid Vista. Just kidding. Best of luck with the new job, I hear that the MS Campus is a pretty neat workplace, so once you settle in you shouldn't have to worry too much about the blood pressure problems, and look on the bright side, you won't even need to fix all of your own bugs before they release.
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reynoldbot
Jupiter
A paper-white mask of evil.
Posts: 790
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Post by reynoldbot on Jun 28, 2007 17:33:20 GMT -4
Better watch what you say Bill. They might come after you.
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Post by Bill Thompson on Jun 29, 2007 1:38:36 GMT -4
Strange. Even though Scientology seems to be anti-psychiatry, Diskeeper is the one bringing up all kinds of personality evaluation tests (as opposed to Microsoft). There were four "tests" I took at Diskeeper. Two were IQ tests. The first of these was pretty standard (which I am proud to say I did nicely on), the second was a one minute test that I aced. Then there were two "tests" that was straight from the Scientology ideology. The first of these was a 200 question yes/no/neither questionare. The second one was given to me by their H.R. person. I think I must have failed this because I was almost laughing during this one. HR Person: "Have you ever been convicted of a felony?" Me: "No. But wouldn't it be funny if I answered, 'convicted?... Oh....No, not conVICTed' " Maybe they are looking for people with low IQ's. This thought has crossed my mind. About, Microsoft. Ah well, I know what you might be thinking. But at least it will be more fun and rewarding. About Scientology "coming after" me, I have no fear. Lord Xenu will protect his devoted followers.
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Post by Bill Thompson on Jun 29, 2007 1:42:20 GMT -4
Another reason to avoid Vista. Just kidding. Best of luck with the new job, I hear that the MS Campus is a pretty neat workplace, so once you settle in you shouldn't have to worry too much about the blood pressure problems, and look on the bright side, you won't even need to fix all of your own bugs before they release. good one! ;D
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Post by Bill Thompson on Jun 29, 2007 2:04:42 GMT -4
This person's experience was very simular to mine... From: www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Parliament/1455/scientology_recruitment_in_the_workplace/ars000828.txt
From: Tilman Hausherr <tilman@berlin.snafu.de> Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology Subject: fwd: Executive Software Hiring Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 22:34:17 +0200 Message-ID: <poilqsolh0o09ovqlle5qk01ggiso4i35f@4ax.com>
I received this from someone. This is the "extended version".
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[Tilman, Here's an earlier letter I wrote about my experience with Executive Software. This one has more details.]
I recently applied to Executive Software for a systems programmer and administrator job they had an opening for. They liked my resume and asked me in for a job interview. While waiting in the lobby I noticed this large futuristic sci-fi like scene hanging on the wall in the lobby. The picture looked like it came out of the movie "Blade Runner". At the bottom of the frame was a copper plaque with the name "L. Ron Hubbard". I wondered, "That name sounds familiar. Where have I heard that name before?"
The HR (Human Resources) lady took me back and administered two written tests to me. The first one was the Oxford Personality Type Indicator. All 100 questions asked here had nothing to do with the job I was applying for nor my ability to do the job. Instead they were questions relating to my personality. I doubt these questions were even legal to ask in a job interview.
(The list of questions on the Personality Type Indicator isn't a test in the sense that it is graded ABCDF, Pass-Fail, good-bad. It merely gives one an idea of what personality one has. For further information see the books: "Gifts Differing" by Isabel Briggs Myers with Peter B. Myers; "Please Understand Me: Character & Temperament Types" by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates; "Portraits of Temperament" by David Keirsey. Also search the web for "Personality Type Indicator")
The second test administered by the HR lady was a timed test of basic mathematical skills and logical thinking. 30 minutes were given to complete the test. I'll accept this as a legal test, however the questions were of a high school level, whereas I have a master's degree in Engineering.
Then in a meeting room I was interviewed by two senior software engineers. They were very impressed with my technical knowledge and experience. At the end of this interview they mentioned they rigidly follow L. Ron Hubbard's multi-volume manual on how to run a business. The entire multi-volume set took up an entire bookshelf. I could see they were a bit uncomfortable bringing up this subject, trying to quickly separate it from the book "Dianetics" and Scientology. They said L. Ron Hubbard was a prolific writer who wrote many other things besides "Dianetics". The interviewer also insisted that he was not a Scientologist, and that being a Scientologist was in no way required to be employed.
One of the interviewers then explained this daily self evaluation method they had of one's productivity, apparently something required by L. Ron Hubbard's bookshelf on how to run a business.
They have this point system. Everything you do is worth points. I'm not sure who determined how many points one gets for each accomplishment. Either the company has a list or the list is buried somewhere in that bookshelf of L. Ron Hubbard's immense tomb of writing.
The interviewer said you keep track of the points yourself. It's on the honor system. From the points you collect you make a graph of your productivity. The interviewer explained the simple method the company uses to evaluate your graph. "It's really quite simple," he said, "it follows common sense. If the graph is going upwards, then everything is good and you don't change anything. But if the graph is going down, something is wrong and you need to change something."
I questioned the idea observing that one's productivity couldn't keep increasing forever, so if the graph happened to be up it eventually had to go back down again. You couldn't conclude that something was wrong.
Then the other interviewer chatted to his coworker, "Oh yes, I really took a big hit last week when I took 3 days to track down that bug." (A bug is a defect in a computer program causing it to not work correctly under certain circumstances.) "And I also took a hit that week I went on vacation to visit my sick grandma."
I thought, "So you're penalized for tracking down a difficult to find bug that takes all your knowledge and skill and experience?"
The interview ended with me not fully understanding this self evaluation point system and how the results would be analyzed by the company.
After that interview they had me step outside for a moment while they had a private talk. They apparently said good things about me because the HR lady came and told me I would have an interview with the Director of Software Engineering. I knew the Director of Software Engineering was a very important person. If the Director of Software Engineering was going to interview me then they must be serious about hiring me.
The Director of Software Engineering took me to lunch at a nearby deli, where I brought up the question of marketing strategy.
"How do you convince customers to purchase your products?"
"We give away 'Diskeeper' on Windows 2000 single user machines." ('Diskeeper' is one of the products they sell.) "However the free version we give away is one you have to run manually. The version we sell can be scheduled to run automatically. It's a 'set it and forget it' version."
"So," I said, "your target isn't the individual consumer but companies who have many PC computers to support. And by giving away the manual version of 'Diskeeper' on consumer PCs the system administrators become aware of the software and think it's neat."
"Yes but they can't manage running the free version of 'Diskeeper' manually on every PC in their company, it's just not feasible if they have a lot of computers to support. So they ask the managers to give them money to buy the real thing."
"But how do the system administrators convince their managers who know little about computers that they should give money to purchase this software package?"
"You're a lot brighter than you give yourself credit for" he said. "Executive Software advertises in the big business magazines like Forbes which managers are likely to read. The hope is managers will see the adds and come to their system administrators and say, 'Why don't we have this software on our system!'"
We returned from lunch with the Director of Software Engineering being quite impressed with me and my knowledge not only of Software Engineering but also of marketing and it's importance. He talked privately with the HR lady for a moment, and came back saying there was one more written test that she forgot to administer.
And here is where the story becomes interesting. This third test she gave me asked many questions that were quite irrelevant to the job I was applying for, and appeared to be intruding on my private life and personal beliefs. Some of the questions I can remember were:
Do you believe in Destiny?
Who invented Buddhism?
When you vote, do you: a. Vote your party. b. Study the issues and then vote.
Would you have no more than two children, even if you were physically and financially able to?
I believe this test was meant to determine my compatibility with Scientology. In hindsight I wish I had tried to sneak a copy of that test out with me.
After completing that questionaire the HR lady said that was all and she would get back to me either way.
A week later I called the HR lady having not heard anything. She said, "Oh, I was just about to call you. You know there were many others applying for the job and we picked someone else."
I doubt she was "just about to call me". And I doubt they had any other candidates applying for the same job at that time. The job required extensive technical knowledge and expertise in a very specific field which I possessed. I can not say why I was not given a job offer, but I'm quite certain it had something to do with Scientology.
Perhaps someone would like to follow up on this story and track down that third questionaire. I'm sure Executive Software didn't come up with it themselves. That third questionaire probably can be found somewhere in the Scientology literature. Perhaps somewhere in that multi-volume set on how to run a business the L. Ron Hubbard way is a section on how to select employees who are compatible with the dogma of Scientology.
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Post by Bill Thompson on Jun 29, 2007 2:59:46 GMT -4
Diskeeper hardly holds a monopoly on the disk defragmentation software business. I've been using Raxco PerfectDisk for years, having found the defragger included with Windows (based, IIRC, on DiskKeeper) insufficient to the task of handling large HDs. I was just looking at Craig Jensen's personal web site. He (the man who started Diskeeper) claims that "It holds an impressive 99.2% market share in the USA, while being sold internationally in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian and Chinese." ( www.craigjensen.com/entrepreneur.html ) I am just the man who can change such a thing. Is Raxco PerfectDisk a better product?
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Post by Data Cable on Jun 29, 2007 3:22:53 GMT -4
I wonder if that "market share" quote includes the watered-down version bundled with Windows as the default defrag utility. And I can't make any informed judgements about PerfectDisc vs. the full version of Diskeeper.
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Post by Bill Thompson on Jun 30, 2007 16:02:06 GMT -4
I take it you didn't get the job. You take it wrongly. If you are saying this because you are assuming that I did not get the job and I am making these posts our of anger, you are wrong. I do not know if they were going to offer me a job or not. Would you want to work at such a place? Wouldn't you prefer unemployment over working at such a place? The interview ended with the recruiter asking me to email him some samples of my work. I take that to mean that they were definitely still interested after the interview in perusing and further considering me as a potential hire. We will never know it I would have turned out that they would make me an offer. I got an offer at Microsoft while waiting to hear from them. I never told Diskeeper that they stink and I would never work with them. Honestly, I was going to play this out to see how it unfolded while still looking for a real job. If an offer came from Diskeeper, I would have continued to interview while working for Diskeeper as little as possible. And all the while, making posts here of my experience.
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Post by Bill Thompson on Jun 30, 2007 16:03:29 GMT -4
I wonder if that "market share" quote includes the watered-down version bundled with Windows as the default defrag utility. And I can't make any informed judgements about PerfectDisc vs. the full version of Diskeeper. Scientology is known for using statistics as a tool to mislead and be less than honest.
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Post by LunarOrbit on Jun 30, 2007 18:06:20 GMT -4
I take it you didn't get the job. You take it wrongly. If you are saying this because you are assuming that I did not get the job and I am making these posts our of anger, you are wrong. I do not know if they were going to offer me a job or not. What I'm saying is that you either started this thread out of vindictiveness because they didn't hire you, or you're incredibly foolish for saying what you did while there was still a chance that they might hire you. Don't you think it's unwise to voice an unfavourable opinion of a potential employer on a publicly accessible web forum? Maybe the reason you haven't heard from them is not because you don't share their religious beliefs, but because they saw what you wrote about them here. If given a choice between working for a company that has a religious leaning that I disagree with or being unemployed I would choose to take the job. I do like to eat occasionally and have a roof over my head, but maybe you have the means to support yourself (and your family) without a job and you only seek one out of boredom. Surely a software company like Diskeeper has internet access and the know-how to Google combinations of their name and yours. Don't you think it's possible they have seen what you wrote here? Edited to add: Look at this... the top search result.
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Post by BertL on Jun 30, 2007 18:52:43 GMT -4
Don't you think it's unwise to voice an unfavourable opinion of a potential employer on a publicly accessible web forum? Maybe that's why Microsoft hired Bill; his distaste, if I may, of competing companies. Well, not really competing but anyhow.
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Post by LunarOrbit on Jun 30, 2007 19:26:12 GMT -4
Don't you think it's unwise to voice an unfavourable opinion of a potential employer on a publicly accessible web forum? Maybe that's why Microsoft hired Bill; his distaste, if I may, of competing companies. Well, not really competing but anyhow. I think maybe Bill should bite his tongue... Diskeeper and Microsoft seem to have a friendly relationship that Bill (Thompson, not Gates) probably shouldn't jeopardize.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Jun 30, 2007 21:19:52 GMT -4
Maybe they didn't hire him because they could see he got the heebee-jeebees as soon as he realized he was in a place with strong Scientology ties.
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Post by Bill Thompson on Jul 1, 2007 4:27:36 GMT -4
Maybe that's why Microsoft hired Bill; his distaste, if I may, of competing companies. Well, not really competing but anyhow. I think maybe Bill should bite his tongue... Diskeeper and Microsoft seem to have a friendly relationship that Bill (Thompson, not Gates) probably shouldn't jeopardize. Or maybe this is a golden coincidence. I will at least give a lot of thought and inquiry before making my next post.
But Cults are bad things. I seem to think they are much worse things that you do. THis is just a difference in opinions. But I think that if Microsoft -- and especially if Bill Gates -- had known Diskeeper's nature, there would not be a friendly relationship. I did not think about speaking out against a potential employer for a combination of many things. In addition to my inbox and my voice mail had been so flooded that I could afford one sacrifice, there is simply the need to sometimes put aside your own well being for the greater good. You talk about putting a roof over my head and providing for my family. Talking about Diskeeper as I have done so simply IS providing for my family. We have only one life. We can choose to be quiet and not make any difference. Or we can speak up and make a difference. If that cuts our lives short, so what? What good is it to live a long live when you never really lived for anything?
I gave the demo version of Diskeeper a try before the interview and before I knew their ties to Scientology. It ran for days and barely defragmented 30 percent of my hard drive. Now I am trying Auslogics Disk Defrag's free version and it has only taken minutes to work. I think it is a better product.
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Post by Bill Thompson on Jul 14, 2007 18:34:42 GMT -4
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