Why has my Klout score dropped

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This seems to be the question that many Klout users asks themselves since yesterday. The reason is simple: Klout has released a new version of the algorithm to measure the influence to improve their accuracy and transparency.

The algorithm will now track better the quality of your interactions instead of the quantity. According to their official work there are three principles that form the basis of the algorithm to determine your score:

  • How many people you influence
  • How much you influence them and
  • How influential they are.

So, something as having a more accurate system has been transformed in a very negative change because lot of users have seen how their score has dropped.

In my opinion the main error Klout has done is not the change itself as many users suggest, but how to reflect it in the score. They should have played more with the psychology of the people and increase the base of the score like for instance adding 100 points to everybody before apply the change, in that way people would have not seen a drop in their score and their egos would have been safe. I’m being a bit ironic but you get the point.

It is really worrying to see how many people trusts the score reputation indexes as the most important thing in Social Media, which in my opinion it’s plain stupid. Don’t get me wrong, I think any score system that allows you track your progress is good, because it will allow you to measure how you are evolving online. But it can’t become your only point of interest or action plan.

Some of the comments you can see in the Klout blog show the madness that is around the online influence and reputation Look this example

many organizations have coupled economic functions and job-related selection to your scoring system. By making this change, you have negatively impacted the job market

Really? Are there companies hiring based on your Klout score? If that’s the case I truly think it is very worrying where we are heading up.

As I said before in all our tasks it is important to have a way to measure success. So Klout, PeerIndex, TwitterGrader, TunkRank … and all the similar systems that give you an artificial and automatic way to measure influence can be a hint for how you are doing your activities online, but none of them can -neither should- replace how we evaluate the influence of a person. It is just common sense to see how any of these score systems attribute you online influence on subject but make you completely irrelevant on a secondary subject.

Don’t be fooled, B2B decisions are not being significantly influenced by conversations on Facebook or Twitter.

What is a MACH?

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People who follows me on twitter have probably seen this week that we are hiring a MACH Developer Evangelist for my team, which basically is a truly passionate about software development.

But being honest, anyone knows what a MACH is? Yes, I really mean MACH this is not a Mac with a typo. If I have to evaluate it based on the amounts of questions you have sent me, the answer is no. So, I realize I made the mistake of thinking everybody know what it is.

The MACH acronym stands for Microsoft Academy for College Hires and it is an accelerated career development program, designed to recruit and hire people who have between 18 and 24 months of experience from around the world that stand up because of their potential and top performance. They are intended to be the new leaders and key people inside Microsoft.

The main goals of the program are:

  • Hire among the top universities of the world in each country the students with the higher potential and talent.
  • Provide them with a top-class on boarding program to accelerate the ramp-up time in Microsoft.
  • Retain talented students and enable leadership-potential employees to excel in their careers at Microsoft.
  • Provide them community-building and networking opportunities.

After reading this you might erroneously think this is just an internship, but a MACH is a full time employee and has all the standard Microsoft employee benefits.

From the very beginning, if you are hired as a MACH you will work in a challenging real role, what it makes it different from a standard hiring is that:

  • The MACH position combines top-class training with the standard job tasks you were hired for.
  • During the first year you will have a structured training program.
  • During the second year you will continue with your accelerated career development.
  • You will have a mentor selected among experienced Microsoft managers.
  • You will participate in international trainings with other graduates in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).
  • You will have global networking opportunities with other MACH hires outside EMEA

I guess you are already asking how you can become a MACH, the good news is that Microsoft continues betting on talented young people and we have several open positions around the World, as an example I show you the ones open in Spain:

Reached this point I can only say I wish you very good luck during the selection process. If you have any question don’t hesitate to ask.

Blog Change

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Welcome to Mad about .NET

I decided to move away from the community http://www.clearscreen.com and start the adventure on my own domain.

For those who do not know me, my name is Jose Bonnin, and I am the Product Development Manager of Payvision, an international payment solutions provider that specializes in multi-currency processing for card-not-present electronic transactions.

Behind my manager role there is a geek who tries to contribute to the .NET community in several ways, I'm Ineta Country Leader and Culminis Country Lead Volunteer for Spain. Therefore, as you probably deducted from the title, the blog subject will not be payment solutions, but the .NET Framework and other related technologies.

Here I want to share my thoughts and opinions regarding this lovely development platform and its community.

I can't finish this first post without thank to the guys of BlogEngine.NET and STUDIO7DESIGNS

I hope you decide bear with me and enjoy reading the posts.

Regards,

Jose.

Job Interviews

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Today I had an unexpected situation while I was interviewing a candidate for a developer role.

We normally start our interviews letting the candidate writing some simple code, in this case, the piece of code was to write a method that reverses a string. But today the candidate, after the time expired to do the test, complained strongly about this way of making interviews. I must confess that I was astonished, I couldn't believe that a developer complained about a test that requires he writes code.

After explain the reasons about why our company does this kind of tests, that this is only a small part of it and that we will never discard a candidate only because the result of the test, he argued that after 5 years of experience he doesn't need to do this kind of tests, since his CV already proves he is able to work as developer. So, he decided not to continue with the interview because it goes against his principles.

I understand that it can be annoying to make a test, when you go to an interview you are normally quite nervous and tired after a work journey, so it's hard to be focused in these situations and the results can be unpredictable.

As I said we don't discard candidates because of it, but I think it's a good start point and we only ask to do what a developer knows best: write code.

I have nothing to say about this candidate, he only followed his ideas. But, what do you think? Are you also against writing code during job interviews?

Presentation

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I would like to start my blog doing a brief presentation about why I start with it and what you would find here.

For a long time I wanted to develop just for fun and to contribute with my modest knowledge about .NET in forums, user groups, etc. but I never find the time or the energy to continue writing code (at least useful code) in front of a computer after the long working days…probably you know what I mean.

So, here I am, the New Year is almost there together with lot of New Years resolutions, normally people want to do diets, go to the gym (I already left this idea too many years ago), etc. One of my New Year resolutions for 2007 is to dedicate more time to develop for fun and not only for work.

I hope you join me in this blog from time to time and you find interesting what I write.