I was reading this …

I was reading this Salon story written by a woman who has been trying to get laid off from her dot-com job. It has solidified my growing suspicion that a good half of all dot-com jobs in the past three years have been pretty much unnecessary and only existed to satisfy the venture capitalists who were fronting the money and needed to see some kind of progress. One of the fastest ways to show that a company is growing is to overstaff it with people who probably shouldn’t have been hired in the first place. And now that the dot-com bubble has burst, and all of these people are without jobs, they are pounding on the doors of those companies who are still hiring. This is what my employer is going through right now. Now, instead trying to find the one or two exceptional candidates among the masses, we’re now seeing massive amounts of people with “two years experience” and “three years experience.” But when you really dig into their skills you end up asking yourself “two/three years experience at doing what?” Sitting in your dot-com cubicle, surfing web sites and hoping the stock price keeps going up? I recently had a résumé come across my desk that was well-written, presented well, and included all the necessary information to get to the phone-screen level. However, when I really dug into the included information, checked out the references and sites listed, I realized that it was nothing but a bunch of fluff and buzzwords. I saw that the skills and knowledge listed in the résumé weren’t adequately represented. It was like someone had scanned three months of an industry-centric mailing list, gleaned the buzzzwords and concepts, and then wrote a résumé based on that.

I spent two years sitting in a corporate cubicle, learning, absorbing, and becoming good at what I do now. It’s kind of like “doing time.” And it teaches you that there is no short path to career success — despite the dot-com media insanity that resulted in the whole industry looking really stupid.

OK, last thought. I sometimes see résumés that are really good. I am amazed. I think “Wow, we need to bring this person in for an interview.” But, then I go to Google and try to find information about this person. Nothing. I search industry mailing list archives. Nothing. I check the membership rosters of industry organizations. Nothing. Whoah, does this person even know how to communicate? How come this person doesn’t even have a personal web site? Why is there no public proof that they know what they’re talking about? Is this asking too much?

CamWorld: Reader Mail. I’m starting a new feature here (modeled on Dave Winer’s old Reader Mail postings). Please note that all email that is posted will be stripped of all identifiers except a name and a URL (if available). If you send me a response which I post, but you’d like it removed, please let me know. Note that all email is moderated and filtered for quality. Discussion groups won’t work here.

Here’s an article that says more developers are targeting Java/J2ME than Windows CE or Palm OS. I wonder if it’s because it’s perceived as more open than the other two.

The Mozilla roadmap was updated recently. It now shows that Mozilla 1.0, if all goes as planned, will ship towards the end of Q2 of 2001.

I can’t help it. Everytime I think about IT/Ginger I am reminded of the Fisher-Price corn popper toy, except in my head I imagine people zipping around on an oversized version of the corn popper, making sound effects from the Jetsons.

Oh, the irony is killing me! Here’s a paper about Flash Usability with the text of the paper embedded into a Flash file….

Whitepaper: Standards-Based Technologies and Enterprise Messaging Infrastructures

Posted by Cameron Barrett at March 8, 2001 07:52 PM

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *