Monday 23 September 2013

commodification part 2

further to my last post about the commodification of personalities online, here are 2 more examples from people i know. one of them has written his job on facebook as being a finance director. er...no you are not. you do helpdesk 1st line support and you help the girl in accounts when she needs invoices organised. why lie?. actually, yes ok, lie if you want, but there are people on your facebook that know what you actually do, and you might make yourself look like a big shot in front of people who do not know you, but you look silly in front of the people that do know you. its pathetic. 

in the second case, a friend of a friend has just got a job at a large american internet firm, that everyone has heard of. he got the job through another friend who is a manager there and hired him. i heard that this guy was good from someone i know, so i thought i would look him up on linkedin. 

for me there is a test to find out if someone is bullshitting and that is if they are specific about the skills they have and what they have done. as the saying goes, there is no 'I' in team, but with regards to resumes, i only want to read 'I's. i want to read experience that conjugates verbs with the singular not the plural. 'we built', 'we delivered', 'we....' whatever. fuck all that, what did you do?. i built, i delivered, i architected. thats what counts. 
anyways, in his linkedin he writes 

"experience creating and delivering Internet software, systems, sites and campaigns"

"I understand the Internet from the wires up to the app, along with a wide range of development/deployment tools & techniques"

Specialties:

» Computers

» Internet

» Bullshit detection


fuck me, have you ever read more generic, non specific bollocks ever from a techie. i thought bullshit detection was one of his specialities. i cant be because his detector should have been going off full blast when he wrote this. 

experience..delivereing internet software, systems. eh???, all of them?. which ones? sun, oracle, apache, IIS, websphere, sharepoint, lotus notes, java, asp, C#, VB, weblogic, netscape, linux, windows????. 

"I understand the Internet from the wires up to the app", non specific again. TCP/IP, UDP, Muliticast, DNS, IGMP, BGP, EIGRP, OSPF, Cisco, Juniper, F5, Barracuda, Watchguard, ASA, PIX, Sonicwall, X.25, ethernet, token ring.....etc????. 

"a wide range of development/deployment tools". i know developers and there are lots of specific ones. i know sharepoint developers, and i know people who do java and c, and i know people that do vb and asp and .net, and i know people that used to do flash and javascript and cold fusion. their specialties dictate the development tools they use. people who do .net tend not to use eclipse. guys who do java dont use visual studio. be specific and stop bullshitting in broad generalizations covering everything. hey, maybe he does know everything, but i am pretty confident he does not. in fact i suspect he might know not much at all. 
how do people fall for this shit?. if i saw a profile like that i would not give it a second look, or i might but only to mock it. its no wonder some people need to get friends to hire them, but you would not get an interview in any good company where you would have to do some real work.

i have been critical of a lot of the people that work in tech departments in finance, but there are also some staggeringly talented people you come across and i very much doubt he is in their class. they are very good, they deliver projects and they know their shit and they are specific about what they know and do.  

its 2 more examples of playing to a crowd of people that dont know you and embelishing your internet presence to make you look better than you are. 

they play this at my gym. its not that good but its good for background music to train to. 





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