Splash Web Effects

In the wake of all of the hubbub about facebook’s security practices, the various how-tos and informational paranoia, I am asked quite frequently by friends and family of all levels of acquaintance about my continued use of frequent facebook and twitter updates, and their varying degrees of professionalism.

I am an avid social media user. I use twitter, facebook, linkedin and a host of other services. I check-in, I tweet and I update statuses. I post pictures of myself and my friends in fun, and silly engagements, such as playing rockband in my living room. I also tweet about what I’m working on (although I no longer post any actual details due to an NDA that covers my public speech). In short, I like to talk about what I am doing, a lot.

I enjoy disclosing details about my life. The reasons I have found for doing so- as they are generally rationalizations rather than instigating reasons- are many. I feel my professional and personal lives are enriched by a living, breathing, up-to-the-minute portfolio of not just my work, but my entire personhood. I also enjoy that it is easy for people I know to keep up with my day-to-day life, as I am young and mobile, and tend to lose contact with people for months at a time before revisiting them.

Now, most of the concerns shared by those that know and follow me are this: Are you not afraid people will judge you incorrectly, see you out of context or assume false things about you?

Of course not. My twitter feed, facebook profile, buzz list and linkedin updates are me in context. No more perfectly am I captured anywhere. I have a unique personality, varied interests and am overall, complex emotionally.

The company I work for while writing this post has a leader within it’s ranks that exemplifies everything right with corporate culture, and is someone I am deeply and profoundly proud to call my boss. The main thing done correctly is the hiring of new staff, as our company is growing rapidly. Many companies, especially in times of growth, tear themselves apart by giving each applicant only a cursory glance, comparing numerical qualifications and cherry-picking only the brightest gems, polished to the glossiest shine. These gems then mix in a pool of others, all gawdy and imperfectly aligned.

The art of arranging human beings so that they will best work together, and choosing those that have not become so set in their ways, and allowing them to support those that are set correctly- this is a skill that many so-called executives will never master in a lifetime. Selecting only the optimum arrangement, the most efficient, frictionless set of gears that don’t wear each other down due to ill-fitting size and shape, this is the skill practiced here.

But this skill is not something that can be summarized in a brief interview, or a scan of a few carefully selected words by a potential interviewee- it is best summarized by a portfolio of life that grows with a person- ideas and information growing and changing with the person it represents- something a simple resume could never do.

So yes, on my portfolio, you’ll find that I am a programmer- I have experience with Classic ASP and other server-side scripting languages. You’ll see how many years I have worked and who for. You will also see the whimsy and talent, the lack of sophistication and the supreme dedication I have to perfecting the profession I have chosen- all of this information is unmeasurable on purpose- it has to be cataloged accidentally, along the course of life, and through the lens of context.

I waited a bit after writing this- 3 months to be exact. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t fueled by a slight against my ego, and that the feminist rage I was feeling wouldn’t falter after time. This is the blogger equivalent of writing an angry letter and waiting till morning to send it.

Here I present, the most feminist rant ever.

A question I am invariably, and I do mean invariably, asked when people find out that I have a child, “How do you manage a family and working?”, or alternately, “Who watches your son while you are at work?”

The audacity of this question is understated, as it has clear implications: people always want to know- not as a polite aside like “What is his name”‘ “How old is he”, etc, is how I can be so irresponsible as to have a career when I have a child to raise. There are then unfortunate implications to that statement that do not merely happen to be rather rude and presumptive, but effect my career as well. Assumptions range that I do not actually like what I do, I am merely doing this to “feed my kids”, that I would not do this if I didn’t have to, that I am disorganized, rushed or hurried in my work, or that I simply do not care.
But this is not predijudice against parents- it is prejudice against mothers, spisifically. My male collegues, many of whom have children- some of whom are single parents- are never asked this question. They might be applauded, if they are single, but it is a badge of honor, not a mark of shame.
This stereotype is absurd- the idea that I would rather be a housewife or homemaker of any sort- that I don’t do what I love or love what I do- that my ambitions for myself are extensions of the ambition to provide well for my offspring, these assertions are ridiculous.
I am much more ambitious than many of my personal acquaintances, and many of my coworkers- but the assumption is that I would give it all up were I to marry someone well off, or attain some sort of lump sum in a stroke of luck. This stereotype is not only one of the single most damaging ideas to feminism in society today, but many professional women- women who would raise intelligent, well-fed and well-adjusted offspring put it off until the end of their careers, or off entirely, due to this assumption. This leaves these incredible people out of the gene pool, and can only hurt posterity. To talk about sustainability, sustaining a population segment with a high enough IQ to maintain and use the technological wonders we use today is one of the highest priorities we can have as a species- this trend has to stop.

There is a Microsoft Knowledgebase Support Article that points out yet another flaw in IE8 or lower. This states that Microsoft Office can’t download documents when you set the page to expire immediately- so essentially you can’t have very secure pages if you want to export information to excel.

Firefox could do this since firefox .8

Chrome could do this from the get-go.

Safari and even Netscape Navigator have this capability, and most versions of AOL’s horrible browser can do this.

Why can’t Microsoft get with the program? The issue here is that MSIE will do what it damn well pleases. It always has, as it commands the majority of market share. Until we can get people on other, more stable web-standards compatible browsers we won’t be able to really open up the modern web.

I am officially unemployed as of 5:00 Friday- oddly liberating and yet, terrifying.

As many designers and developers alike know, while quitting your job is a terrifying prospect- being laid off is far worse.

The idea of being laid off is not frightening in and of itself, if you are a qualified individual working in a market that has many available jobs. Being that I am that individual, I was not scared at first. However, being in the midst of  a recession that has hit the IT sector hard, my myriad skills are not paying off the way they normally do.

I am a multi-language, multi-skilled developer with design skills, copywriting ability, support experience and the ability to generally fix most electronic devices. This allows me to really spread my CV across the craigslist “resumes” section, it hurts me when competing for jobs as managers believe I will somehow be less skilled in one area because I am multi-talented.

This leaves one option while looking for a manager not afraid of extra skills: Freelancing.

Freelancing has its upsides and it’s downsides- I fully intend the bulk of my career to be in the freelance industry, but not while I am starting out. The meager, 250-dollar for a whole website jobs that I have to chase down, hunting the manager on his lunch breaks to beg him for a design approval, please read this copy, please sign this, etc. It’s maddening. I don’t already command the respect of a huge portfolio necessary to drop problem clients- their dollars are as good as any.

Most of my work is in-house, intranet based or outdated from my last bout of freelancing, so my portfolio currently contains one entry.

I’m in the process of rewriting a site, I’ll post before and after soonish. This should help me get some credibility behind my outlandish claims.

I want to redesign all of the local government websites.

Seriously, who writes these? A lot of time they don’t work or validate in anything but IE7 and when they do, they are still the most hideous things you have ever laid eyes on. Regardless- some of them get awards.

I genuinely want to redesign these, and I will take a significantly lower sum than I would normally charge, in the name of patriotism. I do not want our nation’s children subjected to bureaucracy, but when they do have to endure it, it can at least be pretty.

Not to mention the functionality. Most government websites have some sort of registration you can perform on them, be it for jobs or to pay your water bill- but the instructions are convoluted and obviously to make up for a developer’s bad user interface or a database designer’s bad practices.

What happened to intuitive, useful and accessible with these people? There are many documents people would love to submit online that don’t require actual paper anyway- stuff that could be submitted directly to the correct database and would only require you to mail in a signature form to satisfy their archaic standards. This would cut overhead by such a significant amount that they might be able to pay someone to, I don’t know, update their website? Scroll down to the bottom of the Tarrant County website, and you will see that it has not been touched since May of 2005!

Governments are slow to adapt to new standards, but the days of putting a website on the Internet and then being “done” are over. You are never “done” with a website. People expect more and more functionality every day, and you need to keep them updated with events and pertinent information.

The trouble with looking for a job in Dallas, Texas is not the amount of jobs availible or really the extreme market penetration of other professionals like you, or with more experience. There are plenty of jobs to go around.

One of the largest problems is out-of-state staffers that do not understand how large Texas is.

I live in Plano, which is just north of Downtown Dallas. This is not anywhere near San Antonio, Austin, Huston, Beaumont, Brownsville or Amarillo. Those are all more than 3 hours one way from my home, in good traffic and no highway patrol on the way down.

A lot of recruiters in India, Missori and even New Zealand want to place me in jobs that are there- asking how far of a drive it would be for me.

They then proceed to tell me they mean Houston, Texas not some other “far away” Houston in another state.

Texas is roughly twice the size of Germany. If you lived in Northern California, would you drive to a job in Southern California? No. You couldn’t do it.

Why do people insist on trying to recruit for these jobs in the wrong areas?

Database design for resume databases and for job hunting sites need to recognize this and divide Texas into distinct regions so one can search DFW and not get anything from San Antonio, and once can search Galveston and not get anything for Amarillo.

Remember, STATE is not a good search parameter, you need to add a REGION field or your results will always be shoddy and low relavance.

I am already tired of this recession. It has caused one company to fall apart under me and now another to restructure their entire business model, leaving me without a position in a few weeks.

I tire of the job hunt- slogging through the thousands of entries posted on job sites like monster and careerbuilder for jobs that require masters degrees in computer science and want 5 years of experience in technologies that are only 5 years old to begin with.

Early adopters are great to hire, but what about the rest of us perfectly capable individuals that didn’t want to hedge our bets too early- who are perfectly capable of writing what you wanting us to write and taking ownership of a large project but who didn’t play in intergal part in the early development of the language?

The other complaint(I shall file this post under “gripes”) I have with many of these postings are the education requirements- how many software programmers do you know that went through 4 years of school?If I entered school to learn software development today, everything I learned in the first two years would be completely useless by the time I graduated, I would have student loans weighing me down causing my initial price tag to be beyond my actual, real-world experience level and my programming technique would be a mirror of what an idiocyncratic professor with very strong opinions about how things should be done (which is why they profess) with flexability that would only come over a great deal of time.

The freshness of new minds entering the programming trade is weakened considerably by these institutions- I don’t see why we should have to fill an arbitrary beurecratic requirement just because we achieve a higher pay grade than an average unskilled worker. We are skilled. VERY skilled. We deserve to be paid as much- regardless of where we learned the trade.

I recently had the fortune(good or bad?) to fill a few internships at a company I worked for. I decided to post an entry on craigslist.

I made it a pretty open-enrollment, no school requirements, no previous experience, capped at one year experience. I was looking for a few eager young marketing break-ins like I was (not that I’m not eager, young or a break-in myself.) to teach the ropes and get cheap labor out of.

Well… my post went locally viral.

I am not sure why, or how, but every community college professor and abuser of linkedin found my craigslist post and ran with it, telling everyone they knew. After about a day, HUNDREDS of local applicants e-mailed me their desperate attempts to get an internship. I had to set up e-mail filters, and was intensely grateful I had given my Google voice number instead of my personal cell.