Shibboleth Resumé

HeadshotResumés are funny things because the one thing they don’t tell you is the one thing you want to know. As an employer, what I suspect I really want is a way to separate wheat from chaff. I want a way to say “Yes, fine, you have all the necessary checkboxes in place, but are you one of the good ones?” Even if you allow yourself the confidence necessary to believe that you are indeed one of the good ones, a resume is a terrible medium since, stylistically, it tends to force people down the path of enumeration-sans-substance. What is needed is a shibboleth. Don’t tell me which certifications you have, tell me that you are part of the culture. Don’t tell me what programming languages you know, tell me that you can kick ass and take names. Everyone who isn’t a bozo (seriously, go read that if you’re ever hiring someone) should be trying to hire the brightest lights in the building, so show them how you roll, or find another job to apply for.

That is how I would like things to go down, but even very hip HR folk would have trouble with a shibboleth resumé, I’m guessing. If I were applying for a job tomorrow, it would probably be something involving usability, security, and overall technology development. The resumé I’d send to a shibboleth-friendly company might read like this (standard disclaimers about the fact that any decent resumé almost automatically sounds boastful and egocentric; my apologies): Continue reading “Shibboleth Resumé” →

Mathematiques Roadshow

Antique Drawer knobI don’t think it’s very normal of me, at the tender young age of 28, to enjoy the Antiques Roadshow as much as I do. I tend to explain that I like it for very much the same reasons that I like books like Salt; namely, that in the examination of the most arbitrary of things, you can reveal the history of the whole damned world. Me being me, of course, a not-insignificant contribution to my enjoyment is made by the people-watching aspect of it.  People are shy or proud or hopeful or confused about the things they bring in, but they are always invested, and that gives the show some (albeit subtle) dramatic tension that predates reality TV.

There is an undercurrent of innumeracy in the show, though, that I find distracting. In the end it’s not enough to wean me – if people are happy in their numerical misunderstanding, so be it; I would hope never to be the one subtracting happiness from the world. But it creates a sort of dissonance for me when I’m watching, to know that their notions of appreciation, even the appraisers and experts, is sort of… out of whack.

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Canadian Pride

Neon American FlagAn article of faith among Canadians is that not only do we know more about our country than Americans know about theirs, but we know more about the US than Americans do, as well. This may or may not be true on balance, but I will let sleeping sacred cows lie. For those who wish to get their self-congratulatory freak on though, behold:

MSNBC’s Short-form US Citizenship Exam

I will admit that I did not get perfect – stupid question 19. In my defense, if I were actually applying for US citizenship, I feel that I would probably have known what the form was called.

Photo Credit: Ctd_2005

Bottoms Up!

Scotch (Bottoms Up!)Software development, like most of engineering, and maybe like most of organized human production, has two sort of obvious approaches to solving a given problem. One is to start from the top and work down. Maybe the top is the higher level of abstraction. Maybe the top is the user interface. In some sense, the “top” is seen as the generic, “high-level”, gestalt view of the world. The style of development that begins from this point is known quite universally and unsurprisingly as “top-down”.

By contrast, of course, one can start with the fundamental technology. Begin at the atomic, and build up progressively more complex, integrated structures. The bottom is not necessarily lower-class, though management will often treat it that way – visionaries live up top, and grunt labour does nuts and bolts work at the bottom. The bottom can actually be a lot of fun, and it’s certainly a valid approach in many cases to start there. I hope, dear reader, that your minds shall not find it particularly taxing to understand that this methodology is
designated “bottom-up”.

Top-down. Bottom-up.

It was not until my second or third year with IBM, that I first encountered the term “bottoms-up development” in an email. I thought it was a rather humourous typo – obviously someone had confused the drinking cheer with the development methodology on a hungover Monday morning and typed the wrong thing. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was a manager, and since then I’ve seen several managers do the same. They just actually don’t know there’s anything wrong. And every time they say it, it’s like reading “Mary could of done that” a thousand times over.

I’m not trying to be a grammar nazi, much less a buzzword ninja, and I understand that it may seem petty. But managers, if you’re reading this, let me be frank: saying this discredits you. It makes you sound like a goober, and even if your team gets along well with you, it solidifies for them the line between them, the technical professionals, and you, the goober.

I do hope it goes without saying that the utterly miraculous reverse-propagated “tops-down” needs to go as well. That is all.

Scotch photo courtesy of: ghz

No Money Down

Mortgages[This really isn’t an article for one person, but there’s one person out there who will think it is about her, and in a way it is – if she weren’t talking about this then maybe I wouldn’t be thinking about it and writing about it just this very second. Nothing in here is specific to her situation though, and with money it’s almost always about the specifics of your situation, so grains of salt all round.]

So you want to buy a house. Great. I’ve already written about that. Basically I think it’s a good idea. Certainly in the long run it’s a good idea for most people – it’s a forced savings vehicle that tends to beat inflation, and it’s also a roof and a fridge and faucets and other things that make life more comfortable. Yay houses. One of the things I glossed over in that article, though, is the question of downpayments, or more specifically their absence: no money down mortgages. You all know that I am not someone to let glossings-over stand.

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Corporate Wildlife

American GoldfinchThe IBM Toronto Lab is a bit of a misnomer. Shortly after I joined we moved out of Toronto, up to Markham, to a brand new lab on a relatively large chunk of property (our ribbon cutting ceremony was September 11, 2001). The nice thing is that this relatively large property is also basically undeveloped except where the buildings and parking lots stand, leaving a fair bit of genuine certified nature lying about. I’ve been keeping a bit of a list, and so far in 2006 I’ve seen (in addition to plants and insects):

  • Deer x 1
  • Rabbits x 2.5 (2 adults, 1 baby)
  • Racoons x 2
  • Squirrels x N

Not a particularly formidable list, though the doe in particular was quite captivating, and quite close. But then there’s the birds…

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God Bless The Internet

King of the World

The internet never forgets. It’s like a giant fiberoptic elephant in an infinite temporal archive made of peanut butter. This can be a bummer if you’re Sanford Wallace or Bernard Shifman but on balance the creation of a broadly democratized, high availability, modern day Library of Alexandria is probably worth a little embarassment. And it never forgets.

It never forgets, for instance, that I have a couple of websites older than this fine, upstanding blog. And I haven’t even linked to the really old ones findable only in archive.org. Silly websites, serious websites, why, even The Coming Revolution is still up, in all it’s crusty glory. For your reference:


[root@lubis html]# ls -l revolution.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nobody 17445 Jun 23 2002 revolution.html
[root@lubis html]#

4 years crusty. But this is the internet. So it is with less surprise than you might imagine, that I occasionally receive email about this, or other pages. This one came in earlier today:

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Signs of Life

It is customary to begin posts of this ilk with a quasi-humourous apology & disclaimer, but you, my readership, are all far too busy to dwell on the reasons for my 47-day absence. Nevertheless, if only to slake your curiousity, please feel invited to select from the following:

  1. When people decide to have you redesign a product with a 6-figure license, per cpu, you find yourself suddenly rather busy.
  2. When starting a different blog, however domain-specific,
    you find yourself suddenly out of things to post.
  3. When, simultaneously, you start a couple writing projects at work, you tend to find your writing jones otherwise occupied, and lose the ability to write words good.

I work too much, I’m a drunk, and I’m cheating on you at the office.

But I swear baby, it’ll be different this time.