Job hunt

A recent NYT headline: "Social Media History Becomes a New Job Hurdle." The gist of the article is that in addition to making people wish they'd never friended you, those mildly offensive comments, slightly obscene party photos, and other infelicitous postings you made on Facebook may eliminate you from consideration for a job should HR run across them pre-hire. Thank you, Times, for once again choosing to write about someone's roman holiday rather than reporting on something really important, namely that social media, and above all LinkedIn (whatever the WSJ may say about it), is revolutionizing how people go about getting a job.

I am engaged in a job hunt. Disillusioned by the state of the self-tracking industry post the first annual QS conference and now painfully aware that Big Data consulting, despite the hype, is still a long ways away from becoming a really significant and productive industry, I'm trying to find a comfortable niche with one of the very, very small number of local companies possessing large-scale data or, failing that, with a company further afield. Since returning to the US I have on several occasions tried doing things the old fashioned way:  find a job posting for which you are well suited, submit a resume as instructed, go in for an interview or two, discuss terms, you're hired.  That hoary process, as best I can tell, no longer works, at least not anywhere I'm applying.  There's no trouble with step 1, but an increasing number of companies make use of third-party hiring platforms (Taleo, Resumator) that, according to me, to people trying to hire me, and to the intermediaries in HR themselves, are more likely to drop applicants into a black hole than they are to get the right CV on the right desk.  At any rate, that process has failed to get me so much as a return email, automated "we have received your application and will contact you if necessary" messages aside (and some of these systems don't even seem to be able to produce that).

So how does one get a job these days?  As ever, by networking.  My current diagram for one of the companies I am targeting looks like this:

Let me point out a few things of generic interest:

• Networking begins by broadcasting your needs:  I need to get in touch with this one company.  Who responds and who can actually help is unpredictable, so just keep an open mind and start talking it up.  Widely.  In my case this led to a motley crew consisting of a long-ago colleague, friends, and even a playground contact.  This core circle is then expanded upon, hopefully exponentially, by meeting with their contacts and requesting from them additional introductions.
• All leads should be followed:  there's no one "not worth" talking to.  For example, my friend's current colleague who worked at the company a decade ago and who only knows one person who still works there?  Well, if he knows someone who worked there a decade ago and who is still there then that person is likely to be reasonably senior by now (indeed, a VP), so while it's a narrow line it's potentially important.  In addition, one is able to ask stupid questions of a non-employee where one might be hesitant to do so in front of a potential future coworker or boss.  Very valuable.
• Actually, not all leads should be followed.  In the diagram, above, I show a link from my college roommate to the CEO of this company.  I do not intend to ask for an introduction as I cannot imagine what I would say to this person.  Perhaps that will change as I go along.
• Recruiters can be helpful, but need to be managed for best results.  They do not have the expertise to do your (potential) job or even to understand it in much detail, and they are busy.  The good ones will understand well enough to get you started in the right place--and I have been lucky enough to meet a couple of good ones here--but you have to fight your own battles.  Also, not unimportant, they can make sure there's nothing wrong with your resume that could short circuit this process.  A recruiter, like everyone else, is more likely to invest in you if you are introduced to them by someone they know.
• Everyone will respond to a request to meet if properly motivated.  In the great majority of cases the mere fact that you're asking and that your request has a recognizable name attached to it is enough:  yes, people are busy, but people like to help; they like to help friends, they like to help themselves, and they even like to help strangers.  In the two cases where my request has been met by silence I solved one simply by asking my go-between to offer the introduction again, a reasonable period of time having elapsed, and the other (Chief Data Scientist, understandably an abnormally busy person) I will solve by barraging him with additional requests from other sources (Data Architect and Senior Director, Marketing Intelligence & Operations seem the obvious ones) once I have met them and convinced them of the worthiness of my cause.
• There is no substitute for a face-to-face meeting.  Wait if necessary, but accept no alternatives.

All this having been said, the real key to success in networking is leveraging one meeting into more.  This can only happen if the one meeting goes well.  And here's where LinkedIn makes the critical difference:  using LinkedIn (and, to a much lesser extent, Google and other sites) as a research tool, it is possible to enter most meetings with a thorough knowledge of your counterparty and his or her environs.  You can and should know who they report to, who they manage, where else they have worked both within and without the company, and, since companies are increasingly moving their hiring activities to LinkedIn, you should know what, if any, positions that person has open or is involved in filling.  All this in addition to knowing the company itself, which knowledge is also facilitated by LinkedIn's ability to reveal the internal structure of an organization.  It is not only we helpless individuals whose every secret is being revealed by nosy parkers sniffing around social networking sites.

As you network your way along you will inevitably start to sound more and more like someone who already works there.  You will learn the relevant topics and the right language in which to express them.  You will mention the right names at the right times.  You will know where to park and how to get a visitor's pass as quickly as possible and will therefore no longer keep anyone waiting.  All this helps.  And eventually--let us hope sooner rather than later given the frightening economic situation--this knowledge of and comfort with the environment will combine with your obvious capabilities to make the possibility of hiring you seem a very obvious step to take to someone in a position to take it.

One other thing deserves mention:  your desired goal in networking in the first place is likely to evolve as the process of networking unfolds.  This in itself is very helpful if, like me, your goal is not to get one particular posted position but rather to find, or if necessary arrange to have made, a job that really suits.  Where will I end up, assuming, as I must, that I end up somewhere inside?  In Big Data, Web Analytics, Corporate Strategy, or some other area yet to be defined?  My thinking on this evolves as my network grows, and if this process, laborious and time-consuming as it is, leads me to the right place then it will have been very well worth the trouble.

The rising waters

Living with the first baby in a small apartment was something like being in one of those movies where the protagonist (me) is trapped in a cube (the apartment) as the water (Felix) slowly rises. Living with the second baby in our current house is like being in the preview of that same movie: everything happens much more quickly, with the exciting moments highlighted. Except for one thing: the leap in water level that is heralded by a baby's first steps has been long delayed.

Give me a break, Gid. You were fully capable of walking--the strength, the coordination, the examples galore--from a year on if not earlier, yet it was only a few days ago that you decided to take some steps. Progress, if such it should be called, was rapid thereafter. A quick photo essay by way of explanation:

Monday: I catch Gideon playing baseball in the backyard. He immediately plants it and swears it was all a coincidence.

Tuesday: While out shopping I turn around and discover Gideon giving Tai Chi lessons in the Japantown food court. He sits down and mutters something in a language I do not understand.

Wednesday: Gideon, unaware that I am no longer holding him up by his overall straps, walks across the room. I film it. Faced with incontrovertible proof he admits he can walk, and asks if we are going to stop feeding him and changing him and all that. I assure him there is no connection between walking and his full ride. I am unable to explain exactly why he does get a full ride, but walking or the failure to do so has no bearing on the matter. Reassured, he strolls down the hall, climbs up on Felix's bed, stands, and starts ripping all the stickers off the bottom of the top bunk. He then eats the evidence.

Thursday: We go to the beach where Gideon emphasizes his new-found ability by walking in soft sand, which is really very difficult, you know.  I am so pleased with him, we have such a wonderful afternoon, and afterwards, washing the sunblock off in the shower, he stands up and yanks on my bellringer so hard I hit overtones.

Gimme a kiss you big lug, you, and enjoy your Friday.

I Salute You, Ernie Pyle

World War II is an utterly ridiculous subject for a blog post:  there simply isn't enough Internet to hold it all.  But I think about World War II a lot and I finally have a way in to a small but important piece of it, so here goes.

Choose a topic, any topic, and follow its path through the 20th century.  Five will get you ten that path breaks when it hits the war, and then, when it comes out the other side, it does so at a completely different spot from where it went in.  (Not the best imagery, I suppose, but it's better than the trite "the war changed everything.")  This disjuncture, this fault across the landscape of history, makes World War II, for me, endlessly fascinating, as does the sheer enormity, in every sense, of the war itself.

And so I read:  Studs Terkel's "The Good War," Morison's History of United States Navel Operations in World War II (15 volumes, don't miss even one), Overy's The Dictators, Das Boot, Churchill's own history of the war (a thousand pages in its condensed version; I'm starting the full six volumes next week, having found, yes, found, five of them on the street a few days ago).  I read and I read, but I do so haphazardly, and so it is that I have only now consumed what everyone over here read while the war was going on, namely the articles of Ernie Pyle, famously the greatest American war correspondent of that conflict.

Perhaps it's the day-by-day nature of his recounting, perhaps it's the man-on-the-ground perspective and his close focus on the grind as experienced by the average front-line soldier, but the net effect of reading these many articles is what feels like a realistic sense of the experience, a sense, almost, of having been there. For the first time I find myself uninterested in the big questions and wholly focused upon the quotidian, which, of course, is how most people took it most of the time. So thank you, Ernie Pyle, for allowing me some satisfaction after all this time of wondering.

And as if that's not enough I find I love the man. Pyle was a wanderer and a writer and a truly great journalist, and his life was the best story of all. I have read biographies for many years now (having been turned on to the genre not by my own historical studies but by my mother's suggestion of Sandburg's bio of Lincoln, about which another time) and what tends to happen if you read enough biographies is that you start thinking in those terms, that is to say in terms of an entire life, start to finish, a life as a whole, and not just about people as individuals, changing from day to day, sometimes this, sometimes that. You start thinking in those terms, and you start valuing people in those terms, too. Lincoln's life is a perfect example, and it's part of why I love the man so: much struggle, many years of wandering in the wilderness (literally and figuratively), the shaping of character by the hammer blows of experience, until finally he becomes the ideal tool for that one very particular job. But what makes Lincoln's life perfect--and apologies if this seems a bit morbid--is his death: the tool, having been used, having done its destined job, was then immediately cast aside.

And so it was for Pyle. He lived the war and he wrote about what he saw and felt, hundreds and hundreds of articles that communicated the battle itself to the (primarily American) millions who did not experience the fight directly. And then, as the war was drawing to its close, after years of marching with the infantry, sleeping on the ground, eating dirt, after living with the terror of air attack and shelling, after participating in the greatest amphibious actions, naval battles, and air bombings of this or any other war, after experiencing and relating all this and with the end clearly in sight, he, like Lincoln, was killed by a bullet to the head, fired by a Japanese soldier a third of a mile away. As Wikipedia notes, "He was buried with his helmet on, laid to rest in a long row of graves among other soldiers, with an infantry private on one side and a combat engineer on the other." Perfect.

I have no desire to go to war, and certainly no desire to die so. I would, though, love to live a life with a real shape, with a unique purpose, and would, I think, be willing to forgo some of its later years if in doing so the ones that I did have were thereby made into a narrative, burnished and perfect, like Ernie Pyle's.

Catnap

I've decided to make fractured sleep my specialty: wake me, wake me, I'll steal it back later on.

Happy Birthday, Talia

Is there cake or shall I stop at wf to get some? I have no issue with doing that...

From: Talia Cell
3:02pm 5/20/11

Even a single-line message offers an opportunity to read between the lines.  Allow me to translate:

You failed to make anything much of Mother's Day or even to ensure that the kids did, you yourself don't care for cake and are probably assuming that having a birthday cake at my birthday BBQ on Sunday is all the birthday cake I require anyway, and in general, dear husband, you've been kind of botching it lately, so in an effort to ensure that I don't end up entirely depressed on my own birthday I am hopefully shaming you into finding a cake in the next couple of hours or, failing that--and I do mean failing--I will attempt to shame you in a more substantive and permanent fashion by actually bringing home my own cake on my own birthday and eating it alone in what will hereafter be called "my" bed with my headphones on while watching America's Top Pastry Chef and you can finish raising the children by yourself.

 Gotcha!

Before I get too smug, it occurs to me that I did not think to arrange a cake for the birthday BBQ tomorrow....