Its interesting Seth Godin writes that there is no need for a resume, even for his internship, yet probably runs into the very problem that resume’s solve: Weeding out the chaff. When you are looking for a person for a job, you aren’t doing all your in depth research on every single candidate. You figure out the ones you want to look into more and then do your google search on them. You do this via their resume. If I am looking for a coder in PHP, I will weed out everyone without coding experience no matter how great their blog is.
The second problem here is that not everyone knows what their blog is about and majority of time, the blog has absolutely nothing to do with work. Just because someone may be an awesome photographer does not mean they can work well with others. Looking at my own blog, it is definitely all over the place. I would never want an employer to judge my work based on what i write here. They can get a sense of my personality, but there is no way you can judge the output of my work on this silly thing. Quite frankly, I don’t even have interest in having a blog that is purely about business, my interests extend further than just internet and advertising.
Rarely will I disagree with one of his remarks, but gotta go with the recruiters on this one. Resume’s are important. That being said, I believe everyone’s goal, however they get there, is to get to the point where a resume is no longer important.
Was reading Joel. Very interesting read about development and stuff of that ilk.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html
It got me to start wondering though…
If the problem is that a lot of sites which are reading that you are using Internet Explorer and so need to have a bunch of hacks put into place but the new Internet Explorer 8 doesn’t need the hacks…
Why isn’t the solution just to have Internet Explorer 8 not show up as IE?
I mean…isn’t it interesting that browser types right now have all sorts of random things in them? (Mozilla etc etc etc)
If all the websites of the world consider IE8 to be a brand new browser (or one of the small players), the majority of websites that used to break will continue, but at least there aren’t all these random IE5,6,7 hacks getting in the way of IE8?
Obviously the answer can’t be that simple…I just wonder why not?
Right now, the big word on the internet is an API. People think, if we have an API, then we will have a platform. Once people start using our API, then they will be sticky onto our system. This is all true and is why API’s are great.
But how can you make your system truly sticky?
Instead of releasing just an API, you should make your system extensible. What do I mean by this? Look at Wordpress as a good example. Wordpress has already created the foundation and anything you would like to add to it, you can by only changing the pieces, instead of the whole.
In many cases, even in B2B cases, someone wants to use the API not because the existing one is bad, but because there is some functionality that works well for them which may be too niche for anyone else. With an API, the user would be expected to build their whole system from scratch. With extensibility, the user only has to change the pieces they do not like. If I wanted to create a pop-up ad appear everytime I load my main page, its an easy add to the code. If I wanted a random audio file to play with each post, again, its a simple changing of that page.
When you are building a platform, this is doubly important. Every company runs differently, they have different cultures, different workflows, when they decide to use your platform, they want to keep all of those things.
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/010076.html
Jeremy mentions the “No Laptop” meeting rule and how horrible it is that there has to be a rule put in place for common courtesy.
The major problem to this rule is that there are plenty of legitimate reasons to have a laptop in meetings. As the newer generations are coming out of college, they feel ever more comfortable with taking notes onto a laptop. Making a uniform rule like this just removes a lot of the nice parts of having laptops in the first place.
There is definitely a problem though with people not paying attention to a meeting (and I will admit, I definitely have done it a lot.)
My proposed solution is actually pretty simple. People should stop accepting meetings which they don’t have interest in. A person who does not accept a meeting is saying they are ambivalent to the goals of the meeting. Only the people who have accepted the meeting invite care about its outcome. At the end of all meetings, people can get meeting notes. In an ideal world, this leads to smaller meetings with made up of people who care about the goals. If someone is curious about the outcome of the meeting, they can read the meeting notes. Then, if it is a very big deal, one so big, it requires another meeting. One can be set up where they will accept (because they now care). Even if it leads to a few more meetings, they would be shorter meetings and there would actually be outcomes from said meetings.
Now granted, we don’t live in an ideal world, so what is a better answer?