Being responsible, creative and motivated means you aren’t If you try to stand out from the crowd by describing yourself as “creative”, “motivated” or “responsible”, you’re actually making yourself look like you lack creativity and aren’t motivated enough to take responsibility for your career by penning a cliché-free LinkedIn Profile. We make that assertion on the basis that LinkedIn …
I am writing this on behalf of someone who is uncreative, unmotivated, and irresponsible. Hopefully your company can make good use of someone with these rare characteristics, because frankly, he needs to get out of the house more often. I am anxiously awaiting your reply which I will pass on to applicant as soon as it arrives.
The three great virtues of a programmer
Laziness
The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer.
Impatience
The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer.
Hubris
Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. The reason why you would write a program that someone else has already written for no other reason than you know you can do it better. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer.
It's the difference between what I call "smart lazy" and "dumb lazy".
"Smart lazy" minimizes total work, potentially at the expense of increased work in the short term.
"Dumb lazy" minimizes immediate work, but often created more work in the long run.
A smart lazy person will get up early to swing by the garage and get that tire with a slow leak fixed, thus eliminating the need to keep filling it. Dumb lazy won't fix the tire, preferring to quickly air it up every day.
It gets worse. Recruitment companies use search products to find CVs. The more times your repeat "pertinent" terms, the higher up the ranking your CV will appear.
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This is called 'spamdexing'; old skool webheads will know that it was invented / discovered in 1995 by a student called James Lick, who noticed how many hits his home page was getting from search engines (no prizes for guessing why) and decided to write a bit of CGI to incorporate the received search terms into the page code itself...
My profile includes my only non-entrepreneurial job, at Kinkos, where I list myself as having been "copy slinging":
"In my formative years at Kinko's, I learned a great deal about both customer service and what happens when you use the electric paper cutter on six ballpoint pens at the same time."
...and under 'education':
"I learned two things in college: First, that sons of entrepreneurs who have never done well in school do not magically do well in college, and second, that 17-year-olds are ill equipped to judge the cost/benefit ratio of student loans taken in order to hurriedly attend lousy state universities.
I did not get a degree, preferring to take the time-honored entrepreneurial path: drop out and start my own business. This has the side benefit of humorous irony should I become extremely successful and be asked to give a commencement address.
Activities and Societies: Arrogant alternative student newspaper."
I think it's fairly safe to say that Fortune 500 headhunters will be passing me over. Which, honestly, is just as well for all of us.
I have looked at the LinkedIn profiles of a couple of people I have had occasion to deal with, and I suspect the Peter Principle applies. Or maybe the HR people who did the hiring didn't realise how different the current job is from their past experience. A glowing testimonial for web design in the late 1990s looks a little too bling-like now.
Welcome to 2011,2010,2009... etc etc.
It is so last year, the year before and the year before that.
I'm not on that site or any social networking site but there again, I know that I'm a dinosaur.
If you are a HR droid and think that LinkedIn (there are other sites available) is any more reliable as a guide to a prospective employee than a resume/CV then perhaps you should be out of a job yourself.
Given that it's robots that sift through CVs / resumes, any non-standard term will just dismiss your application. Every coach harps on using as much standardized formats, clarity etc as on average recruiters look about 12sec at the paperwork --- fitting in is a benefit, not a drawback. As in most companies.
Try replacing your "intelligent, proactive" by "more cunning than a fox that was made Professor of Cunning at Oxford" and report back on your success or (more likely) failures.
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