When I was meeting the company guys, I'd updated and printed my puny resume in case they would've wanted it but realised they had "my resume" already. Basically the headhunter had copy pasted my puny LinkedIn profile data into their some sort of resume template and the guys were thinking I was actively looking for a new job.
Weird coincidences but ended up taking the job and haven't regretted after 2,5 years.
Alternatively I wonder if a modern version of geekcode could be created with a service that automatically compresses a submitted resume into a comprehensible string of Unicode characters?
Where are the semioticians when we need them? Syntax, grammar, pragmatics, all develop at a rate of knots, but we still use a subset of ASCII for the vast majority of our symbolic computation. Could we do better than a joke from the nineties?
Here's an example of how much it can matter:
* I co-founded my first company with people I met at university.
* We got our first investor thanks to a chance encounter between said investor and one of my co-founders at a bar.
* When we exited that company, our investors lawyer arranged a meeting for us with another of his clients, who hired us.
* One of the execs at that company hired me for his next startup, and introduced me to his brothers, so I could work part-time for them until he got funding.
* One of my co-workers at that company was one of my co-founders at my next company, and our other co-founders were friends of that person. One of them had worked for the VCs who invested in our first round.
* [I went to Yahoo for a couple of years -- no connections there.]
* The general counsel at my last pre-Yahoo startup pulled me into my next startup.
* [I then went to a web dev agency, no connections there]
* The co-founder of the company I worked at before the web-dev agency contacted me about some contracting, and I ended up joining full time (my current job)
So Yahoo and the web dev agency are the only places I've worked over the last 26 years where my resume has mattered. Even then, at the web-dev agency I name-dropped one of people who'd hired me previously, and it impressed them, so who knows how much my resume really mattered there either.
Funny, only one of the gigs I've gotten in my 30 year career has come from not networking...my first one. Every job after that has come about because of people I know recommending me for the job.
This has been super helpful over the past 15 years as I've been an independent consultant. In fact, I went indie because I had a network.
I don't need to look for gigs anymore, people come to me. I turn down way more gigs than I can take. And I haven't had to have an actual interview for a job in over 20 years.
I'm sure this isn't the norm, but it certainly makes work life a lot easier.
Does that not just imply that your network wasn't that good but not necessarily that the adage "who you know more is more important than what you know" is actually false?
My first summer jobs were with people my dad knew. The first actual programming job I got because I happened to be tagging along with my friend who had a job interview.
From there on in I got jobs mostly because I had a friend inside vouching for my talents.
This also goes the other way, I wouldn't join a company where I don't have inside information on how shit actually gets done.
The above is as necessary and unsurprising as rain falling to the ground. There is no other way that things can work. Thus the practical advice you can give someone is not only to learn something but to widen their professional network so that there are many people who know they've learned something.
It is the exact same thing in a big bureaucracy. You have to know how to sell yourself, which just means you need to successfully communicate your accomplishments. Too many people do great work, but they don't communicate their accomplishments, and then they are surprised that less qualified people are promoted over them, and they grow cynical or resentful when it is really their failure at communication that has caused the problem. Like many things in life, it's better to be mediocre at two necessary things rather than excellent at one and skipping the other. But no amount of righteous anger about the unfairness of life is going to change the fact that people are not omniscient and that talent is hard for strangers to evaluate.
So much to unpick in that statement.
The potential for communication differences in culture, gender, and personality to outweigh job performance.
That communication is a two way street, but poor communication is often attributed to one party.
The tendency for the promotion process to favour “upward focused” communication and communicators.
The fact that objective performance measurement, which could ameliorate some of these problems, is a joke.
It’s true that communication skills are essential, but laying the blame on poor performers just perpetuates problems.
I'd really rather go with "the more society discovers that we don't know how to obtain objective measures of excellence". We really don't have good tests that can fit in the interview slot for a lot of software engineering jobs.
For example, attend the tech conferences in your field. Contribute to open source projects they are involved with. Hang out where they hang out. Etc.
Make it easy for chance encounters to find you.
If they already know you, you can skip that step and the risks involved. Depending on your personality and flaws however it might also be a negative thing if people know you : )