toomuchcoffee

It hurts, but the best thing really is to just take your lumps, and try to detach yourself from the the idea that the rushed, off-the-cuff judgements that utter strangers make of you in the heat of the most awkward of social contexts imaginable has any relation to you as person.

That is to say: do take inventory of what happened, and do try to learn from the situation and do better next time... but please don't take it "inside" you as a person.

Life is just way too short for that.

Wow. I guess I'm just so glad that I got to grow up in a completely different universe.

Where no one cared about "selling teaches and counselors of their desires and passions..." - we cared about our desires and passions quite a lot, thank you, but for their own sake. And couldn't give a rat's ass about selling an admissions counselor on them. Even if in fact we were busting our chops to get into the best school we possibly could -- this would have seemed like an incredibly vain and superficial approach to getting to go where we wanted in life. Like trying to game the system somehow, because that was the only way to get ahead. Or flattery.

And the thought of nurturing a portfolio of extracurricular "desires and passions" for the sake of impressing these kinds of people -- let alone for the supposed brass rings that would supposedly be within our reach, after years and years of such compounded drudgery and self-abasement -- really, now. Who has time for any of that?

Most hiring managers at bigcorps aren't nearly so clueless, but a lot of them take a, how to put this, long-term view of things... and don't always know about from GitHub or SO, let alone what cachet they have in hacker communities.

So again, it can be a, let's not say perfectly viable, but viable-ish strategy to bank on one's commit history on GitHub, and other proxies like Stack Overflow... if you're content, and secure enough in your market value to stick to the 5% of the employers that value these kinds of markers very greatly.

But for the other 95%, not so much.

Groovy for startups -- as are things like having a cool Twitter handle, making pithy remarks in SO, etc. If you're exclusively interested in startups, that is.

But for the vast majority of employers out in, you know, the general universe out there -- not so much.

This is because about 80%-90% of the time, employers (and even more, recruiters) aren't looking at all at any of your intrinsic traits, but rather at proxies, e.g. where you went to school, who you worked for.. and how long you worked there.

That is to say, to a large extent their logic goes like this: "I don't have time to parse all of this candidate X's attributes and traits; but I can see that entity E (school,employer) has conveyed the following attributes {a1,a2..} to candidate X in the recent past. So as a matter of expediency, and to get make some headway this inbox of resumes before I need to get coffee again, I'll just X++ or X-- accordingly."

And it also happens that one of the must highly valued attributes they have is whether the candidate was recently (or even better, is currently) employed by some company they consider to be cool (by whatever criteria).

Of course, it's perfectly fair to say you wouldn't want to work for an employer with such a shallow way of looking at the world... and that anyone who's willing to just close their eyes, and look at the real you not only won't ding you for taking off a year to live in a squat in Barcelona with your hot girlfriend, work at a coffeeshop, and not only start to learn from scratch, but make commits to the source tree to some emerging language Y that's decades ahead of its time, albeit with precisely zero value in the current job market... but might even find you a potentially much more valuable, well-rounded candidate for having done so.

But the vast majority just don't think that way, course.

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Care to elaborate?

Most people don't follow the stock performance of Zynga/Facebook and pepper their daily conversations with who has raised what, or how much startup X was acquired for.

Impossible!

That's a good angle to take. And the choice of words and tone here is key -- it's not a rant, and it doesn't finger-point. It puts the emphasis on you, not them -- and it basically says "look, I'm disappointed and I'm suffering", thereby engendering empathy.

But if in fact they listen carefully, it also expresses criticism which can be quite damning. I like language that works like that.

So true. So very, very true.

"so if you've invested yourself heavily in either of these languages, you'll be perpetually looked at as a 'B' player on our team... so really, you shouldn't bother applying."

Then again, we could say the same thing about nouns.

So people feel understandably cheesed and disappointed. But to say that they feel "entitled" to the spoils of another entrepreneur is a bit of a stretch.

Consumers are drawn to inferior products (just like they are to junk food and lousy music; and in the personal sphere, to bad lovers / toxic bosses) for a whole lot of bizarre and perverse psychological reasons. But also due to the inexorable power of marketing, in its various guises and generalized forms.

I can see where Brad is getting at, and the lessons are quite valid, for those us attempting to engage ourselves in that minority slice of the global economy concerned with creating services and products or services of actual, intrinsic value -- as opposed to fluff ("experience"), addiction, or outright graft, which are the driving concerns behind the bulk of activity on in modern, post-industrial economies (such as ours) at present.

But if there's one lesson that can be easily drawn from the post-war economic experience -- it's that consumers' decisions are quite often very far from rational or "quality-driven."

They're just as often driven by fear, anxiety, the need to conform. And that's exactly where the magical power of marketing comes in.

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A lot of people just don't click with formalized education at all in their early years. They just couldn't throw themselves behind all those authors and facts they're "supposed to" be up on. Some of them are too busy learning informally by dealing with the world around them -- i.e. with things like nature, work, and you know, other people.

Then slowly grow to form their own view of the world, and seek their own path to obtaining a more structured comprehension of it -- which might well mean starting (on their own volition) formalized education sometime in their 20s or 30s -- or perhaps not.

A great many who choose this route, or have it forced upon them may fail or flounder -- but a great many also don't, and end up with accomplishments for others to read about or hear about in those books, classes and received intuition that some people think are the only valid starting points to figuring out how to make a dent in the universe.

Clearly you were never a kid.

Let's rather hope they're a passing phase, please.