career Archives - Page 2 of 2

2009 Highlights

It’s the end of the year, and the end of a decade. What were my favorite projects of 2009? What did I have the most fun working on?

Murder in Ocean Hall

I can’t help myself, I like to write fiction. People have asked me how I could leave my job and then spend countless hours alone, in a coffee shop, writing a novel. I’ve offered advice on setting a schedule and being committed, but the truth is that writing a book is a huge sacrifice and something that you must really, really want to do. And something that you must enjoy doing more then anything else. Continue reading “2009 Highlights”

USAJOBS vs CBO Job Site

Too much exposure to USAJOBS has really turned me cynical. Despite news reports on the need to recruit thousands of new employees, the main federal jobs site is a usability nightmare, unfathomable to even people who work on web sites, like me. While the site has few defenders, some have argued that it has to be that way, because it’s the government. Federal requirements dictate its complexity and difficulty.

There’s got to be another way! And there is. It’s the job site for the Congressional Budget Office. The site is a model of simplicity and common sense, where you can apply for a job in minutes, rather than hours. Let me spell out the differences between the CBO site and USAJOBS:

It’s all one site.You’re not bounced to a separate organizational site to complete a whole other application, like you would if you applied for a job with Agriculture from USAJOBS.
An easy password. You don’t need a complicated ten character password with upper and lower case letters plus numbers.
Upload or copy and paste your documents. Choose which is easier for you – either upload a Word doc or copy and paste your resume. You don’t have to enter information job by job. Supporting docs can also be uploaded.
No KSAs.
Job descriptions less than a page long, in plain language.
No confusing instructions to fax or snail mail in additional information. It’s 100% online.
It’s well-designed. The site makes excellent use of white space and provides strong visual cues for users, such as making the “Submit Application” button blue and placing it at the bottom of the right-hand menu.

Why can’t the rest of government do this? The site is not complicated, in fact it looks like it was designed in the late 1990s. But it’s simple and easy for visitors. It’s oriented around their top tasks, as good government sites are supposed to.

Looking at this site, USAJOBS makes even less sense to me.

The Four Stages of Job Markets

A Guide to the Recovering Job Market

I’ve had the experience of looking for work during the worst economic periods of the last twenty years. As a recent college graduate, I passed out resumes during the post-Cold War sag of the early 1990s. I was an unemployed web editor following the collapse of the dotcom bubble in 2002.

And I’m looking for work now. My timing has been impeccable; I’ve left jobs at precisely the worst times.

In Washington, we’re better off than the rest of the country but not immune to down times. Slowly, however, things are getting better. My experience has been that job market goes through four distinct stages. Continue reading “The Four Stages of Job Markets”

StrengthsFinder 2.0

I took the StrengthsFinder 2.0 test. It asks you a series of questions on how you like to work, how you get along with other people and how you’ve organized your life. You have 20 seconds to answer each question because they want your gut responses, without a lot of thinking. The same kind of questions are asked again and again, in slightly different formulations, to find out how strongly you feel about something. When answering, you choose a range of responses from “agree strongly” to “disagree strongly.”

When you’re done with this online test (it takes 20-30 minutes to complete), you’re presented with a list of your top five strengths. Here’s mine:

Input
Strategic
Intellection
Maximizer
Learner

I took this test three years ago, when it was part of Now, Discover Your Strengths. Interestingly, I had the same five strengths when I took it last, just in a slightly different order.

What’s different in StrengthsFinder 2.0 is, along with a list of your strengths, it provides a couple of additional tools to help you become happier and more effective. The first is a personalized guide that contains:

• Brief descriptions of all five of your strengths

• Your Personalized Strengths Insights, which describe what makes you stand out from others with the same theme in their top five

• Some examples of what the theme “sounds like” — real quotes from people who also have the theme in their top five

• Ten very practical ideas for action for each strength

• A Strengths Discovery Activity to get you thinking about how your talents and your investment work together to build strengths that you can apply to your work and personal life

• A Strengths-Based Action Plan for review with a friend, manager, or colleague.

There’s also a simple online tool where you can pick from their suggestions on how to improve yourself and build a custom guide of practical ideas for you to follow.

If you’re a compulsive planner, StrengthsFinder 2.0 is for you. But I think it’s also useful for people going through a career transition or just wondering if they’re in the right job.

I strongly agree with the core philosophy of StrengthsFinder – you should concentrate your efforts on what you’re best at, rather than trying to improve upon your weaknesses. Not only is this a more efficient use of your time, it’s more likely to lead to happiness.

SXSW Interactive 2008

Trying to see the future of digital media.

I recently attended SXSW Interactive, a conference on new media in Austin, TX, from March 7-12. Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology.

Taking place on three floors of the Austin convention center, the event is overwhelming, with sessions beginning at 10 and running to 5 with bonus events and parties in the evening. There were usually about a dozen different things you could do at any time during the day. For example, at 11:30 on Saturday you could choose from panels on e-commerce, managing communities that work, Expression Engine 2.0 sneak peek, accessible rich media, the contextual web or “how to rawk SXSW and achieve geekgasm”. In addition to the panels, you could also go to book readings, take part in smaller “core conversations” on select topics, visit the trade show or pop into the ScreenBurn Gaming Fest.

The evenings featured parties and events where you could meet fellow techies. I went to the Dorkbot happy hour (geeks showing off their robots), a BikeHugger happy hour (with excellent barbecue), the SXSW Web Awards (sponsored by Adobe) and the “Rock Bands Rock Opera” party, sponsored by a company called Opera. These were excellent opportunities to drink free beer and meet other web folks from around the country.

It amazed me how tech-savvy the participants at the conference were. Nearly everyone had an iPhone, it seemed, and those who didn’t brought laptops to the conference to take advantage of the convention center’s speedy wifi service. The conference provided many handy online tools for participants. For example, I created my own calendar of events and downloaded it to my iPhone. SXSW also featured a mobile version of the conference program and a daily blog that I could read on my iPhone. I took notes on my iPhone so I didn’t need to carry paper around at all.

However, I was a Luddite compared to many people, who were updating what they were doing on Twitter and Facebook, uploading pictures to Flickr, making podcasts, and chatting about the sessions they were in in Meebo.

The overall theme of the conference was excitement over the future of the web. Participants in the conference shared an evangelical confidence in technology. This confidence was not placed in big companies but in small, organic teams, reflecting the DIY attitude of Austin and SXSW.

I’ll write more about the experience in the coming days.

Hollywood 2.0

A fascinating post by Marc Andreeson on rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley’s image. Here’s his inspiring conclusion:

However, in the event of a long-term strike, out of the ashes of the traditional model would — I believe — come the birth of certainly dozens, maybe hundreds, and possibly even thousands of new media companies, rising phoenix-like into the global entertainment market, financed by venture capital, creating amazing new properties, employing large numbers of people, and rewarding their creators as owners.

As someone who’s made a career out of working on web sites, and has dabbled with filmmaking, I’m ready for this new world. When you build a web site, it’s all point and click, online collaboration, drag and drop, copy, paste, submit. When you make a movie, it’s about printing out scripts, stuffing them in envelopes and pitching your ideas in person to people far removed from the actual decision-makers.

This is a world that’s calling out for disintermediation. The moviemaking business is filled with gatekeepers (like studios and agents) that add costs and keep consumers from getting the content they want. Andreeson rightly points out the music industry as an obvious parallel.

I have a friend who gets all his media from YouTube. He doesn’t watch TV. I suspect that, the longer the strike drags on, the more people will be like my friend.

The Internet has utterly changed countless industries. Now, with advent of the writers’ strike, it’s Hollywood’s turn.

Blogging Under Your Real Name

An excellent post by Penelope Trunk on blogging under your real name. As someone who’s been online in one form of another since 1996, I couldn’t agree more with her advice.

As I said in my comment, blogging is a great way to increase your visibility online through that arbitrer of importance these days, Google. If Google can’t find you, do you really exist? We’ll leave that philosophical question for another time. In practical terms, being online has greatly helped me find jobs, expands my network and allow old friends to track me down.

Why did I initially decide to go online? Vanity. I was a writer of short stories who felt that I should be more widely known. My stories had been accepted in some very very small literary publications with circulations of less than a thousand subscribers. The process of your story being accepted by one of these journals is to snail mail it to an editor and wait 3-12 months for them to get back to you. This ancient process still exists today.

After AOL announced that they would provide space on the Web for their users, I taught myself HTML and published several pages online. (Unbelievably, they are still there.) I was not a computer person or a geek, just a frustrated writer who wanted to publish his short stories online. I’m not sure how much the world was interested in my tales of adolescent longing but my vanity led me to a whole new career as a web person.

The Mini-Retirement: Costs and Benefits

palm tree, Santa Monica, CA
In his book, The 4-Hour Workweek, author Timothy Ferriss discusses the idea of taking a “mini-retirement” while you’re still young enough to enjoy it. His point is that we Americans have it all wrong. We work hard through our youth to save up for a retirement in old age. That seems backwards to him – we should have our fun now, while we still can.

This is something I’ve always believed in. “You have the rest of your life to work,” I’ve counseled others who have considered taking a few months away from cubicle land. We’re fortunate to live in this historically unique time and place where jobs are plentiful. You’re not going to starve and there will be work for you when you come back, at least if you’re lucky enough to be a college graduate in America.

However, mini-retirement has costs and benefits that need to be considered. In my own life, I’ve tried to alternate my creative pursuits (writing) and my career (web person). I’ve taken several mini-retirements so that I could write. Here are the costs and the benefits:

August 1991 – December 1992: I leave my nascent career as an Information Assistant in Washington, DC, and move home to Florida. I work as a temp while I write a novel. I’m completely broke, live with my parents and yet am really happy.

Cost: I’m “behind” some of my friends who are becoming successful in their careers.
Benefit: I write a novel, my most important life goal.

July – October 1996: The Internet has just begun to take off. I’ve created my first web site, so that I can publish my fiction. I leave my library job behind and take several months off to travel and write. I also think there has to be a way for me to find a job doing this new web stuff.

Cost: None. I don’t make any money for three months but I get a new and much better job as an Internet Content Consultant.
Benefit: I work on my writing and edit the script of an independent film, Carrots and Onions. Reading someone else’s screenplay convinces me that screenwriting is something I can do. Perhaps more importantly, with my web job I’ve switched fields. For the first time in my life, I feel like I have a career not just a job.

December 2001 – May 2002: A few months after 9/11, it’s a terrible time for a mini-retirement. My plan, formalated earlier in the year, of taking a couple months off to travel and work on a screenplay stretches into a half-year of intermittent freelance work.

Cost: My finances suffer a major blow from the months of semi-paid freelance work. And when I finally find a new job, it pays less than my old job. My friends are buying homes, piling up $$ in their 401Ks, having kids. And spending lots of time in the office.
Benefit: Though it’s tough to see as I look at my bloated credit card balance, the work and connections made during this time will pay off later. I finish my script, Mount Pleasant, which in 2006 will win the Film DC screenplay competition. And, with plenty of time on my hands, I become part of the local film community and meet people I will work with in the 48 Hour Film Project (2003, 2006) and DC Shorts. I also get into photography, a hobby that will bring me much joy.

Mini-retirements are not without cost. However, they’ve added a richness of experience to my life that is truly priceless.