# (1) 08 Dec 2009, 05:35PM: Repurposed Email:
Some of my ad hoc social writing recently has been to email lists. With a bit of editing I can decontextualize a few paragraphs into something to amuse you.
After a recent shooting:
Cory Doctorow's "Cheap Facts and the Plausible Premise" has
the somewhat hyperbolic line "...we now inhabit a world where knowing
something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it."
This is incredibly encouraging regarding, say, childrearing techniques, bike
repair, activism, crafts, entrepreneurialism, and travel. It means that
initiative, resourcefulness, and not-being-oblivious pay very high
dividends. But that goes for IEDs, too.
"Dear Mandy," a fairly nerdy and British political rap song.
Danny O'Brien! "I have volunteered to take the meetynge notes in the style of a 17th
century essayist.... So up, and to Noisebridge, where I did attend the
meetynge of the week, and was so pressganged there into beynge a recordist,
and did solemnly type this at that time into my computationeristic
automaton...."
This includes "Steven, a cabler from this parish, did offer to fixe the
cabling in our place, and did offer so to put his plannyng unto the wiki,
the builde mailynge list and discuss."
Regarding the virtues of pain:
And there's Gate Control Theory (on pain & nerves)...
The virtue of pain is that it stops?
On dress codes in job interviews:
I'm really wondering how much of this "oh you gotta wear a suit to an
interview" is a male thing, a New York City/Eastern US thing, and a BigCorp
thing. I'm glad I don't use that particular shibboleth when hiring -- I get
superior access to qualified candidates who get turned down by other
interviewers for stupid reasons, score! Some nice lines from Moneyball that get at my perspective:
"You know what gets me excited about a guy? I get excited about a guy when
he has something about him that causes everyone else to overlook him and I
know that it is something that just doesn't matter." - Paul DePodesta, p116
Sure, we're all playing the probability game, and if I were a male in New
York City looking for a desk job at a publicly owned corporation, I'd
probably put on a suit for that interview, in case I got a superficial interviewer. But let's be clear that it's about probabilities, and not some
kind of handed-down-by-God Rule about who's hireworthy.
Relatedly, from a conversation about job interviewers asking personality-related or personal questions:
I used to interview really badly, so I didn't get various scholarships or
into selective summer programs or jobs. I would always make it to the
interview, basically never past it. Now I'm much better, but it's not
because I specifically worked on My Interview Skills, it's because I (mostly
unconsciously) improved my general people skills. And I can see a sensitive
hiring manager trying to balance the need to get someone personable with the
wish to help nervous people relax -- by, for example, asking them ahead of
time for something personality-related that she can ask about in the
interview, to get the interviewee speaking more informally.
We put a lot of emphasis on the ability to "communicate" - in person, on
paper, etc. But just as a timed essay during Finals isn't the best test of
my day-to-day intellectual abilities, an incredibly pressure-laden,
ritualized submission process (double entendre intended) isn't the best
way to see how a person communicates day-to-day. The abstracted crucible is
sometimes easier to game, and is much less worthwhile than the work and
skills it's meant to symbolize. I know every hiring manager needs a
screening mechanism, but I don't want hiring managers to think that
mastering the interviewing/cover-letter-writing kabuki dance is an
unambiguous thumbs-up for a candidate.
By the way, here's a great cover letter we got while editing the anthology:
I haven't been writing much in the blog since work has consumed me. I may take requests, though.
Elliot Aronson's The Social Animal and Gavin de Becker's The Gift Of Fear made me think a lot about the role of the news media in basically
encouraging copycat killings. Any loser with a gun and the will to use it
basically becomes a role model. As de Becker puts it, the most important
question regarding a potential assassin is, "do you believe you have the
ability to kill [whoever]?" If the answer is "well, no, he has all these
bodyguards, etc." then you don't have to worry about the nut, even if he's
fantasizing about doing it all the time. If the answer is yes, then there's
a problem. And so when an attacker attacks, the news media become a PR
machine whose message is "this attack is
possible" (the
"plausible premise").
Nerdy humor recommendations:
Science jokes, just real groaner puns --
read the comments on BoingBoing for more. I have hearted Brian Malow
for years and evidently was and am right to do so.
There is an aspect of temporary pain that's soothing to the self-loathing mind. "I'm not supposed to feel good; my default state is stressed, distressed, sad, somehow in emotional pain; that's how I know I'm working hard enough, being productive enough, struggling hard enough, not wasting time. If I feel minor physical pain (even if I have to deliberately incur it), it's like getting drunk. It numbs the voices telling me that I'm not doing enough. I must be doing enough, I'm in pain! If I'm in pain it means I can relax."
I once knew a guy who trained martial arts, a lot. He had a proverb he was fond of. He used to say "Pain is just the sensation of weakness leaving the body". And so he kept on training, even when it really hurt, because he knew it was just weakness leaving his body. And it worked; over a period of twenty years, nearly all the weakness left his body. When I last saw him, there wasn't enough weakness left in his knees or ankles for them to even bend. He walks with a stick, of course. Turns out that you probably ought to leave a bit of weakness in there.
As the thirty-fifth pick approaches, Eric once again leans into the speaker
phone. If he leaned in just a bit more closely he might hear phones around
the league clicking off, so that people could laugh without being heard. For
they do laugh. They will make fun of what the A's are about to do; and there
will be a lesson in that. The inability to envision a certain kind of person
doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks
like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a
failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out
an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you
are less likely to find the best person for the job. - p115
This discussion is reminding me of how different jobs customarily have
different intake rituals and customs. The more creative industries expect a
certain well-roundedness and ability to deal well with curveballs.
Academics expect you can churn out erudite-looking prose, including a custom
cover letter, basically at will. Software managers expect that developers
can list a few dev jobs on their resumes, and might interview in an
unsociable manner but can code in front of you if you give them a puzzle.
Dear Money Guy,
Sorry, I've had it out the arse with boring, yet professional, cover
letters. And since the worst thing you can say is no, I figured what the
hell. I hope you enjoy my 3500 word submission. But, if not, I look forward
to hearing no from you soon. And feel free to be as brazen as you like. It's
refreshing, I promise.
- Comments:
Posted by Jed at 15 Dec 2009, 05:27AM
A couple of thoughts:What you say here about interviews being too formalized to be good measures of job performance makes lots of sense.But I think you may be somewhat underestimating the importance of certain social factors.In particular, if someone shows up to an interview dressed totally inappropriately for the job, that may be a good indicator that they won't fit in very well in that particular workplace.Similarly, if someone sends me a story or a job application and completely fails to follow the clear detailed instructions I've provided on how to do so, I tend to have a negative reaction. There are at least two parts to that:* The irrational part: I'm a rules-follower; I put the rules in place for good reasons; I get annoyed when people unilaterally decide the rules don't apply to them.* The rational part: If someone applying for a job can't be bothered to follow the rules, that suggests to me that they may be unlikely to follow the rules once hired, which means that working with them would likely make me really unhappy. (It may also suggest that they don't pay much attention to detail, which may or may not be important, depending on the job.)Of course, that doesn't mean following the rules is an unambiguous thumbs-up. But significant disregard for the (explicitly stated) rules in this kind of situation is a yellow flag for me.So say you're a hiring manager in a corporate environment where everyone dresses in suits every day, and everyone's expected to be in the office precisely at 9 a.m. And some guy shows up for an interview ten minutes late wearing torn jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. The fact that, even in the specific short-term ritualized interaction of an interview context, he didn't bother to adhere to the conventions of that workplace may suggest that he's not a good fit for that corporate environment.
