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Is Your Email Address Holding You Back? (wsj.com)
Whether you're freelancing or on the job hunt, don't let a poorly conceived online handle limit your career prospects A quick glance at any group email confirms what recruiters and hiring managers know too well: Not everyone sheds their adolescent email addresses when they enter adulthood, instead maintaining allegiance to digital monikers based on the music, videogames and contraband they once held dear. From a report: Though rebranding yourself online can be a pain (as those who've been through the ordeal of changing their contact info know), the practice is often better for your career trajectory, said Chris Swanson, a career and college counselor at Bremerton High School in Washington state. "It's just like the idea that a handshake and eye contact makes a good impression. That's the first thing that comes across someone's desk." Even so, many Americans still use curious handles for professional exchanges, either by virtue of inertia or nostalgia or because they've never had an employer-issued handle and don't know any better -- they only know Dave Matthews rules.
[...] It might be ironic to send missives from @aol.com, but it doesn't suggest an exceedingly tech-savvy candidate. Actually, "It weirds me out," said Ms. Moore. "Why are you still using AOL? Gmail is definitely the winner." Don't even get her started on Hotmail. When updating a resume it's a good time to evaluate if an email address seems dated, especially if applying for a tech gig.
[...] It might be ironic to send missives from @aol.com, but it doesn't suggest an exceedingly tech-savvy candidate. Actually, "It weirds me out," said Ms. Moore. "Why are you still using AOL? Gmail is definitely the winner." Don't even get her started on Hotmail. When updating a resume it's a good time to evaluate if an email address seems dated, especially if applying for a tech gig.
Run your own mailserver. DNS registration is cheap these days, and you can have as many different email addresses as you want.
I have been keen to do this for a while now, but have always assumed it would be a total hassle with the whole whitelist/blacklist thing.
Does it in fact wind up being a lot of work, or should I jump right in?
A thing to remember about High Tech is that there is enormous value added.
As a result, company management can be off-the-wall-fruitcakes, following or instituting management fads and perpetrating many horrible management pathologies, yet still have enough profit left that the company can go on for years before dying, or even thrive.
Then, even if they take it down (or better yet, bail out just before their house of cards collapses), or a competitor with less pathology eats their lunch, failure in High Tech is so often not the fault of the failing that it's not a black mark. Unless how they screwed up is SO visible that it becomes a scandal (or sometimes even if it is) they can then use their experience as a qualification credit when going for their next job, beat out less pathological but more junior applicants, apply the same or even bigger and better pathologies to another, larger, company, and take it down, too. Iterate for a while and you have a successful career, are rich from cashed-in stock options, and leave a trail of devastation as a legacy.
What's true for upper management goes double for middle management and functionaries. They get to inherit both the pathologies of those above them and create more or follow fads of their own. As lower-ranking they're expected to be less competent and their foul-ups are not the subject of major business-press scandal.
Minsky divided the first three decades of computer science education into three periods of about a decade each:
1) Computer science was too new. Colleges had no idea what to teach, so they taught the wrong stuff. (Like everybody was taught how to WRITE a compiler.) A four-year degree was actually a handicap for getting a job in industry: It meant you had more that you had to UN-learn before you could learn the stuff you actually needed to know to be useful. The trick was to go ALMOST to a degree (to get access to the tools to learn and the useful skills), then get a job and drop out.
2) Colleges figured out enough about what was really needed that going all the way to a four-year degree actually made you more useful than not.
3) Colleges got into teaching a bunch of computer-science methodology fads and the degree became a slight handicap again.
There have been a few more decades since then, and a lot more fads, both in computer science and in management. About a decade back, for instance, a degree was a mandatory check-box, and no matter how experienced you were, how many patents you had, who you knew, or how hard the people running the actual department were crying for you to be hired, you couldn't get HR to process your paper without having the sheepskin, checking the box, and filling in the adjacent slot with the name of one of a handful of big-name schools.
On one hand some big-name companies are again hiring by some measure of skill and not requiring degrees, a practice that might spread. (Especially if H1Bs get restricted.) On the other, we've got the "email provider is A SIGN" fad in H.R. circles. So here we go again.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Them : I have a great customer...
Me : No, you don't. They left it up to a relative stranger to track down leads instead of searching LinkedIn or Monster or whatever else. You have a customer who doesn't actually care enough to use Google.
When I wanted to relocate (family reasons), I didn't have any contacts in the area I wanted to relocate to -- I worked with a great recruiter and had an interview scheduled for my current job before the job was even posted on the job boards.
Them : I have a great opportunity for you...
Me : No you don't. Companies don't use recruiters when they want serious candidates, they use recruiters when they are looking for meat. They get their serious candidates through personal networking and personal recommendations. You would never hire a candidate for a "Great opportunity" through something as anonymous as a recruiter.
When my company needed to grow, we quickly ran out of personal recommendations and though we posted to the usual places, sifting through the hundreds of unqualified resumes got to be a chore. The company had worked with a recruiter off and on for over 10 years, and she sourced us some great candidates (including me).
Recruiters are kind of like travel agents -- you don't always need one, but when you do, a good one is worth their weight in gold.
Them : I have a great customer... Me : No, you don't. They left it up to a relative stranger to track down leads instead of searching LinkedIn or Monster or whatever else. You have a customer who doesn't actually care enough to use Google.
Alternatively, I have a team of 4 developers (including me) and our hr person is basically just a part time employee that processes payroll. I have neither the time or the aptitude to spend days trawling through LinkedIn or whatever you think I should be doing with my time instead of building my product. However I have a reasonable amount of cash and I'm willing to pay someone else to do the web trawling.
Them : I have a great opportunity for you... Me : No you don't. Companies don't use recruiters when they want serious candidates, they use recruiters when they are looking for meat. They get their serious candidates through personal networking and personal recommendations. You would never hire a candidate for a "Great opportunity" through something as anonymous as a recruiter.
In an ideal world, absolutely. Certainly, most of the best candidates I've interviewed were people I've interviewed from hackernews. However, the worst CVs were also from there. In my experience, you want to give yourself the best openings to get the right candidate and that means recommendations, meet ups, hackernews and recruiters.
Them : We're hiring 17 great people for a project... Me : Good luck! You're attempting to build a team without any real knowledge of how they will work together as a team. You're actually throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping some will stick. If you're hiring 17 more or less random people for a project, most of those people are basically just desperate and if I were there, I'd have to do all their jobs for them. You'd be better off hiring two or three known assets and have them bring their own people in. In reality, if you're hiring 17 people at once, you should actually be outsourcing the project.
Any project that starts with hiring 17 people will probably never get delivered. A lot of these kind of postings, at least where I live (London), are for contract bodies at banks, which is generally well-paid but incredibly boring maintenance work, so take that or leave it
One of the problems with your theory that you should be able to build a large team from recommendations is this though. I have a team of 3 other people. They are the best people I have worked with over the last 3 or 4 years - that is why I brought them in. Who are they going to have worked with in that period that is outside of the same group? You need a way of bringing in new blood