Re:personal connections always count
on
Feature:Geek Jobs
·
· Score: 1
All the tech jobs I've ever had have been as a result of personal contacts. The last one took five months to land, involved following up with someone who I had last talked to something like eight years previous, and was never advertised at all internally or externally.
The classic study of how people find jobs is Mark Granovetter's PhD thesis, "Getting a Job". Some ridiculous number of people get jobs through personal contacts. People who you don't know very well are paradoxically much better sources of tips for work, since they give you access to information about parts of the world you don't have much idea about.
I think it's a grand idea to have people rotate through tours of duty doing moderation.
I only read the +2 or better articles, to save time. (It's either better than the norm, or at worst just a random sample.) So if I get a day to moderate, I'll be selecting from the +2 sample, and mostly whacking things that are a waste of time for my fellow +2 readers, and promoting the things that are worth it for the +3 readers.
It would be good to have a proper sample of readers by their filtering status so that some people who are picky always get a chance to be even more picky.
Ed
(who has never yet been moderated in a positive direction on slashdot, not for lack of trying so far)
Many analyses of the motivations of people to contribute to free projects miss a substantial part of the reason why it would be good to work hard on something for no immediate gain.
If you manage to make a name for yourself when you're relatively young, you can leverage the contacts you make and an extended social network in the years to come. The wider your circle of acquaintances and friends, the more likely it is that someone at random ten years later will be in a position to hire or to fund your next project.
As fate would have it I've been doing a little newsletter called "Vacuum" for about a year now. It's about one bezillionth the size of Slashdot, has less than two hundred regular readers, and comes out only 2x/mo (in a good month).
It has its share of quickies, but most of it is more deliberate. A recent issue compared the Slashdot effect to the impact that a regular guided tour bus has on a city (the tourists become part of the place they're touring).
Slashdot Mirror
All the tech jobs I've ever had have been as
a result of personal contacts. The last one
took five months to land, involved following
up with someone who I had last talked to something
like eight years previous, and was never
advertised at all internally or externally.
The classic study of how people find jobs is
Mark Granovetter's PhD thesis, "Getting a Job".
Some ridiculous number of people get jobs
through personal contacts. People who you don't
know very well are paradoxically much better
sources of tips for work, since they give you
access to information about parts of the world
you don't have much idea about.
Ed
I think it's a grand idea to have people rotate
through tours of duty doing moderation.
I only read the +2 or better articles, to save
time. (It's either better than the norm, or
at worst just a random sample.) So if I get a
day to moderate, I'll be selecting from the +2
sample, and mostly whacking things that are a
waste of time for my fellow +2 readers, and
promoting the things that are worth it
for the +3 readers.
It would be good to have a proper sample of
readers by their filtering status so that some
people who are picky always get a chance to be
even more picky.
Ed
(who has never yet been moderated in a positive
direction on slashdot, not for lack of trying
so far)
http://egroups.com/list/vacuum
If you manage to make a name for yourself when you're relatively young, you can leverage the contacts you make and an extended social network in the years to come. The wider your circle of acquaintances and friends, the more likely it is that someone at random ten years later will be in a position to hire or to fund your next project.
thanks
Ed
Edward Vielmetti emv@umich.edu Vacuum project: http://egroups.com/list/vacuum
As fate would have it I've been doing a little
newsletter called "Vacuum" for about a year now.
It's about one bezillionth the size of Slashdot, has less than two hundred regular readers, and comes out only 2x/mo (in a good month).
It has its share of quickies, but most of it
is more deliberate. A recent issue compared
the Slashdot effect to the impact that a
regular guided tour bus has on a city (the
tourists become part of the place they're touring).
thanks
Ed
emv@umich.edu