I work in the defense industry, which inherits some of the problems of its customer, the Government (in particular, a reluctance to spend money on infrastructure, reliance on policy compliance rather than personal accountability, and older, less tech-savvy decision makers). One of the computers on my desk still runs Windows XP, ironically because the security approval to replace it with a windows 7 computer didn't come through until just recently. So it is no surprise we aren't using wikis or IMs or Slack; I don't even know what the last one is (I mean, I can google, but I don't 'get' it; I've never had access to anything like that).
Few modern technologies can survive in this environment. By the time a 'new' technology is vetted by security, approved by the customer, and authorized by finance, everyone will have moved on to something else. But email remains. It works everywhere. It doesn't require 'special' software that the person you are communicating with may not have the IT permissions to install even if they knew how. Even the most out of touch customer representative knows what it is; you don't have to make slides about why you need this thing on your program. It can work over public networks and private networks; you don't need to trust a cloud or a young company. There are well-developed practices for using it. Lawyers and compliance staff thoroughly understand the legal issues (this is no small concern in a large company).
Maybe timing? If you are planning to buy a new smartphone sometime in the next n months, and are undecided about exactly when to buy or what to buy, maybe this will tilt you toward buying an iphone, and now?
Given the millions of other blogged words on this topic in the past 48hours, Slashdot now needs clickbait too?
(Sigh.) This is cliche, but I can't help myself. If your objection to the 'click bait' was to not only click the link to the content but to interact with it by logging in and posting a comment... you're doing it wrong.
I don't know who said this, but I heard one commentator claim that the apple watch was not a smart watch, but a wearable computer. I thought this was apt because when I think of the apple watch as a 'watch' it isn't particularly compelling to me (and this is from someone who still wears a watch, and uses it to tell time). However, when I open up my vision to 'sky is the limit', yet-to-be-invented applications of a wearable computer, I'm more interested to see where this will go.
As with the iPhone, the 'included with the first edition' features aren't as interesting as the 'invented by third parties and forced upon a reluctant Apple' (remember, native apps sold through an app store was not in Apple's original vision).
As you point, out, the way we use email has changed. I could try to set up gpg again, but I'm much less likely to do so now, even though I feel the need for encryption more strongly than ever.. Fifteen years ago I accessed my email through an email program on one computer. I now use webmail almost exclusively (when using PCs) and/or any number of different mobile device clients to get to my email. I don't even know how I would approach trying to set up an encrypted email system that works on 'everything' from webmail on PCs at home and at work to my ios tablet to my android phone to my girlfriend's macbook. If the solution is to travel back in time -- use a non-google mail server, access email with a single computer that I control physical access to, etc. -- that's really unappealing, and there are both subjective and objective costs to taking that path. I'm not unfamiliar with how that can work: we [colleagues and I] run communications like this where is a severe confidentiality or national security need. For lack of a better word, it sucks. If you don't appreciate having off site access to email (let alone smart phone access) go without it for a few weeks and see what it is like.:-) In our environment, it is actually both faster and cheaper to mail people encrypted CDs than it is to get all parties to agree on, approve, and arrange training for an encrypted email or network exchange.
You should not assume that you can both stay at your current workplace and live long enough to see retirement.
Ok, partially valid point. If my employer doesn't provide standing desks, and I think that standing desks are worth any potential reduction in salary, relocation, and/or inconvenience associated with finding a new employer, then that is logically what I should do.
However, arguments of that type (which could apply to any workplace safety condition) eventually do eventually break down when one considers that employees are not perfectly mobile and interchangeable, and that there may be enough willing workers that employers may not face any market pressure to compete in this area. This is why we have to have government-imposed safety regulations, because 'just get a job at a factory that is safer' was not a reasonable or successful approach.
I appreciate this and other studies that affirm that sitting most of the day is bad for you. What am I supposed to do about this? Like a great many professional workers, I work for a large, un-hip company whose furniture, real estate, and office layout is driven by cost and not ergonomics or health. I can't just decide to have a standing desk or reconfigure my 'workstation' -- arbitrarily, and due to client sensitivities I can't work from home. I guess I can just hope the news gets around and maybe my kids will get to have the choice.
Don't know if I agree with the characterization of engineers; we're a pretty diverse bunch.
I do agree with your East coast / West coast anecdote, though, and also point out the difference between industries. Our software engineers (large, east coast defense company) don't wear ties or jackets, but slacks and a button-up collared shirt is the minimally socially accepted dress; even a polo shirt will mark you as a little bit young or casual (not an advantage in this industry). Our subcontractors on the west coast will sometimes even wear shorts to work, which from the perspective of someone who has only lived and worked in the North East US is unthinkable (in the sense that it would not occur to me that it could ever ok, but I think that it is ok now that I've stopped to think about it).
I was going to state this in a slightly less cynical way (the lowest bidder doesn't always win) but it is true that if you hire a government contractor, you get an expert in government contracting, which is different than being an industry leader or a subject matter expert. There is a lot of paperwork, regulatory compliance, and face-to-face networking involved in working successfully with the Government, and navigating it requires a certain amount of expertise and overhead in itself. I say that as a (mostly content) employee of a large defense company.That said, I don't think that is a unique problem. Lots of industries (healthcare, civil engineering, maybe finance) have to spend a lot of time and money on regulatory compliance. Maybe not web development, though.
First, I wanted to link to
This blog post by Steve Losh on writing documentation. I think offers some good metaphors as to why 'reading the source', even 'self documenting' source, is insufficient, though of course not everyone will agree with his philosophy.
Second, I wanted to say on the projects that I work on as a systems engineer doing new product development (as in this, not the information technology use of the term) documentation is perpetually threatened. And we usually work on comparatively well funded, non-FOSS programs. Documentation is timing consuming and expensive, and sometimes it is even customer direction to place it at a lower priority than new development. Though inevitably it makes things harder later, sometimes that is o.k. if it works better with the cash flow (saving money now only to pay more later can work if you expect to have more money later). Unfortunately FOSS software projects don't necessarily have people promising a ton of money for the documentation.
I've rented minivans on business trips (particularly for outdoor field tests of equipment my employer develops). They work very well for our use: surprisingly large cargo capacity in a weather proof bay, flexible reconfiguration to carry either people or equipment between test sites, low floors and true fold-flat seats (compared to many of the SUVs we've rented) making loading easy, car-like handling to suit drivers without large vehicle experience; and wide availability at car rental companies both large and small.
Now, we are talking about renting for a specific purpose for only the duration of that purpose, which is a completely different economic calculation than buying a car for daily use.Nonetheless, I've been convinced that when I do have kids (young children seem to require a frighteningly large amount of support equipment) a minivan will be the way to go. (Certainly compared to an SUV, which would offer similar features in a less convenient shape, or a small car, which lacks cargo.) Of course, this all depends on my finances at that point in time.... I'm not so well off that I can purchase vehicles arbitrarily.
According to the Wikipedia article, it's actual object oriented programming, taught in the modern fashion (i.e., directly, and not via 'C first'). It looks like there was originally an second version of the course that included more of the traditional introductory computer science things (data structures and algorithms) though these are still covered to some degree.
As I lament elsewhere in the thread, though that's appropriate for a course called 'CS' I would have preferred, in high school and college, to be taught a more practical 'how to use the standard library and other common libraries'. Granted, that would be more programming than computer science, and it probably would be dirty and pedestrian to people who actually do computer science. But while programming is widely used across technical fields, I don't think many people need to know how to write their own linked list methods or sort algorithms. For me it would have been better to talk about how to solve more challenging 'real world' problems using the existing tools instead of solving 'simple' problems using algorithms we wrote by hand.
We're really talking about two things in the thread -- getting more people to enter the field of CS, and getting people in general to have more useful CS skills. These are different goals.
I don't remember receiving any computing instruction in high school, in any course. Now, that was 15 years ago so maybe that has changed. I hope so! If not, 'teaching computing in any fashion' is more important than 'teaching computing in a specific fashion'.
My college mathematics courses did integrate mathematica and to a lesser extent matlab (engineering courses, but I wasn't an engineering student). This was great for learning about math, but maybe less great for learning about computers.
As a practicing non-computer-scientist engineer, it would have been more useful to me have had good applied programming courses and not computer science courses. What I do in my job (which is mostly matlab, but I've used C++ in the past) is patch together various library and systems calls together with some math and flow control logic to solve problems. In my CS/programming courses in college, they taught us about data structures and sorting algorithms. I would never try to write my own sort algorithm or linked list management methods. It's not interesting and as a non-specialist I would not likely do better than what already exists.
There may be something to this. The principal advantage of the AP credit I earned before college was that I was able to avoid some of the required courses outside my major. Though, I certainly would have taken an AP course in my area of interest had my school offered it, because I would likely score and grade well and that would have helped my GPA if nothing else.
My scripting/programming is exclusively in Matlab and similar tools so I can't weigh in here EXCEPT as a novice programmer. I tried in past to play around with android (which is java) and separately to relearn what little C/C++ I learned in my college days. As a novice, learning a new IDE is a sizable wall to climb. These tools are not documented with beginners in mind, and I was spending most of my time just trying to get hello world programs to build and link correctly when I wanted to learn the language instead. The IDE was an impediment at my level -- but maybe I was just learning the wrong way. When I was taught C++, it was 'learn C first, learn objects second, learn STL never'. The new strategy seems to be encourage use of standard library containers right away. Similarly, if I were to learn proper IDE use from the beginning (and I include visual interface layout tools under that heading) my experience would be different.
I _have_ used tools which look like IDEs when preparing LaTeX documents (LaTeX is a typesetting markup language used in technical publication). Autocompletion of commands and previously defined labels (variables) is invaluable. I'm an inaccurate typist with a bad memory. Even if I weren't, I suspect computers are better at remembering those kinds of details than I am.
It really depends on the project, but where I work (doing system integration) we use oscilloscopes pretty heavily as 'general purpose troubleshooting tools'. Perhaps significantly, we aren't building boards (we have another department to do that) but interfacing those boards with various sensors, motors, equipement from other vendors, and so forth. For example, we use oscilliscopes to help characterize motor/sensor control loops, to quantify noise of all types (in sensors, in power supplies, etc.), to troubleshoot electrical interface problems, and so forth.
Especially for the control loop work, I can't imagine being without an oscilloscope.
I wouldn't say 'idiotic' -- I believe you don't need to fix all the problems in the world before you're allowed to do new things.
That said, I come from a family of teachers, and that insight leads me to agree with you. I'm especially offended by teachers buying school supplies out of pocket. If I, an employee of a large organization, had to buy office supplies out of pocket, I'd assume the company was on its way down the toilet or at the very least had major management problems. Teachers are somehow conditioned to think having to buy supplies for your classroom and your students/customers is o.k... or they have too much empathy.
Again, there's no reason you can't have both makerbots AND fix these problems, but my experience is that investment from technical companies and press celebrate enrichment in either a few affluent schools or in the one poor school that has the luck of being the example case. Meanwhile, there are plenty of schools remaining without enough pens and paper, let alone current generation computers, ipads, makerbots, etc....
I'll admit I'm tempted to look at overall number of stars, and assume a 4 star place is better than a 2 star place. But I usually end up looking more closely (because ALL the restaurants in an area will be suspiciously highly rated) at the negative reviews. Like you, I try to judge the relevance of the complaint. For example, if the worst thing that anyone has to say about a restaurant is that service is a little slow on Saturday nights and that they had trouble seating your party of 10 without a reservation, that's probably a good restaurant. Complaints about food quality, bathroom sanitation, etc. are much more noteworthy.
Thanks for pointing this out; it goes along with the 'do not volunteer information' rule when dealing with cops/auditors/security people. They aren't looking for reasons to be nice to you. I was thinking more along the lines of having history of topical, well received blog posts of tweets might elevate one's standing... but I'm probably not one of the exception few who can pull that off, and I'm not shooting for a journalism job anyway.
First of all, thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I don't work in IT or software so some of the specifics don't directly apply, but the generalities do.
The biggest clarification I need to make though is by 'online presence' (with my examples of webpages, blogs, and tweets) I didn't mean social chit chat or tools like facebook. I meant 'having a history of making topical posts that are well received by an audience'. If a twitter feed, it would be a journalistic twitter feed, not a 'what I ate for breakfast' twitter feed. The argument (as it has been made to me) is that regularly generating content, and maintaining an audience, shows that you are an active member of your field, and that your ideas have some influence. Especially given that my current work is bound by NDA (no portfolio, no publications, vague resume) having something outside of that would be useful -- but I can't create a reputation ex nihlo. And, since I'm an engineer and not a journalist, it might not matter that much anyway.
Thanks! Yours ended up being one of the most useful posts, because you successfully read my mind: I wasn't clear by what I meant by online presence, and most readers assumed I meant social chatter on facebook. By online presence I didn't mean facebook at all, and when I mentioned twitter and blogs I meant those in the journalistic sense of "regular, technically topical postings to an appreciative audience". Your view is what I would have guessed. My current employer may not know social media exists, so I don't they use it for hiring, but the rest of the world may differ..
I don't work in software, but my work is covered by NDAs so I understand not being able to share a 'portfoilio' of my work or publish. It's one of the limitations that led to my question. I have no record of existing outside my company.
Some of this I deserve for not being clear -- By 'online presence' I mean things like currating a topical blog or having a followed twitter feed, not purely social stuff. The argument, as made to me, is doing these things demonstrates you are an active, respected member in your field, and that your ideas have traction.
...I just can't imagine how spending one's time "tweeting" or maintaining a Facebook page has much to do with what kind of employee I want, unless perhaps those "tweets" particularly socially unacceptable.
I *might* do a search of technical forums to see what kind of tech questions and answers my applicant is giving / asking...
I don't think I mentioned facebook in my post, though I did mention twitter. The idea is that having an online presence (my examples suggested websites, blogs, and twitter feeds) indicates you have ideas, and based on the size of your following, indicates that you've convinced other people that they are good ideas. It shows you are an active participant in your field and are recognized as an authority. Or at least that's the argument that has been made to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I work in the defense industry, which inherits some of the problems of its customer, the Government (in particular, a reluctance to spend money on infrastructure, reliance on policy compliance rather than personal accountability, and older, less tech-savvy decision makers). One of the computers on my desk still runs Windows XP, ironically because the security approval to replace it with a windows 7 computer didn't come through until just recently. So it is no surprise we aren't using wikis or IMs or Slack; I don't even know what the last one is (I mean, I can google, but I don't 'get' it; I've never had access to anything like that).
Few modern technologies can survive in this environment. By the time a 'new' technology is vetted by security, approved by the customer, and authorized by finance, everyone will have moved on to something else. But email remains. It works everywhere. It doesn't require 'special' software that the person you are communicating with may not have the IT permissions to install even if they knew how. Even the most out of touch customer representative knows what it is; you don't have to make slides about why you need this thing on your program. It can work over public networks and private networks; you don't need to trust a cloud or a young company. There are well-developed practices for using it. Lawyers and compliance staff thoroughly understand the legal issues (this is no small concern in a large company).
Maybe timing? If you are planning to buy a new smartphone sometime in the next n months, and are undecided about exactly when to buy or what to buy, maybe this will tilt you toward buying an iphone, and now?
Given the millions of other blogged words on this topic in the past 48hours, Slashdot now needs clickbait too?
(Sigh.) This is cliche, but I can't help myself. If your objection to the 'click bait' was to not only click the link to the content but to interact with it by logging in and posting a comment... you're doing it wrong.
I don't know who said this, but I heard one commentator claim that the apple watch was not a smart watch, but a wearable computer. I thought this was apt because when I think of the apple watch as a 'watch' it isn't particularly compelling to me (and this is from someone who still wears a watch, and uses it to tell time). However, when I open up my vision to 'sky is the limit', yet-to-be-invented applications of a wearable computer, I'm more interested to see where this will go. As with the iPhone, the 'included with the first edition' features aren't as interesting as the 'invented by third parties and forced upon a reluctant Apple' (remember, native apps sold through an app store was not in Apple's original vision).
As you point, out, the way we use email has changed. I could try to set up gpg again, but I'm much less likely to do so now, even though I feel the need for encryption more strongly than ever.. Fifteen years ago I accessed my email through an email program on one computer. I now use webmail almost exclusively (when using PCs) and/or any number of different mobile device clients to get to my email. I don't even know how I would approach trying to set up an encrypted email system that works on 'everything' from webmail on PCs at home and at work to my ios tablet to my android phone to my girlfriend's macbook. If the solution is to travel back in time -- use a non-google mail server, access email with a single computer that I control physical access to, etc. -- that's really unappealing, and there are both subjective and objective costs to taking that path. I'm not unfamiliar with how that can work: we [colleagues and I] run communications like this where is a severe confidentiality or national security need. For lack of a better word, it sucks. If you don't appreciate having off site access to email (let alone smart phone access) go without it for a few weeks and see what it is like. :-) In our environment, it is actually both faster and cheaper to mail people encrypted CDs than it is to get all parties to agree on, approve, and arrange training for an encrypted email or network exchange.
Ok, partially valid point. If my employer doesn't provide standing desks, and I think that standing desks are worth any potential reduction in salary, relocation, and/or inconvenience associated with finding a new employer, then that is logically what I should do.
However, arguments of that type (which could apply to any workplace safety condition) eventually do eventually break down when one considers that employees are not perfectly mobile and interchangeable, and that there may be enough willing workers that employers may not face any market pressure to compete in this area. This is why we have to have government-imposed safety regulations, because 'just get a job at a factory that is safer' was not a reasonable or successful approach.
I appreciate this and other studies that affirm that sitting most of the day is bad for you. What am I supposed to do about this? Like a great many professional workers, I work for a large, un-hip company whose furniture, real estate, and office layout is driven by cost and not ergonomics or health. I can't just decide to have a standing desk or reconfigure my 'workstation' -- arbitrarily, and due to client sensitivities I can't work from home. I guess I can just hope the news gets around and maybe my kids will get to have the choice.
Don't know if I agree with the characterization of engineers; we're a pretty diverse bunch. I do agree with your East coast / West coast anecdote, though, and also point out the difference between industries. Our software engineers (large, east coast defense company) don't wear ties or jackets, but slacks and a button-up collared shirt is the minimally socially accepted dress; even a polo shirt will mark you as a little bit young or casual (not an advantage in this industry). Our subcontractors on the west coast will sometimes even wear shorts to work, which from the perspective of someone who has only lived and worked in the North East US is unthinkable (in the sense that it would not occur to me that it could ever ok, but I think that it is ok now that I've stopped to think about it).
I was going to state this in a slightly less cynical way (the lowest bidder doesn't always win) but it is true that if you hire a government contractor, you get an expert in government contracting, which is different than being an industry leader or a subject matter expert. There is a lot of paperwork, regulatory compliance, and face-to-face networking involved in working successfully with the Government, and navigating it requires a certain amount of expertise and overhead in itself. I say that as a (mostly content) employee of a large defense company.That said, I don't think that is a unique problem. Lots of industries (healthcare, civil engineering, maybe finance) have to spend a lot of time and money on regulatory compliance. Maybe not web development, though.
First, I wanted to link to This blog post by Steve Losh on writing documentation. I think offers some good metaphors as to why 'reading the source', even 'self documenting' source, is insufficient, though of course not everyone will agree with his philosophy.
Second, I wanted to say on the projects that I work on as a systems engineer doing new product development (as in this, not the information technology use of the term) documentation is perpetually threatened. And we usually work on comparatively well funded, non-FOSS programs. Documentation is timing consuming and expensive, and sometimes it is even customer direction to place it at a lower priority than new development. Though inevitably it makes things harder later, sometimes that is o.k. if it works better with the cash flow (saving money now only to pay more later can work if you expect to have more money later). Unfortunately FOSS software projects don't necessarily have people promising a ton of money for the documentation.
I've rented minivans on business trips (particularly for outdoor field tests of equipment my employer develops). They work very well for our use: surprisingly large cargo capacity in a weather proof bay, flexible reconfiguration to carry either people or equipment between test sites, low floors and true fold-flat seats (compared to many of the SUVs we've rented) making loading easy, car-like handling to suit drivers without large vehicle experience; and wide availability at car rental companies both large and small.
Now, we are talking about renting for a specific purpose for only the duration of that purpose, which is a completely different economic calculation than buying a car for daily use.Nonetheless, I've been convinced that when I do have kids (young children seem to require a frighteningly large amount of support equipment) a minivan will be the way to go. (Certainly compared to an SUV, which would offer similar features in a less convenient shape, or a small car, which lacks cargo.) Of course, this all depends on my finances at that point in time.... I'm not so well off that I can purchase vehicles arbitrarily.
As I lament elsewhere in the thread, though that's appropriate for a course called 'CS' I would have preferred, in high school and college, to be taught a more practical 'how to use the standard library and other common libraries'. Granted, that would be more programming than computer science, and it probably would be dirty and pedestrian to people who actually do computer science. But while programming is widely used across technical fields, I don't think many people need to know how to write their own linked list methods or sort algorithms. For me it would have been better to talk about how to solve more challenging 'real world' problems using the existing tools instead of solving 'simple' problems using algorithms we wrote by hand.
We're really talking about two things in the thread -- getting more people to enter the field of CS, and getting people in general to have more useful CS skills. These are different goals.
My college mathematics courses did integrate mathematica and to a lesser extent matlab (engineering courses, but I wasn't an engineering student). This was great for learning about math, but maybe less great for learning about computers.
As a practicing non-computer-scientist engineer, it would have been more useful to me have had good applied programming courses and not computer science courses. What I do in my job (which is mostly matlab, but I've used C++ in the past) is patch together various library and systems calls together with some math and flow control logic to solve problems. In my CS/programming courses in college, they taught us about data structures and sorting algorithms. I would never try to write my own sort algorithm or linked list management methods. It's not interesting and as a non-specialist I would not likely do better than what already exists.
There may be something to this. The principal advantage of the AP credit I earned before college was that I was able to avoid some of the required courses outside my major. Though, I certainly would have taken an AP course in my area of interest had my school offered it, because I would likely score and grade well and that would have helped my GPA if nothing else.
My scripting/programming is exclusively in Matlab and similar tools so I can't weigh in here EXCEPT as a novice programmer. I tried in past to play around with android (which is java) and separately to relearn what little C/C++ I learned in my college days. As a novice, learning a new IDE is a sizable wall to climb. These tools are not documented with beginners in mind, and I was spending most of my time just trying to get hello world programs to build and link correctly when I wanted to learn the language instead. The IDE was an impediment at my level -- but maybe I was just learning the wrong way. When I was taught C++, it was 'learn C first, learn objects second, learn STL never'. The new strategy seems to be encourage use of standard library containers right away. Similarly, if I were to learn proper IDE use from the beginning (and I include visual interface layout tools under that heading) my experience would be different. I _have_ used tools which look like IDEs when preparing LaTeX documents (LaTeX is a typesetting markup language used in technical publication). Autocompletion of commands and previously defined labels (variables) is invaluable. I'm an inaccurate typist with a bad memory. Even if I weren't, I suspect computers are better at remembering those kinds of details than I am.
It really depends on the project, but where I work (doing system integration) we use oscilloscopes pretty heavily as 'general purpose troubleshooting tools'. Perhaps significantly, we aren't building boards (we have another department to do that) but interfacing those boards with various sensors, motors, equipement from other vendors, and so forth. For example, we use oscilliscopes to help characterize motor/sensor control loops, to quantify noise of all types (in sensors, in power supplies, etc.), to troubleshoot electrical interface problems, and so forth. Especially for the control loop work, I can't imagine being without an oscilloscope.
I wouldn't say 'idiotic' -- I believe you don't need to fix all the problems in the world before you're allowed to do new things. That said, I come from a family of teachers, and that insight leads me to agree with you. I'm especially offended by teachers buying school supplies out of pocket. If I, an employee of a large organization, had to buy office supplies out of pocket, I'd assume the company was on its way down the toilet or at the very least had major management problems. Teachers are somehow conditioned to think having to buy supplies for your classroom and your students/customers is o.k... or they have too much empathy. Again, there's no reason you can't have both makerbots AND fix these problems, but my experience is that investment from technical companies and press celebrate enrichment in either a few affluent schools or in the one poor school that has the luck of being the example case. Meanwhile, there are plenty of schools remaining without enough pens and paper, let alone current generation computers, ipads, makerbots, etc....
I'll admit I'm tempted to look at overall number of stars, and assume a 4 star place is better than a 2 star place. But I usually end up looking more closely (because ALL the restaurants in an area will be suspiciously highly rated) at the negative reviews. Like you, I try to judge the relevance of the complaint. For example, if the worst thing that anyone has to say about a restaurant is that service is a little slow on Saturday nights and that they had trouble seating your party of 10 without a reservation, that's probably a good restaurant. Complaints about food quality, bathroom sanitation, etc. are much more noteworthy.
Maybe they just tell you that to get self-incriminating admissions. "Come on! You'll feel better once you get it off your chest."
Thanks for pointing this out; it goes along with the 'do not volunteer information' rule when dealing with cops/auditors/security people. They aren't looking for reasons to be nice to you. I was thinking more along the lines of having history of topical, well received blog posts of tweets might elevate one's standing... but I'm probably not one of the exception few who can pull that off, and I'm not shooting for a journalism job anyway.
First of all, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I don't work in IT or software so some of the specifics don't directly apply, but the generalities do. The biggest clarification I need to make though is by 'online presence' (with my examples of webpages, blogs, and tweets) I didn't mean social chit chat or tools like facebook. I meant 'having a history of making topical posts that are well received by an audience'. If a twitter feed, it would be a journalistic twitter feed, not a 'what I ate for breakfast' twitter feed. The argument (as it has been made to me) is that regularly generating content, and maintaining an audience, shows that you are an active member of your field, and that your ideas have some influence. Especially given that my current work is bound by NDA (no portfolio, no publications, vague resume) having something outside of that would be useful -- but I can't create a reputation ex nihlo. And, since I'm an engineer and not a journalist, it might not matter that much anyway.
Thanks! Yours ended up being one of the most useful posts, because you successfully read my mind: I wasn't clear by what I meant by online presence, and most readers assumed I meant social chatter on facebook. By online presence I didn't mean facebook at all, and when I mentioned twitter and blogs I meant those in the journalistic sense of "regular, technically topical postings to an appreciative audience". Your view is what I would have guessed. My current employer may not know social media exists, so I don't they use it for hiring, but the rest of the world may differ..
I don't work in software, but my work is covered by NDAs so I understand not being able to share a 'portfoilio' of my work or publish. It's one of the limitations that led to my question. I have no record of existing outside my company.
Some of this I deserve for not being clear -- By 'online presence' I mean things like currating a topical blog or having a followed twitter feed, not purely social stuff. The argument, as made to me, is doing these things demonstrates you are an active, respected member in your field, and that your ideas have traction.
...I just can't imagine how spending one's time "tweeting" or maintaining a Facebook page has much to do with what kind of employee I want, unless perhaps those "tweets" particularly socially unacceptable.
I *might* do a search of technical forums to see what kind of tech questions and answers my applicant is giving / asking...
I don't think I mentioned facebook in my post, though I did mention twitter. The idea is that having an online presence (my examples suggested websites, blogs, and twitter feeds) indicates you have ideas, and based on the size of your following, indicates that you've convinced other people that they are good ideas. It shows you are an active participant in your field and are recognized as an authority. Or at least that's the argument that has been made to me.