Category: Modern problems

How do you take a 30 year career and convert it to a blipvert?

Blipvert is a reference to a movie called Max Headroom where a new form of advertisement in a slightly dystopian future was blasted into the general populations brains. The problem was that at some point the bombardment would cause your head to explode.

My resume is dated, to be sure. I’ve been looking at articles and suggestions about generating the attention necessary to get your resume past an idiot HR person and into the hands of an actual hiring manager.

Apparently you need to create a resume that caters to the short attention span, so prevalent in todays young people.

I was wondering if I could create a Twitter version that might actually be read.

Exp Technical SQA prsn, no threat to your job, looking for employment. HMU if pos avail pay needed = min wge or better. Amer Citzn, Ntv Eng

Blast it out to every single corporation with a Twitter account. Who knows, It might actually work. Maybe I could get my 15 minutes of fame and cash in like the Kardashians.

I’m half serious.

The problem is that my resume is, uh, diverse.

Hey it’s not my fault, the 80’s and 90’s were  tumultuous time in the high tech industry.

It’s not like today when everything is like the Linkin Park song “When they come for me”

Part of the lyrics say “Everybody wants the next thing to be just like the first.”

What that means to technology is that more and more of the tech has all the originality and creativeness of building a toaster.

The diversity of my resume is seen as a demerit not a plus. Rather than an HR person looking at it and saying “Gee, this guys has been in the industry since the beginning and has done quite a bit they look at it and say why has this guy been at so many companies?

They don’t think about the mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, and “leading edge” technologies that fell by the way side.

Most of the HR people today are barely in their 20s and they have zero clue about life pre cell phone or iPod. Most of them never consider that a lot of the technology surrounding them wasn’t in existence 20 years ago. They have no sense of history and even less interest in learning about it.

There are three contract positions on my resume that illustrate my point elegantly.

Ameriquest Mortgage, Washington Mutual bank, and Countrywide Mortgage

Yep, I worked for all three of them and they are all gone now.

Here’s some more:

Kentek Information Systems, Peerless Systems, Konica Business Technologies, BlueKite.com, Splash Technologies

Kentek is gone and has been for a while. Peerless is still limping along, where they once had a floor and 1/2 of a building in El Segundo the last I heard they were down to just a few offices. Konica merged or was purchased by Minolta and while the office still exists it’s not the development office it once was. BlueKite.com, GONE! in a particularly ugly way, as is Splash. The remainder of Splash was absorbed by one of their competitors.

I’ve got more…

Suffice it to say that unless someone is printing a score card there is no way a 20 something HR person could come close to understanding what the business was like, or the reason that someone like myself would have such and extensive resume.

Especially when they’re looking for the cheapest newbie out of college they can lay their hands on.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that but sometimes experienced people just want to work and they don’t care so much about climbing the corporate ladder or the money. We just want to do good work, and live our lives, and leave the ladder climbing and Machiavellian machinations to the young.

I’ve been in management, I’ve been a real manager and a manager in name only. I’m not looking for that career path right now.

If I was offered a management position where I was really a manager and not one in name only, I’d consider it.

I don’t want to have the title and simply be the scape goat for someone above me that’s calling the shots but serving up their “Managers” when things go badly.

I’ve been there, done that and I have the T-shirt.

Of course none of this is something one could or should say in an interview. Honesty is strictly forbidden when dealing with an HR child.

Depending on the hiring manager you could get away with saying to them.

Note, the manager would have to be a guy and he’d have to be a stand up kind of guy.

There are perhaps a few women who could take it in the spirit in which it was said, but they’d have to be from Australia, or New Zealand.

You know places where pragmatism, a “can do” attitude, and common sense are still preferred over political correctness or the fear of hurting someones feelings.

Yeah, I said it!

If I were young enough or wealthy enough, I’d try to move to Australia or New Zealand and become a citizen. I miss the days here in America when having a common sense approach at your company would get you raises and promotions.

I’d love to find a place to work in the world where that philosophy was still the norm instead of the exception.

I can dream can’t I?