So I had a job interview yesterday, the first in…. Well, I would say “months,” but I did have a “record yourself talking to an ‘AI'” thing last week which was almost like a job interview, but not really. One of the things on the job posting was “Comfortable pushing back, including with senior engineers, when a process or PR isn’t ready to ship.”
The best story I have for this comes from my days at the digital marketing agency almost 20 years ago. The client’s product, secondnature™ brand dog litter, was going to be featured on Good Morning America, so the agency hired a consultant to optimize the Flash presentation/video. The consultant was auto-didacting Flash as she went, or she was trying to, but it came down to an all-nighter the night before the product appeared on a network television news show. My role was basically waiting all night for something to test, and her role was to say, “I’ve almost got it now, it’ll be ready soon.” So I undoubtedly watched a couple episodes of the early The Simpsons seasons on the eMac and stretched out on the floor for a nap with the volume turned up on the PC speakers so I would hopefully hear the instant messanger ding. Around daybreak, before air time, she delivered…. Something. Something not better than we already had. So I vetoed it. And the agency, presumably, ate the cost of that failed effort (the agency, as it happened, ate a lot of costs of failed efforts both while I was there and after).
It’s a good story, but: I would have probably had to explain what Flash was.
I mean, HTML 5 did not come around until 2008. Before that, it was Macromedia (later Adobe) Flash, a browser plugin that handled video and rich applications. Because neither Microsoft Silverlight (a johnny-come-lately) nor Java applets (write once, run anywhere, riiiiiight) did it quite as well. It eventually became a rich attack vector, though, and HTML 5 with its new tags killed it.
Ah, gentle reader. I said yesterday:
But too often the ATSes and other parts of the over-the-transom job application/hiring process these days, again, winnow on arbitrary measures and don’t allow for perspective and context. And, boy, mister, after almost thirty years in computers (more if you count programming Commodores and Apples), do I have context and perspective.
I’ve been around long enough that I know the problems that newer technologies and processes are trying to solve. Git and distributed version control systems? Developers were tired of finding files locked in Visual Source Safe–so, have pull requests and merge conflicts actually made things better? Dunno–that’s just how we do it now and come up with ever more creative and time-consuming ways to fix the new problems. (Aside: You know, some job postings still mention that the applicant should be familiar with source control systems and include Subversion aka SVN which was a 20-year-old proto Git. I cannot imagine anyone is still using Subversion, but I guess one never knows.) People tired of frames and table-based layouts created Cascading Style Sheets and now the widget-based responsive design front-ends which rely on hard-to-nest blocks of code whose methods change seemingly every release of the framework, and…. Okay, frontend stuff is not my passion.
But that perspective is not valued, old man. What companies want is for employees to do it the current way the bestest.
