A Beautiful Day and Career Counseling from the Pointy-Haired Boss

Pam and I made every excuse we could for one more errand out in this sparkling, crisp (sounds like a soft drink) day. All of that rain has resulted in flow­ers and green every­where, and we could see moun­tain ranges to the North from Broad­way that I don’t think we’d ever seen before, or at least not this well.

We got lots of odds and ends, and in gen­eral, pre­pared for Pam’s trip that will take her to our old haunts in Boston, her brother’s fam­ily in West Spring­field, Mass­a­chu­setts, and a final stop in Min­neapo­lis for the STC (Soci­ety for Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion) Con­ven­tion. She’ll be on the road for nearly 3 weeks. I hope none of her Koi die while under my care.

As for me, I get to con­tinue my job search, which has con­tin­ued with help from friends and a new career man­age­ment com­pany that I’ve signed on with. The lat­ter has involved lots of def­i­n­i­tion of career goals, com­pil­ing ‘nar­ra­tives’ of my work accom­plish­ments to date, and meet­ings with my assigned con­tact at their offices. I leave off names and com­pa­nies here for a rea­son: The meet­ings, and my inter­ac­tions with this per­son are not going as well as I would hope. Why? As it turns out, the per­son who is to be my advo­cate, coach and adviser at this com­pany is decid­edly non-technical. Really non-technical, as in not know­ing much about the Inter­net, Com­put­ers, the Web, or any­thing remotely related to Tech­nol­ogy. This has proved…challenging to me and is fairly trou­bling. After all, how can some­one advise you on your career if they have absolutely no under­stand­ing of what you do to begin with?

Case in Point: At our last meet­ing, they brought up their Sav­ings and Loan’s web page on their screen, turned it to me and asked point-blank: “Is that all you do”? I was a lit­tle taken aback. “Yes, I answered, after a moment of silence where I held back the urge to lean across their desk and punch them in the face, “But that’s not all of it. It’s like ask­ing a Fur­ni­ture Designer if all they design is chairs.”

While it’s a good thing for me to make sure that I can relate to a non-technical per­son (which is not some­thing I usu­ally have a prob­lem with; I’m a self-admitted geek but I am a result of a Lib­eral Arts Edu­ca­tion), I have to say that rewrit­ing my resumé so that all of the tech­no­log­i­cal ref­er­ence are either elim­i­nated or sim­pli­fied is not some­thing I would have done on my own, and I won­der if it’s going to serve me well. Will I have a ‘David for Dum­mies’ ver­sion of my resumé that I trot out for some­one who I think will give me a blank look if I men­tion the words ‘User Inter­face’? Then again, how would some­one like that ever be inter­view­ing me for a job in the first place?

On Tues­day, I am to appear for my meet­ing in for­mal job inter­view attire. Accord­ing to their rules, that’s a dark suit and tie.

Techies in Van­cou­ver: When was the last time you appeared for a meet­ing in suit and dark tie? It’s not that I don’t have one, or haven’t worn one in my life, but it seems to rein­force the idea that these peo­ple have no freak­ing clue what­so­ever what tech cul­ture is like.

If this con­tin­ues to irk me and inter­feres with my job search, I may request a dif­fer­ent per­son to work with, which may prove a bit uncom­fort­able for all con­cerned. Nev­er­the­less, I’m going to give that some seri­ous thought. In the mean­time, it’s back to my old resumé, which I’m try­ing to use to cre­ate more ‘nar­ra­tives’: “Once upon a time, there was a need for a click­able HTML pro­to­type…” (*Doh!*)