• Ted Pin (5/30/2008)


    Loner (5/29/2008)


    Companies keep saying they can't find the right person, do they know what they are looking for in the first place?

    That is a really good point. The shotgun approach makes me want to employ the counter strategy of applying even if I only match 40% of the requirements... but that breaks one of those "golden" rules of job hunting: don't waste HR's time if you don't meet the requirements. I think the desire to have people who are good, and good at truly everything under the sun at once, is unreasonable and doesn't really benefit anyone in the long run.

    As someone who stubbornly has managed to stay relatively generalized, it's interesting to see how disconcerting senior "non-specialists" truly are to them. I mean - for better of worse - I've been a "utility guy" getting stuck dealing with the odds and ends for better than a decade now, requiring me to jump from one thing to another, and yet - it's very confusing to tell them "Sure I have 5 years in that technology but I haven't touched it in 9 months". Being great at everything just isn't plausible from where I sit.

    I guess "Senior adaptable Wrench engineer" doesn't quite come across in an immediately useful sense to them: put me somewhere, I get myself back up to speed in whatever it is and we go from there.

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    Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?