Tom Purl’s Web Site

On Marketplace yesterday, there was a great piece on how a lot of job-seekers are using social networks to help them find new job. They focused on strategies that make it easy for potential employers to find you based on relationships, and how efficient that can be.

Searching for a job has always been about who you know, and who those people know. Hiring managers don’t want to go through the tedious and expensive work of finding new talent using head-hunters or classified ads. They want to call someone that they already know, or have a friend recommend someone. Social networks make it easier to keep up with the people you know and connect with their friends, making them a great job-finding tool.

Social networking sites aren’t the only online tools that can help you with your job search. Blogs and mailing lists are also a great way to reach out to people with similar interests, even if you never meet them in person. For example, there are a few technical blogs that I follow that are well-written, informative, and indicative of an author with good problem-solving skills. If I was looking to hire someone who had that author’s particular skills, then I’m likely to put that blog’s author on my short list.

I feel the same way about mailing lists. It’s difficult to understate the importance of good problem-solving and communication skills in the world of IT, and they’re difficult to properly gauge in an interview. If I see someone on a mailing list display these skills along with strong technical skills, then putting them on my short-list is a given.

So it’s obvious that I value good social networks in other people. The problem is that I haven’t been cultivating my networks as well as I should be. Here’s some of my issues:

• I have two different blogs. It’s a long story as to why that’s the case, but it doesn’t do much to help anyone find or learn about me.
• My Facebook page isn’t linked to my blog or my linkedin page, and vice-(vice?)-versa. Someone who knows me based on Facebook wouldn’t know anything about my technical skills, and someone who wanted to communicate with me via Facebook wouldn’t be able to do so if he or she only knew about my blog.
• My Linkedin page is out-of-date. Even though I’m not looking for a new job right now (thank goodness), having an up-to-date profile can help both myself and my friends.
• My blog is pretty empty, which is especially embarrassing when you consider that I’ve been writing blog articles in one way or another for almost 6 years. The old articles are either lost, or in a format that is difficult to convert into something WordPress can use. Also, I have a *lot* more stuff that I could be writing about. And some of it might actually be worth reading by one or two people

So what can I do? Here are some actions that I think will help:

• Move everything to a single blog, and have that be a single, publicly-accessible place for friends and professional resources to find me.
• Link all of my sites together, and make the associations very obvious.
• Make a habit of updating my Linked profile 3 or 4 times a year.
• Move my good articles from my old blogs to my new one. I’d love to write more articles, but I don’t think I’ll make that a goal. Obnoxious, forced articles are definitely worse than none at all.

It’s a lot to do, which is probably why it isn’t already done, but I think it will pay off.

I read a great article on the Freakonomics Blog today regarding the opportunity costs associated with financially free software updates:

• How Much Does a Free iPhone Update Cost?

In it, the author basically points out that his financially free iPhone update cost him one hour of his life when the update broke his phone. A lot of the commentors on the blog stated that exchanging an unexpected hour of your time for an up-to-date iPhone is totally worth it, but most of those people are, in my opinion, probably either lonely and sad or too young to properly value their time.

I have more than a few electronic devices in my home that require periodic updates, so I’m very familiar with this type of story. I’ve gotten to the point where I just automatically budget time for any type of update that I do. This time budgeting is important because it allows me to truly contemplate how much each little update will “cost” both myself and my family.

What I’ve found to be even more important when it comes to valuing my time, however, is budgeting for updates and other administrative overhead before I acquire a new gadget or piece of software. And since the amount of time performing ongoing maintenance can quickly dwarf the amount of time required to set up a new gadget, you need to account for them both along with financial costs when you consider acquiring new hardware or software.

Let’s look at cell phone choices as an example. I use a Nokia 6101, which I purchased without any phone contract-related subsidies for around $50. It’s small, is incredibly simple to administer (no explicit patching and very little configuration), can receive e-mail, and can also be synced with my calendar and contacts. There are some things that I wish it had, like a larger display, and there are a few things I wish I could do with it, such as send e-mail. However, even though I’m a very connected person from a communications perspective, I find that this phone really meets all of my functional requirements very well. The icing on the cake is that it just works (to borrow a line from Apple): I turn it on, put it in my pocket, and forget about it.

Now, there’s no denying that the iPhone is a significantly nicer piece of hardware, and it contains significantly nicer software. It has a large display, a powerful and extensible user interface, and is web-enabled. It truly appears to be the future of smart phones.

The problem is that, with enhanced functionality comes increased complexity, and this grouping usually ends up costing you time. The iPhone OS, core, and third-party applications must all be explicitly updated, and sometimes this action requires multiple interfaces. More “moving parts” (from a software perspective of course) means more points of failure, which means you spend more time troubleshooting and fixing your phone.

Ideally, something as important and integral to our daily lives as a cell phone should transcend its status as a electronic gadget. It should be so reliable and idiot proof, that you focus on what you want to do, not on how it will be accomplished. If your phone satisfies this requirement, then you should be able to say something like “if I need you while I’m at the store, I’ll call you using my cell phone”. Notice that I didn’t specify my phone’s brand, it’s communication protocol, or whether last night’s iTunes update deleted all of my ringer profiles.

Of course, I’m looking forward to the day when it will be practical for me to own a smart phone, and, from a functional perspective, the iPhone seems like a great piece of engineering. I’m just going to wait until it’s financial and opportunity costs are more in line with my budget.