I continue to belive that employers want to hire people who are useful, and the way to get hired is to therefore demonstrate “usefulness”. And that this is true for both a traditional job, and more flexible arrangements.
There are like, two separate job markets.
The first one is legible, and operates through a “fair” system of applications and filtering processes. Good companies don’t want to make hiring mistakes because one bad apple can bring down a whole team. Bad companies make hiring mistakes, and pay falls to the level of the average employee.
From Rich: nobody cares about your fancy resume template if you have a real job
From Visa:
Me, aged 17: how can you trust employers? the economy? Everything is built on lies and manipulation
Friend: lol chill out you conspiracy nerd
12 years later
Friend: I got fired, haven’t paid off my student loans, and people tell me to code
Me: deep breath I’m so sorry
From Visa: If you want cool and interesting jobs that pay decently, you have to be a cool and interesting person that can demonstrably create value. How fucked up is it that our education systems don’t actually optimise for this - and in fact disincentivize this? The game is rigged.
From Visa https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1817638376495010151
when i look back on my life/career/work journey I sometimes get this ominous sense that i did very little, and that most of my efforts were misspent or wasted, and that it’s very strange that i’ve done as well for myself as I have, and I wonder what everyone else was doing
I think the resume is dead. It’s prose wrapped in so much window dressing. Everyone is just adding action verbs to bulleted lists. Hiring managers go through so much hassle to convert this into a skill set match.
I propose that it should be like Kayak for engineers. One should be able to whittle down a list of thousands of candidates like flights. Select a minimum of two or three criteria, and see what remains on the list. I want to easily find that needle-in-a-haystack engineer.
The key would be self-evaluated skill sets. Reduce everything down to a numerical ranking from 0 to 5. Use AI to generate grading rubrics for thousands of skill sets, and the candidate can add their score in any skill set they want. LinkedIn tried this but failed to assign a grading system. This would eliminate the need for the first round of screening interviews. Software world has this, but I haven’t seen the equivalent for general engineers?
This would provide an identity matrix of a person. A person’s eigenvalue, if you will. Easily parsed, easily stored in a database, and easily filtered.
I built a mockup for this a few years ago. Who else is building this?
Freelancing
pricing for “trust me”
After a certain point, a large part of your fee becomes this thing I call the “I know what I’m doing” fee. People are choosing to pay you so they don’t have to second-guess thier decision.
Motivations
My primary reason for not having a regular job is that I consider my time to be worth way more than any sane person would pay for it. This isn’t because I spend it in ways that are particularly better to working a job, but because I have a ridiculously low tolerance for things I don’t feel like doing.
The second reason is that I do not get along with most company cultures (or people) in my home country.