deborah | Entries tagged with careers

It is an odd realization, as I apply for jobs post-layoff, that nearly every job I've ever had has been found via networking, not cold-applies. That means, I suppose, that I should put myself out there, though doing so makes me uncomfortable on the 2023 internet.

So, here's my résumé, also my general portfolio page, and my GitHub: deborahgu. I can legally work in the US (and, I believe, in the UK, although my work hours, though somewhat shiftable, will be based on GMT -5).

In my most recent position I have been the Principal Engineer at a medical software company, primarily working in Python with Flask, also SQL (PostgreSQL), TypeScript, JavaScript, and ReactJS, in a Docker / Kubernetes environment on AWS. I pick up new languages and frameworks quickly, although Python is the language of my heart. I am a Full Stack engineer but I prefer working on the backend; in this position I focused on architecture and development of RESTful APIs, security, accessibility, and IAM (using Okta, Auth0, and privacyIDEA). I'm an accessibility expert, and have domain expertise in publishing, libraries, and archives.

I loved this last job because it was a collaborative (all-remote) team of folks who happily paired as necessary, and who collaborated to come up with best practices for architecture, standards, and code style. I really would like that again.

I'm primarily looking for remote. I'll consider a term-limited contract for the right position. I mostly just want a position that's not actively doing evil, where I can focus on writing interesting, high-quality, sustainable code with smart, collaborative teammates at a stable company that's a decent employer.

My extremely uneducated guess from reading some of the rules pertaining to US H-1B visas, is that DHS or USCIS could probably issue a rule regarding the length of time H-1B visa holders could be unemployed during during the next 12 months, which would be:

a decent thing to do when tens of thousands of tech jobs are going away
an excellent way to prevent American brain drain and a good exercise of soft power
a way to help the remaining employees of Twitter escape

(Yes, obviously the entire system is not fit for purpose. This is just one thing that the executive probably could do, and definitely won't.)

If had a platform read by people in tech too young to have gone through a downturn before, here's what I'd say.

It sucks, and I'm sorry. Even if it's a good layoff for you, that works in your favor, and that you knew was coming, it still sucks. It's okay to feel some kind of way about it.
Keep up old the ex-old-job people social networks that aren't actively dangerous or toxic for you. I got my first post-layoff job when I went out to lunch with former colleagues from the position where I was laid off and they asked me to work at their new place. Every ex-old-job community is going to be full of people who successfully leapt to a new place which, by definition, is hiring.
Don't sign anything without a lawyer's eyes. When I got laid off the second time, a local labor lawyer gave me a free consult on the severance package. And really think about the math; especially if you have medical insurance from another source, the severance the offer you is often not worth the NDA, non-disparagement, and arbitration clauses.
You will get a good job again. You have skills and connections. It might be rough in the meantime, but you will.
There's still plenty of remote jobs. And contrary to what VCs will claim, most companies don't actually think you're smarter just because you live near them. If your needs, family, or support networks don't tie you to living in a place where the cost of living is unsustainable for you, you don't need to live there. The rent is too damn high everywhere, but you'd be amazed at how far a tech salary will take you in most parts of the country.
Every large company hires tech people, and bigger companies are often much better employers than startups. Companies that are great employers, especially for people from underrepresented groups, are often stodgy and boring, with no interesting vibe. Show me a company with an established HR department staffed by professionals and a risk-averse legal department, and I'll show you a place that nobody on social media thinks is interesting at all. Look for lists put together by polling actual employees, not by random PR departments.
If you're young and in tech, there's a reasonable chance you've been paid in Ludicrous Mode for your entire career, and may never really have struggled for cash. It's fine if that's you! Just know that there are skills you can learn. If you have friends on the other side of our economy's awful divide, they might have good advice. But there are plenty of little things you can do to save money. They can't move someone up a tier in our fucked up economy, but they can help you learn to budget. For example, the tech industry has taught you to buy subscriptions things that already existed free or cheaper, in some cases (eg. audible vs. the library).
Don't do a bootcamp to get more skills; many of them are ridiculously expensive scams that don't teach much. Look into your local community colleges, which often teach more for a fraction of the cost.
You don't owe the old place any loyalty. Leak to the press if it gives you satisfaction. Just, leak to someone with a track record of not throwing sources to the wolves. You don't want a rep and you don't want to paste a target on your back, especially if you're dealing with the world's richest man in the middle of a spite-fueled tempter tantrum.

allen and I formed Suberic Networks back in 1997, which is hard to believe. Our baby is a millenial! Over the years we've providing hosting solutions to myriad non-profits, small businesses, informal organizations, clubs, and individuals. When doing freelance programming, we've done so under the umbrella of Suberic Networks.

Suberic was formed back in the wild old days of the Internet, when "there shalt be no commercial speech on the Internet" was extremely recent history (only three years after Canter and Siegel spammed Usenet). We've grown a lot over the years. I can't recall for sure, but I bet we once had little icons that said "Bobby approved!" and "Best when viewed in Lynx."

Today we're launching the new home page for Suberic Networks, LLC. Our gorgeous new logo was designed by Pablo Defendini. The site's launch aims to showcase my freelance programming work.

We build database-backed software solutions with rich user interfaces that provide a tested and welcoming user experience. Suberic Networks is particularly adept with the Perl and Python programming languages, and we can modernize legacy software as well as design, build, and test new projects. We have specialties in accessibility, user experience, digital libraries, and publishing.

I know many of you are involved with accessibility, library, archives, and publishing. Not coincidentally, those are particular strengths of Suberic Networks consulting! I encourage you to consult our expertise and consider whether we might be of use to your organization. And I'd be grateful if you'd signal boost (without spamming, of course) to interested parties.

first she had on her own checkered cap, then a bunch of gray caps, then a bunch of brown caps, then a bunch of blue caps, and on the very top a bunch of red caps.

Apologies to Esphyr Slobodkina

(For those more in the loop of

obscure fairy lore or
Dungeons & Dragons baddies based on obscure fairy lore than on
76 year old picture books

the allusion was to me being a person who chooses to wear many hats. Any implication of being beleaguered by monkeys is purely coincidental.)

After several happy years at Safari Books Online working with Python, I'm moving on to other projects. For now, I'm moving on to a variety of open source projects. I hope to have the chance to talk about the bigger ones soon. As for the smaller ones, well. Expect pull requests from me soon!

Seriously, though. I'm trying to talk myself out of adding (imagine Allie Brosh-style self-insert here) Fix All the Accessibility Bugs! to my todo list. That seems like a Poor Life Choice.

Much love to all my Safari Co-Workers who've been mentors in my journey into Python Infested Waters. I'm sure I'll see most of you in my new spaces as well. Liza will be sad that I'm looking forward to having time for Perl projects again -- though probably happy to know that I'm a convert to the Python culture 100%, if only partially to Python-as-language. (You'll pry regexes out of my cold dead fingers, Liza. Well, pretty easily; you've seen my fingers. But out of my metaphorical fingers.)

W3C work isn't going away, especially not since my W3C colleagues have been making noises about increasing their demands on my time, you know who you are. And there's likely to be more children's and YA lit in my life soon, as well! More details will be forthcoming if that happens.

Further up and further in!

It's a good thing I don't live near DC, because I would apply for this job in a hot minute.

Department: Executive Office of the President
Job Title: Accessibility Officer

( Duties )

Step one: teach the people running the job board that you don't use all caps for headers, you use regular capitalization and style to caps with CSS if that's what you want. :D

Do people in jobs like this get fired when the administration turns over?

...Now I'm imagining the accessiblity officer in the Trump administration.

I have finally started identifying as "I have all these huge posts in draft, but I really want to boil them down into something smarter before I post them. But I have one very simple thought just occurred to me.

I have finally started identifying myself as "a programmer" and not just "a person who writes a lot of code" or "an archivist who hacks a lot." I don't think it's actually because I now have a job title of "programmer." It's because I've been doing code reviews.

My code reviews are still very junior. In many ways, I'm too trusting of the code that I read; I sometimes read it as pseudocode and so don't see errors. But I forced myself to start doing it, and I started with just asking for more comments any place where the code wasn't self-explanatory -- which is really valuable, and I should not understate that with "just."

The obvious next step from there was to ask people to clarify their coding style to make it more self-documenting. If it took me too long to figure out what was going on, then either it's a complex bit of algorithm and needs better comments, or there's a fair chance the code is not as clearly written as it could be. I will admit this is an easier task than it could be because I am almost always code reviewing Python programmers, not Perl programmers. Python programmers don't have so much of the cultural machismo attached to writing WORN (write once, read never) code. (For what it's worth, I don't think that has anything to do with structures inherent in the languages. You can write unreadable Python just fine, and Perl Best Practices-compliant code is plenty readable. It's a cultural problem.)

From asking people to clarify their coding style it was actually a surprisingly short jump to pointing out ways code could be more efficient. Once you start looking at ways the code is not written very clearly, you start noticing inefficiencies. Before you post a comment you say to yourself, "that generator is kind of hard to read, I wonder why they used it? Before I critique it maybe I should check to see if that's the best way to do this thing." And then you find it's not; it's too slow, or too memory intensive, or the like.

Of course, I need to remember to comment on the elements of the code where I do have strengths, and I need to remember that those strengths, while they are not the same as those of senior engineers, are relevant skill sets which actually need to be addressed in the product by more people. In my case, that's accessibility along with usability and user experience.

Everyone doing a code review needs to check for security and accessibility issues, and don't worry if you don't know the details. All you have to do is say things like "I see you are taking user input here; did you verify all of the security issues were resolved?" Or "I see you have added a new interaction mode to the front page; did you do an accessibility review?"

Just make sure the person for whom your code reviewing those your limitations. If you are not particularly skilled with knowing performance tuning, then you probably shouldn't be the only person code reviewing a rewrite the database ORM. If you aren't sure, talk to the developer.

You can code review for developers who are far more experienced than you! You can code review even if you aren't doing a lot of programming yourself.

So give it a try.

I've left Tufts DCA after the longest tenure I've had at a job to become a support engineer at Safari Books Online. Among other things, this means that after nearly a decade, I've left academia for private industry.

Well, for publishing. Which is like private industry, but for people laugh at profit.^[note]

( I want to talk briefly about my career trajectory. )
^[Note] I snark; Safari does just fine, online tech books being a popular item even before you get to all the reference book contracts. Though after a decade in academia, my scales for what is considered financial success are all off. Academic institutions measures success not by quarterly profit, which can be low, but by the size of the endowments they sit jealously and often uselessly upon like learned Smaugs.^[back]

My friend Jeanette needs your help. This is a letter from my friend Jeanette Beal, a blind Assistive Technology Specialist. Repost, link, let us know if you can help with publicity/media or legal aspects. If you do repost, please repost in full without cutting or summarizing.

Roy Tennant has dashed off the startlingly ignorant "If You Are a Library Sysadmin, You Are Toast". I really hope it was tongue-in-cheek and just missed its mark as far as humor goes.

There's a certain extent to which I think if you are a library sysadmin, you are making poor career choices. If you have that skill set and feel like sitting alone in a basement closet all day interacting with nobody but computers, why are you working in libraries when you could have a real job that pays actual money? (Said the pot to kettle.)

Tennant says:

When I, as just a moderately savvy librarian, can learn maybe five to ten very specific steps and be able to deploy any application I would likely want to deploy, why do I need to talk to my system administrator ever again?

Roy, in this day and age, 90% of what system administrators do is something that you, as a moderately savvy librarian, could figure out how to do. Most systems administrators aren't writing device drivers and patching kernels all day long. But you know what? 90% of what librarians do is something any moderately savvy patron could figure out. 90% of what office administrators do is something any moderately savvy office employee could figure out. You don't have specialized employees because they have access to the supersecret field knowledge that only guild members, with their club handshakes, can discover. You hire specialized employees because in order to have something done well in a time efficient fashion, our society has decided to specialize.

Sure, you could set up an externally hosted ILS, hack Drupal in the cloud all day, store all your data in Amazon S3. And then either:

You will be doing a bad job of managing that information and making sure it is backed up and reliably accessible; you don't have a lot of time because you have your own actual job to do, or

You will be doing a bad job of your own actual job, because you will be too busy making sure that all of your cloud-hosted material is backed up and reliably accessible and managed to actually do the tasks you've been paid to do, or

You will wake up one morning and discover you have become a library sysadmin.

"I can find books and articles myself with Google scholar, what would I ever need a librarian for? LOL your job is in danger!"

On my private list labeled "really? I wanted my coworkers and colleagues to know these things about me?" is that I apparently write parody romance well enough to win ArchivesNext's hilarious archivist romance contest in the "Cold-Hearted Career Woman" category. Thanks so much for running the contest, Kate and the panel of intrepid judges!

On an entirely different note, the Archivist of the United States just posted "How to Be a Smooth Criminal", archival patent secrets of Michael Jackson's dance moves. Archives are awesome, yo.

And Karen Hellekson over at the Transformative Works and Cultures symposium posts about "Persistence and DOIs, addressing the reasons why one could want to use an external persistent URL provider but the difficulties one can run into when doing so. Thought-provoking.

How much time do I spend singing the praises of interlibrary loan? Because of ILL, my coworkers and I are currently passing around the marvelous Protected by the Prince, an absolutely terrible Harlequin about the Prince of Lusitanalpsvillia (or something) and a mousy, bespectacled archivist.

This LOLcats version of the book (irritatingly lacking alt text; come on, people, get with the program) is actually a pretty accurate rendition of the plot, and possibly better written. ArchivesNext is running a hilarious quiz/contest about the book and its premise.

ROFLMAO.

Edited to add: Rebecca at Derangement and Description, creator of the LOLcats comic, is going to be adding transcript or some kind of alt. Given that I rather gracelessly snarked in public instead of privately asking her to add alternative text, this is my public apology and recognition of her coolness.

No! You cannot think of anything more fun than working closely with me every single weekday! I will bring in candy! I will go swimming with you! I will let you play with my large collection of librarian action figures! (Photograph to come as soon as I remember to bring a camera.)

Archivist for Digital Collections

( job description beneath the cut )

Please pass it on.

Two links today which were both partially inspired by the 20 year anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

First, the depressing one: Via Jennison Mark Asuncion, Dennis Lembree identifies several accessibility gaps on the home page of the new section508.gov web site. The site was launched partially in celebration of the 20 year anniversary of the ADA, and some of the accessibility gaps Lembree finds are whoppers: overly styled text instead of heading tags, for example. As Jennison said, what does it say when the chief US gov agency promoting IT
accessibility is not where it needs to be with their own site?

But let's follow with a much more inspiring post:

jesse_the_k: "20 Years and a Day for the Americans with Disabilities Act". This essay inspires me to see all the good we've done in two decades. From

jesse_the_k:

So, thanks for my life, ADA: many mundane things, and a few great big ones.

The law is not enough; as Cal Montgomery taught me:
Discrimination is always illegal; only activism makes it unwise.

And something I don't say very often, because I'm still pissed off about certain comments about atheism, But thanks, George H. W. Bush, for signing the ADA into law. Because of that law, I have a job.

YALSA Blog had a post I mostly liked about Blogging as a Professional Development Tool, but the opening paragraph concerned me greatly.

"Last month I posted an interview with Perry Moore, the executive producer of the Chronicles of Narnia films and author of the Y/A novel, Hero, to the YALSA blog. Did I know Moore personally before interviewing him? No, I didn’t. How did I get to know him? I blogged about his book. Yes, you read it right. I posted a blog entry on my own blog about his novel, Hero. Moore read my review, liked what I had to say, and suggested an interview."

I know a lot of book bloggers who treat their online reviews with the same sense of professionalism as professional reviewers. They write positive, negative, and mixed reviews, depending on what the book deserves. I know bloggers who have received angry mail from authors or editors and have taken it as a mark of pride. But this opening paragraph from YALSA Blog, in all its well-meaning optimism, exemplifies everything that worries me about encouraging people to become book bloggers.

This post explicitly states that the author (a) did important professional development and (b) met a successful young adult author and film producer because she wrote a review the author liked. I'm sure most people start out with every intention of integrity but it's hard to keep that when you know publishers are more likely to send you galleys* if you say nice things about the books. It's hard to remember when authors are coming into your blogs themselves and praising you every time you say something nice. A lot of people work very hard to keep that level of integrity, and the YALSA Blog article inadvertently but actively discourages that. I'm sure Perry Moore would not have suggested the interview if the blog post have been a negative review (although I can't swear to that, because I can't find the original blog post anywhere).

I had to take

diceytillerman's excellent advice and unsubscribe from most author blogs after one author had gotten in the habit of posting squeefully along the lines of "wow, anonymous Kirkus reviewer, you are the best person in the world and I love you love you love you." That just felt too good, and compromised my integrity when I was reviewing that author's books. My hindbrain would send little reward signals every time I wrote a sentence in a review that I thought would make the author say nice things about me. (Yes, some of you are authors. Hopefully I will not be sent any of your books to review, and if I am, I will figure out what to do then.)

First of all, you should only book blog if you love books and love talking about them. Secondly, it can indeed succeed as a professional development tool -- although keep in mind that a reviewer who only writes squee might have prospective employers think twice about that blogger's ability to do collection development and selection. But you should NEVER be encouraging people to do book blogging in order to get the attention of authors or to get galleys from publishers, because both of those goals will result in intellectually dishonest reviews. The blogger with the best intentions cannot override the hindbrain's desire for free stuff and the friendship of famous people.

* I really don't understand why adults get so excited about galleys. First of all, they are often full of errors, and rarely read as smoothly as the finished copy. Secondly, yes, you get the book early -- but if nine months are going to pass between the finished version of book 1 and the finished version of book 2, those same nine months are going to pass between the galley of book 1 and a galley of book 2. And if you aren't guaranteed to get the galley of book 2, you will be waiting even longer between books than the people who waited for the finished version. If it's just the "free", than I would like to recommend to all these people their awesome local public library and its interlibrary loan program.

In "Descartes Letter Found, Therefore It Is", I learned that a long-lost stolen letter of Descartes' has turned up in my alma mater's archives:

If old-fashioned larceny was responsible for the document’s loss, advanced digital technology can be credited for its rediscovery. Erik-Jan Bos, a philosophy scholar at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who is helping to edit a new edition of Descartes’s correspondence, said that during a late-night session browsing the Internet he noticed a reference to Descartes in a description of the manuscript collection at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. He contacted John Anderies, the head of special collections at Haverford, who sent him a scan of the letter.
...
Scholars have known of the letter’s existence for more than 300 years, but not its contents. Apparently the only person who had really studied it was a Haverford undergraduate who spent a semester writing a paper about the letter in 1979. (Mr. Bos called the paper “a truly fine piece of work.”)

Guys, this is awesome. This is why I do what I do! Putting collection guides online is a royal pain (ASK ME HOW I FEEL ABOUT THE EAD STANDARD), but this is the kind of story that makes it all worthwhile. Archival collections are full of hidden treasures the archivists themselves don't know about. It takes a dedicated scholar to find these lost and hidden (and rarely digitized) gems, and digital collection guides, followed up by e-reference, followed up by spot digitization, solved the puzzle.

Viva la Ford!

On a more somber note, from "Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business)":

Now, whenever I screen resumes, I ask the recruiter to black out any demographic information from the resume itself: name, age, gender, country of origin. The first time I did this experiment, I felt a strange feeling of vertigo while reading the resume. “Who is this guy?” I had a hard time forming a visual image, which made it harder to try and compare each candidate to the successful people I’d worked with in the past. It was an uncomfortable feeling, which instantly revealed just how much I’d been relying on surface qualities when screening resumes before – even when I thought I was being 100% meritocratic. And, much to my surprise (and embarrassment), the kinds of people I started phone-screening changed immediately.

For Disability Blog Carnival #59: Disability and Work:

Liz Henry tells us that October is Disability Employment Awareness Month in the United States. Who knew? I guess this is why my university's human resources newsletter this month has an article called "Accommodating Our Valuable Employees", all about the wonderful ways in which the human resources department jumps through hoops to adapt the environment for employees with disabilities. Someday I have to meet this department of which they write. </snark>

Anyway, I've written plenty on the frustrations of being a working person with disabilities, but I wanted to talk about some of the ways in which it's actually pretty awesome. ( Even I can't complain all the time. )

I am honored to be a presenter at the forthcoming Diana Wynne Jones Conference, in Bristol this July. (Except now I have to write the paper.)

I am honored to've been asked to teach Fantasy and Science Fiction at the Center for the Study of Children's Literature again this Fall. (Except now I have to prep for the class again.)

If only my time-consuming avocational successes paid well enough to support me, so that making time for them could be easy.

Why isn't the library blogosphere abuzz over the to-be-deported librarian (or library employee; the new stories are inconsistent but seem to imply a library employee) Marxavi Angel Martinez? 23-year-old Martinez has been married for two years, works in a library, is attending college, has a 15-month-old son, and plans to become a kindergarten teacher. She didn't criminally race across the border in hopes of stealing jobs from hard working Americans -- that is, unless as a three-year-old she decided to swim the Rio Grande.

You know, at some level it disgusts me that the main defense of Martinez I've seen in the news is, effectively, she had a skilled-labor job and white friends ("To go after productive citizens who have been our neighbors and friends for years? It's insane"), but if that's what it takes to make people realize that undocumented immigrants are also human beings, fine, I will take it. Although what the heck is up with this news story? "Alamance County ? Thousands of people use the internet at libraries around the Triad everyday, but it might not be the safest place. Sheriff Deputies in Alamance County arrested Marxavi Angel Martinez earlier this week. Martinez was employed by the county library system. She is facing federal charges for alleging aggravated identity theft, false claim to U.S. citizenship, social security fraud and fraudulent or misrepresentation of a material fact. This comes less than 24-hours after MySpace had security breach. ... Can the internet be trusted?"

Also, note to self: NEVER read the reader comments on immigration stories in the news. I simply don't have enough Sanity Watchers points to go around.

In more entertaining crazy news, LibraryThing has gotten a warning from Google AdSense for the "adult or mature content" in -- wait for it -- Library of Congress Subject Headings.

Library Garden posted on The New IT Librarian Application.
Librarian in Black responded with How to Test Applicants' Tech Skills.
Caveat Lector responded with Testing Your Techies.

Full disclosure: Before I went to library school, I spent ten years as a systems administrator in large corporate environments, and I was damn good at it. I still run my own small ISP. So I'm speaking here as a librarian/archivist but also as a sysadmin.

Library Garden's post is misguided: "If the person's resume and cover letter meet your standards, TEXT their cell phone to set up an interview. Unorthodox? Perhaps, but part of the IT personality is embracing modern technology. Texting is one of the most popular means of communication with our younger population and, if we want to stay current with our patrons, then we need make sure our IT people are familiar with it as well."

This is maybe good advice if you are trying to hire a Library 2.0 guru, but is it good advice to hire IT personnel? No, no, and no. Your IT people need to be able to make sure your servers are backed up. They need to make sure you have fast reliable networks. The need to make sure you have all of the rights you need to administer your data, and all the right tools at your fingertips. They need to make sure that your data are secure. They need to be on top of improvements in file systems, aware of security alerts, knowledgeable about server-class hardware. They probably need to be capable database administrators in a pinch. And if the library staff believes the best way to communicate with users includes setting up text notifications, then your IT people need to be able to set up a good infrastructure for sending text notifications.

Does that mean they need to take in text messages themselves? Maybe you think so. Maybe you think that nobody can set up a good infrastructure of a tool they don't themselves use. But I will tell you, there are plenty of fantastic sysadmins who are complete Luddites about personal technology. Are you really going to hire a sysadmin because she uses twitter? Or are you going to hire her because she writes Debian Linux kernel patches in her spare time? I will give you a hint: there is only one right answer to this question.

Librarian in Black hits it: "And testing an IT person's skills is a lot tricker, but it can be done...assuming you have someone on the other end who can verify the accuracy of the responses. I advocate for essay questions and actual problem-solving questions that present a real problem and ask for code,or a project plan, or a network diagram."

There are two hugely important points here: testing and having someone in-house who can verify the accuracy.

I have no idea how people do real interviews without doing skills tests. My favorite sysadmin test is to hand people this snippet:

crw-rw-rw-  1 root tty       3, 175 2008-06-07 23:43 ttyzf
prw-r-----  1 root adm            0 2008-06-10 10:04 xconsole
brw-rw----  1 root disk    202,   2 2008-06-07 23:43 xvda2
drwxrwxrwt  7 root        root         5120 2008-06-10 15:56 tmp
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root      4 2008-04-24 15:48 lib64 -> /lib
-rwxr-sr-x  1 root mail  395107 2008-06-09 10:07 elm
-rwx--x--x  1 root staff  15340 2008-06-09 10:07 mmencode

I ask them to talk about it. It's a great piece, because if you have any UNIX admin experience at all, you should be able to at least give a four-word description of that whole class of text. And there are lines in there of some fairly intense levels of complexity, which in many cases only an experienced administrator would be able to describe. It's not a Pass/Fail test, it's a Show Me What You Know test, which is a far better kind. Alternately, I would ask problem-solving questions: "User calls up yelling about [situation]. Fix it." This gives you the opportunity to watch both problem-solving skills and at least the job applicant's stated user-communication skills.

But the vitally important issue here is what Librarian in Black says: assuming you have someone on the other end. It's very, very difficult -- almost impossible -- for an entirely non-technical hiring committee to select a good technical applicant. You can select someone nice, and you can select someone who will fit in with your corporate culture, and you can select somebody who talks a good game. But without finding somebody else with a similar set of job skills to sit on your hiring committee? It's all luck. Trust me, no matter how smoothly the person comes off, no matter how competent he or she seems, you can't do an accurate assessment of technical skills without having the knowledge yourself. Technical people often sound extremely confident in their skill, oftentimes with no good reason. If it is at all possible for you to get an IT person from somewhere else in your organization to sit in on the hiring committee? Do so.

Profile

deborah

Suberic Networks

Syndicate

Custom Text

Gnomic Utterances. These are traditional, and are set at the head of each section of the Guidebook. The reason for them is lost in the mists of History. They are culled by the Management from a mighty collection of wise sayings probably compiled by a SAGE—probably called Ka’a Orto’o—some centuries before the Tour begins. The Rule is that no Utterance has anything whatsoever to do with the section it precedes. Nor, of course, has it anything to do with Gnomes.

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated May. 23rd, 2025 04:43 am

Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

The Australasian Journal of Me

Entries tagged with careers

Layer 3 (networking)

this is about the birdsite but also isn't

There- my blessing with thee! And these few precepts in thy memory Look thou character.

Look, Ma! I'm a freelancer!

my own checkered cap

accessibility job opportunity in DC

On code reviews and being a programmer

changing my career without changing my role

a highly qualified blind professional in a bind

startingly ignorant post

what's the correct LCSH term for "rock hard abs"?

Doctor, I think my purity is burgeoning

can you think of anything more fun than working with me closely every single weekday?

20 years of the ADA: Accessibility good and bad

nobody is objective, but book blogging advice sometimes scares me

(1) digital discovery (2) meritocratic myth

working while disabled: it's really just fine

this is a very small violin you are playing for me, isn't it?

immigration, libraries, and that evil Library of Congress

Techies in Libraries

Profile

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Custom Text

Expand Cut Tags