<story><title>A teenager&apos;s guide to avoiding actual work</title><url>https://madned.substack.com/p/a-teenagers-guide-to-avoiding-actual</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bluGill</author><text>It is, and always been: who you know more is more important than what you know.</text></item><item><author>pulse7</author><text>There was a thread on HN a week ago [1] about &amp;quot;How to write a resume that converts&amp;quot; and the most voted comment starts with a sentence &amp;quot;The importance of resumes has been overstated for many years now, and I look forward to the day they are phased out entirely.&amp;quot;...&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=27112542&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=27112542&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>movedx</author><text>I love stories like this. I have one of my own, actually.&lt;p&gt;When I was first getting into IT I started sending out CVs. Mine was terrible. I had been working in call centres for years at this point and all my &amp;quot;experience&amp;quot; was basically self-taught, so not really experience at all. As a result my CV was void of any actual content a hiring manager in IT would want to read, thus it was binned a lot.&lt;p&gt;I applied for a job at a nearby network hardware repair place. They needed someone to look after their Cisco kit and about 30 Debian Linux systems. I was attracted to the mix of responsibilities so I applied, sending in me not-so-good CV. I was eventually asked to come in to have a chat after waiting about a week to hear back from the place.&lt;p&gt;At the end of the interview, Bob (let&amp;#x27;s call him), said I was more knowledgeable than the RHCEs that were coming through his door. This was nice to hear, but then he said something that really made me smile...&lt;p&gt;Apparently my CV was worse than I thought. It was so bad, that Bob literally put it in the bin under his desk. About four days later, Bob was reading through a local Linux User Group (LUG) mailing list and he saw a name he recognised: mine. So he opens the email and reads the thread in which I helped another LUG member compile a sound driver for their kernel. The instructions I gave worked.&lt;p&gt;Bob was impressed but he couldn&amp;#x27;t quite remember where he had seen the name. At this point the business owner, John (heh...), was standing besides Bob&amp;#x27;s desk and noticed my CV in the bin. He pulls it out and reads my name across the top. The penny drops for Bob and I get the call to come in and have a chat.&lt;p&gt;I got the job.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rsj_hn</author><text>This is really an unhealthy and flawed understanding of what is a necessary part of life. The problem is how to find good people, and the more society downgrades objective measures of excellence, the more people need to rely on personal recommendations. It&amp;#x27;s not that people wouldn&amp;#x27;t take a stranger for a job, but when there is a lot of uncertainty, they can&amp;#x27;t absorb the risk of the stranger not being qualified. So they will always prefer someone they &lt;i&gt;know&lt;/i&gt; is qualified over someone who they don&amp;#x27;t know is qualified but might be better.&lt;p&gt;The above is as necessary and unsurprising as rain falling to the ground. There is no other way that things can work. Thus the practical advice you can give someone is not only to learn something but to widen their professional network so that there are many people who &lt;i&gt;know&lt;/i&gt; they&amp;#x27;ve learned something.&lt;p&gt;It is the exact same thing in a big bureaucracy. You have to know how to sell yourself, which just means you need to successfully communicate your accomplishments. Too many people do great work, but they don&amp;#x27;t communicate their accomplishments, and then they are surprised that less qualified people are promoted over them, and they grow cynical or resentful when it is really their failure at communication that has caused the problem. Like many things in life, it&amp;#x27;s better to be mediocre at two necessary things rather than excellent at one and skipping the other. But no amount of righteous anger about the unfairness of life is going to change the fact that people are not omniscient and that talent is hard for strangers to evaluate.</text></comment>
<story><title>A teenager&apos;s guide to avoiding actual work</title><url>https://madned.substack.com/p/a-teenagers-guide-to-avoiding-actual</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bluGill</author><text>It is, and always been: who you know more is more important than what you know.</text></item><item><author>pulse7</author><text>There was a thread on HN a week ago [1] about &amp;quot;How to write a resume that converts&amp;quot; and the most voted comment starts with a sentence &amp;quot;The importance of resumes has been overstated for many years now, and I look forward to the day they are phased out entirely.&amp;quot;...&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=27112542&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=27112542&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>movedx</author><text>I love stories like this. I have one of my own, actually.&lt;p&gt;When I was first getting into IT I started sending out CVs. Mine was terrible. I had been working in call centres for years at this point and all my &amp;quot;experience&amp;quot; was basically self-taught, so not really experience at all. As a result my CV was void of any actual content a hiring manager in IT would want to read, thus it was binned a lot.&lt;p&gt;I applied for a job at a nearby network hardware repair place. They needed someone to look after their Cisco kit and about 30 Debian Linux systems. I was attracted to the mix of responsibilities so I applied, sending in me not-so-good CV. I was eventually asked to come in to have a chat after waiting about a week to hear back from the place.&lt;p&gt;At the end of the interview, Bob (let&amp;#x27;s call him), said I was more knowledgeable than the RHCEs that were coming through his door. This was nice to hear, but then he said something that really made me smile...&lt;p&gt;Apparently my CV was worse than I thought. It was so bad, that Bob literally put it in the bin under his desk. About four days later, Bob was reading through a local Linux User Group (LUG) mailing list and he saw a name he recognised: mine. So he opens the email and reads the thread in which I helped another LUG member compile a sound driver for their kernel. The instructions I gave worked.&lt;p&gt;Bob was impressed but he couldn&amp;#x27;t quite remember where he had seen the name. At this point the business owner, John (heh...), was standing besides Bob&amp;#x27;s desk and noticed my CV in the bin. He pulls it out and reads my name across the top. The penny drops for Bob and I get the call to come in and have a chat.&lt;p&gt;I got the job.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kindall</author><text>People always say that, but only one of the full-time jobs I&amp;#x27;ve had in my thirty-year career has come from networking. In one other situation I was the guy who got several former co-workers hired, all at once, a frankly freak occurrence I still don&amp;#x27;t quite believe actually happened. My current job, I was contacted out of the blue by the team&amp;#x27;s manager on LinkedIn. Most of my jobs have come from being active on the Internet, or else from applying cold.</text></comment>