mostlyghostly

Empirically, I'm getting about the same results from my 1 page and my 2 page CV, based on call back rates, funnel progression, and interviewer comments. Go ahead and use two pages if the incremental content is relevant to your overall pitch.

(In my case the extra material is relevant... I've run pricing at five companies, which is usually a massively cross-functional job. Unlike my typical competitor, I've also mastered most of the supporting technical, accounting, and commercial disciplines... which makes me a one stop shop for serious pricing problems.)

My recruiter invites have been dropping at a exponential rate once I passed age 45. LinkedIn is apparently a fairly efficient platform for age discrimination.

Yes and No.

Most paintings don't have (much) value. Behold my latest work, the brown ring of quality... do I hear... 5 cents?

A few paintings have value, primarily due to the fame of the artist or the history of the piece (It hung <place>). Supply is frequently capped by the fact the artist is dead...

Simple English Translation: We cannot trust any publicly posted claims about product performance, since they have effectively been cherry-picked by the marketing / legal team.

Bad claims can be take down, thus the only remaining claims are good ones.

Cool - can anyone provide a quick list of alternatives?

And most of these tests are basically bullshit, in terms of real world impact.

What's the contest here? Who's most desperate, most willing to sacrifice their life and health for pennies on the dollar?

Seriously. I'm a middle aged guy with kids and parents to take care of. I'm not in a position to spend 30 hours / week doing bullshit puzzles & memorizing an algo book for crap that is basically irrelevant to my job.

You know what I'm good at?

- Spotting the bug before it happens, by watching how the team interacts and who is checking their work...

- Parsing client requirements and finding what matters

- Duct tape engineering so we can hit a go-live date when everything else is a smoking pile of delayed dog-shit...

- Talking the client into dropping a feature that we can't deliver and pivoting into something we already have...

Generally of far higher value than some brain teasers...

It started well and devolved into a bitter rant about the universe. So... here's some perspective from a career on both sides of the table.... (manager and engineer)

- For many teams and personalities, it is very hard to ship anything without a deadline. (as a solo founder, I actually use this psychology on myself to stay on track.)

- Short chunks and deadlines work better than longer ones.

- Peer pressure is a powerful stimulant.

- Your time is not of equal value. You don't really have seventy hours of quality work in a week. You've got maybe 15 "truly inspired" hours, 25 "grind it out" hours, and a lot of filler, face time, and paper shuffling after that. If you're smart, you slip in some employer funded personal growth & education time into that mix.

The classic mistake is to screw up the mix. I actually run into this as a freelancer. My rate for "truly inspired" time (real thinking about theory, architecture, influencing others, lecturing, or consulting on high level topics - eg. I must be fully present and prepared) is between $150 - $500 per hour (depending on the degree to which I'm inspired by the topic in question; $500 if I couldn't give a crap, $150 if I'm truly interested), "grind time" is $75 - $90 (you're paying for work without face time or deep insights, done at my convenience), and I'm unsure how to sell people filler, face-time, and paper shuffling. My typical solution is to go take a nap.

By the way... once you deduct pitching and running the business (10 hours, mix of inspired & grind), that means a freelancer REALLY has only 20 - 25 hours of useful time to sell in the course of a week. Past that, you're either working much harder than an employee or trying sub in filler and hoping your client doesn't notice it...

The typical employee is selling 15 - 25 hours of grind, perhaps 5 of inspired time (if you're lucky) and as much filler and self-directed time as you can get away with. From an employee satisfaction perspective, inspired is a win, filler / self-directed time is neutral to a win (depending on how well you entertain yourself), grind is a negative. Grind time is less onerous if you feel like you are accomplishing something in the process.

My goal as a boss is to get as much grind / inspired time for my buck as possible, since that's what generates output. (employee development matters but is a complex payback balancing future productivity / retention / motivation; filler doesn't really help me at all) The essential management challenge is spotting people slipping filler into a day and telling them to get back to grind. Good bosses protect your inspired time. Someday I'll hopefully get to work for one again.... (LOL)

There's nothing REALLY wrong with doing an 80 hour sprint one week if you can engineer some paid downtime later. I have weeks where I'm exploited and - to be fair - others where I'm massively overcharging my employer. It evens out.

You're assuming:

a) the risk can be neatly packaged and mitigated b) the cost of appropriately mitigating that risk wouldn't preclude running the business.

Long tail risks exist in every business, that rare event that takes the whole thing down. There are tons of them.

Each of which has a .00001% chance of happening.

The consumer brand version of this having one of your employees say some stupid shit in at bar (on video) or the summer intern like the wrong tweet, at which point a woke mob descends upon your brand with pitchforks at the ready....

There is no practical way to mitigate this. You can do the basics (don't hire assholes) but it's open season from there.

I've always thought the most thankless job in the world is running HR or PR at a massive retail company like Wal-mart or Macdonalds. You're one redneck idiot away from being on the national news (for doing or saying something most reasonable humans would never dream of) and you have literally hundreds of thousands of these people showing up for work each day.

At which point, you get the soul crushing task of getting on national television to explain the conduct of the moron in question and explain how it doesn't represent some embedded policy of the company to encourage <bad thing>. Better yet - you get do this every couple of months, since you have hundreds of thousands of these morons. Statistically, it becomes a predictable process.

(No offense, but this is about as non-hypothetical as it can get. This was my reality in the recent past)

A good question. Here's an attempt at a reply..

- You're trying to retain 5, not the 50.. the other 45 are objectively not-critical to the enterprise (in the sense we could eliminate or replace those roles).

- A large fraction of the 45 are basically screwed in the job market; most of them were older, had decades of very specific experience, or had worked their way up in an organization that valued effort/loyalty over credentials. Milking another decade of work in their current role has life changing consequences for these workers and their families. Many of them were primary breadwinners in a bad area, so their job was the last line of defense between a respectable lower-middle class existence and the trailer park for them and their kids.

- Current reality was not reflective of long run potential. If we could stabilize the business, not only would the 50 jobs in question be preserved but there was an opportunity to rebuild and hire back. (feel good moment: this actually occurred. The team was able to restart key areas of the facility and we rehired some manufacturing people)

Young, highly educated people have no concept of the degree of privilege they enjoy in the labor markets. That degree opens doors and you don't get tossed out the instant some hiring manager sees a little grey hair. You don't have 30 years of experience which immediately becomes the leading reason NOT to hire you for a job because someone thinks you're incapable of learning anything new.

Life basically sucks past 50...