Product Endorsements from ...Before?... the Grave

Tom Hanks talking about the ad that uses AI&Deep Fake technology to use his likeness in order to promote some dental plan reminds me of 15 years ago when the One Laptop per Child organization used John Lennon's likeness to promote their mission.

I wrote about it back then - pointing out the problems of someone's likeness being used without their consent (in Lennon's case, Yoko Ono gave her approval) not thinking there'd come a time when living people would have to contend with the same issue.

While I don't think anyone's likeness should be used without the explicit consent of the person (even their estate requiring explicitly approval) maybe (hopefully) the silver lining good news here is celebrity endorsements will become so diluted with fakery that they'll no longer be meaningful.

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Let's Clear Up The Ambiguity!

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FAQs for a Software Engineering Hiring Manager

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7 Steps to Writing an Amazing Resume

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7 Steps to Building your Portfolio MVP

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Work Experience vs Professional Experience

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In reviewing a bunch of resumes this week, I noticed quite a lot of resumes with a  "Work Experience"  section. In each of those resumes, people had de-valuing some very valuable  experience - and I write that with no exaggeration. The problem is people were looking at their experience purely through the "Job Title/Relevancy" lens and had reduced their experience down to a list of discrete, random, disconnected jobs. No interconnectedness, no narrative thread weaving through it all. As much as you may feel some jobs have no way of being connected, the reality is  you   are always the connection . To not connect them on your resume is to lose all that growth, knowledge, skills, impact, value, and trajectory. In other words - you lose the " You " in the resume. I recommended they start with a small change. Reword "Work Experience" to "Professional Experience" because, ultimately, every single job they had was in service of building their
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