I'm behind on messaging a lot of people. If you're waiting on a response from me, I'm sorry - I'll try to get back to you soon. While I could, in all honesty, just say "I'm busy" and leave it at that, the reality is...  well, I'm busy. Thankfully I'm fortunate to say I'm not being disrupted by any large & life changing events. I'm just reaching one of those points I think we all reach at various points... when everything all happens at once, and we're just barely staying above water. Maybe these moments are worth recognizing - when you're able to be the good husband/wife/partner, the good dad/mom/guardian, the good son/daughter/child, the good friend, the good neighbor, the good coach, and you're even good at tending to your own needs... but all of that takes time, takes intention, takes energy. It's the feeling you get perhaps just before you feel overwhelmed... and, (if you do it right) maybe you will avoid

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.

Was going through some old blog posts, and "What's New" updates to a webpage I had in high school. It's an interesting relic - seeing what was important 23 years ago... Nov 6, 2000: The tough thing about Entertainment sites is there's so much competition out there, that it's very hard to get ahead, or even close to the head. There's so much to do. Maybe I should add electronic cards, so that people can send their friends e-cards. That will be a good feature. Well, I'll be getting to work on that, I guess. So, things I will be working on for a while (meaning that I will be updating the site even less) are: 1. I'll be working on getting a greeting card section, to send to your friend by e-mail. 2. I'll be working on a better main page, after you opened up the site window. 3. I have to make a banner, so I can begin trading banners. 4. I'll be adding new games. 5. I'll try to add a download section, where you can download some games onto yo

(This image was generated with AI) Interviewing tip for those on the job hunt: Bad interviewers act like gate keepers / bouncers / powerful decision makers. They act with an air of superiority, don't do an adequate job of making you comfortable, welcome, or at ease. Their hire/no-hire decision is subjective, unclear, rooted in opinion and impressions. Good interviewers take time to break the ice, make you feel comfortable and take the pressure off the interview. Their hire/no-hire decision is based on how well you present your experience and knowledege, and works off a more objective framework. Great interviewers are on your side. They cheer you on, help you grow. Their hire/no-hire decision builds on the objective framework the good interviewers use, and they're looking for how well you demonstrate your potential for growth & the diverse value you bring as an invidiual to the team. You may still not get the offer, but the interview will likely continue to be a great resour

If you're #jobhunting but feeling #ghosted, if you're #opentowork but also #opentofeedback, if you're #talking but not #talkingwithhands then you need to join Taylor Desseyn and I next week on our #Unghosted live-stream where we review REAL resumes by REAL people in REAL time. If you want your resume reviewed live, send it over to Taylor (details in the event.) #opentohelping #opentounghosting #opentoexcessivehashtags Update: You can see the recording of the  live event here...

This is one of my favorite memories I get on my phone around this time of year. I hope it gives you the smiles it always gives me.

Reviewing your resumes, I jotted down a bunch of quick & trivial things for people to keep an eye on.  Make sure your resume FILE contains your name - don't go with a generic "Resume2023.pdf"; "Your Name.pdf" or "Your Name - Your Title.pdf" is an easy way of avoiding some (rare) situations where your resume file gets lost in a stack. File size: We're well past the age of floppy disks - so while disk space isn't the concern here, a 5Mg Resume means your resume probably has more than it should. :) PDFs over Word docs. Your resume should be a document in its "final" state. PDFs will preserve your font choice, your formatting better than Word. LinkedIn URLs: Remember when an email address in your resume was a novelty? Well, now the hip kids are including their LinkedIn URL! Be hip like them. Make sure your resume is free of typos (Fun Fact: Surveying a bunch of other hiring managers, I learned a lot of them are more likely to pass on

  With 80ish resumes left to go, I just want to share this one piece of general advice: Don't be ADJECTIVE heavy: "Dramatically improved the speed of a process to be much faster" Be FACT heavy & be NUMBER heavy: "Reduced process time from 8hrs to 2hrs, saving $80,000/year."

  Flight was delayed late into the night, but was able to get through a fair bit of them. The rest are to come. Stay tuned. 😴

I have a long flight coming up and figure the most constructive way to pass the time would be to review as many resumes as possible, for free. You have a deadline of 11:59:59pm PT, August 25th, 2023. If you DM me your resume, I'll give you as much constructive feedback as I can come up with. Flood me with resumes & make me regret this post! Help spread the word by resharing. 💛 Illustration credit goes to the incomparable David Neal - content creator, manager of development relations, community builder, and drawer-of-custom-profile-pictures. He's worth a follow!

In the thousands of resumes I've reviewed over the years, almost everyone fails to consider 1 key person from their target audience. And it shows.

"Quantify things!" "Make sure you quantify your experience!" "And quantifiable impact statements." "Quantify, quantify, quantify!" It gets said a lot... but some people struggle with it... so here are 4(ish) ways to quantify your #impact on your #resume

This robot has represented so much in my life. From hearing about the wild dream to being a part of building cutting edge disruptive technology, from 6 people to 60, from Startup to Acquired, from hiring coworkers to building life long connections. Despite the changes this robot witnessed, it also represented consistency: Injecting genuine personality into everything with fearless vulnerability, tackling every problem with the belief that the solution was not in the product but in our attitude, and most importantly - loving people, loving connection, loving the highs and lows. For me, this bot represents the all-seeing eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, from The Great Gatsby. It has witnessed a time many of us think of fondly, and it has witnessed my life since - navigating a world without my Gatsby. He would have turned 50 yesterday (anyone who knew him would probably chuckle at the absurd silliness of him as a 50 year old...) We used to joke "I fought the bot and the bot won,"

  Bad news. After staring for too long at a PowerBI, it came to my attention that my hair part line is really behind target.

I heard someone say requiring cover letters is like asking candidates to write fan-fiction about working at your company. 😄 Jokes aside, I think seeing a cover letter as a literary work is a good framework for when to write one, and when not to: Don't If... It's imaginative: "At your company I would..." It's autobiographical: "And then I turn 22..." It's irrelevant: "I really like charcuterie..." Do If... It's a short form persuasive essay that can't be immediately inferred from your resume: "I was the lead developer on the very product your company now uses." There is no 2.

Listing hobbies on your resume is like sharing a picture of your beach vacation on LinkedIn. If you do, it should be relevant in obvious ways. If it's not relevant in obvious ways, then it should be a conversation starter. If it's not a conversation starter, it should at least pique one's interest. If it's not piquing interest, then it's just taking up precious space... ...just like a giant sand-sculpture takes up precious space on a crowded beach.

After years of trying different recommended techniques for delivering criticism (looking at you Compliment Sandwich) I've concluded: no matter how you deliver criticism, it's going to be a tough conversation. There's no avoiding it - people will get hurt, grow defensive, get upset, be offended, or at a minimum be mildly irked. It's led me to wonder: why should expecting otherwise? Being criticized sucks. In my own situations, even when I ask for criticisms from those I trust and admire, it stings when I hear the criticism. I feel compelled to defend myself, to explain myself, to give a reason why their criticism doesn't have the full picture. I feel defensive even when someone validates something I'm already criticizing in myself. The result: I'm tired of pretending emotions aren't real. I'm tired of pretending there's some sterile, stoic, clinical way of giving a Spock-like logical assessment of someone's flaws and that it will be met well.

Almost 20 years ago, as I was wrapping up college, I was walking downtown and passed by a small antique store. I'd normally have kept walking but something caught my eye. The most beautiful Model 3 Underwood Typewriter. It wasn't working. The keys were jammed, some armatures were bent, the spindle wasn't...spindling. But it was still beautiful. I loved the mechanical genius of it all. The pure ballet caused by pressing a single key, rotating the ribbon, moving the paper just so slightly. No wires. No plastic. It was gorgeous. But not gorgeous enough for me to pay the sticker price, (I was still a student, after all). So, I haggled the price down - and then lugged the 50lbs machine 23 blocks back to my apartment. People on the streets lit up when I passed them. One person even made an offer to buy it off me while I carried it home. But it wasn't for sale. I got it back to my apartment, and spent the next 4 hours cleaning it, and restoring it to full functionality. I love

"Mom? .... Mom?? Can someone get my mom for me?" This past weekend, I'd seen a boy climb half-way up a structure before his fear of heights struck. What made matters worse: younger kids were climbing around him with confidence and ease. Seeing his panic, I asked him where his mom was and asked if he needed help. He looked around, hesitated, and replied: "I'm kind of scared." But then, just as he finished saying this, he inched his way upward some more. I wasn't expecting that - and chuckled. "Looks like you're able to keep going though!" I checked in on my own kids - and when I glanced back, I'd seen the boy had climbed even higher. "Well, look at you - you're doing awesome! You're pretty much at the top!" I called out.  Watching him climb over the top edge, I gave him a thumbs up and said "Great job!" and went back to my kids. Moments later I heard his voice call down to me: "Thank you so much for helpi

A few years back my daughter gifted me a little book called "Things I Love About Dad," with pages of prompts that she's been filling out over time. The other night she told me she filled out a new page: "I love that you taught me to appreciate me." This one may just be my favorite page to date. It's so easy to confuse appreciating oneself with being confident, having an ego, or being arrogant. But those others show themselves externally. Appreciating yourself is being friends with your inner monologue, it's knowing you may not always get things right and may make mistakes, but it's acknowledging the intention that's behind them. It's writing a post about a personal note from your daughter, worrying if you're conveying the right message, debating whether to hit post, and thinking 'if it helps someone pat themselves on the back instead of beating themselves up... it's worth it.'

  Someone recently asked for my take on cover letters - and while in the past I'd say they're largely pointless unless they provide details your resume cannot (a personal link to the company, an employee, the product - or best of all, some specific experience that would be invaluable to the organization) this current job market has me re-evaluating. I still believe (based on data) that many cover letters will get ignored - when volume of applicants go up, hiring managers don't have the time to read them all. They'll prioritize the resume first, then - if the candidate looks appealing - they may gloss over the cover letter. They may then read the cover letter in more depth in advance of the interview - but at that point, the ball's already in motion. Below 1,000 employees and your cover letter will have greater impact than above 1,000 employees. The smaller the company, the more they'll want to have information about their candidates, rely a lot more on trust, an

Dear Old Me, Whether it's in classes, talking to friends, or in interviews - I'm really feeling like I'm never good enough. When I see what others can do, the solutions they create, it looks so easy for them. I really want to be a programmer - so hopefully you've gotten better? ~Alishah   -- Dear Young Me, Let's start simple: Output is a terrible way of measuring difficulty. You never know how hard something is for someone - even if they explain their thought process. That's why we say  "they make it look easy."   Have you ever looked at one of those images that has a hidden image inside it? The first time, it can be tricky to find - but once you see it, it's always there. A lot of problem solving boils down to how many things you've already seen. The fewer things you see for the first time, the better equipped you become at solving them. Part of the trick is taking those problems and simplifying it down to basic parts. Then, whenever you encou

My daughter was telling me how she's nervous of her upcoming recital. Asking why, she said how was worried about messing up in front of others and getting embarrassed. Being the supportive parent I am, I said "Well, I can promise you this: you will absolutely mess up. It will happen, and there's no avoiding it." Seeing this was doing nothing to build her confidence, I elaborated: " Perfection is impossible. There are no perfect performances. Everyone messes up - and really, a perfect performance isn't always that interesting. It's robotic. The thing that gives music its 'soul' is imperfection." What wows people is how you handle the mess up when it happens. Do you shut down and walk off stage? Are you so scared of messing up you never get on the stage? Do you laugh at the mess up and forge ahead, continuing to make more mistakes? Do you pause, reset, and continue on without further mistakes? Or do you take that mistake and make something out

  Dear Old Me, So - you wrote recently about how "all the answers become distractions." What did you mean by that? It sounded good, and I wonder if it's what I'm dealing with? As I get better with coding, I'm constantly getting new ideas. Ideas come faster than I can build them - and I just can't keep up. Are you still dealing with that challenge?  ~Alishah P.S.  Did you ever finish Zinglok-725? -- Dear Young Me, The problem never goes away. Someone I/you (we?) admire called us creatively erratic - and while it stung to hear, it was only partially accurate. The thing is, you'll eventually learn to manage it in a few different ways: You'll get better at identifying what intrigues you about the idea. Ideas will come to you as massive projects - but if you spend the time to dissect it down to the trivial bit you'll usually come to the conclusion that: the problem you're interested in has already been resolved, and the rest is just an interesting i

  Everyone's talking about ChatGPT. Today, I'd like to introduce SkatGPT . ...Jazz singers, be afraid...