Social Hacking [was: "Strong Scripting Skills" - a definition?]

Wed Jan 28 12:20:43 PST 2004

This may be too "job-seeker" oriented for the general BayLISA list,
but I think it's generally applicable in the abstract.  And I'm using
"hack" in the classic sense, not the media-misappropriated sense.

On Tue, 27 Jan 2004, Robert Hajime Lanning wrote:

>I think we are defining new depths of what a "rabbit hole" is. :)

I'm never surprises me when geeks take a question that's really about
a social issue--"How can I represent myself as a competent scripter
without over-inflating expectations of my skill set?" and turn it into
a syntax or technical semantics festival.  (Particularly ironic in
this case, since I recall one respondent's mantra as a boss: "don't
use technology to solve a social problem."  You know who you are. ;-)

To my mind, this penchant to dig into the syntax/technical semantics
misses the real need geeks have now, more than ever: hacking corporate
culture and culture in general.  It's a buyer's market these days.

So I'd like to hear some more geek social/cultural hacking stories and
techniques, be they engineering your self-presentation, sussing out
the true inquiries underlying the interviewer's questions, or better
ways to deal with the bureacracies.  I'm sure all of us could use some
new tools to put in our bag of tricks for dealing with clients/bosses/
co-workers (and maybe even spouses/SOs :-).

To my mind, a good example was Jim's story of turning the
interviewer's ps pipeline question onto it's head, thus demonstrating
Jim's understanding of the depth of the system rather than his memory
of syntactical minutae.

My own "hacking" has lately focused on revising my understanding of
successful resumes (having taught tech writing in the late 80's, I
knew I was out of date).  If enough folks are interested, I can post
some brief comments regarding resume tuning.  Or, perhaps some "rules"
I coined for myself from dealing with HR at a past job.

=Nadine=

--
N. Nadine Miller
vraptor at employees.org