Promoting Professional Geekery #47 – Keep A Recruiter List

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(For more Promoting Professional Geekery, see this Roundup of past columns.)

“But wait,” you say, “Steve you constantly talk about having a recruiter list.  How can this be new to this series?”

And I can respond “Shut up, that’s why.”  But in reality because there are specific recruiting list issues you want to follow if you’re specializing your focus on promoting particular career goals.  Goals like, say, using your geekiness on the job.

So for those of you who haven’t heard me go on (or like to hear me go on) I always encourage people to keep a list of recruiters to hand out to people on a job search.  You can of course flesh it out in your own job searches, and have a handy list to give out fast.

This is great for promoting professional geekery.

There’s the obvious solution, of course: you can help people out fast on the job search.  But there’s another reason as well.

You get to know these recruiters, know who works, and know how they interact with people like you.  You can make sure they’re right for the present and future progeeks you know – you can even keep sub-lists or let people know what recruiters truly fit “them.”

It may take a little extra effort to tweak – especially depending on your own career and experiences.  But it’s a good way to help people out.

Also you can encourage others to do this and start sharing lists.  Maybe your artist friend has an art list, your friend in gaming has a gaming list . . .

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach for professional and potentially professional geeks, fans, and otaku. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/

Yes, It’s Automated Mashed Potatoes

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So in some 7-11 in Singapore has an automated mashed potato machine.

We’ve also talked automated pizza here, automated convenience stores, and so on.  As you may have guessed, I kind of have a thing for automation, especially in the realm of food.  There’s a reason for that.

Let’s face it, people like their food and like it fast.  A lot of people like gadgets.  Oh, and a lot of businesses would like to remove “people” from the equation of a lot of things.  I see more and more food automation – and seemingly wacky automation – as a potential trend for these reasons.

In fact, I could see it go farther with concern over health.  Tell me how actual attempts to deliver healthy food someone would go over – at least in the right areas?

So, for you progreeks, keep food automation in mind.  If people are going to make a freaking mashed potato vendor this year, I can easily see a lot more food automation happening in the next decade.

Until then, pass the mashed potatoes.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach for professional and potentially professional geeks, fans, and otaku. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/

Big Pile Of Ship

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Wait, news analysis?

Yeah, we over here at Fan To Pro have been dreadful busy, moving, getting new jobs, sick of old jobs, sick period, etc.  So the news analysis has kind of declined – and we do dump interesting articles to Ye Olde Twittere Feede.

So we didn’t get in a lot of news analysis, which of course was because all the great news happened at once.  I think if I were to sum it up, Apple’s new operating system is based on the Penny Arcade kickstarter, which is run in Windows 8 by Amazon, which is crouching over the burning corpse of Best Buy.  Or something.  Oh, and RIM is a disaster, but we knew that.

But out of the news articles, and all the crazy, something stood out:

Amazon is pushing to make same-day service.

Sure, it doesn’t come as any surprise, but there’s some takeaways:

First, this is going to be a challenge to lots of local retailers and not-so-local retailers.  Let’s face it, when you can get it from Amazon, people tend to.

Second, what’s being missed here is that Amazon is probably going to develop some revolutionary storage and shipping technologies.  People will want to help it happen, look at it, copy it, etc.  If you’re into shipping tech, this is revolutionary.

But there’s one thing that’s being missed among the Amazon-will-crush-all and so forth.

Amazon also has their amazon storefronts and the like.  What the hell are they going to be able to do when they have this mass shipping/recieving system set up? What kind of service can they offer to others?

Think of what it can mean for small businesses.  Think of how many other small companies providing services like this they may crush.  Think of what it will do if they use this to try to help people ignore the fact they’re sort of undermining other businesses . . .

Imagine if Amazon faces limiting lawsuits?  They could scale back – but keep the shipping business as a business.  An amazing about of people use their EC2 cloud service.

So, no, there may be much more to this than simply crushing others.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach for professional and potentially professional geeks, fans, and otaku. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/