Concurrently Chaotic

For the past few months, my top priority issue has been searching for a new job. My current (as of March 2010) job contract will terminate by March 31, 2010. Looking for a job itself is very stressful, and you need to focus on writing a lot of documents, including your CV, cover letters, etc. In this article I will introduce a few Web sites which might help job seekers in general.

Ask A Manager, a blog written by a real human resource professional, has been particularly helpful during my job searching period. The articles on the blog suggest me that corporate and organizational cultures in Japan and the USA are much more similar than different with each other. I think the psychology of hiring and getting hired is highly universal.

For writing a CV, Dave Levin's job application page has a set of useful examples, especially for those searching for IT research/academic positions, with the statements of research and teaching. His energetic, upbeat and rational writing style, while not getting overly emotional, will help you find how to make your CV fit for the job openings. (Note: of course you need to change the details of your CV for each job you apply for.)

Getting the job contract terminated, laid off, or even fired, is itself a tedious and tough experience. I've read a few books for helping myself:

• Hugh MacLeod's Ignore Everybody: this book and his comic strips remind me of the hard cold facts that creative people must endure loneliness, and that they have to earn money before doing what they want to do.
• Martha I. Finney's Rebound is what ACM first suggested me for career development. The good thing about this book is that it starts from describing how to cope with the traumatic and angry feelings when you first find out you're getting pushed out of a job.
• Chad Fowler's The Passionate Programmer, formerly called My Job Went to India, describes how a software developer should cope with the change of trends and other social environmental factors. I highly recommend this book as a list of checkpoints for sorting out your experience and finding out what you need to do for doing what you really want to do.

And I suggest you to think carefully about how you expose yourself through blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media, during the transition period of your job. Your articles or written pieces on the Internet are public and not private; an Ask A Manager article about how managers feel about blogging of their employees represents a practical view of pros and cons of blogging in a plain English.

I also suggest you to make your past blogs private, when you feel awkward about what you have written there, even slightly. Then you can reopen them after editing and removing the articles before you get embarrassed.

posted at: 14 Mar 2010 | path: /writing | permanent link

I was checking the reports submitted to me a few days ago. One of the reports looked pretty much professional and eloquent. So I decided to pick a sentence and put the sentence as is to Google. Then I discovered most of the contents were copied, or plagiarized, from the same Web page of a professional article. No wonder it looked professional.

I'm always telling other people that you need to describe the source of the quotations when you put them into your contents. I am pro-share, pro-remix, and pro-reuse person, and I support Creative Commons. I've never been against quotations, provided that proper and legal indication of the sources are given.

But I didn't see the source in the report. So I had to give very low evaluation to it.

Lessons:

• Your reviewer will put your documents in Google and other search engines. Plagiarism is that common, unfortunately.
• Show the sources when you quote something. Unauthorized quotations are liabilities.
• Know your legal rights and duties on quotations, and do not abuse them.

posted at: 30 Jul 2009 | path: /writing | permanent link