I’ve been obsessed with “wild tangents” or “unusual trains of thought” lately. It started with that post the other day about the turkey vulture that eventually turned into a plug for a Vaporwave radio station. It was a fun post to write, so I’ve decided I have to do more of those, perhaps make it a “regular Friday thing” (I’ll try, but I am incapable of having a “routine”). Once a week, I’ll take one post to look at a strange conversation or train of thought I had this week. The ideas and experiences that aren’t big enough to be blog posts on their own, but when combined, become one coherent, if slightly bizarre, singular concept.
This week started with the addition of new teammates at work. Five years ago, I was a team of one supporting the company’s “Government Cloud.” Then, as the environment grew, they added one and a half people. Two years ago, when CMMC looked like it was going to be a thing, we started building the team out, and even added a second “Government Cloud” to the scope of our support. Now, my team consists of twelve, plus a dedicated manager. I’m no longer talking to myself during standups, at least.
The interesting part was, two years ago, “AI” was supposed to put all of us programmers and engineering types out of a job. Ironically, the only people I think AI has replaced at my company are the now increasingly-ironically-named “Human” Resources department. It was hard enough eight years ago when AI wasn’t a smartass yet. “The manager really wants you on the team, but the thing is, you have ‘Agile’ on your resume. You need to change that to ‘Agile Safe’; otherwise, the computer will kick you out as unqualified.”
These days, job searching is quite literally:
- Ask AI to rewrite my resume and cover letter to align me perfectly with a job description that another AI has written.
- Employer AI reads my AI-enhanced resume.
- Employer AI generates a rejection letter detailing why I don’t meet the qualifications my AI specifically optimized my resume to highlight
Of course I don’t even read this letter; I just ask Co-Pilot to summarize it for me along with the rest of my email.
Now the alternative is LinkedIn, where all recruiters are at the same call center in New Delhi and will offer you the world if you just email a scanned picture of your driver’s license, Social Security card, my mother’s maiden name … you know, so they can set up direct deposit now because you’re definitely going to get this job. Of course, once in a while, you get one genuine, clueless human who is not a scammer:
“Great news! Our AI says you’re a 97% match!”
“Really? For what?”
“I have a company that is desperately looking for a CMMC Compliance Specialist!”
At this point, I usually start crying, whimpering, and planning how I can fake my own death to stop these calls from coming in.
This is AI again. There is no such thing as an expert in CMMC. I don’t believe any company has ever fully met the standards. So, the algorithm substitutes “is still, against all judgment, working at a company moving towards CMMC compliance” with “would enjoy significantly even more CMMC in their life.”
So, naturally it occurs to me that
- LinkedIn needs to be shut down in the interest of user safety.
- The “resume format” itself is outmoded and wrong.
Even though there is not really a standard, there are rules about what you can and can not say on a resume. For example, I used to have not just an “Objectives” section on my resume, but also a “Non-Objectives” section. I thought I was being helpful. However, more than one recruiter told me to remove both to make room for more skills, languages, platforms, and software systems. You see, recruiters don’t read (they meant to say “care about”) objectives and goals. Recruiters just want to spray-and-pray generic resumes out to employers in the hopes that one will land them a commission.
So, “what should an ideal resume look like in the age of AI?” Inspired by my tech geek friend who wrote his resume as a downloadable Docker container, I decided I’m going to make mine a public GitHub repo: Person-Object-Model version 57.0! I plan to throw it all up there — the education, the training, the work experience, the reasons I liked or hated a particular job, the side software projects and their influences, the podcasts, the music I’ve written or contributed to, the novels, this blog, the other weird hobbies. Of course, no recruiter or employer would ever go through it, but what about an AI recruiter? It would take seconds, and finally it would have an accurate picture of my capabilities, my strengths, my mindset, and my personality. Don’t infer who I am from old job titles. Wander around for a while and see what I’ve actually made and how I think. How much better would that AI be at finding good employer/employee combinations than one that just matches up acronyms faster than a human with the same lack of attention to detail?
Heck, why doesn’t social media work this way? Facebook and Threads only want to know who I am and what I’m clicking on or talking about in my posts so they can feed me more. They don’t want to know why, for two glorious minutes, I was looking up Spanish citizenship and emigration procedures. They don’t know about finding an amazing house in Málaga on the Spanish Mediterranean coast that was actually significantly cheaper than the one I have that is almost paid for.
Of course, I clicked through to the next picture… Oh, the house isn’t included… neither are the palm trees… and it’s not “exactly” beachfront… the view is slightly obstructed…
Stupid AI slop ad. The weeds aren’t even that nice. Probably not worth the money. I withdrew my bid.
The rest of my social media interaction is extremely relevant to any potential employer. Yes, okay, I spent a lot of time this week arguing continuity errors in the latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It’s not actually my job, but I keep showing up, and this needs to somehow be part of my resume. My memory, attention to detail, and ability to spot inconsistencies in a fictional timeline are not at all dissimilar from performing risk analysis on a computer system that is undergoing continuous refactoring. The only real difference is, Azure doesn’t usually wear the OBVIOUSLY WRONG UNIFORM IN A FLASHBACK SCENE!
Similarly, while listening to WSBZ, I heard Paul Hardcastle’s smooth jazz cover of Pink Floyd’s Money. It’s faster, punchier, and in 4/4 instead of the original 7/8. I’m still trying to decide whether it’s brilliant or a misdemeanor. However, if he had hired me as a business analyst, I could have pointed out, “You’re either going to turn your fans onto Pink Floyd and lose them, or you’re going to have Pink Floyd fans in your front yard with pitchforks and torches … maybe both. What if we looked at a different song?”
Oh, and I also wrote what I think is one of my favorite short stories in years. Might as well throw it into the repo as well so somebody reads it. The point of the story is to provide closure for the characters in The Halferne Perfidy, ten years later. This is awkward, because The Halferne Perfidy hasn’t been published yet, meaning I’m now editing an unpublished novel to accommodate a probably-will-never-be-published short story that exists mainly to improve the unpublished novel. Publishers and agents probably refer to this as “career momentum,” or maybe not.
Which led to my big revelation of the week: All of this is what social media should be. Not pictures of your pets or your lunch, but maps of your thoughts and how they relate to things you like. The AI rabbit hole made me think about resumes. The resume made me think about identity. Identity made me think about social media, and somewhere between fictional starships, imaginary Spanish real estate, jazz arrangements of Pink Floyd, and unpublished science fiction, I’ve accidentally sketched out an ER Model for what I think might be a better social network — not one that maps people, but one that maps curiosity.
Imagine drawing your own maze of rabbit holes instead of writing a profile. People wouldn’t follow you because you like the same movies. They’d stumble into your maze because, against all odds, they also like Sneakers, and find themselves wondering how your maze ties it to cloud engineering, medieval philosophy, progressive rock, the Vytautas Bridge, and Neuromancer. (I can explain that line as well, but not in this post. It’s already too long.)
It is social media where you don’t discover people because they know people you know. People discover each other when they tunnel into the same semi-obscure place, bump into each other, and each wants to know how the other found it and what it means to them. I don’t know if this is a viable business model (obviously, this elevator pitch is 1500 words), but I think I’m assembling a team to help me look into it. At the very least, it makes for a much more interesting browser history.
