Tweeting for dollars

If you’re on the Twitters-dot-com, you’ll have noticed their craptastic new revenue-generating capability: “promoted” tweets.

For whatever amount of money (look it up if you care; I don’t), you can have one of your tweets appear in some algorithm-determined number of people’s timelines, whether or not they follow you. (Apparently you can pay to have them appear for a long time, because I’ve seen some that originated last year. Don’t they understand that tweets, like fish, go off after a few days?) Basically, it’s like TV commercials, because they interrupt the flow of the nonsense you already have signed up to get, by virtue of following people.

Actually, it’s like TV commercials from the last century, precisely because they show up in the timelines of people who have neither need for nor interest in your product, and all you do is piss them off. (Like high school kids and garage bands being offered great deals on Siemens infrastructure or call center solutions.)

And Twitter is exactly the platform for people to express their pissed-offedness.

For example: this promoted tweet from Grey Goose, inviting folks to “engage” with these ESPY awards. (Yeah, right—no idea, and no desire to investigate.) So between the product and the honoree, we struck gold with the first two responses.

Then there was this one from…well, dunno, really. The White House? The Conference on Aging? The Society for Honoring Lots of Stuff?

Again, the first two responses are just stellar.

Twitter is obviously making money off this crap, so it’s not going to stop. In the meantime, as I’m blocking the hell out of these twits, I do enjoy watching the pushback.

More career advancement

Oh, looky here—another great opportunity for me from one of the many contract vendors without whom tech giants like Microsoft, Cisco, Adobe, Symantec and Google would have to hire and adequately compensate the people whose labor earns them their amazing profits.

There are several things I find interesting about this particular come-on.

First of all—yes, of course I’m going to jump at something that pays two whole dollars above minimum wage, especially for a client that is clearly so cash-strapped.

Okay, I’m pretty sure Accenture is not the actual client. I don’t know where Ashutosh, the recruiter, got that company name, but I’m pretty sure (from a bit of, well, Googling) that the job is at Google, another corporation that really does need to cut costs everyplace it can.

I especially like that they want this person to “master policy knowledge” so s/he can “perform a wide variety of application policy reviews” and “take action on violating apps”. For $17 per hour.

And I wonder where they got the requirement that there be no bad attitudes? I mean, how many people have been run through this job and, after seeing what was actually expected, told them to stuff it? At this end of the pay scale, you tend not to get folks who have a long-term interest.

Then there’s the recruiter. He lists a New Jersey phone number, but as is usual with Collabera and its competitors, when you look up the individual, he’s actually in India.

They use VoIP phones to give the appearance of being in the US. Because they don’t even want to pay the low end of US recruiter salaries when they can get the work done for 80% less in India.

Finally, old Ashutosh must be having a hard time filling the role, for some reason. I got a follow-up reminder about it yesterday.

It's all in the definition

A friend who’s never worked in the software industry offered to help me explore the job market in his area, and he asked for a copy of my résumé. Well, the level of what he calls jargon about broke his brain, so I sent him a second copy, this time annotated with some definitions.

You know—marketing-type stuff like value propositions, sales enablement tools, messaging, and go-to-market planning. Also, in the software product management line, such terms as product roadmaps and feature-benefit presentations.

(And let me say that I understand perfectly how opaque a résumé for someone in a different field can be. I’ve helped friends in tech support and user experience design—both of them areas my work has occasionally touched—rewrite theirs, and at a certain point in each discussion I had to say, “Okay, I assume that when you say [blah-blah-blah] your target reader is going to know what you’re talking about, right?”)

There’s a whole language specific to this industry that users are not privy to. In fact—if you’re doing it right, there’s no reason on earth why they should know that that language exists. All that should be visible to them is when they fire up their device, does the application do what they were told it would do in the manner they were led to expect that it would, without making them tear their hair out in the process? Yes?—fine. No?—#fail.

So, understanding that there’s a whole world of humanity out there that does not have the vocabulary to get this visual joke, I’m still putting it out there. On account of it makes me laugh every time I look at it.

Hint: you may think you’re seeing one thing, but the product manager will tell you it's a…

Allons, enfants de la patrie

Today is Bastille Day. The French and the French-at-heart will be celebrating the awakening of democracy on the European continent that was represented by an insurrection in Paris on this day in 1789.

Yes, it’s taken the French a while to work things out—a bunch of republics, a couple of empires and one or two half-hearted attempts at restoring the Bourbon kings. (Is there a band called the Bourbon Kings? There should be. And they should play Zydeco.) Plus a Commune and some années noires.

But nobody’s perfect. And I really like the French.

I particularly love how anyone can celebrate their national holiday. For example—the traditional French waiters’ champagne race (like this one in London) held all around the world:

Well, to mark the holiday from here in the Valley They Call Silicon, I’m going to give you a bit of Hollywoodized French chauvinism, because I don’t believe it’s ever been captured better than in the iconic scene at Rick’s Café Américain.

You know, where Major Strasser and his boys, full of caviar and Veuve Cliquot ’26, have commandeered Sam’s piano and are belting out “Die Wacht am Rhein”, and Victor Laszlo demands that the house band play the French national anthem. For a few moments, there’s this amazing quodlibet going on between the master race and the conquered, but you know who prevails.

Vive la France! Vive la République!

Gratitude Monday: A walk around the park

Meetups can be a mixed bag, as I’ve discussed here in the past. It really is a case of having to kiss a lot of toads before you find the good-looking heir to the throne.

So I’m grateful that I’ve come across one that looks like a keeper. Perhaps that’s because its goals are modest: a group of ambulatory folks get together on a Saturday morning at a park in Cupertino…to walk. And talk. Just an easy pace, for an hour, in the neighborhood around the park, and light chitchat.

When you think of it, really pretty disruptive to the ethos of the Valley They Call Silicon. No athletic competition, no real fashion statements, no self-important strategic positioning. Such a relief from every other meetup I’ve been to here.

It was great to explore an area that’s new to me, with a slightly different take on mid-century architecture than I see in Sunnyvale or Mountain View. However, there’s a similar breadth of approach to the current drought: some lush green lawns, some drab brown, and more than a couple of plastic ones.

Interesting that the little brown rabbits I’ve previously only seen on hikes around the Stevens Creek Reservoir appear to have moved into suburbia; I’m thinking that the drought may have something to do with that.

They look so very cute, partly because it’s not my garden they’re chowing down on.

Our organizer had timed the walk perfectly—just on the hour, we were back at the park. Pedometers were checked, conversations concluded, and we set off for our Saturday activities.

And I’m very grateful that I had the opportunity to recharge my humanity batteries in this simple but profound way.