Re: Why being Real Smart SUCKS

From: DavidBowman (dt041054_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 02/07/05 

Date: 6 Feb 2005 22:43:15 -0800

> > After college, there IS nothing worthwhile.

> What about your career?

What career?

When you've managed 920 PCs, built and programmed the
neutron-embrittlement monitor for a commercial reactor, represented
your
company at a compiler conference,
wrote for PC Magazine and PC World,
wrote the custom software Judge
Jackson used in the Microsoft case,
spent two months programming a gamma-ray spectrometer, wrote a skyshine
analysis utility for variable shield geometries, and then quit for no
other reason than to see what it's like working in a piss computer
store so you could publish an article about it called "Try A Little
Vendor-Ness", then it doesn't MATTER that your
award-winning work has
universally been acclaimed as excellent --- particularly if you look
like a biker, are a biker, and answer the question "what do you want
to be doing in five years" with guffaws and laughter.

You see Creighton, they're looking for the guy in a suit who learned
the Java language with great difficulty from a place he found on a pack
of matches that said "Earn BIG MONEY in computers!" who hates it, and
only does it so he can rise to middle management, not the guy in
sneakers
who owns one dress shirt, nine black T-shirts, no other shirts, and who
learned Java from a pirated IBM websphere CD in the morning and wrote
a proxy server in the evening.

Stupid businessmen -- Republicans all -- interpret doing many TYPES of
things as "not knowing what you want to do", and will take someone
who's Microsoft Certified over someone who could teach it, every single
time.

See, hiring managers are looking for people like themselves, and so
they want sizzle, not steak; and talk, not action. They interpret
"better" as "unusual", "eclectic" as "eccentric", "overwhelmingly
capable" as "overqualified", and "appearance" as "reality".

Yeah, my first posting was a joke!

I don't REALLY think that being smart sucks; what sucks is that
everything is run BY stupid people FOR stupid people.

Sure, maybe I should have kept looking after a month or two, even
though Bush fucked up the economy and tech unemployment in this
area is twice the general rate, but I decided to say "the hell with it"
early, and now divide my time between earning a little money doing
creative writing, and doing the only thing I really want to do: learn.

I do a good bit of it at sci.relativity, for which I thank you very
much.

And how was your day?

=[ d