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Geek Jobs in your back yard: Part II

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Bonnie had noted earlier that those of us looking for geeky jobs may want to search our own back yards for them before assuming we have to move (easier for some of us than others, says the guy living in Silicon Valley).  I wanted to add to her excellent post by nothing that there's a tool that makes it even easier.

LinkedIn.com.

Yes, LinkedIn.Com is one of my crush objects, but with good reason – one of many reasons being it's Company search function.  If you want to find jobs and companies in your own backyard, here's what you'll want to try (go on, give it a shot even if you're not looking);

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What Is a Geeky Job?

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So I talk about Geeky jobs and being a professional geek and so forth.  Geek 2.0, Modern Literati, etc.

So what do I mean by this?  In short, what do I consider a geeky job?  Admittedly I never put it into words much, but with the one year anniversary of the blog, I figured I should try.

First of all, to me, Geeks (and Fans, etc.) are people who get worked up over something.  They're passionate and intimately involved in what they do.  Drives and motivations may differ, but they get INTO things.

Secondly, Geeks, Fans, Nerds, etc. get into doing things with what they like.  They're not (always) passive consumers.  They do websites, fanfic, fanart, role-play, fantasy sports, conventions and more.  They are involved.

Third, Geeks are usually about the information – from sports statistics to new recipes to the latest anime.  They thus tend to take to communications technologies quicker for obvious reasons.

So a  Geek is:
* Passionate
* Involved
* Informational

So to me a Geeky job is one that:
* You are passionate about.  There's a visceral element to your involvement.
* You are involved in creating and doing stuff you care about.
* You communicate with others, grow, exchange information about what you do.

A geeky job varies from person to person for obvious reasons – which is the point.  It's what gets you going, involves you, and drives you to communicate.

Granted there are jobs that are likely geekier than others because they involve passion, involvement, and information (say, manga artist or social media programmer).  There are some that are doubtlessly non-geeky for most of the population.  But a lot of it is personal.

Also a job may be very geeky even if its not in a geeky area, or is part of something less than geeky.  Working IT is geeky almost everywhere, even if its in a very dull area – which I can confess to experiencing first hand, when I worked in 'boring' industries, on some wonderfully geeky jobs as a programmer.

Passionate, involved, and informational.  Those are your markets for a Geeky job – and you can look to see what you can do that fulfill those three traits in your career.  If you have that, you have a geeky job.

– Steven Savage

News of the Day 6/19/2009

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Economic/Geekonomics/Freakonomics:
A look at fears of a 'lost decade' and more – Includes interview with Paul Krugman. Two points arise out of this – one, there's some justification that the economy of the world will level off but not improve, and two there's extreme demographic shifts in jobs going on in older markets.

Let me add to this, geek-career wise: I see a decent change for either a future "dip" in 3-5 years or not so much a lost decade, but a lost few years (or a long slow recovery). Those of us in geeky jobs, those of us used to leveraging technology and hobbies and fannish contacts, might as well go into overdrive just in case we need those edges to deal with a nasty 'new normal.'

Social Media:
For teachers, journalists, and social media enthusiasts, a look at how journalism schools can and are teachign social media.

Technology:
Google reserves 1 MILLION phone numbers – As part of Google Voice, a one-stop phone number service. This sounds insanely ambitious, and not cheap to do, so I'm curious as to how it'll be monetized – I can also see copycat services popping up easy. This could be good for Google, but its sort of "way out" so I'm going to watch.

Video Games:
Activision CEO threatens not to make games for the PS3 next year. Big ouch here considering how big Activision is. For those of you looking to work at Sony or working there, consider this a definite alert and follow the story – this may be hot air, but could be the start of something. Sony does need to cut prices, but looks like they can't, so they may have to figure a least-worst situation.

EA gets John Schappert as COO – Schappert left EA to go to Microsoft, and then has come back. I'm taking this as a good sign – he has plenty of experience, has been on "several sides of the fence", and seems pretty savvy. With other news, I'm tentatively leaning to EA getting its act together, but . . .

Playdom hires away EA's past chief operating officer, John Pleasants – It sounds like he's big on social media. I'm also going to move Playdom into the "send them a resume" category since they seem to know what they're doing and then some.

Finally, let's talk a geek singularity and a Doctor Who model of Open source

-Steven Savage