Advice

If Instead of Cannot

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Many years ago, when I was a Senior Programmer with a consulting company, one of my clients commented that I never said anything was impossible – I never said "No, it cannot be done."

Now of course there are times in my career I have said no.  And when I said things could be done, I also noted the costs – which is a way of saying "I can do this, but boy is it going to cost you or disappoint you."  However the fact is that in your career, "it cannot be done" is not something you want to say to anyone – including yourself.

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Social Media Points of Failure

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Facebook has just added a lot of new features to its offering, buttons and graphs and likes and widgets galore.  Of course among the various discussions about Facebook, one issue keeps  coming up is that Facebook, as it gets bigger, is a single point of failure in people's online lives and identities.

If you think back, there have been a lot of "single points of failure" in peoples online lives.  I remember when ICQ was the big chat program, when LinkedIn had no competitors, when everyone worried about Twitter owning people's lives (remember that?).  There's always a worry that some provider or web service will dominate everything – and then bad things will happen with hackers, TOS changes, etc.

So we've had a lot of worry about points of failure in our internet lives.  Though I have yet to see a Great Online Life Destruction Debacle, it is a possibility of course.  However,  I've watched many a gloom and doom story about the internet and have yet to see Netageddon happen.

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Careers, Communications, and Getting People Off Of Your Back

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You're doing a job search or career change (or both), and you're working hard at it.  You may be sending out resumes like crazy, or networking, or going to class, or all of these and more.  You're doing a lot to advance your career, and you know it.

Unfortunately it seems other people don't know it, and they won't get off your back.  They want to know what you're doing in your job search, they want to know how you're doing, they want to know whats up.  You may feel you spend more time being bothered by friends, family, and so on than you do interviewing or studying.

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