[clug] Bidding for jobs - Was developer to restrict ssh

[Neill Cox]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 7:19 PM, Arjen Lentz <arjen at lentz.com.au> wrote:

>
> (OQ does both, effectively)
> It all depends on whom you're dealing with. If it's essentially a
> recruiter, HR person or generic manager, then realistically the only avenue
> is to be mr can-do-all. That's beacuse in this case all you'd do by adding
> conditionals is introduce doubt into a person who is not equipped to assess
> this, so they'll pick the easy road and merely weed out any people with such
> conditionals in their info.
>
> If you're talking in-person with someone with a clue, you can present
> yourself confidently on your area and level of expertise, be clear about
> where the current boundary of expertise lies, and your willingness and
> ability to also explore more. For someone with a clue, a mr can-do-all would
> be a pretentious liar.
>

+1 to this.

Not that I recruit people, but I do regularly have to sell myself.  I don't
lie or claim expertise I don't have, but I do carefully tailor the caveats
to the audience.  The more technical the audience the more detail I give.
Less technical people tend to get the "well, I haven't done exactly that,
but I've done very similar things and I don't think it will be a problem".
More technical ones might get "I haven't dealt with xyz
language/db/whatever, but I learn fast and I have used abc"

Solved problem are boring.  I like learning new things :)

Cheers,
Neill