Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Scott Berkum Talk

Today I went over to MIT for a talk given by Scott Berkum, a former Program Manager at Microsoft. His talk was very enjoyable, though I really did not learn much new. It was mostly directed at those who have not yet been in the workplace, which I have for over nine years now =). Great and entertaining speaker, though. I'm bummed to have to miss his 4pm talk on "Why Software Sucks," but religion calls.

Some pointers and thoughts from the talk:
* Don't send out bad resumes. It's seem obvious, but a lot of people do it (you wouldn't believe the crap I saw while at SI. I think my favorite all-time was one in which the person had put "Great written and oral communicator" and "communicator" was misspelled)
* Berkum used a picture of a football team to illustrate the different roles a person can play. You want to be the guy making the tackle, even if someone is drawing a face mask penalty on you at the same time
* Chewing with your mouth closed is a good thing. Smacking is gross (Oops, sorry. That was inspired by the guy sitting next to me. It was seriously making me nauseous)
* Work-life balance is incredibly important. Yeah, we all know this, but I loved the quote: "You work eighty hours a week?!?! That's embarrassing!"

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Ahhh, welcome to the "I went to this talk and here are the pointers" bandwagon ;) Seriously though, it's nice, thank you for posting.