yesthattom | Fortune published "100 Best Companies to Work For"

How was the polling handled internally?

One of the slimy things at Symantec (which I think got them a lower score than they would've gotten otherwise thanks to reverse psychology) is that we were strongly encouraged to paint them in a good light when polling time came around. Not sure if that was for Fortune or some other "best place to work" poll, though.

I beleive the process is that Fortune interviews HR and visits the site, etc. But, yes, this kind of thing is generally through self-assessment.

I would love to work in Zurich!

I have a feeling you wouldn't want to hire me after what I did to the calendar. ;-7

"what I did to the calendar" -- What?

Something extremely silly, but harmless... (http://redsonja.livejournal.com/642761.html) Although I am not sure what would have happened if I let it go past Election Day 2008!!!

No worries, I don't think anyone noticed.

I have to say, it processed the request pretty damn fast.

I'm glad to hear that! Calendar systems don't store all the individual dates of a repeating event. We just store the "formula". Then for every day that we display, we check to see if the formula gets triggered. As a result, the display gets slower as you add more repeating dates, but then there are tricks to make it faster. Caching is done, calculating the potential first/last dates a formula could trigger results in not needing to do the calculations for dates outside that range, etc.

Yep... wasn't timing it exactly, but it definitely did the whole thing in under 60 seconds. Impressive considering it was being pushed to do something rather abnormal. I didn't think it was that big a deal - just was being silly.

However, since I have you on the line, so to speak, you might want to tell whoever is in charge of such things to put a bit of bulletproofing in that keeps someone from doing this in a more open-ended (and potentially icky) manner. I'm not a destructo nerd, and I don't like the thought that someone else could use this in a manner that might actually break something.

I'm looking for writing contracts. Know of any at Google (or elsewhere)?

What language? :D

I'm not sure what the smiley's for, so I'll assume it's a sincere question...

I'm competent to publish in English and Esperanto. I can get by in French and Dutch, and have some understanding of Russian and Yiddish.

If the writing you intend to do is technical, one would think you'd be asking him about O'Reilly rather than Google.

Please do not talk about things that you don't know about, or consider researching before you say something.

I'm perfectly aware that Google would have spots for technical writers. Any large company would. I'm the one selling the Dec references on EBay, remember?

Please do not assume that I don't know what I am talking about or have not done research, simply because I opine that he might prefer to write for a public publisher instead of a private company.

I'm sorry for making that assumption. I must have misunderstood what you had written.

Eh, no biggie. I didn't explain WHY I wrote what I did, after all.

Hopefully my reply to him below clarified the reason for my opinion.

I am still not quite sure why you friended me, but have no particular desire to start communications on a hostile note. So no offense taken, hopefully none given. I can be a snarky wiseass sometimes, but I'm not here to piss anyone off.

Thanks for the link -- I see a couple there for "temporary" positions. I'd ideally do remote freelancing, but would commute to Mountain View for the right gig.

Ah, I see -- thanks. I have some connections at O'Reilly, but I don't think that's the best match for me: I'm not enough of a hard-core tech for their readers, most of whom are looking for detailed technical information from leaders in the field. I excel at understanding and describing technology in a more-general way: for example, with this article about computer-based exhibits in museums (PDF, 1.3MB).

But maybe I should revisit O'Reilly... after all, Tom's book isn't really about *technology* per se...

It's funny that you say that, I've found the opposite to be true. I feel that O'Reilly's success as a publisher is rooted in the accessibility of their books. I've even heard them sneered at (admittedly by a not very nice guy) as being "written for noobs". I don't consider that to be an insult, especially considering that it came from someone who failed the Solaris certification test that I passed because I bothered to read the training guide that he felt was too "beneath" him.

My own opinion is that a lot of the people who write for O'Reilly are considered industry leaders not only because they understand the technology in detail, but because they also know how to explain it in an accessible manner to people who've never seen it before.

Private company technical writing can vary wildly in comparison. You can get a lot of excruciating technical specifics that need to stay company internal, or they'll striate versions of the data based on support contract level (or in the military, security classification). The lifespan of a document can be very short. Of course, that's job security right there, but it seems to me that a product and it's documentation should be robust enough to last for a while. Once you're on the inside you're documenting bugs, patches, version upgrades and spec changes galore. I worked at Sun for four years, and geez o pete but those people went through the dead trees (or digital equivalent) when it came to documentation.

I guess it's all about what you want to write. I can't see myself as a technical writer, dude, especially the company internal kind, so more power to ya. I'd probably get pissed off at having to constantly twiddle a document to fit a product, to the point where I'd just want to fix the product to fit the document instead. :D

Nice that you covered the Asia Society. I was there recently. They've added an audio presentation that you can access via cel phone as you walk around the exhibits.

I find the O'Reilly books to be extremely accessable. In particular, I can highly recommend "Time Management for Syatem Administrators", I keep loaning it out to coworkers.

Indeed. I asked some questions about it on Tom's web site, but it was in reply to an older post and perhaps was not seen, so perhaps I can ask again here: are either adult ADD/ADHD and/or the "caffeine geek subculture" addressed therein?

I replied. Sadly the system doesn't email you if someone replies to your reply. (and the CSS is screwed up right now on the comment pages... dang!)

I'm going to turn my answer into a full post next week.

They give it back?

People should steal it, and threaten to beat you up if you ask for it back.

You should buy dozens of copies and hand them out rather than risk daggers and funny looks when you ask for it back.

(Wow, I gotta cut down on the caffeine and askaninja.com videos)

Well, perhaps if I had more stable employment, particularly in some area where your book hasn't gotten as good a distribution. Like, say for example, Zurich.

Thanks for the comments. I'm not really going for pure technical writing: I'll take it if it's in my field of expertise, but I'd rather work on things that are more mainstream. O.K., so an IEEE journal isn't exactly "mainstream", but people *do* read them for entertainment as well as work. :)

The tabletop article was fun to do.

I only know of the full-time positions on our web site.

How about Kirkland/Seattle?

plenty

that is very cool :)

for the thing you are hiring for, does everyone have to do a couple of months training (or weeks or whatever it is) in Mt View?

Nope.

Fortune published "100 Best Companies to Work For"

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