WTF? Re: [lbo-talk] How to Deconstruct Almost Anything

Matt lbo4 at beyondzero.net
Fri Dec 22 10:12:54 PST 2006


On Thu, Dec 21, 2006 at 10:53:23AM -0500, bitch wrote:


> which left me homeless for nearly a year. Oh yes: Free labor! As such, I
> glanced at Federal job openings and noticed a supposed shortage in
> information security, a field in which I worked for several years. Then I
> decided to look for more work with the Department of the Navy, then
> expanding outward to the entire Fedzyztem.
>
> And lo! I found, of course, ridiculous language that meant nothing to me,
> acronyms and initialisms galore. In short, all many of ways in which
> language was used to keep people OUT. That is, to weed down the talent pool
> or make the process so frustrating, so insider, that I can see how people
> would just give up from feeling excluded.

That is one explanation, but I will suggest another. The Bosses don't really have an interest in keeping these jobs "insider"; their interests are opposed to the interests of the workers in this field who do want it to be "insider".

Usually though the Bosses are writing the job descriptions.

I recently moved out of that very field - information security. My old boss wrote a job description and it was terrible - exactly as you described. It was so full of acronyms and jargon all jumbled together in a manner as to be unintelligible. I feared it would scare away competent people who might read it and think the company had no talent, so I rewrote it for her and removed all of that junk and wrote one that stressed what we really needed: an aptitude for learning on one's own, good writing skills, and the ability to self-direct and direct a small project team.

My suggestion was rejected and the alphabet soup was used instead and the quality of respondents was not what I had hoped.

Sure that is anecdote but I can't be alone in experiencing a boss who has no idea what their worker actually does, who ends up writing an awful job description because of that ignorance.

Matt

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