🤗n Spin 🎪

How many valid answers are there to a “yes or no” question?

……

In a court of law: 2️⃣

In a congressional panel: ♾️

Watching C-SPAN panels or politician/Big Tech CEO interviews you’ll get whiplash from the spin, spin, spin as they dodge questions like Neo dodging bullets

So what can we learn from this practice? Can we twist spin  into something of positive value?

I think yes. esp as we enter this inflation/recession/whatever we are calling it - obviously on a macro scale workers have LESS bargaining power (as individuals) during the job hunt as companies are entering periods of fiscal conservatism….

its been documented for awhile but switching jobs is the most reliable way to keep salary on pace with inflation and then some. ofc there are infinite reasons folks stay/leave jobs aside from money and your mobility greatly depends on the field you’re in, years of exp, and market conditions.

that being said…

jumping on the SRE bandwagon and hopping from cloud to cloud running into all the flavors of Kubernetes has kept me surfing the bleeding edge meant I ended up with a basket of buzzword-y skills that recruiters j’adore

so while I have found out after the fact that I was underpaid and/or leveled in almost every role….by switching roles I’ve been able to minimize that pay gap, esp factoring in sign-ons (which yeah if you leave <1y you have to pay back but if you ask your Future Company nicely sometimes they’ll foot that bill)

SO

what does any of this have to do with spin?

before entering an interview let’s just assume you’ve done the prep work to understand the company, industry, market, role, etc.

there’s going to be a gap between what you’re looking for and what the company is looking for - the goal imo of interviews is to see if there’s enough overlap in that venn diagram

things are gonna roll a lot smoother if you’ve got the message/impression you’d like to leave them with figured out beforehand. also you probs already know this if you’re “nontraditional” in any sense

so when you’re asked questions like “do you have experience with x” or whatever….don’t let the answer end with a brief “no”….

try “not in production but I’ve been running a cluster at home for 1 y and followed XYZ’s tutorials” (don’t lie obvs but turn that “no” → “no but here’s what I can bring to the table)

ps I bet all the grandmas and old ladies back in the day were buff af because now I’ve tried hand-mixing in baking and now hand-carding and JFC I’m a weakling haha