This part is interesting:
"In the past, we've talked to friends and neighbors, but a lot of times we found that applicants interact more through social media sites than they do with real friends," said Capt. Mike Harvey. "Their virtual friends will know more about them than a person living 30 yards away from them."
It sounds like there are multiple things driving this trend, with the increased bargaining power of employers in a weak labor market being only one of them.
If an employer asked me for a password to anything, I would assume that it was a test to see if I was too guillable and would be a security risk.
If an employer asked me for a password to anything, I would assume that it was a test to see if I was too guillable and would be a security risk.
This makes me think of the definition of "professional" in Disciplined Minds as somebody who can be trusted to internalize and carry out the goals of the organization when they aren't being directly supervised.
I can see doing this for a security clearance but not otherwise.
Also I believe giving out your FB password is a violation of their terms of service. Certainly that's the line I would take if asked. "I'd love to comply but I am a reflexive rule follower and can be relied upon to follow the rules no matter how idiotic." Then I'd find five dollars remuneration commensurate with my skills and experience.
Also I believe giving out your FB password is a violation of their terms of service.
On metafilter someone argued that employers using the password to access one's FB profile would be committing a felony. However, that person is not a US lawyer, nor is that person your lawyer.
Maybe I need to start working on a fake Facebook profile, to give to any future employers.
Good grief. No giving of passwords to outside parties. Good grief, no. The article also mentions giving a password to your email account? No fucking way. Ridiculous. I beg your pardon.
Some other discussions of this I've read have noted that doing this could reveal to the potential employer lots of information that they're not allowed to ask about, such as marital status, which makes the legality of this sort of thing even more dubious.
I'm not surprised that employers are asking. What *does* surprise me are the number of people I know who are aghast at this, but think it's perfectly reasonable for a potential employer to request bodily fluids from you.
This is insane, but certainly not moreseo than the proposed thing in AZ where your employwer could ask for your medical records.
I keep thinking there's going to be a tipping point with Facebook where it becomes not worth it, but then I keep not quite reaching it yet. The thing where you can't untag yourself and can only make it so that the tagged photo of you doesn't appear on your profile comes close.
Relax. We just want to make a baby with you after you're dead.
Giving a stranger access to my email would violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (20 U.S.C. ยง 1232g; 34 CFR Part 99). It's true!
9: Yeah, I work at DOJ and so had to be drug-tested and fingerprinted before I could start work. And I provided a ton of financial information and information about where I have traveled in the past 10 years. And an actual (retired) FBI agent visited my house and interviewed me and talked to my neighbors.
But this seems like a bridge too far to me.
think it's perfectly reasonable for a potential employer to request bodily fluids from you.
I'm perfectly happy to provide bodily fluids to any potential employer who asks. I'm pretty sure bodily solids would approach felony assault, however.
And [self-proclaimed job-seeker guru]'s not troubled by non-disparagement agreements. ... "I think that when you work for a company, they are essentially supporting you in exchange for your work. I think if you're dissatisfied, you should go to them and not on a social media site," she said.
Neofeudalism, woo!
think it's perfectly reasonable for a potential employer to request bodily fluids from you
I do not avoid potential employers, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.
So you all don't think I should have agreed to let my employer tap my phone? Darn it.
13 - As someone who has been a character reference, I hope your neighbors showed the same restraint I did and did not say, "Tulip is a delightful person, and I'd trust her with my child as long as there wasn't a bottle of Jack Daniels in the house."
I forget where I heard this - here? - but there's a company that apparently goes through social networking sites of its clients' potential employees and blacks out any data the employer isn't supposed to ask about.
That's without the password, though. Still revolting.
Apparently about a dozen states, including California, now have pending legislation to ban discrimination by current employment status, which I suppose is good. Only one (NJ) has enacted it (business groups are in opposition).
18: Actually, my mom was one of my references for a period when I was unemployed. The agent told me that he had talked to her and said that "she had a lot of nice things to say about you." What a relief!
10: "employwer"
Is that a typo or were you trying to create a word like "Emplowner" to illustrate the reality of the new feudalism?
I feel like we're going to go from advertised job benefits being "good health plan and 401k match" to "won't try to control every aspect of your life like some assholes do." As I post this from work.
to ban discrimination by current employment status
How the hell would they enforce this? Seems easy enough to conclude that other candidates have more "experience".
Pretty much everyone here has emplowned a dude.
Lot of fun was had in my household musing about the FBI interviewing my inlaws in connection with my clearance. Almost as much as musing about the NSA listening in to conversations, in Saarlaendisch, between wife and m-i-l, trying to figure out what sort of perfidy 'gall bladder' might be code for.
25: you know, when I first read that one--a few days ago--I immediately thought of The Mineshaft!
Completely outrageous and I hope the employers are reported and prosecuted for the reasons Nathan lays out in 8.
The point of looking at someone's FB page should be to determine how discreet they are in their public persona. When we interviewed for paralegals last month, there were applicants who revealed way too much information on social networks. That was sufficient to narrow the pool of applicants along with the usual qualification requirements.
So wait Liz how did you determine that?
I think the point, neb, is that if Liz couldn't see anything incriminating on the applicant's public feed, then they were for that very reason discreet enough.
29: For example, the woman who had a MySpace profile with all of her modeling photos and pictures of excessive drinking didn't seem like a good fit for a paralegal. She also wasn't qualified, so the decision wasn't solely based on her public persona.
A better example would be if someone's public profile included illegal activities.
I don't really see why pictures of modeling and excessive drinking make for a bad fit as a paralegal, tbh; the former seems simply unrelated and the latter is something (module pictures) that such a person has in common with many successful lawyers. And the relevance of the pictures is lost on me.
33: I want someone as a paralegal who is making a career of being a paralegal. I don't want the employee to leave for a better offer, be it modeling or whatever.
I also want someone who is tech savvy and discreet enough that I wouldn't worry about client confidences being shared. If you're posting inappropriate pictures, or say bad mouthing your former employer on a public forum, you might not be good with confidential information.
I also want someone who is tech savvy and discreet enough that I wouldn't worry about client confidences being shared. If you're posting inappropriate pictures, or say bad mouthing your former employer on a public forum, you might not be good with confidential information.
This really is a real concern. A single disclosure fuckup involving client confidential information on Facebook could lead to a gigantic malpractice suit and a disaster.
I deny that pictures of oneself drinking are inappropriate on myspace. That seems like precisely the appropriate venue for such pictures. Nor do I think that having such activity pictured is any more inappropriate than engaging in it, something I also do not think is inappropriate (I mean regular binge drinking is a problem, sure, but on occasion, meh). I think there's a salient difference between that and badmouthing former employers, or violating confidences.
34.1 is just a variation on the old "overqualifed" rationale, and has nothing to do with discretion.
I don't want the employee to leave for a better offer, be it modeling or whatever.
You want someone so limited that they couldn't possibly get a better job?
But specifically about paralegals, the best ones I've worked with have been performing arts types supporting themselves with a day job. Anyone who's smart and together enough to be a good paralegal could probably be doing something more impressive -- if their real energy is going toward their acting careers, you can get someone with excellent skills and brains, and without the kind of (day job related) ambition that would keep them from sticking around.
You're seriously worried about someone leaving a job for modelling?
How the hell would they enforce this? Seems easy enough to conclude that other candidates have more "experience".
Not well, but you could say the same for race and sex, right? It would accomplish something, first, to keep "must be employed" out of job announcements and to some extent also out of internal written materials (for fear of lawsuit), therefore at least getting qualified but unemployed people's resumes in the "read" pool, and hopefully over time becoming more of a social norm.
Much like with existing nondiscrimination laws, it could only go so far given broader social problems (in this case, the buyer's market in employment).
My own suspicion is that a lot of the filtering procedures used--for hiring, procurement, whatever--are selected and persist because more because they provide a sense of control, of making a rational choice in the face of an otherwise overwhelming set of options, than because careful review of the evidence has determined that they are more reliable than alternative methods. But then, I've never had a job, or otherwise been engaged in such processes. Still, I've read about such things.
Less flippantly: it is worrisome how common such practices are, when there is--to my knowledge--absolutely no systematic evidence for claims like "people who post pictures of themselves drinking are more likely to talk about sensitive legal materials." What's worrisome about it, besides a general tightening of pressures to conform, is that we end up with yet another difference between the rulers (who will gradually be more and more exclusively made up of those who were most willing to jump through the discretion-hoops) and the ruled. And since the rulers were all willing to make these constant penny-ante sacrifices of individuality in the name of personal advancement, they are unlikely to be particularly sympathetic to those who were not. "You'll permanently lose your financial aid eligibility if I decide to prosecute you for marijuana possession, which normally would never have even resulted in an arrest, but the cop was having a bad day? Well, shit, I never touched the stuff because I've been planning out my legal career since I was 15; why couldn't you have been more responsible, like me?" That sort of thing.
I keep reading this post title like "Neighbor, please!"
I was unaware that there were people who seek to make careers of being paralegals. Of course in this job market you can weed out applicants through whatever random criteria you want.
What's worrisome about it, besides a general tightening of pressures to conform, is that we end up with yet another difference between the rulers (who will gradually be more and more exclusively made up of those who were most willing to jump through the discretion-hoops) and the ruled. And since the rulers were all willing to make these constant penny-ante sacrifices of individuality in the name of personal advancement, they are unlikely to be particularly sympathetic to those who were not.
Not just that, they resent the very idea of someone who "didn't" "follow" the "rules" not being punished. Similar to the homosexuals in charge of various religious institutions who have been repressing their urges all their lives, and will be damned if they let people get away with not repressing those urges.
What about pictures that are not actually of drinking but of activities that would cause the viewer to infer drinking / inebriation? For example, my brother in law recently posted a picture of himself doused with some liquid and a half a watermelon on his head. I pointed this out to him as a prototypical example of the kind of thing future prospective employers will find on his facebook page, but he's not actually doing anything obviously inappropriate.
I'm also not saying that people shouldn't do things like drink excessively. But doesn't that seem like an inappropriate thing to put on your public profile? Aren't people here using pseuds because you don't want these threads to come up when someone does a search on your name?
I have a very closed FB profile and a very open G+ profile. The political rantings go on my FB profile for my friends to see and the pretty pictures from Costa Rica are public on my G+ profile.
There could be a perfectly good wacky I Love Lucy-esque explanation for that.
Comity!
And now I need to convert my LaTeX resume to (shudder) Microsoft Word format. I know, I know--much like asking for a Facebook login, requiring a Word document should be a signal that I absolutely do not want to work at such an establishment. And it is! But I'm at the point where I can only force myself to apply to jobs that I do not want, and possibly not even those.
I have a collaborator who absolutely refuses to send his LaTeX presentations in powerpoint so I can merge them with everyone else's work. Yeah, great, you're a purist, but you're wasting my time.
But doesn't that seem like an inappropriate thing to put on your public profile?
Well, no? Not really? It could potentially be the case that the following obtains: each individual—everyone—thinks privately to herself, "I don't see anything wrong with excessive drinking or, really, with photographing such things, but lots of other people do, and so it's at best indiscreet and at worst downright imprudent to have publicly visible photos of yourself doing that." Then you'd have this persisting standard despite no one's actually believing it, because everyone assumes everyone else does.
(Nor is drinking obviously the kind of thing that we have other standards about; e.g., presumably you don't think it's inappropriate for paralegals to copulate, but putting pictures of yourself copulating with someone on your public profile would be dodgy. I don't think drinking is like that.)
I would want a reason why putting pictures of oneself drinking on myspace is inappropriate, and I don't think "it's inappropriate because other people will think you do further, unrelated, inappropriate things if you do that" is one that should be heeded. Especially coming from someone who doesn't think the drinking itself is inappropriate.
I have a collaborator who absolutely refuses to send his LaTeX presentations in powerpoint so I can merge them with everyone else's work.
Just convert the powerpoint slides to pdf and use pdfjam to merge them, duh.
But I need to pull individual parts of his slides (graphs, pictures) and put them in other people's, as well as normalizing formatting. So I saved his pdf as images and cropped appropriately. Does that make me a bad person?
My own employer a while back got a bit too enthusiastic about social networks and all that and asked me about which ones I was on, but a polite e-mail to the unfortunate intern saddled with this task soon put an end to it.
They can ask me to behave myself during the eight hours a day they pay me for and outside of that they can go fuck themselves.
These sort of things are very much landgrabs on people's personal lives made possible because it's so easy and convenient to google people, in a way that e.g. asking their family and friends about them isn't.
LizSpigot would never ask her prospective paralegals about how much they drink in their weekends, but because it is so easy to find this information on Facebook or whatever, she does feel she can use this to judge them by.
It's really the public aspect of the pictures, though. I'm really not some secret straight-edge person here. Publish all the pictures you want, but keep the privacy level at friends (or circles) only.
It goes for other areas like politics too. I don't care if you guys know that I think Santorum is one of the worst people on the planet, but maybe one of my clients is going to vote for him. I don't want to publicly announce that I think he's evil. And I would wonder about a potential employee's discretion if he or she is putting inflammatory statements on a public forum, even if I agree with those statements.
But what about the public aspect of the pictures is the issue? Why is making these pictures public a problem, where making pictures of yourself frolicking with a puppy public would, presumably, not be? Even if one of your clients might be like Montaigne in thinking that "No one enjoys the sight of animals playing together and fondling one another, but the spectacle of them rending and dismembering one another is a universal entertainment."?
Honestly the potential damage from public oversharing from a paralegal of client confidential information are so high that it seems perfectly reasonable to worry that someone who seems beyond the norm of oversharing in public spaces generally might overshare client confidential information. Even if the risk goes from 2%-5% when your entire business is potentially at stake that's a big deal. And, no, the risk assessment probably won't come from a systematic social-science study of the relationship between MySpace profiles and incidents of disclosing client information, but guess what people have to make important decisions in real time without social scientific information, and "public oversharer" generally is not a good quality for a paralegal. That's just the real world -- deal with it.
Doesn't making powerpoint presentations require buying expensive software? I wouldn't be able to make a powerpoint presentation, and it's not out of "purity" but just out of "why would I spend a bunch of money on that?"
Listen, if someone isn't going to employ me or be my client because I post too many pictures of birds, then that is not someone I want to engage with. Life is not worth living without distributing more pictures of birds.
Too much work is being done here by the expression 'public profile'. If you really have an open FB wall, you're either ideologically opposed to the creation of a private social networking persona, or you're an idiot. Some employers might have a legitimate concern that client information or other privileged communication could end up being public in that case. They're also wildly exaggerating these risks in order to police people's totally unproblematic private behavior, which is disgusting.
But here we're talking about logging into people's closed FB profiles to check for... what exactly? Employers might have an interest in your being careful about your public disclosures, but what you say to friends is your goddamn business. Anyway, they're opening themselves up to poking into all sorts of things that are irrelevant to hiring, so I devoutly hope this practice doesn't stand up.
Doesn't making powerpoint presentations require buying expensive software? I wouldn't be able to make a powerpoint presentation, and it's not out of "purity" but just out of "why would I spend a bunch of money on that?"
Most people have access to Microsoft Office nowadays.
Drunken pictures of oneself is not beyond the norm of sharing on myspace.
Yes, it is true that (as you will no doubt point out) myspace isn't actually a walled garden; it is very easy to see into it. But that doesn't mean that you can infer from what someone does on myspace to "public oversharer". (Incredibly strained analogy: you can't infer from the way someone talks, when they are (a) in public but also (b) on the phone, that they are talking then the way they would be talking to a potential client. Code switching—it's real.)
That's just the real world -- deal with it.
Mauvaise foi strikes again! I am aware that that is the real world; otherwise I wouldn't get so het up about it. What I want is a justification that goes beyond "but that's how it is" to explain why in any given situation someone putting it into effect is acting well. Because someone putting it into effect can also not do so, and does not have available to him/herself the justification "that's the way it goes". It doesn't have to go that way, in this particular case.
He's not some independent researcher, he works for a pretty significant university so I'm fairly sure Office is on their standard image.
re: 58
You could just use Open Office, anyway. FWIW, I resent the fuck out of certain Office centric things. I used to not mind occasional use, but since they introduced the Total Obfuscation Superfuckmatic Arsebar, I've been unable to even do that.
I work for a pretty significant university. My personal computer does not have Office, and my university issued computer has LibreOffice and OpenOffice. I don't know if you can make powerpoint with those, but I'm sure it'd be a pain to try, especially since it would involve moving between OSX and Linux.
Drunken pictures of oneself is not beyond the norm of sharing on myspace.
No, but putting up drunken pictures of yourself that are available to the public are well beyond norms of public sharing for people in the legal services industry (and, I think professionals generally now? who has a public myspace account with drunken pictures?)
Mauvaise foi strikes again!
That's my superhero name and catchphrase, you know. I've trademarked it.
I've found dealing with open office kind of a pain. Maybe it's sorted out now, but I remember it being kind of confusing because you had to go between different file formats. Enough of a pain that my response to someone asking me to use office for something would be to make fun of them and refuse to comply.
I use three computers which break down thus, as far as OS and word processing software go:
- Gentoo/OpenOffice
- OS X/OpenOffice
- Ubuntu/LibreOffice
LibreOffice and OpenOffice interoperate just fine (one being a fork or something of the other—can't remember the details); they have a file format in common.
Fortunately between gmail, google docs, and iPhone I can now mostly deal with things that involve office. But for powerpoint I have no idea. Plus powerpoint presentations are unprofessional and annoying.
If you really have an open FB wall, you're either ideologically opposed to the creation of a private social networking persona, or you're an idiot
I'm genuinely uncertain where I fall on this spectrum.
70: Heh. Send me your FB profile name and I'll let you know.
I appreciate that nosflow is continuing to argue this point.
I agree completely with his position, even though my personal sense of privacy is unnecessarily strict and I am unlikely to post anything which could be construed as "oversharing."
And I don't know what standards would apply to the world in general. But a huge amount of the law business involves keeping confidential information closely confidential-- this is a big part of the reason people hire lawyers -- so it's not unreasonable for special standards to apply.
Now I felt like I had to check, and his university does in fact offer Office to faculty and researches at no charge. If you use it for minimal organization/display of data powerpoint is reasonable. I'd heard about how the DoD overused animations and other crap but didn't really have a good understanding of the issue until this made my eyeballs bleed.
I am reminded of the very heated discussion I had with some friends about whether it was appropriate to consider someone's MMORPG habits (World of Warcraft specifically) when making a hiring decision. My friends thought it was beyond the pale; I thought it would be a pretty good gauge of addictive personalities and probability of showing up to work without having had enough sleep.
But a huge amount of the law business involves keeping confidential information closely confidential ...so it's not unreasonable for special standards to apply.
So how did people screen paralegals before google?
I agree with nosflow that there are cases where people posting things online is enough of a red flag that it's something to worry about, but also think it's important to remember that looking up somebody's public online information is a poor proxy for what you're actually interested in -- can they follow directions about maintaining confidentiality.
Looks like I can get it for free too...
The 'legal work is special' argument means that you're justified in being particularly careful about hiring people who are good at being discreet -- if they mean to keep something to themselves, they do. The problem with using party pictures as a proxy for that is that there's a good chance the prospect doesn't regard the pictures as embarrassing at all -- they haven't failed to keep something quiet that they knew they should have concealed, they just have a different standard (but a really, really ordinary and conventional standard) of what's acceptable in public than you do.
So how did people screen paralegals before google?
College degrees, connections, all the other bad proxies that you are stuck with in hiring someone.
that looking up somebody's public online information is a poor proxy for what you're actually interested in
In most job hiring, almost all the information you have is a poor proxy for what you're actually interested in.
Good the quality of proxies is additive!
Is there any possible way hiring ought to be done that's radically different from how we do it? Like a novel sorting and sifting mechanism that would better place people in the right task?
A radical I know talks on occasion about novel wage schemes, like "wages should be inversely proportional to demand for the job, and nothing else" or the "all voters should get $50 to spend on donations, and politicians aren't allowed to use anything else."
That flavor of idea is what I'm curious about.
Whoa, I just realized that when I use the word "heuristic" I should be using "proxy".
"wages should be inversely proportional to demand for the job, and nothing else"
I mean, wages should be inversely proportional to the number of people who would like to hold the job.
The problem with using party pictures as a proxy for that is that there's a good chance the prospect doesn't regard the pictures as embarrassing at all
Even if they don't view it as embarrassing, given multiple qualified choices someone who appears to be more cautious about privacy is more appealing than someone who is visibly less cautious about privacy. Maybe the drunk party picture person would be totally obsessive about not revealing client information. Who knows. But you are stuck with the information you have in the hiring chair, and someone who is well far afield on the public sharing/revealing private information scale is visibly more indiscreet than someone who is less inclined towards public sharing.
Also, I suspect that lots of super-drunken pictures on a public Myspace profile would be a problem in academic hiring/tenure review. But maybe I'm wrong.
I think the whole argument here comes down to 'well far afield'. You're right (or, reasonable) about someone who's revealing stuff that's unconventional to reveal. Party pictures, though, are awfully conventional these days, and it's not clear to me that someone who reveals information that it is conventional to reveal is by that fact more likely to be generally indiscreet.
But you are stuck with the information you have in the hiring chair, and someone who is well far afield on the public sharing/revealing private information scale is visibly more indiscreet than someone who is less inclined towards public sharing.
LB's point comes in here too, though; how can you tell that this information is saliently "private" or comes in the field of discretion for that person? Nor, for that matter, can you tell that the person whose public profile is devoid of embarrassing photos is more discreet: the void might be there for lack of photos (lack of behavior to be photographed), not for lack of brazenness.* Nor can you tell that the person who (let's say) has the photos, or the behavior, but doesn't post them, is actually more discreet; there are other explanations, too, e.g. that the person is very controlling about information about himself but is a shameless gossip whenever information about others drops into his hands.
It's true that you're stuck with the information you have, but if it's a question whether that information even points in the direction you want to be informed about, it's far from clear that you're getting anywhere in using it, or, for that matter, that you should bother getting it.
* Remember Hadleyburg!
I'm also suspicious of people who use hotmail, aol or yahoo email addresses on their resumes vs. Google, but I realize that's not fair. (I don't actually discard resumes for this reason)
Also, I suspect that lots of super-drunken pictures on a public Myspace profile would be a problem in academic hiring/tenure review. But maybe I'm wrong.
Tenure review would kind of surprise me for multiple reasons (those involved are older, for one thing); I would be less surprised, but still disappointed, about hiring. But I'm not arguing about how hiring actually proceeds.
Party pictures, though, are awfully conventional these days
Party pictures, sure; pictures of being super-drunk, not so much. Anyhow, the argument does come down to what's conventional to reveal -- if it was totally normal for grownups to have public Myspace pages with lots of pictures of them really really drunk, then it probably wouldn't matter much. But I don't think that's the case.
I don't know what standards would apply to the world in general
This is really the key. I'd wager most professions (hell, most jobs) don't have these sorts of discretion requirements.
(I really doubt it would make any difference at tenure review. Hiring, well, it depends but I also doubt it for most things that could go up there. Again, we're talking mildly drunk pictures--for academics, you're more likely to get strikes against you in hiring if you come across as really obnoxious or argumentative on blogs. To pick an example at random.)
for academics, you're more likely to get strikes against you in hiring if you come across as really obnoxious or argumentative on blogs.
No wonder I got no interviews.
If I had a myspace page that showed modeling pictures and I'd applied for and didn't get a paralegal job, I'd be happy to know I avoided working for someone who talks about confidential hiring information on a comment thread.
I've found that LibreOffice/OpenOffice generally are ok for moving back and forth from simple word or even excel documents, but near total crap in handling powerpoint. I end up saving things I write on my netbook - if I have to write them in an office program - in doc instead of docx because it transfers better when I end up putting it in word at the end. Yes, I know, I could just do an all open source workflow. But I don't.
The real question is, if you like being a drunk professional model, what are you doing in Utah (Sundance and Deer Valley excepted).
Also, I think I've overshared at times about being a student, all of it under a pseud or with privacy settings turned up, but still I feel like I should have kept most of it to myself or as just conversation. Of course that's the danger, right? That online stuff starts to seem just the same as regular conversation. Just with search engines.
I don't think I've ever said much about being an employee. Partly because of unemployment, but also because I like keeping that separation between work and other stuff. As I've said, I never check things like unfogged from workplaces. And I've worked for places where social media and reading political blogs has been part of the job.
appropriate to consider someone's MMORPG habits
A Bush admin employee at some agency once shared confidential work information, including actual documents, I think, using the chat features of some online game.
At no time in the last 18 years that I've been hiring for either a paralegal or an associate have I had fewer than 40 resumes showing adequate qualification per position. Of which maybe at least 5 to 8 were more or less equally 'best' qualified, coming down to intangibles like chemistry and attitude to make the difference. Diligence, discretion, reliability: that's what you're looking for, since most of the substantive stuff can be learned pretty readily by a reasonably intelligent and minimally qualified person. And a level of dignity -- what I can Google, the clients can too.
The last time I applied for a job, Facebook didn't even exist.
Not well, but you could say the same for race and sex, right? It would accomplish something, first, to keep "must be employed" out of job announcements and to some extent also out of internal written materials (for fear of lawsuit), therefore at least getting qualified but unemployed people's resumes in the "read" pool, and hopefully over time becoming more of a social norm.
Huh. This probably says more about me than anything, but I honestly wouldn't have thought it was a serious issue, at least for paralegal equivalent status jobs. It certainly hasn't been when I've recruited - probably half to two thirds of the people I've hired have been unemployed at the time. Then again, most of those positions have been entry level or thereabouts.
99: Me too, I think. Myspace might have.
I probably could have lived with my boss accessing my Usenet history, but I didn't suggest it in the interview or anything.
Wait, check this out: the last time I interviewed* was June of 2001. And I never will again**. Woohoo!
* not quite true; when I got the boot from there, in Sept. 2005, I did interview with one other firm. But I was comfortable, in the interview, in saying that I hated doing 75% of the work (retail) they did. So I wasn't exactly begging.
** while I will be auditioning for clients the rest of my life, it's a wholly different dynamic.
(Having just had a generous glass of Lavagulen with my office mate, and admitting same on the fucking internet -- it's his birthday, and he gave me a bottle of Bushmills single malt for mine -- I'm not really in a position to judge.)
Lagavulin. Good thing no ever reads my comments.
for academics, you're more likely to get strikes against you in hiring if you come across as really obnoxious or argumentative on blogs.
THIS IS HOW OUR BEST AND BRIGHTEST ALL END UP TEACHING IN GHANA.
|| I see that two Libertarians have filed for our US Senate race. Apparently both will appear on the general election ballot. I very strongly doubt that this will hurt Sen. Tester more than it hurts Rep. Rehberg (running for Tester's seat). I take back 17.8% of the trash I've talked about Libs over the years. Think I'll have some more of that Scotch.|>
Carp:
Apparently, Republican politicians in your state write interesting guidebooks on prostitution?
http://mtcowgirl.com/2012/03/16/cowgirl-book-review/#comment-45980
Demonstrates his business savvy.
81: This is much less general than what you're talking about, and wouldn't give a more optimal final result, but it might reduce deadweight loss. For years, I've been trying to convince my (engineering) company that we shouldn't use GPA / internships as a first pass filter for candidates. When I graduated, my GPA wasn't really excellent, but still good enough to get past most filters. I don't remember how many on campus an phone interviews I had, but it was on the order of 100. I initially tracked them in a database, but I got lazy and stopped doing that after about 50. I think I went to about 10 onsite interviews.
The best engineer I knew in school had a GPA that was well below 3. At the time I was trying to convince us to hire him, I was barely fresh out of school and my word didn't carry much weight; I couldn't even convince us to interview him.
It seems to me that it's not a good idea to expend 1 man hour on a
Considering how weak the correlation is between interviewing and actual engineering skill, why not use a random initial filter (or, if that's too radical, a filter that uses GPA plus experience plus randomness). This really shouldn't sound crazy to engineering and CS folks, because randomness is powerful; it's often the case that adding randomness lets you compute an arbitrarily good approximation with much less effort, and it sometimes lets you skirt impossibility results, giving a (good approximate) solution where none could otherwise be found.
On the other topic, I purposely don't dress up for interviews because, why would I want to work at a place that hires people based on how they dress? If FB was a big thing when I was coming out of school, I would have posted pictures of myself having fun, for the exact same reason.
Excerpt from the Cowgirl (Livingstone is a vanity candidate, the strong favorite being former US Rep. Hill):
There's plenty more in this chapter and the book, all worth reading. In the end, needless to say, there is only one person who will have gotten rolled and that's Livingstone, for having published this monumental piece of stupidity. At present, he's spent north of $300,000 of his personal money on a fruitless campaign for governor, and will now have to explain his hooker expertise to the GOP churchgoing crowd. And Livingstone is already busy explaining not only why he and his wife were "on a yacht full of hookers in Monte Carlo," but also why he wrote a letter to Muammar Qadafi in 2011 offering to help get him out of Libya in return for $10 million, a story reported in the New York Times. I always thought $10 million was bit steep. Perhaps the price included some advice to Qadafi about how to get hookers.
Finally, one could argue that this is all good news for Rick Hill, against whom Livingstone is competing for moderate Republican primary voters. But Hill himself once failed to follow Livingstone's advice. Hill got busted by his wife for sleeping with a cocktail waitress, which led to his divorce.
Alas, Hill could have avoided these troubles by simply reading Livingstone's manual. On page 37, it clearly states that "An escort is always preferable to picking up a bar girl."
I bet neither of them has invented his own language, based on the personalities of prime numbers, like the Republican running to represent my district in the state house. These guys are really yesterday's Republicans.
Carp:
In my state, we are fighting back by posting information about periods on Republicans' facebook pages.
Ladie, please feel free to join in:
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/03/15/project-tmi-feminist-humor-defense
way back at 10: I keep thinking there's going to be a tipping point with Facebook where it becomes not worth it, but then I keep not quite reaching it yet. The thing where you can't untag yourself and can only make it so that the tagged photo of you doesn't appear on your profile comes close.
Yeah, that was a big deal -- the lack of control over one's self-presentation in general -- as were the facts that a) I apparently dislike my extended family more than I'm willing to admit to myself and, even more, b) I would get very depressed seeing the great network of "friends" I had built, when only the friendships I kept up through other channels were actually live. So I left in spring 2010 and have almost never missed it, but it makes me bitter about social life in general. And about the internet, I suppose. Bitter bitter bitter.
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Query. How does one make oneself appreciate one's present life rather than yearning for a different life? This is basically the life I wanted more than any other five years ago (or so). Clearly I needed a reality check at that point, but still -- I wish I could enjoy it more, since resenting it doesn't seem to get me anywhere. (Useful resentment would be, for instance, outrage at unjust working or living conditions and so forth.) Certainly *working* toward a different life, or planning a new path, or such, is fine. Yearning, though? Pointless parasitic emotion; fuck it.
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Huh. This probably says more about me than anything, but I honestly wouldn't have thought it was a serious issue, at least for paralegal equivalent status jobs.
Oh, absolutely. I don't think this is something that really applies to entry-level jobs. It does offend most people's sensibilities, though (breaks the bootstraps narrative).
How does one make oneself appreciate one's present life rather than yearning for a different life?
Are you really asking for advice? I have advice on this!
Assuming that it is a life that you think should content you, I'd say to do a few things.
If you don't work out, start working out. Regular exercise makes you feel good most of the time.
Gratitude journals are said to be effective. (I don't keep one, but they're said to be overalll mood elevators.)
The two key things that consistently boost people's mood are being outside and interacting with friends. Intentionally schedule a whole lot of that shit.
Keep in mind that your preferences and your mood may not align. You may think you want to be a surly loner who interacts through pixels, but if you kept a consistent mood journal, you would probably find your mood more elevated after coffee with a friend than after a few hours in the blue light at home. You may think you like living alone, but be in a consistently better mood if you have a (decent or good) roommate (not necessarily true for introverts). Get in the habit of checking your mood, and trust it more than your usual preferences. Your preferences got you where you are now.
112: How does one make oneself appreciate one's present life rather than yearning for a different life?
I think I understand the question, and of course I don't know the answer. I mostly try to keep an eye on the yearned-for life: whose life do I find yearnable-for? Try to emulate that person. If that makes any sense. But that acknowledges the yearning, and perhaps you feel you don't want to do that. I don't see any way around it myself.
It will surprise absolutely no one that I wholly endorse 108.
How does one make oneself appreciate one's present life rather than yearning for a different life?
I've heard volunteering can also be good for this. But I think the big thing is, stuff that gets you outside of your head. The two Big Things that are dominating your life right now both invite endless amounts of dwelling on one's life, and no one's life, no matter how awesome, does well under obsessive self-scrutiny.
How does one make oneself appreciate one's present life rather than yearning for a different life? This is basically the life I wanted more than any other five years ago (or so).
Start by watching Oprah.
112: b) I would get very depressed seeing the great network of "friends" I had built, when only the friendships I kept up through other channels were actually live. So I left in spring 2010 and have almost never missed it, but it makes me bitter about social life in general. And about the internet, I suppose.
You may well not have this in mind at all, but yeah, sure, certainly: something like Facebook comes across (to me) as a demonstration of what social life is supposed to be like. But actually, no, I do not have 500 friends, and it is absurd to suppose I should, just as it's absurd to suppose, as so many of us did, that we should always go out on Friday and Saturday night, lest we be losers.
Life is not actually like that. I wouldn't bemoan it so much as breathe a sigh of relief.
I don't mean that one should breathe a sigh of relief and leave off the yearning thing. That's a different matter entirely.
I don't know, you have to have dreams.
A little Lagavulin now and then.
I like Megan's prescription very much. I'm ill-suited to answer this; I tend to be overly adaptable to the point of suppressing negative feelings about my circumstances (a la the Riso-Hudson description of the enthusiast).
However, I wanted to pick up on this: Certainly *working* toward a different life, or planning a new path, or such, is fine. Yearning, though?
Are you yearning for anything more specific than "something different?" Might be some clues there to get you from yearning to working-towards.
Also, I wanted to push back a little more on the paralegal thing. OK, for some people it's an entry level job, between undergrad and law school. For a great many others, it's way more than that. Real responsibility -- more than junior lawyers, oftentimes -- and a full fledged responsible professional career. If the clients are paying $100 per hour or more for someone's time, they can and often do expect a level of maturity.
I understand that paralegaling can be a pretty good (and even pretty well paying) gig, but it still seems rather too much to demand that someone becoming a paralegal desire to be a paralegal as a career. Why not think of it primarily as a way to enable other pursuits? I recall that DE Shaw, whatever other sins they might have, used to actually advertise some positions (not positions of no responsibility, but not the main trading/technical positions, either) explicitly by saying: hey, you smarty-artsy-fartsy types, this is a good job that will enable you to do other things, you should apply for this. That struck me as downright civilized.
125: I'm happy to push back and aver that there are many, many, many, many people who are excellent at compartmentalizing. That the labor market is weak isn't much reason to pretend that you can know what is in a persons heart based on their Facebook pictures, is it?
There's huge range and regional variation in paralegal responsibilities and the kind of people who become paralegals. IMO the big NY firms are the ones who are still inclined to hire as paralegals college grads from fancy colleges for a few years (they can get away with this because they are paid by banks, who are willing to pay for junior associates to do scut work). For most other firms, that's no longer the case, because, as Carp says, being a paralegal is a tough job for which experience is helpful, and which really is a professional career. There used to be a lot of actor/writer types working as LA paralegals, but that's mostly gone by the wayside as firms realized you're better off with people who want to do the job professionally as a full time career.
The paralegal I work with most is great and does a lot more than many junior lawyers -- I would not at all prefer a well-pedigreed moonlighter.
That the labor market is weak isn't much reason to pretend that you can know what is in a persons heart based on their Facebook pictures, is it?
Of course not, but there's a wide range between knowing what's in a person's heart and being willing to take a gamble on your entire firm's existence when hiring someone whose job is to deal with highly confidential information.
being willing to take a gamble on your entire firm's existence when hiring someone whose job is to deal with highly confidential information.
By your own admission you do that no matter whom you hire, since all you have are opaque proxies, and you have no real knowledge of which proxies are even any good.
Oh, and sorry for ignoring your serious life issue to bicker about paralegals, LK. I think it's real work (valuable work, but real work -- it doesn't come automatically) to be contented with your current life, and requires a lot of therapy/religion/mindfulness.
Probably spending a lot of time on the internet is one of the worse things you can do.
Incidentally, I don't think that wanting a job "professionally" excludes thinking of it also as a way to enable other pursuits, since those pursuits don't have to be the kind of thing where, once you make it big, you devote yourself entirely to them, giving up the job you never cared about. That may be the kind of model that an actor works with, but it doesn't have to be the kind that, say, an artist does. IIRC, our own mcmc has a day job. "Day job" is not definitionally equivalent to "thing I dislike and also suck at", though it might mean "thing I do during the day".
I worked for two big firms and one little firm in NY -- the two big firms hired lifers, not fancy college kids, but it was a job, not a a career. Nothing, or almost nothing, that I'd call legal work -- no research, no drafting. The little firm hired fancy kids thinking about maybe going to law school in a year or two. I found the fancy kids more useful, or anyway easier for me to manage in a way that I got useful work out of them. But I couldn't tell you how representative my experience was even within NYC.
t still seems rather too much to demand that someone becoming a paralegal desire to be a paralegal as a career.
I dunno, I've certainly hired overqualified people who were moonlighting, but in general I actually WOULD prefer someone who wants the level of job they actually have. Which is quite a lot of people, honestly. Unfogged's wildly unrepresentative sample notwithstanding, being a paralegal is a more professional, better-paying job than most Americans have.
Re: confidentiality, I do Google job applicants (and volunteers), but more than that I explicitly discuss with them the confidentiality expectations we have, and what constitutes an invasion of someone's privacy.
It's really pretty stunning how bounded people's thinking is within their own sphere of experience. If you live in a suburb and don't know your neighbors, the idea that a street vendor may hear what you are saying about a client and know who you are talking about can seem really astonishing.
How does one make oneself appreciate one's present life rather than yearning for a different life?
I'm with Megan on the value of exercise and getting outside for counteracting depression.
I've spent the last year and a half yearning for the past, a past I know I've idealized to some extent but one I really enjoyed most of the time. But I know getting back there is an impossibility and so is changing any of the decisions and events that got me to this present.
The only thing that makes sense to me is to do something, anything, to move in what might prove to be interesting or satisfying directions, to take risks and see what happens. There are no guarantees as to outcome, Murphy and his minion Glitch run the universe, and I have ample proof of that. In the end, you're dead no matter what, you might as well roll some dice before the game gets shut down.
Okay, once more into the paralegal breach. Halford's point is well taken, firms have a major interest at stake in insuring that employees won't blab important stuff on the internet. And maybe, absent any other information, the tendency to be personally indiscreet should be used as a marker of professional indiscretion.
But... this reminds me an awful lot of the (terrible!) argument people used to make about Clinton. The whole business about 'how could you trust someone who would cheat on their spouse, etc., in the highest office in the land?' As if no adulterer could be trusted with a position of political influence. And the right response there was: oh, come on. Private infidelities come from sources that don't have any necessary political analog at all. People are crappy in their private lives and scrupulous at work *all the time*, and someone who will happily spill every icky detail of their divorce to you may clam up when it comes to patient or client information.
That's not an argument against using personal indiscretion as an indicator, just noting an analogy that makes me uncomfortable with doing so even when it's necessary.
132: Right -- in my limited experience, people for whom paralegaling was a day job were more competent and energetic than people who didn't have anything else comparable going on (okay, not always. I'm remembering a useless guitarist. But generally). I think it's easier being cheerful and engaged in what can be (while difficult and requiring all kinds of competence and knowledge) an awfully dull job if it's the thing that makes it possible for you to do what you love, as opposed to just being the daily grind that puts food on the table.
130 -- You run with the proxies you have, and willingness to be undignified and unusually disclosing in public would, I think, give most people pause about someone's overall commitment to privacy and discretion. Including, again as Carp says, not just lawyers but also clients. For what I do personally an aspiring model given to getting drunk and then oversharing on the internet would read as affirmatively dangerous -- the person might be fine but no way am I ignoring that risk when there are many qualified candidates.*
*This is all hypothetical; the situation has never come up in real life.
127 -- I haven't done that much hiring in the last 4 years, but what I've done doesn't actually feel any different, in terms of numbers of qualified applicants per opening, than in the 90s or 00s. I've always had a lot of options. Candidates have really had to sell themselves as having the skills and attributes I'm looking for. Many do.
I fully appreciate someone saying 'well fuck that, if you don't want to hire someone like me, I don't want to work for you.' I'm that way myself. And if someone don't want to work for me, I certainly don't want to hire them.
129
Of course not, but there's a wide range between knowing what's in a person's heart and being willing to take a gamble on your entire firm's existence when hiring someone whose job is to deal with highly confidential information.
Don't you have some sort of insurance against serious employee foul ups?
I'd also strongly second Witt's 134; the best way to ensure that people behave appropriately is to tell them what that means to you and see how well they seem to get it.
Don't you have some sort of insurance against serious employee foul ups?
There's malpractice insurance, but it can't make a client hire you again.
I'm actually kind of surprised to hear that, Witt (re: googling), though I think maybe you've mentioned it before.
I dunno, I've certainly hired overqualified people who were moonlighting, but in general I actually WOULD prefer someone who wants the level of job they actually have.
I don't see the distinction here. My hypothetical moonlighter DOES want the level of job for which they're applying. It's just that this person also wants to be able to do other things, on their own time. The ability to do that would in fact be the reason to prefer the relevant level of job. (It will be recalled by lifers here that I was a legal assistant before I went to grad school. Not a bad job at all! One could do a lot worse than to have a job like that, and interesting things to do outside the job. "Doing X professionally, as a career" seems to be being conflated with "being primarily interested in doing X, period".)
You run with the proxies you have
If this means "you can only run with the proxies you have", sure, I buy it. If it means "if you have a proxy, run with it", it is definitely bad advice.
Story about the Bush admin official oversharing here.
pooping pooping pooping pooping cocks cocks butthole fuckface hire me
137 -- My experience was emphatically different at my big firm. I worked with a bunch of career paralegals who were absolutely top flight. They were able to completely master the record -- docs and deps -- and the technology for presenting it all in the courtroom. Indispensable people. And judges really responded well to them as objective presenters -- my experience is the same with opposing paralegals handling exhibits, transcripts, and the technology in the courtroom. I ask for an exhibit, by page and bates, and as soon as I've said it, it's on the screen in from of each juror. Whether they work for me or the other side.
They are equally invaluable in prepping witnesses: the witness recalls some obscure document, and not only can my paralegal tell me if it really says what the witness thinks it says, but can have it in my hand in minutes.
A good paralegal is easily worth 2 junior lawyers. Maybe more, now that I have lexis on my laptop, using wifi in the courtroom.
No one needs to require that paralegals have no outside interests that they wish to pursue on their own time, of course that's fine. But if one's primary interest is in another career, and you're using the paralegal position simply as a way to make money while getting that other career under way, that's a different story. While such a person could, theoretically, be a fantastic paralegal, there's also obviously risk there.
143: I'm sure I've mentioned it before, although I guess it's just barely possible I didn't do it under my real name. I don't think so, though. I think I talked about the 23-year-old guy who had a enormously misogynistic "joke" as the second Google result for his very distinctive name.
His explanation, when asked, was that this was a stupid thing from when he was in high school and his friend had not taken his name off the group. Sorry bud, the extent of your free learning experience is going to be that I was honest with you about why I wouldn't take you on.
People who don't take confidentiality seriously can cause catastrophic harm to my clients, up to and including indirectly contributing to their deaths. If that means I turn down a few people for overly broad reasons, so be it.
"Doing X professionally, as a career" seems to be being conflated with "being primarily interested in doing X, period".)
I definitely don't mean to conflate these. I meant "Doing X professionally, as a career" as contrasted with someone constantly having one eye on better prospects or their "real" interests all the time.
I'm delighted to hire people who have lives outside work and for whom work is a way to pay the bills, as long as they have some level of ethics about doing their job decently when they're there.
I have a couple of thoughts to add. First, paralegals with 10 years experience in Silicon Valley can make 90k. Paralegals that manage other paralegals can make over 100k. We don't pay that high in Utah, but we pay pretty well for experienced paralegals.
When the firm first started we hired a lot of people with no experience, based on the theory that young(ish) people can learn and pick up technology and be great paralegals. It turns out that it's hard to spot people who are excellent with details when they don't have any experience. We now prefer people with more experience because if they lasted at a firm for at least a few years, they were probably good with details.
Sorry bud, the extent of your free learning experience is going to be that I was honest with you about why I wouldn't take you on.
And if it really because of his friend that his name is still attached to this thing that happened between five and nine years previously, his having learned your reason will enable him to do what, precisely? Is the lesson that he should really lean on his friend some more?
I'm sure neb was an excellent paralegal.
If I was choosing between him and someone with 7 years experience hoping for the next 10 with me, well, I'd think the career aspiration was pretty important.
Lean on me / when that stupid joke / that you made in hiiiiigh schooool / just cost you a joooob
Sadly, as a legal assistant, I never made anything like paralegal skrilla.
Leaving aside the what makes a good proxy question, I'm generally in favor of things like paralegal work being supported at a career/permanent job level. I've done research-support type work (not in a legal context) as an intern and I would have liked to do it for a real wage but I was basically told that the kind of stuff I did was mostly considered intern/low-level work, regardless of how important it actually was, and there was no way to make a career out of it. This had a lot to do with economics - many places can't afford to have a significant amount of support staff. So you had regular rotations of people coming in and doing the work for a few months and then moving on, regardless of whether they really got how to do it well.
Frankly, if I had, or if moving up the ladder like that were a possibility (the (tiny) firm where I worked didn't have anything above "legal assistant"), I'd probably still be in Chicago, doing that.
I was also a legal assistant for a brief period between college and grad school. It was okay, but I probably would have enjoyed it more if I had had more outside interests or activities. I was nothing like a paralegal, though; the firm's paralegal had been at it a long time, and while she seemed a bit burned out I didn't really have the knowledge to judge the quality of her work as a paralegal.
My first job out of college was basically data entry for a litigation support company, cataloging documents on a terminal that could be used pretty much only for cataloguing documents. The documents were being scanned by another company and the text database we created was getting merged with the image database somewhere down the line. Tedious work with extremely high turnover, generally students and artists and people looking for part-time second jobs. The company didn't last very long.
I can't say for sure what lesson(s) he took from it, but I hope they included "If you lie, someone may call you on it" and "Hateful jokes you make with your friends may cause somebody not to hire you."
(The "back in HS" thing was b.s. -- the page was from two years after his college graduation date.)
I hated that job, but I've never done so much reading just for my own pleasure and edification in my free time. And then I went to grad school.
Oh, and one more thing: Even if every word he said was true, it's still inexcusable, because a 15-year-old should have known better too. I certainly did.
Hmmm, Witt seems harsh, but that leaves me with being both on team pro-misogyny and pro-employer, so there's that. Anyhow, Carp gets it totally right in 147. A good paralegal is the greatest thing ever.
Would it be churlish to point out that you weren't hiring the fifteen-year-old? I mean, I am not really interested in defending this person, about whom I know next to nothing that isn't negative, but I knew a lot of people who were gigantic asses in high school who have turned out surprisingly well, if (wait for it) facebook is anything to go by.
Leaving aside the truth or falsity of the dates and whatnot I'd have to ask: is misogyny at 15 (or homophoby or whatever other nasty curdled milk of human kindness) really something that you think one shouldn't be able to leave behind or live down by 23? I can see rape, murder, assault even... But the other stuff? You certain?
On the broad question of whether people can do dumb or hurtful things (at any age) and eventually grow beyond that and see how what they did was hurtful -- sure, I believe that.
If I didn't, I wouldn't spend near the amount of time I do working with people on overcoming bias. (And I wouldn't be as cringingly embarrassed as I am to recall my own episodes stupidity and hurtfulness.)
On the narrow question on whether my organization should weigh being the personal-growth experience of a very privileged kid more heavily than the possible harm that privileged kid might (even unintentionally!) commit against our clients...no. There are lots of other places in the world he can learn, if he really wants to.
the extent of your free learning experience is going to be that I was honest with you about why I wouldn't take you on.
This is a fairly valuable free learning experience. I'm curious to know whether the joke is still up. Witt, got a sec to google?
Doesn't show up in the first five pages of Google results for his name. Looks like he took my (solicited) advice and created more positive content to push it down in the rankings, if it's still there at all.
Lesson learned, apparently. And you didn't even have to shoot his laptop.
A good paralegal is easily worth 2 junior lawyers.
If only the junior lawyers knew that. More importantly, if only the senior lawyers actually acted like that on a regular basis. But IME no matter how valuable a paralegal might be, the culture of law firms is such that the paralegal will always be reminded that they are, first and foremost, not a lawyer. (The best example I recall being that, as a paralegal I was ineligible to play in the softball league my firm was in. But as soon as I left that job for a better one in a different industry, I became eligible.)
And now I need to convert my LaTeX resume to (shudder) Microsoft Word format.
An awesome tool for converting various markups to various document formats:
http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
Pandoc can't really cope with the full fullness of LaTeX as a source format, unsurprisingly, so if your resume is fancy, it may not get you much further than copying and pasting from a pdf.
Apparently, you can write in multimarkdown and convert out from there into all kinds of formats. I've used it to take notes but haven't composed any real documents that way. Also, I don't do anything with LaTeX.
74 Now I felt like I had to check, and his university does in fact offer Office to faculty and researches at no charge.
But if he doesn't have a computer running Windows this is not necessarily any help.
I use Keynote a lot, but of course if I'm sharing a presentation with anyone I send a PDF. It's easy to pull images from a PDF and reuse them elsewhere.
OpenOffice does have a PowerPoint equivalent (called "Impress"). I've never used it before, but I just took a look at it and it appears to work fine.
175: My experience is that it does not handle image sizes or fonts or spacing very well when coming from powerpoint if you have anything even slightly complicated. Animations can also be a disaster, but I've only tried that once when using someone else's animation. I usually avoid them.
By the way, my understanding is that LibreOffice is now considered the preferred of the two big open projects. I guess there was some dispute over the future of OpenOffice and many of the major open document people moved to Libre. I've found it works better and is a bit faster on windows than OpenOffice.
The last time I tried to use OpenOffice on a Mac, it was still pretty sluggish (admittedly, this was at least two or three years ago).
Keynote, as a rule, seems to be much prettier than PowerPoint or other alternatives. As one expects from Apple products. (I've seen some very nice looking presentations put together in LaTeX, but it's usually nontrivial to make them pretty.)
176.1: That makes sense. It seems perfectly suitable for making a simple presentation that's compatible with PowerPoint, but I can see how going the other way would be trickier, especially with all the crap that a lot of people put in their PowerPoints.
176.2: Huh, interesting. My copy of OpenOffice is from a couple years ago, when I briefly became interested in using it instead of Office. I soon lost interest, so it's just been sitting there.
I've seen lots of prezi in classes recently. When done well it can look really good, but often it ends up being not much different than a powerpoint presentation with bonus motion sickness.
Sorry to ignore those who responded to my plea; crazy evening. I appreciate the suggestions and thoughts. There are, oh, forty different complicating factors: the major one is that this formerly-desired "life" is about to end anyway, and I have to figure out what comes next. ("Paralegal" as "day job" without "Facebook account"?) But even if I only have six months left of living here and doing this, I would like to enjoy it, thereby training myself to enjoy whatever comes next. Unless the next thing is epic shit. Perhaps I will say more if it's still opportune tomorrow morning.
A Whit Stillman movie, sez the other thread. For unclear reasons, I find myself needing to believe that Flippanter loathes Whit Stillman.
I find myself needing to believe that Flippanter loathes is Whit Stillman.
I find myself needing to believe that Flippanter loathes is Whit Stillman.
I've found that LibreOffice/OpenOffice generally are ok for moving back and forth from simple word or even excel documents, but near total crap in handling powerpoint
AFAIK, at the moment:
Text documents LO -> MSOffice - works but don't expect embedded things other than graphics files to be transferred.
MSOffice -> LO - works rather better. Most things (except for some Office graphic embeds) work but might look weird. Reviewing comments recently started working, rather than all being rolled into one.
Spreadsheets LO -> MSOffice - basic data and formulae will work, fonts may go weird. Only very basic charts can be trusted to get through.
MSOffice -> LO - basically works but some graphics won't appear.
Presentations LO -> MSOffice - pretty much anything might happen.
MSOffice -> LO - works, but some graphic objects won't, and dummy text and artefacts show up.
In my experience, OO3.2 just before the LibreOffice fork worked slightly better. As a rule, LO eats MS files better than MS eats MS file formats prepared by LO (or to put it another way, MS file formats aren't actually formats).
Yeah, the .docx resume I whipped up on LO resulted in some formatting fuckups when viewed in MSOffice. Sigh.
180-181: Bay Area Whit Stillman movie marathon? I'm game. I'm so game. Fuck, I could do a performative-dance thingie, Rocky-Horror style, in front of the screen.
I think I have a public Facebook profile that I should lock down. The one you all know about is locked, but there's one where I locked things down as much as I could. The other one was supposed to be for public things like commenting on posts put out by a hospital CEO.
88: I use gmail, but I feel like yahoo should be given more respect than hotmail.
128: I knew someone who was a paralegal at that ip firm Wilson sonsini, and some of the lawyers were thinking of breaking away to join a NY firm. She was on the way to law school, but she had a lot more responsibility and was paid more than the NY Paralegals, and the other firm balked at paying her salary.