American View: What Critical Information Is Missing from Every Job Posting?

In the book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James Scott emphasized the concept of “metis” … a sort of cunning, practical intelligence. To quote Cass Sunstein’s review of Scott’s work:  “Scott understands metis as ‘a wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human environment.’ … The essence of metis is knowledge about when and how to apply rules of thumb to concrete situations. Good doctors, good riverboat pilots, good writers, and good joke-tellers have this knowledge; they do not proceed mechanically or by rules. So too, and importantly for Scott, with specialists who deal with emergencies and disasters. ‘Although there are rules of thumb that can be and are taught, each fire or accident is unique, and half the battle is knowing which rules of thumb to apply in which order and when to throw the book way and improvise.’”

 

This hard-fought-and-won experience gives seasoned professionals an intuitive and comprehensive understanding of how to respond effectively to irregular situation, like a power outage, a system crash, a security breach, etc. It’s not memorized checklists; it’s a body of knowledge about what works, when, and why. This body of knowledge can’t be translated into objective position requirements. It can be shared effectively in anecdotes, however an applicant must reach the interview stage to get a chance to hear whether they possess the metis needed to succeed in the employer’s environment.

 

Finally, some aspects of the workplace are universal, like subpar coffee, bad acoustics, mandatory training, and – most important for our purposes – under-resourced support functions. Consider: internal IT is always a supporting entity. Even in “high tech” Dot Com start-ups (a.k.a., machines for turning piles of VC funding into branded tchotchkes and lame excuses), there’s a clear demarcation between product technology and internal technology. The stuff that makes money, be that a website, a mobile app, a factory, or a storefront will get massive funding. “You have to spend money to make money” as the saying goes. Support functions, though, always get the absolute minimum amount of people, gear, and cash to fulfil their purpose because support functions don’t make money. They’re a cost centre, not a source of profits. Any bit of IT kit that does start generating revenue gets moved into the product side and out of support.

 

That’s why support functions always seem to be enduring the “long hangover” culture that comes from chronically needing new and better gear, infrastructure upgrades, better tools, trained people, and enough time to catch up on their backlog of non-critical taskings. This requires workers who should be focused on repetitive, routine, and regulated tasks to learn other functions’ business processes, insider language, and idiosyncrasies in order to get the resources they require.

 

That’s why it’s not enough for a young, aspiring sysadmin to know the fundamentals on LINUX administration well. To keep their server(s) running, they’ll need to interact with networking to ensure traffic is flowing correctly. They’ll need to work with facilities to ensure temperature and humidity are controlled wherever their servers are hosted. They must think like paranoid security people to recognize the tell-tale signs of a potential system compromise. Realistically, a sysadmin will need to cross-train on many different professional functions to ensure they can get the support they need to be able to do their primary job.

 

These cross-training expectations aren’t likely to be listed in the position description, though. There are too many of them, and it’s difficult to articulate in less than a page why a LINUX sysadmin might need to understand HVAC technologies when that’s a Facilities specialisation.

Together, these factors cause the most important requirements of a posted vacancy are never listed in the job description itself. They’re lost in the whitespace. Experienced workers expect that and intuit both what’s probably going wrong behind the scenes and how their experiences might be valuable for the put-upon incumbents sitting across the table from them at the interview. Younger workers seem to have no chance …

So, then, what’s a newly graduated job seeker supposed to take away from all this? “Sure,” one might say, “I agree that everything in the real world is more complicated than job recruiters and hiring managers let on. So what? What do I do with this revelation?” It’s a fair question. It’s not like anyone can just intuit the horrors lurking in the whitespace … except that they kind of can. Once you discard the business school mental model of a perfectly ordered and friction-free workplace, you can start to imagine a more realistic work environment. One rife with miscommunication, inefficiency, and good intentions gone awry. [1]

 

Knowing this allows a job seeker to consider the workplace different from a job seeker with zero experience. Understand that you’re not going to join an efficient, perfectly engineered, and fully funded model of business excellence. No matter where you work, accept that you’re joining a slow train wreck in progress. The people you’re interviewing with need colleagues that can not only learn but can gracefully adapt to a chaotic work environment. Present yourself as that person! 

 

Therefore, my advice is young job seekers is two-fold:

 

First, add language in your résumé about your experiences working under arduous conditions. Mention your experience coping with power failures, floods, severe weather, malware attacks, the Hollywood writer’s strike … whatever. When you’re competing against other inexperienced junior candidates, it will be your supplemental skills that help you stand out. Lots of people learned how to drive a LINUX server at uni: very few people can claim to have performed any sort of work during exigent circumstances. Being able to describe how you’ve kept your function(s) running when everything around you seemed to be going pear-shared gives you a huge competitive advantage during screening. Even if the job you were doing was flipping burgers instead of patching software, it still counts.

 

Second, once you get a preliminary phone screen, ask questions about what skills, abilities, and tasks you’ll need to become proficient in to fully support the organisation during contingency operations. Demonstrate that you’re willing and eager to learn not just the safe, 9-to-5, rote admin tasks, but everything that must be accomplished to make the mission happen. Express how you’re flexible, creative, cool under pressure, and reliable in a crisis. Ask what exotic skills the seniors and leads in the section have.

 

The best performers demonstrate their mettle – and, therefore, their exceptional value to the team – when everything is going pear-shaped. Those are the moments when the best players stand out and cement their status. It’s never too early to put yourself forward for consideration to leadership as one of the stalwart and capable players, starting with how you craft your résumé. Intuit what’s missing in the whitespace and put yourself forward as the candidate who can assist in a crisis. That’s what companies really need, even if they’re unable or unwilling to admit it … before the interview stage, anyway.

 

 

[1] Think less Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and more Star Trek: Lower Decks if that helps.