Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Bits and Pieces - March 18, 2014

I keep meaning to cross-post these three here, and just don't get to it. Maybe tomorrow.
War With No Hope
Soviet Economics
Russian Exceptionalism

Trapping and tracking the mysterious snowy owl.

Like those maps that show countries' characteristics by distorting the physical size of the countries? This is the site for you!

Some history to remind us that once upon a time, women dominated computer programming. Not misogynistic boys.

I don't want to insult anyone, so if you can tell me what LinkedIn is good for, I will apologize.

A science quiz that is somewhat more difficult than the run of the mill. With a link to another one.





2 comments:

Dave W. said...

Three things that LinkedIn is good for:

1) Staying in touch with people you used to work with or go to school with. I've managed to reconnect with lots of people I used to know who have moved on to other subfields or other careers altogether. Once we stopped going to the same conferences together, it used to be that they pretty much dropped off the face of the earth, unless I happened to hear about them from mutual friends. Now we have a way of staying in touch.

1A) As an important subcase of (1), keeping in touch specifically with people who can serve as references for your past jobs. I've had reference checks who wanted to talk with all my managers from the last decade or more, and had a bit of a challenge finding current contact info for people who, like me, were multiple companies removed from the job where we worked together. Now most of those people are in my LinkedIn contact list.

2. Getting jobs. I got interviews for both of my last two jobs because of my LinkedIn profile. One was from a corporate recruiter who was looking for certain specific skills, and the other from a former co-worker who was hiring (and inferred, correctly, from my profile that I might be available). This may definitely vary, depending on your field, but it does happen.

Cheryl Rofer said...

Thanks, Dave! Good to know!