by Jefe on February 19, 2012
I have been working in the Interactive space since I graduated from college, which is longer ago than I’d like to admit, and my job title has always been either producer or project manager, which means that most people in my life do not understand how I actually earn an income. Usually, when trying to explain my role to friends and family, I use a general contractor or a movie producer as examples.
For the general contractor example, I say, “If you are redoing a kitchen, you don’t care about the types of pipes being used, or the type of wires that are going into the wall. All you care about is what exactly is being done, how long is it going to take and how much is going to cost.” That resonates, especially with homeowners.
For the movie producer example, I say, “Think of the Oscars. Who gets the award for best picture, the most prestigious award of the evening? The producers. What did they do? Direct? No, that went to best director. Make the sets? No, that went to Best Set Design. So what did they do? Everything else, from securing and managing the budget and timeline to making the director and actor get along, when they really dislike each other.” That really resonates, because how doesn’t like movies?
Still, that doesn’t necessarily nail it and now, I can also refer these fine folks to the image below:
Via Kay
Tagged as:
career,
it,
jobs,
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producer,
project_manager
by Jefe on February 18, 2012
A few months back, Gawker posted about how one uber-geek named Roger Craig (no, not the retired San Francisco 49er) was able to develop a web app that modeled America’s favorite question and answer show’s question sequences so that he could win an insane amount of money and break their all time record.
Craig delivered this news to the New York “Quantified Self Show & Tell” where he explains how he developed a web tool and various supporting programs to analyze and effectively train himself on a database of past questions. Its a 14 minute talk and its worth watching if you plan to ever be on the show, like I do.
If you did not know, every year I take the entrance exam hoping / praying that this is the year I end up on the show. When I throw out of my many inane pieces of trivia and/or little known facts, I usually follow it up with the statement, “One day I’m going to be on Jeopardy!” to try to reduce my geek factor. That being said, my secret fear is that I’ll get on the show and get destroyed by my lack of opera and classical music knowledge. Having Mr. Craig’s app to help me identify my weak spots would be ideal.
As an aside, one of the best articles I ever read about “Jeopardy!” was written for GQ magazine and it was titled “Why is Alex Trebek laughing at me?” It came out in the late 90’s and I cannot find it online – I was hoping to link to it in this post. If you find it, please let me know!
Tagged as:
jeopardy,
quiz,
tv