Interview Tip No 73: Bring Your Binky

Among the many, many reasons I hate what I do for a living is the fact that I often have to brush against an endless stream of smug children who have accomplished nothing, yet believe my profession began the day they decided to turn on a computer. Here's a prime example: in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal and linked on Yahoo!'s front page, on the growing acceptance of heads of state wearing blue jeans to international gatherings, there's a quote from someone named Andrew Dumont, the Vice President of Marketing at a bulk text-messaging service called Tatango.

"When someone shows up to an interview or meeting in anything other than jeans, it shows inexperience and a lack of confidence."

So let me get this straight: if I walked into the worldwide headquarters of this burgeoning, soon-to-be-worth bazillions (this is snark, by the way) start-up wearing khakis, it would be obvious to this genius from the get-go that, what, I'm lying that I've been doing this crap for twenty years? Wow, Andrew must have a wealth of experience to be so laser-like in his judegements; at least as many years under his belt as Steve Jobs, who helped start this notion that smart people only wear denim. So let's check out Andrew's LinkedIn profile and see what game-changing technologies he's brought the world:

Andrew Dumont’s Experience

Take your time reading that hefty document. He's been "Vice President" for two years; before that, he was grinding it out as a candidate in an intense, competitive management training program customer service representative answering the phones at Horizon Bank. But not to worry, even though he's only 21 years old, he's still working on that degree from Western Washington University in Psychology and Marketing.

Well, I guess with a CV like that, he's got the goods to know on sight whether you'd know which set of cheeks were higher than the other based just on what you were using to cover them. And maybe he's on to something, seeing as the customers that were big enough tools to endorse his product almost all appear to be young, and wearing suits in these headshots. Clearly it helps to be inexperienced and have a lack of confidence to pony up your organization's money for what sounds like little more than an SMS version of LISTSERV.

Interesting that LISTSERV technology has been around for about as long as I've been putting food on my table doing this stuff. It's interesting too, that that's about as long as Andrew has been alive. To think that when I put on my new suit to go to my first interview, Andrew was having someone put on a new diaper.

Yes, I am being particularly rude here, but that's only because I have had my share of sitting across the table in interviews with 21-year-old "Senior Architects" who have dismissed me as "needing more experience." I can only hope that as these people plod along (assuming they're still in this field, and haven't gone back to bussing tables) they'll spend an hour of their life talking to someone like Andrew, who will already have written them off because they clearly didn't have the experience to know that you should dress like a child.