Read job postings. Write a résumé. Practice interview skills. Network.

To the extent that any educational facilities teach you how to find a place in the labor force, that’s it. Pretty accurately, you could call this “How to get a job.” That is, how to get offered a job. With the national unemployment rate at whatever it’s at, that’s certainly a valuable skill these days, but lots of people have the chance to aim much higher — at least high enough to get two job offers. Then what?

You’re pretty much flying blind if you rely on the same folks that taught you about one page resumes and how to talk to recruiters at job fairs.

I think every college student would be well-served to have some guidance on how to choose a job or a career. And the problem starts way before college; high school students pick colleges, which are long-term expensive decisions, basically on a whim. It all seems kind of insane looking back.

Company cultures, hierarchies, job roles, products, businesses and dozens of other factors that will impact your daily life, probably making the difference between being happy and miserable at work, are never formally taught or even discussed. I think it’s one of the reasons that startups seem so magical to so many, because they appear to break rules when they just do things differently and the rules were never there in the first place.

I’m not convinced that a vocational education is the best fit for most, but I do think that some sense of practical decision-making would be immensely valuable and hopefully prevent a lot of people from finding new ways to kill time for eight hours, five days per week.

I’ve recently been learning Ruby on Rails and after hearing the term for a long time have actually begun to understand what “test-driven development” is. The idea is that you define success for a piece of an application by writing a test that “uses” the application in predefined ways and tells you whether or not it produces the expected results. Before I go on I should admit that in an effort to learn how to make things in Rails faster, I’ve actually not written any tests. Bad, I know.

I think the idea of test-driven development is pretty cool. It forces you to set specific goals, makes it clear when you achieve them, and hopefully makes achieving them even easier and faster since the scope is so clearly defined. Thinking about it more, there are probably other parts of life and certainly work that would make sense to approach this way. One that came to mind and made for a catchy title was testing itself, in the product and user sense.

Surveys, A/B tests, multi-variant tests and many other methods of learning from customers have become wildly popular, and rightly so, thanks to the work of Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Sean Ellis (who first taught me about it) and others in what’s generally been termed “The Lean Startup” movement. Like any good fad, I think that some followers have fallen victim to function following form — in other words, I’ve seen a bunch of people use these tactics for the sake of using them. One instance of this that sticks out is running tests where virtually no result is going to teach you anything.

The most egregious offender has to be surveys, I think because they’re the easiest to create and the most vulnerable to lazily copying from others. Every question on a survey — like every line of code in an application — has an implicit, real cost. Usually it’s a lower response rate, which means you get less information and it takes longer to get it. So a great deal of effort should be put into eliminating unneeded questions, just like a great deal of effort is often put into eliminating unneeded code. Or (here comes the theme) in a test-driven development world hopefully the unneeded code is never written in the first place, because you’re writing code based on test requirements and writing tests requirements based on what’s needed. It’s a beautiful system.

Back to the surveys. There are several “standard” survey questions that I see almost everywhere and have a way of creeping into new surveys as you write them: gender, age, income, location, referral source, etc etc. Certainly all of these can be valid survey questions, but they’re probably not all important all of the time. Unfortunately it’s really, really easy to add them to your product survey and some services like SurveyMonkey will even automate it for you. Pretty soon this turns into survey-by-committee and you’re asking 30 questions with boondoggles from every part of the company added. Biz dev wants to know about the users’ favorite websites, marketing wants to know about age and gender, sales wants to know about purchase intent for mid-size cars (wtf?) and the list goes on. Meanwhile, if the scope of the survey had been properly defined, it would be clear that none of these were actually required; or, if these were actually required, it would have been made clear sooner and maybe someone would have fought against it, thanks to a test.

This is a trivial example only to make a point, but I think it’s an important point that comes down to two ideas for me:

1. Keep in mind that just because something is easy to do doesn’t mean it’s low risk
2. Upfront investment in making sure everyone agrees on the goals can pay huge dividends later

Testing to accelerate learning is great and more companies should do more of it, but adding unneeded complexity (for you and for your users) through more survey questions or button colors doesn’t always improve your tests.

From time to time stories come out that are generally fashionable to be outraged about. Facebook’s numerous privacy skirmishes and Groupon’s Superbowl commercial are a couple examples. So is Kenneth Cole’s off-color Tweet about Spring fashion in Cairo.

People get up in arms about these things. They post on Facebook and Twitter, often promising to never buy the offender’s products again. But it’s nonsense, more often about showing off how upset you are than actually being upset in the first place.

I’d like to ignore whether or not any of these things were good ideas (for whatever it’s worth, Facebook’s and Groupon’s almost certainly were, Kenneth Cole’s almost certainly was not) and instead focus on whether or not it makes any sense at all to be upset about what they said or did.

I think the most reasonable litmus test for these kinds of things is whether you’d be offended (even a little bit) if someone said it to you at a party or if you learned about it in isolation.

In the case of Facebook’s privacy mess last year, I knew many, many people that were up in arms about it. Most of them thought it was unethical, immoral and downright mean-spirited. But for all the wrong reasons, I’d argue. They were all (every single one, among the people I personally knew) fine with their own use of Facebook; some changed their settings, most didn’t, and all went on with their lives. But, boy, were they ever worried about everyone else who wasn’t as smart as them and able to avoid making asses of themselves on the internet. I’m sure it’s all good intentioned, but it tweaks me in the same way that any evangelical religious people attempting to spread their morality to others does–it just seems like a lot of overreaching without a lot of logical thought.

In the case of Groupon and Kenneth Cole, I’m hard-pressed to believe that anyone wouldn’t laugh if similar things were said at a party. “How about those Egyptian riots? Like a Black Friday sale, right!” “I’m sick of all these daily deals, how about something new like 2 Free Tibets for the price of one!?” This is pretty harmless stuff by any reasonable measure. Except when it affords you a soap box to preach from.

And that’s really my biggest problem with all this. That the complaining isn’t really complaining, it’s preaching and it’s often baseless. If you’re legitimately offended by any of this stuff, I really do think that’s fine. But if you just want to protect the less-refined masses, then it doesn’t make any more sense to me than censorship.

Yesterday Business Insider published AOL’s leaked “master plan.” I haven’t yet figured out how to navigate BI’s slide show labyrinth (patent pending, I’m sure) to find the actual document(s), but the gist seems to be that AOL is going to produce a couple thousand pieces of content per day, at a rate of 5-10 per creator, with a focus on SEO and a hard reliance on pageviews as its metric of success. Say what you will about how creative or ethical you might think this is, that doesn’t really interest me. What does interest me is how this knowledge can be exploited.

In any competition, having more information about other players’ motives strictly dominates having less. That is to say, it’s always beneficial to know more about what other people or companies in your market are doing since it gives you the opportunity to ignore that information or act on it. Now we know more about AOL’s strategy and there are a couple key things that people trying to get coverage from AOL publications can exploit.

I think this is really valuable to people who work in PR in two ways.

1. Any organization that relies on a large number of people doing a large number of things is inevitably going to struggle with internal communication. Ordinarily it’s very tough to get repeated attention from a single media outlet; in other words, it’s really hard to get TechCrunch to write about you 10 times in a month, which you’d like to do because it decreases the unit cost of learning how they work, what they like and how to pitch them. With hundreds of reporters writing hundreds of stories per month, AOL’s staff is hardly going to have time to chew their lunch, let alone cross check who has covered whom. It’s going to be much easier to double (or triple or quadruple) dip in multiple press hits on AOL properties, all of which are motivated by the same high level goals of SEO and pageviews. Let’s say the upfront cost of researching how to pitch a new outlet takes 5 pieces of coverage to recoup — on TechCrunch that might take 2 years, on AOL you might be able to do that in 3 weeks.
2. PR is a historically difficult idea to get companies to rally around when they’re early-stage, resource-limited and engineering-driven. PR is notoriously difficult to measure and relies on a lot of soft value props like “branding” that make anyone who knows how to use Vim want to shoot anyone who likes writing emails. With AOL producing content and making decisions based on pageviews and SEO — hard metrics and measurable tactics that any news.ycombinator reader can appreciate — the internal pitch to invest in PR is a little easier. If AOL is measuring their success by things that you like, you get a bit of associative property help in justifying its existence (PR, not AOL).

If I were doing PR right now, I’d be turning a lot of attention to understanding AOL as it grows into Tim Armstrong’s army of bloggers.

This blog post mentions a small app I wrote to do some testing. If you want to download it, it’s available on Github here.

Messaging and positioning

Three weeks ago I took a look at our messaging and positioning for my new company, Insidr. In other words, I had to figure out how to optimally present our company and product: the words to use, the example to cite, the feelings to emote, etc. I wanted to be very analytical about it and arm myself (and my team) with as much data as possible to inform decisions (and let us call bullshit when needed). What follows is the process I used, from start to finish, to make an analytical decision about an emotional question.

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