[CLUE-Talk] Marketing Your Linux Skills

[Nate Duehr]

Jed S. Baer wrote:

> Neither. Just the 2 cent summary of the article.
> 
> But, I actually did an eval of various HR packages once while I was on the
> bench for a consulting firm. What has already been pointed out by others
> is absolutely true. The nearly de-riguer format for HR mgmt. packages is
> Word. Think about it. M$ provides an API for Office formats, so SW vendors
> can use VBA, or MFC to diddle with it. I wouldn't be surprised if the
> various APIs actually make it easier to deal with Word than plain text.
> 
> BTW, there are lots of people now who don't know what "plain text" means
> -- they never work with it. In fact, they think that what they're looking
> at in their word processor is plain text. Note that even if OpenOffice,
> when you look at the prefs, they refer to word-processor documents as
> "text documents". I've asked people to send stuff via e-mail as plain
> text, and gotten Word documents in reply. As a further example of this
> type of thinking, I once received an event schedule as an Excel
> spreadsheet. It was at most a half-page of sparse text. Nobody at the
> originating organization could understand why this was an issue.
> 
> But, to get to the core of your question, it's an indication of the
> self-reinforcing ubiquity of M$. Regrettably, for the job-hunter, the
> question is whether you can afford to have your resume tossed out merely
> because of the format.
> 
> I'd love to turn my aging Win95 box into a Linux playground. But as Angelo
> pointed out, OpenOffice still isn't good enough. So, I keep the old thing
> around mainly to run Word97.

I'd contend that OpenOffice is plenty good for something as simple as a 
Resume' is supposed to be.  If you're using features that OO doesn't 
have, your resume' is waaaaay too complex... and no one is going to 
bother to ever read the entire thing.

It sounds like you mixed two topics... OO not being 100% capable of 
doing OTHER types of documents you need, and the Resume' discussion.

For those that are reading along, please don't get the impression that 
OO can't handle resume's -- unless Jed disagrees with this comment for 
some reason.  Jed?

In business today, Word (the word processor) gets used for e-mail 
formatting, and Excel (the spreadsheet) gets used for technical 
documentation -- with a few pretty pictures from Visio thrown in -- 
mainly because Word's methods for page layout and tables are so horrid.

It's amazing anyone ever gets anything done using software in that 
manner... (GRIN).

C'est la vie!

Remember, in most cases, the people who can't be bothered with knowing 
how their computers actually work are probably the people hiring you to 
be the "Computer Person".  Knowing your audience is important...

Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com