A tip for those who may be looking for employment:

When the job application says "Send me an email with samples, or a link to your portfolio", DO so!

I posted an ad on CGTalk cause they were free until the 31st of October, looking for a new artist for Ice Cream Showdown, and 90% of the applicants just used the default portfolio submission tool instead of sending me a personlized email with the information I requested in the ad, and a whopping 50% had portfolios which consisted of some text telling me about how skilled they were, and their email address, and NO LINK TO ANY ARTWORK.

I am a busy man.*

I cannot be bothered replying to every applicant's email asking them to send me a link to their portfolio which I already asked them to do in the job ad!

If you can't follow the simplest of directions then I have no use for you! If I were printing these applications out, I would take delight in the noise they produced as they went through my shredder, if I owned one!

(* This is a lie.)

Include an up to date CV with references. You are no better than your last job.

Venting isn't a tip. :) jk

I thought to include your work was common sense. Oh well, guess Voltaire was right that "common sense is not so common."

Assume the human to be dumb like a bread or worse so that the few exceptions can surprise you :)

It amazed me awhile back when I had to interview for my replacement when I was leaving a job. Most of the people who came for interviews hadn't even looking at the website, and half of them phoned for directions when we'd already given them the address. They were applying to be a technical support analyst with good working knowledge of tonnes of different applications, so in theory, they should be smart.

At an interview I had to ask somebody 3 times if I could take a look at their portfolio - it was clasped tightly between their legs. In the end he gloomily said, "Suppose so."

Scary thought of the day: Imagine how dumb the average person is...

...Now consider that half the people out there are dumber than that.

Go to any American school -- colleges and universities included -- and you'll find this is very true. Especially many of my classmates.

Good thing about the american schools - you pass without any effort and can instead focus your learning on more meaningful things than school agenda.

Even I got a diploma from the states but i was only visiting that school temporarily and wasn't entitled to a diploma ... nobody noticed that little circumstance when it came to handing out diplomas to the masses ... lol

Its the same over here in the UK, I got a diploma in IT by simply knowing how to send an email, use a spreadsheet and word processor.

xlsior, that's not the scary thought, that's the secret to power.

Looks like some Ratboys have the gift of discernment! It's simply the commodity of the whole political merry-go-round that dare not speak its name. It's not even worth marvelling at.

We had a good laugh the day my friend got his CV out in the pub. He was quite perplexed by the fact that he had made plenty of applications but got no interviews.

The CV itself was four A4 sides of condensed text. No headings, paragraphs or margins, and the opening line read 'Having been made redundant from my last job..'

as you know most autistic people have a numerical gift of some kind its freaky

well the smarter one gets the dumber s/he apears to get
i thankfully avoid meeting the students of cambridge, those that arnt upper class twits or should that be tw@'s that fit the eton/oxbridge stereotype, seem to be the kind youd find in any uk university although with a bit more money and maybe still named tarquin.

but i have met a few former students who frequent the rock/goth club i used to go to when i wasnt heading for work the time these people were going home.
one knew a guy studying high maths complex algebra type stuff (dont ask me i have to get out a calculator to find out how old i am these days)
yet he had to fall back on his bar job knowledge to work out simple sums and every calculation started with £

and another guy i went on a one day course with seemed to have his brain full to overflowing as each time the tutor said something he'd be muttering to himself as if hes making way by getting rid of some useless info he picked up (like the nutritional information on the side of a cerial box)

It just proves that being educated is not the same as being intelligent.

One can be educated and unintelligent, uneducated but intelligent, or, like me, both educated and intelligent. ;)

My home country - the UK - has a culture of anti-intellectualism. Ignorance and uncivilised behaviour is celebrated. Anyone who is either educated or intelligent risks being labeled "stuck up" or "too good for the likes of us". To be safe it's best to present yourself as being both uneducated and unintelligent, this way people will think that you are "street wise", "down to earth", and "keeping it real".

There's something I have no trouble with ;-)


We've recently been recruiting, so I set a Java test (part multiple choice, part written) for the prospective candidates. I was actually worried that I may have made it too easy, but in the end the average results for the multiple-choice section was only 64%.

I at least expected one or two people to "walk it"...
Time to lower my expectations, I guess.

wanna post that test?

I wouldn't mind knowing how well I'd fair :)