My Pet Peeves, Twitter Edition

Edit: The things I used to complain about.

Originally posted March 2, 2010 on AIXchange

I’m not looking for work, but I know several people who are, so I like to keep an eye on AIX opportunities and pass along relevant leads to the job seekers I know. One thing that I’ve noticed with AIX job notices that are posted on Twitter: The posts seldom mention a crucial little detail, that being the location of these jobs.

For instance, I’ll see something like:

“AIX Admin wanted, check out this Web site.”

But there’s no mention of where the job is located. You’re forced to visit the Web site — and then, oftentimes, to register on the Web site — to obtain that information.

It shouldn’t be that complicated. Tell us whether you’re looking for a full-time employee or a contractor. Tell us the requirements. Give us the contact information.

And definitely tell us where this job is. Other than in the unlikely event that an employer is willing to provide significant compensation for relocation expenses, an employment opportunity in the U.K. probably won’t interest many job seekers in the U.S., and vice versa. So why not clearly state, “U.K. AIX admin wanted,” so people can easily see if the job is realistically worth pursuing?

Obviously plenty of folks are looking for work these days. If you’re a recruiter, don’t you want to make it as easy as possible for job seekers in your area to reach you?

As I’ve mentioned, I like Twitter and I think it can be a valuable business tool. But here’s another thing I see on Twitter that bugs me: Someone will tweet something, and then I’ll get re-tweets from 20 other people saying the same thing. Maybe it’s on me for not knowing how to filter redundant information, but I know it’s a waste of time to see identical tweets, sometimes over a period of days.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Recently, the aix-l mailing list had a discussion about converting a filesystem from JFS to JFS2.

The discussion concluded with this answer:

“Just found out this can be done on AIX 6.1 with the -T option from alt_disk_copy. So IBM must be supporting it on AIX 6.1 now.”

Later that day, and the next day, I was inundated with tweets about this very same thing. At least some helpfully included pointers to related information on publib.

Certainly it’s good information. I guess I just need a way to better filter it without having to see it 30 times. Seriously, if there’s a way to filter comments in Twitter, please leave a message in the Comments section. I need to know.