Sunday, early, everyone still asleep. An old memory turned up uninvited. Or maybe invited. The paper had a piece yesterday about graduates, hundreds of letters out, machines reading every one of them, no interviews at the end. I didn't finish it. I didn't need to.
Years ago, a place that moved a lot of money very fast. Small job, build a prototype nobody could describe yet. The man - nice guy, terrible tie - looked at my CV and said it out loud: you're overqualified.
I felt the heat crawl up my neck. I said what he needed was someone critical, and someone who had shipped a product from a spec that didn't exist. I'd done that a lot. It's most of what I've ever done. He hired me on the spot, and I've liked that answer too much ever since, which is usually the tell. (I've told it at enough parties that the Mrs. now mouths the punchline along with me, just to throw me off.)
So did the clever hire stay clever? Months later they wanted to fire a developer. Too slow. By the numbers, he was. I sat with him and read his work, and the numbers turned over: he rewrote everything he touched because he couldn't leave bad code standing. He wasn't slow. He was in the wrong seat. We moved him to testing, the people who catch the mistakes before the customers do. There, not being able to stand a flaw is the whole job. He was good at it.
Here's the part that kept me at the kitchen table this morning. Nobody advertises for the thing that got me hired. There's no line item for it, no rate card, so I've spent twenty years being paid for the job next to it. I read that man in an hour because I had the same problem and never noticed.
Twenty years. My shoulders went up and stayed there, like someone had read out a bill.
Anyway. Somebody's moving upstairs, so the hour is up. Kettle on for two, and no more telling that story at parties. Probably…
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson