Great Tech Career Advice from Fake (And Possibly Murderous) Podcasters

I recently spent a weekend in NYC with my wife and some good friends of ours, and as luck would have it, they lived just a couple short blocks (VERY short blocks if you're from Washington, DC) from the building where they shoot the dark comedy "Only Murders in the Building" with Martin Short, Selena Gomez and Steve Martin. As a fan of true crime, my wife adores this show. As a fan of podcasting and gorgeous architecture, I went along with her to take a picture in front of the edifice, like a couple of absolute Gray's Papaya eating, I Love NY hat wearing tourists.

While we were freezingly repositioning ourselves for the perfect selfie, I couldn't help reminding myself of a scene and piece of advice Cinda Canning, the insufferable podcast star of the true crime series "All Is Not Ok in Oklahoma" -- and one who is a suspect in a murderous plot -- once confides to her endlessly put-upon personal assistant, who is yearning to do something more fulfilling on the show:

"Don’t be too good at a job you don’t want."

As someone who has been involved in developing, configuring, architecting and maintaining the ever-changing stacks of the "it" Internet IT technology of the day - p.s. "how many i's and t's can I write in a sentence that makes sense?" - it never occurred to me until recently how much that statement rings true for me. Don't get me wrong - I love the challenge of making complex systems all come together in an intricate puzzle that draws on 25 years of coding and architectural knowledge to do the barely possible. But I'm equally pleased to make that happen according to my original budget estimates, to convince stakeholders of the necessity of making it happen to further their business goals, to ensure that the folks working under me are proud of their work and have the confidence in the integrity of the product, so that they can go home to their families and relax when the day is done. The hard truth is that when you are good at both tech and business, it's easy and comfortable for those in pure management who don't understand the tech to pigeonhole you into what they can't do, rather than what you might just do better than them.

So please, to the recruiters out there: the next time you find a candidate that checks off all the boxes on the the list of skills you got from the job description, submit them for the same open position at the organization that's meant to manage them. They might just make a better candidate.