fuzzing the lines between tech, policy, design, data and organizing, but really just trying to help solve some problems.
techpolicy / UX / design / data / dataviz / visualization / urbanplanning / civic / opensource.
TLDR: Georgia’s List — https://groups.google.com/g/ga-list
I work in user experience design and research in the internet freedom/tech policy space. The jobs and resources will majority be from that ecosystem, and most of my advice is going to be about finding a job in the civic tech / public interest tech ecosystem. If that’s not what you are looking for, this is less likely to be helpful to you.
Finding a job is harder than it should be.
Most go-to stats, aren’t really stats anymore, they are sound bytes, but the tldr is that many jobs (most jobs?) are found via people’s networks. Some people frame this as “networking,” but I’ve always understood it as finding out about positions and applying to roles via degrees of connections in people’s networks.
There are a few reasons, but a big one is that there are a lot of people, lots of different types of work, and it can be hard to describe work in a way that actually connects you to the people you need. Also information is hard to navigate on the internet, and advertizing your job well means spending money or hiring people in ways that can lead to you getting too many applicants for a job. Long story short, it’s a many to many problem, and so any signal we can get in any way helps us to navigate resumes, applications, people etc. To be clear — I’m not saying that this is good, I’m just describing the reality of the challenge of the problem. This is why there are people who specialize in every part of this process — recruiting, placement, writing job decriptions, etc etc. Obviously, this is problematic and is a major factor with diversity issues in organizations and fields.
At the moment (Dec 2023), AI is adding complexity and making things worse, with people using AI to write cover letters and workshop resume language, and on the hiring side, AI being used to review resumes, even while we know there are bias issues in the models.
Ultimately, what it also means is that just applying to anything and everything isn’t what works most of the time, and finding your way to your curated resource, talking to people, or reaching out for referrals can be some of the best ways to actually get a job.
What this also means, is that if you can pay this forward to others, you should. If we all helped share and spread job postings, we expand the networks and reach and start to actually have more diverse networks connected to each others.
A long time ago, I used to try to match people to jobs. I’m on a lot of mailing lists, and so a lot of jobs cross my inboxes. People also know that I know a lot of people from diverse backgrounds, so I get sent a lot of positions to pass along. About 10 years ago, I couldn’t handle the scale anymore, and I wanted to enable people to just share jobs, so I setup a Google Group out of necessity. I don’t want this to be a job for me, I see this as a way I can support people in the community and some day when I need the help, people will be there for me. Though every once in awhile I joke about actually creating my own recruiting firm… Not in the plans at the moment, but you never know!
Also! Somewhere along the way, we stopped teaching people about how to get jobs, how to search, what the process is like, how to make resumes. We seem to think that the internet has the answer for folks, but that makes a lot of assumptions, e.g. that people know how to search, what they are searching for, that the advice is good, and generally applicable, and that everyone can find the one resource they need to solve their problem. But there are major gaps in this logic! The hiring environment and ecosystem changes constantly, major world events, like say, a pandemic, totally change the paradigm, new field emerge and have really different flows as new titles permeate organzations and job postings, AND lastly, I’ve yet to see a good resource on the fact that a lot of people’s best work experiences are in the non-glamrous jobs that we don’t always want to include, e.g. service and retail work, where we learn the basics of dealing with people, being detail oriented, showing up consistently to shifts, being a part of a team without getting to know everyone, working through new things without a lot of mentorship and support, etc. If someone has a good resource on how to frame work experience in service and retail work, please send it over and I’ll add it to the list.
I recently stumbled across the term “job fairy”[1] and decided to adopt it and I’m so happy to have found a term that someone else uses to do what I also try to do! She has a whole patreon style system and is way more organized than me, but I’m adopting the term, writing this page up, and trying to put more out that’s helpful to folks, again to try to help and scale, so that more folks can find jobs. I do this in my spare time, so if you find this valuable, consider buying me a coffee or donating to my organization, Superbloom Design.
If you are looking, hiring, also a node in the network of networks, please subscribe, and do your part to spread the word. Feel free to share this list with others.
I work in user experience design and research in the internet freedom/tech policy space. The jobs and resources will majority be from that ecosystem, and most of my advice is going to be about finding a job in the civic tech / public interest tech ecosystem. If that’s not what you are looking for, this is less likely to be helpful to you.
I often meet with folks to try to help talk through issues they are having, questions they have, resources that might be useful. I usually learn about good resources as part of this, and try to add those to the list.
[1] from Rachel Meade Smith