Morrie the Toupee Salesman

Sometimes I think I’m the most trained person in the world. Along with 3 degrees, and a real strong effort towards a fourth (terminal) degree, I’ve taken a whole slew of management and technical courses over the years. Before Christmas Expedia sent me to 2 day long sessions about providing feedback to employees, something the laughable (and anonymous) comment here reminded me of. Just for the record, there was never any attempt made in providing feedback to me at digg (not a single performance review, something that would at the very least have demonstrated competent leadership — otherwise terrifically hard to spot at Digg HQ), just somehow somebody decided I wasn’t worth developing. Perhaps its the over-40 thing, people often think that someone of my age can’t learn, even after I provided credible evidence to the contrary, perhaps it was because any review would have been dominated by the founder-like things I did. Or perhaps it was just greed (that’s where I’d put my bet).

Digg wasn’t terribly big on the training front, though they did put me into one course. I was lucky enough to add to my grab bag of “professional development” classes (which have included such weirdness as “Beginning Autocad Usage” and “Real Time Software Development in C”, Media Training. They brought in a former journalist, now wearing a probably much more lucrative hat, to teach us how to best deal with aggressive reporters who sometimes distort the facts. I only really remember one thing, and for some reason it comes to mind today, the day that Digg announced layoffs. “Don’t lie to the press.” Not sure why.

Incidentally I’ve also been on the other side of the podium quite a bit, having taught at the University of Manitoba, along with a few professional development classes of my own, and I did test prep for Kaplan once upon a time (the primary qualification for that last job is, of course, high scores on standardized tests). But I’ll leave my teaching experiences for another post.