[PREV - BY_LINK_CHAIN]    [TOP]

DREAM_CRITIC

                                             November 14, 2020

I have occasional dreams where someone is being
critical of me, where it seems to me-- typically     In one dream, a woman
both in the the dream and out of it-- that the       who evidently didn't
criticism might very well be worth listening to.     know me by sight was
                                                     saying: "That guy Joseph
In a recent dream: I'd just been                     Brenner is *such* an
through a gauntlet of job interviews                 arrogant blowhard!  If
at a company, and I was packing up my                he really wanted to know
stuff, getting ready to leave--                      something, he'd study
                                                     the code for the linux
Evidently, this was some sort of start-up still      [inaudible] subsystem!"
in it's casual phase-- lots of work was being
done at crowded tables in an open plan office.          I woke up thinking
It's fairly unrealistic, but it seems that some         "wait, *what* is
management/hr functions taking place out in the         it I need to study?"
open, so I could overhear a discussion about how
I did in the job interviews...

    So, the woman in management/hr was sitting at
    a desk, talking to another woman, an engineer
    of some sort who had interviewed me.  I was at
    an open table behind the engineer: the manager         My dream critics
    could certainly see me, but evidently the              are often female.
    engineer didn't know I was there.

    The manager clearly liked me, and I gather she
    thought the engineer would certainly like me
    also. The manager evidently thought it would
    be cute to ask the engineer her opinion about
    me while I was still in earshot.

        Like I said, this is improbably unprofessional but
        then traditionally Silicon Valley has been full of
        amateurs improvising: you get unusual behavior now
        and then.

    The engineer began coldly stepping through the
    problems she had with me, giving a blunt
    description of my performance.  While I covered
    some things well, she complained that I couldn't
    seem to give a linear answer to a question, and
    was constantly indulging in irrelevant asides--
    actually she said something about "embarrassing"
    asides, which had me wondering what she meant.

    I wanted to go up to her and apologise for overhearing
    but to thank her for her remarks-- you're not often
    allowed to get this kind of negative feedback-- but
    "then I woke up".


    Actually it made sense to me that a certain kind of
    techie could react really badly to my tendency to
    free-associate and babble about different things--

    Myself, I might think I'm getting at the real,
    underlying issues, but if you don't believe there
    *are* any such underlying issues this could be
    baffling, and in the worst case, it could sound like
    I'm ducking the problem.

    And I might think it's interesting and amusing to
    discuss old mistakes and problems I'd run into on
    similar tasks, but a different sort of person just
    might hear me embarassing myself for no good reason.




--------
[NEXT - NEXT]