This past week, I was part of an interview caucus at work. In these, all of the folks who interviewed a given candidate get together to make a decision as to whether to make an offer to a candidate. Each candidate at our company is typically interviewed by 5 or more people, including a mix of technical staff and executive staff. Makes for a long stint for the candidate, but at the end of it, we’ve gotten a good sense of them and they’ve gotten a good sense of us.

Our “victim” this week was a solid contributor at his previous company who was recommended by some of our current team who’d worked with him previously. I had some concerns, though – through no fault of his, his current company wasn’t really doing anything that we’d consider particularly relevant, from a technology perspective. He’d actually argued for using more current technologies, and had eventually decided to leave based at least partially on this problem. All good, so far. The challenge was that he couldn’t tell me how he was scratching his “geek itch” outside of work, since work wasn’t doing it for him. Reading blogs? Doing some coding on the side? Couldn’t even get him to give me a list of the things he _wished_ he was doing. No extra effort to get more current, other than to raise a concern with his company that he wasn’t staying current.

All of this boils down to me to a “watch what I do, not what I say I wanna do” sort of lesson. He says he wants to be more current, but isn’t doing anything about it. I called out that attribute in the caucus. And now I’m feeling accountable to myself to a bit more. Working on an OSCON brief right now, so surveying my topic and making sure all of my points look like they’ll hang together technically. Plan to poke a few components of my brief and really push ’em to their bounds, whether or not my topic is accepted. [Desperately hoping it’s accepted… need to push myself technically, and show a few more women up there, all in one fell swoop.] Looking to build these geek opportunities into my regular work-life, as well, since I’ve become more of a team enabler and leader than technical contributor over the past year.

Oh, by the way, see what I do not just what I say is spilling over into the rest of my thinking, too… called someone else on it in the work world, but I see it hitting my Christian walk, my fitness approach, my interaction with my kids and my hubby, …. starting to feel like I need to be careful when I open my mouth!