My perfect job - a culture evangelist

14 May 2005

The question I always get asked at interviews is “What’s your perfect job?” Hypothetical questions annoy me at the best of times; because if I were working in that situation the problem would never have existed in the first place. Or, at least, would not have escalated to the proportions stated in the question. Alas, an answer is necessary.

So, for the record, my perfect job is a "Culture Evangelist."

Never heard of it? Neither had I until I heard the words roll off my tongue. Allow me to explain.

Companies spend a lot of money marketing themselves to others. They also spend a lot of money on recruitment consultants and headhunters. When the industry is technology based, these two target groups of people are largely the same. That is, they’re trying to attract “geeks.” This is a group known as “people with values” and are the hardest to advertise to. However, there is a very simple way to make contact with them… through other geeks. Some major companies have realised this, Red Hat and Google among them.
Red Hat hire so many Linux Kernel programmers that they do, in effect, control a large part of the Linux development process. This gives big business the security they want when buying a Linux solution (as Red Hat can point to specific people who will solve their problems). This move also promotes the company through personal signatures and blogs of their employees, and provides a good feeling in the community when they see intelligent, clueful, people working on the software they themselves want to use. Geek trust is so hard to attain, and personal geek accountability goes a long way to achieve this. A million marketers and their promotions budget, can not achieve what one geek can with a well-worded blog entry on how they improved their product. Replete with technical details.

Google, on the other hand, allow employees to work for 20% of their time (1 day in every week) on personal projects. This is a very geek-friendly policy, and means that every geek on the planet wants to work for them. Google recruitment no longer needs to be pro-active; they can just sit back and watch the best CVs from all over the world flood in. Consequently, they’ll have the best choice of the best people in the world without paying anyone to find them.

So back to the “Culture Evangelists.”

A culture evangelist is one that is employed by a company largely to work on his (or her) own personal projects. Their skill is that they are clueful people that other people can look to for answers and/or inspiration. They will generally be bloggers, authors or other community figures. They maintain full ownership over each of their projects, but are obliged to mention their company in the documentation. This is similar to the patronage monarchs bestowed on composers in the 1700 and 1800’s. Typical projects of the culture evangelist could range from book reviews, to mailing list activity, to various source forge projects, or books and articles.

As their work, whatever it may be, disseminates through Slashdot, NTK, The Register and the like, their company gets brownie points for hiring a clueful person (which attracts others), a higher Google rank due to the increase in links to their site, and kudos and awareness for the company and product in general.

I suggest that a grade 1 culture evangelist would spend 1 day a week on personal projects, which could ramp up to a grade 5, according to time with company and/or successful projects.

So if someone wants to hire me, my perfect job is a culture evangelist. Ok?