Interview with someone who designs languages for a living.

When I was 13, I designed my own language. Since I didn’t care about or pay attention in school*, I did most of it in class.

It took a few months. Having a consistent and flexible grammar was really important to me, so I spent a lot of time working on that in particular.

I decided to combine ideograms and a phonetic alphabet, and use a wide range of sounds (40) from languages as diverse as Navajo and Frisian.

I even concocted my own proto-language so etymology made some sort of sense, though that was a bit overkill I figured out later.

Anyway, at the end of it all I ended up with a language that 99% of English speakers couldn’t even hear some of the important phones therein, and which they couldn’t read, and which couldn’t be easily explained because most people accustomed to phonetic alphabets don’t get ideograms and combining them with a phonetic alphabet…well, let’s just say it was a powerful language, but not easy.

But what I liked about it is that the most common couple hundred phrases or so could be written as one character, and it still had all the power of a phonetic alphabet, with neither way of doing things being superior.

*I once spent two months in a class, and didn’t even know what class I was taking. I had never seen the book and though I did the assignments (sort of), they were so easy that I had no idea what the subject was in specific.

What it looks like when someone with training fights people who have none.

The guy knocks the second dude out with one left hook.

Without knowing what was being said, it’s hard to know who was the instigator. Remember, when two people are threatening you (as is likely from the evidence), it doesn’t pay to be timid.

The guy doing all the dominating looks like he had standard boxing training, not krav maga or other similar martial arts. He uses very effective, well-aimed punches (most people with no training miss more than they hit due to adrenaline).

By the way, he deliberately misses with the kick at the end as he wasn’t sure if the second guy was disabled or not. He was already kicking when he turned around, but once he realized that the second dude was no longer a threat he pulled the kick up so as to miss, showing his goal was mostly to disable his potential attackers and get out of there.

I don’t have much comment directly on this topic, though for lower-tier jobs not requiring a lot of hard-won domain-specific experience I think it is true.

However, one of the commenters got me thinking about how often employers in IT search for a specific set of skills, so much so that it is truly unreasonable.

For instance, a few months ago I saw a job post on a site about how the company was looking for someone with a VMWare Certified Professional 5 certification, and that those with only VCP 4 certification would not be considered (or wording to that effect).

I am an expert in VMWare ESXi from version 4 to 5.5. There is nothing that I can’t do with that product range. I know nearly everything there is to know about it. Without exaggeration or bragging, out of IT people who work with it, I’m probably in the top one percent (one of the few products I can say that about as I tend to be a generalist in most areas and am probably rarely even in the top 30 percent or above).

Yet I only have a VCP 4 certification at the moment, and hadn’t planned on getting my cert for 5.

And the reason is that VMWare ESXi version 4 and 5 really aren’t all that different. You could explain the differences to an eight-year-old in about 15 minutes. The average IT worker could learn them in 30 seconds.

I glanced at a chart for 5-6 seconds and knew all of them.

For those not in the techie world, it’d be like adding a few commas to a book and telling someone they had to read it again as they knew nothing about it and actually hadn’t even read it, even though they’d just finished it the day before.

That’s how stupid that job ad is.

I can’t really explain it, as that can’t be blamed on HR which is my usual bugaboo. No, some techie who should know better had to write something that specific and inane.

I’m not surprised that employers hurt potential employees with ridiculous requirements that make no real-world sense. That’s just the way of the world now. What does surprise me is that employers hurt themselves at the same time, without seeming to understand it at all.