Implications of Your Internet Footprint

Recently, I was made aware of a present-day practice by some employers to research potential employees by examining what they find on the Internet. Curiosity led me to investigate the nature of my own Internet footprint. I found the usual suspects, such as this blog and a few patents that I had authored. But, I also discovered a few things that I had forgotten about, including an article that I wrote for a print publication, some photographs, and bug reports that I had submitted. I soon found myself wondering, in the unlikelihood of a change in my job status, whether my Internet footprint accurately reflects what I want to convey to prospective employers, and their customers, or in the case of self employment, what I would prefer to convey to my own customers. How well does your Internet Footprint fit you?

If you do your own search, you will probably discover that you have either no Internet presence, or that your presence reflects only a small facet of your professional life. For those of you about to start your careers, I am hoping that you will have posted your resume for others to find. For others of you, who consistently post to forums or write blogs, your presence may already be a fair size.

Some of us, whose names are uncommon, have an advantage over those whose names are shared by other people. I myself have found my name associated with an organization that has a vested interest in dogs, specifically terriers, but this belongs to another person, not me. Perhaps we all need a distinguishing pseudonym, or we could use our everyday name paired with a second name in another language, such as in Mandarin or Inuit.

As consumers, we have the ability to research prospective contractors, such as interior designers, personal investors, and even tool providers. The ability to read someone’s blog allows us to discover a little about the attitudes, and personality of the person, which gives us the ability to foresee the potential of being able to interact with the person, and of forming a long term relationship with the supplier.

Your Internet footprint could either be a minimal one, or it could contain many of the things that you have accomplished so far in your career, as well as your interests and hobbies. The competitive nature of the hiring process will continue to feed the growth of on-line personae, and having a presence may eventually become a necessity. We all need to ask ourselves what kind of footprint would be more successful in getting our foot in someone else’s door.

The software development tools that we use are also a factor. WDSC is built on top of the Eclipse platform, which allows for the integration of many different tools, such that team members with various skill sets are able to create and manage artifacts for different types of applications, such as terminal, web and rich client applications. This flexibility and diversity is attractive to prospective new hires who would prefer to advertise the fact that they have become experts with an extensive set of Eclipse based tooling rather than with older terminal based tools.

WDSC gives employers who develop terminal based applications an advantage in attracting new talent of the personal computer era, who are naturally more adept at using Eclipse based tools, and who could use the tools to extend existing applications to the web, or rich client. Eclipse, being public open source software, enables newcomers to contribute ideas, requirements and code, with the automatic benefit of increasing a person’s Internet footprint. This is the kind of footprint that the latest working generation wants and needs to have. They would like their friends to know that they are using modern, leading edge tools, and that their experience will become broader and richer as their tools encompass newer technologies.

As tool providers, we as a group are obligated to creating, and updating a compelling set of tools for the newer working generations to use. The path may not be as painless as any of us would like, but I know that I, along with many others, will be contributing to our own on-line reflection of ourselves. And so, perhaps, should you.