Ep. 008 of Underserved, The geek shall inherit the earth

Underserved

Andrew Gelina

Society & Culture, Technology

5.0 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2019

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Robert "Swifty" Swift (LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-swift-2094774/ ) A.K.A "Nixon" has been a fixture of the Boston geek community for decades. An engineer turned recruiter by day, in his free time Robert has been to most cons, gaming gatherings, LARPs, and D&D sessions in the 617. Robert serves up his top phone, Skype, and in-person interview tips and then shares his off-the-clock experiences, providing an exclusive look into the social underbelly of the Boston tech scene.

Arisia: Boston’s Oldest Sci-fi Convention https://arisia.org/
The Ig-Nobel Prizes, Presented by real scientists who run a hobby Magazine the AoIR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annals_of_Improbable_Research
The Convention Competition to Arisia.org is of course Boskone! https://www.boskone.org/
The Insanely Popular D&D Weekly Live Show “Critical Role” https://critrole.com/
The Matt Mercer effect https://www.geeknative.com/68009/what-is-the-matt-mercer-effect/
The New Popularity of D&D https://tinyurl.com/y2vl5kp9
Paizo’s game “Pathfinder” created the first Competitor to D&D ever, https://paizo.com/pathfinder
Types of LARPs https://thelarplife.wordpress.com/2015/06/10/types-of-larps/
Local US “Best” LARP manufacturer https://www.b3is.com/
and his LARP Store near Worcester MA https://larpbox.com/
The SCA https://sca.org/
Gaming Stores in Boston that Swifty goes to: http://www.pandemoniumbooks.com/ https://www.battlegroundgames.com/
And the Adventure Pub, Boardgame café in Arlington, MA https://theadventurepub.com/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to this week's edition of Underserved, the podcast for the rest of the tech industry.
0:12.4	I'm your host Andrew
0:13.8	Julyna. Today I am joined by Robert Swift also known as Swiftie or Nixon by
0:19.6	certain folks. We'll hear those stories later. a senior technical recruiter at
0:23.9	seerings consulting Robert welcome
0:29.4	thank you very much we've talked to Colin who also does recruiting at CERrings,
0:34.5	but you've been in the trenches
0:35.8	and you have an interesting angle.
0:36.9	Didn't you used to actually be an engineer once upon a time?
0:40.8	Yeah, you know, the 90s was fun for everybody. I did a computer science minor at Stonehill. That was back in the days when hobbyists people were still building PCs to you know run stuff on them and the intercollegiate network was just coming up and coming around.
0:56.6	So...
0:57.6	The interwebs?
0:58.6	Yes, it became the interwebs by the time I graduated school and started goofing around and people were talking about,
1:05.5	you know, who had the coolest email address.
1:07.4	Yeah, whether or not you had like a dot org or a dot edu or a dot com. Yeah I totally had a dot org. So yeah I mean I left got into
1:19.0	tech late working for a couple investment firms doing their big rip printing stuff where take a normal person, you know, a week or two to build a book and I could take it all from data and do it in about 15 minutes and then ship it to Austria or some place and only investment firms could have formed that stuff back in the day but now print in the on demand is is how everyone prints.
1:43.4	There's very little of that other type stuff and I moved from that into
1:47.7	being a network engineer, did networking, you know I'm a cable and a hands-on guy so I can do my own cat 5.
1:57.0	Right around the time that I started doing complex stuff with Windows OS and Linux, I moved into product deployments and unfortunately as a geek because I could string sentences together the companies that I was working for pushed me into pre-sales engineering and then the dreaded sales.
2:14.6	Killer, killer of engineering careers.
2:19.5	You know, I know a lot of guys I went to high school with and that I knew from you mass that were
2:24.9	engineers that ended up in sales engineering and kind of developed that outgoing side of their
	...

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