It started with a tweet from Toxic “Machinima” Menges, Linden Lab are looking for a community manager. The successful candidate will need to know how to use Twitter, as well as having an awesome blog. They will also need to be happy, which right away makes me deeply suspicious, shiny happy people laughing, it can’t possibly be good for morale.
Joking aside, this is one of a few interesting job vacancies being advertised on Linden Lab’s Careers page.We’ve had some good community people in Second Life, Blondin for example, who was pretty damn awesome, then there was Amanda, who ended up being Blondin’s boss, I’m not sure what happened to Amanda, there was a bit of controversy but I liked her because she could be quite blunt when needed, so could Pink, whom I also admired from afar, not generally when I was talking to her, but you know, needs must, you can’t play the seeker of truth and justice and be biased in favour of the management! I’m going off on a tangent, back on track!
Other eye catching vacancies include:
Customer Relations Representative – Technical support side of matters by the look of it and making sure technical support and engineers talk to each other. I work in technical support, getting techies to talk to support is a challenge, trust me, techies often like to fix things, they don’t always like talking, indeed some of them like sitting in darkened rooms with the heating set very cold and mumble at you, whereas support requires an ability to be called names and not take it to heart and then call the techies names for not talking to you.
Director Of Customer Support – Looking after lots of aspects of customer relations and technical support, they could cut out the middle man here and hire Cyn, or Robin, or Catherine, although I’m not sure how much experience they have in some of the required fields, all three of them quite frankly rock …. ok so I confess that’s not a qualification for such an important position but come on, bring them back! I know Cyn wasn’t the most communicative of directors outwardly and that Catherine appeared to have a shoe fetish, but there’s room for people of that calibre and experience. Robin certainly has lots of game industry experience.
Virtual Currency manager – This one is interesting to say the least. this is specific to the Linden Dollar, hmmm, what are they planning here? This is the sort of thing Zee would have been involved in back in the day but I don’t think it’s at the sort of scale Zee was at in terms of management structure.
The responsibilities of the virtual currency manager include initiatives to monetise Linden Dollar activity with a long term view, that is, interesting! There are lots of other interesting responsibilites for all the positions but I chickened out of copying and pasting them in case I get in trouble!
The positive here is that Linden Lab are hiring, the note of caution is that Linden Lab is growing way beyond Second Life and into lots of new areas, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they are hiring. However some of these jobs do look Second Life centric, although it could be that Linden Lab want to expand their virtual currency into other areas, the Linden Dollar really is a powerful feature for Second Life, so maybe it has potential to expand to other worlds.
Anyway, interesting times, maybe these new people will even talk to us, Hurrah!
The lab don’t hire from outside of the US anymore, which is a huge shame for me, as I would be all over that role in a heartbeat (my background is in community management- career wise more than 13 years). They also don’t seem to consider anyone with SL experience as particularly worthy of a role within their company. LL need to stop being scared of their users, and understand that with the role of Community Manager at least, familiarity of culture and platform is a huge plus. I wish whoever does get the job of Community Manager good luck – the customers are a tough group, but remember this, they want their voice heard – that’s all they ever wanted. Methinks there’s a podcast Chantal Harvey, myself and Ms. Fairchild did a while back that needs to be listened to by any prospective candidates…
A community manager should be someone with SL experience and LL do need to stop being scared of their users.
Customers do want to feel engaged, if you look in the merchants forum a lot of the complaints have a common factor of lack of communication from LL. Customers can be a tough bunch, but someone with the right experience can manage that.