So, while I was at Intuit there was this manager dude who was very focused on climbing the ladder and was pretty sharp at office politics but didn't have any other skills.<p>He wanted to make his mark, and was facing pushback from his engineers for his wacky plans, and so he thought up a scheme whereby each of his subordinates would define their "personal" brand, write it down on a piece of paper, along with a graphic "embodying the brand" and stick it on the sides of their cubicles. [1]<p>He exerted relentless pressure on the people reporting to him ( He tried to get me to go along but I was thankfully a peer [2] and not really subject to his fancies) till they all had these ridiculous "brand statements" stuck to the sides of their cubicles. The best engineer in the group (he left the company soon after this) had a big picture of Two Face with "Either you die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" written underneath. The manager didn't understand what that meant,(but was suitably impressed by the picture) and he showed off his "initiative" when some VP chaps came around [3] and in due time was promoted to "Director" for his "team building" skills.<p>The engineers all fall around laughing if you mention "personal brand" to them, but hey they are still doing the same job wrestling with ancient horror codebases [4] and the manager fellow is now earning twice what he was for half the work so who is cleverer? :)<p>Nothing to do with the content of the posting really. Just something that came to mind when I read "Personal Brand".<p>[1] All kinds of management fads swept Intuit periodically. This kind of stuff was very normal there. A lot of nice people but very very "corporate".<p>[2] I was supposed to do technical "architecture" work , but had a "manager" in my title and was sufficiently high in the hierarchy (and boy does Intuit believe in hierarchy!) that I was this guy's peer. The cost of being so "high" was death by meeting. When I found myself in a "meeting about a(forthcoming) meeting" I knew it was time to quit.<p>[3] One VP was a sharp fellow and he had a bemused expression on his face after seeing the Two Face "brand" but he didn't say anything.<p>[4] Example 1: The code for QuickBooksOnline is <i>the</i> most terrible code I have seen in my life. I had no idea you could write Java like that. I still have nightmares about it and it wasn't even something I was working on.<p>Example 2: There was this "engineer" who built a flash application to view a database table (not a database, a <i>table</i>). The app wasn't "advanced" enough to order the entries by primary key (or by anything else) so the team (of which this fellow was the "lead engineer") would bring up the flash app and scroll desperately to find the right row for debugging etc. No one ever used a "Select * from ..".<p>The creator of this abomination was given a spot award by his manager for "building useful tools to support the company technical strategy" (which at that point of time boiled down to something like "flash frontends and cloud backends").