#flawed thinking

It might be because I was severely bullied and abused by people who looked like models as a child and teenager. Which doesn't excuse it! it's a reason for my brain to develop that kind of intrusive thoughts.

As an active job-seeker, I read a lot of those "10 Ways to Land that Job!" and "5 Reasons You Didn't Get That Job!" posts and articles. I know that I shouldn't. Nothing good ever comes out of those. They either all say the exact same thing, or the advice is so asinine, only a high school sophomore would not already know it. But one bulleted item I recently read really got my goat.

Here is the full list:

I wouldn’t hire someone who:

has a hotmail/yahoo email address (tip: gmail, your own domain, mac.com, or anything else looks better)

doesn’t have a website/blog/online portfolio or a twitter account

has no experience whatsoever

I’ve never heard of

These are all fairly debatable. In fact, the last one made me laugh out loud. "I wouldn't hire someone who I've never heard of"?? I'm still scratching my head on that one. Is this someone whom you haven't heard of until they apply for a job, or do you only hire friends, former colleagues and famous people? This sounds like an arbitrarily unnecessary constraint that limits your potential employee pool and only serves to make a job-seeker feel like crap when they are informed, 'sorry I've never heard of you, so I can't hire you despite your qualifications.'

But actually, it is the very first item on this list that made my hackles go up. Discriminating against a possible hire based simply on their email address. And I'm not talking about [email protected] here. This rule extends to every single email address of Hotmail and Yahoo! webmail users. So apparently [email protected] is so offensive that even looking at that person's credentials isn't even worth this hiring professional's time. Sorry, John Smith. You lose.

This is exactly the kind of prejudice against totally benign and useful things that I hate. There is also no explanation given, by the way. Just that "anything else looks better." Not IS better, mind you, but LOOKS better. That's the choice of words here that is the crux of this biscuit. Why is a Hotmail user so unqualified to work for/with you? This type of debate goes back a long way and was probably never more prominent than during the 'Switcher' and 'I'm a Mac' ads from a few years back. Comparing two things based not on their merits, but on hyperbolized anecdotes, is a time-tested debate strategy. But is one that really should just stay with the FOX News crowd. (Yeah, I sideswiped.)

Here's the disclosure that you're all waiting for. Yes, I have a Hotmail account. I have had it since 1999, and you know what? It has never let me down. Not once. Hotmail, as a Microsoft service, has been around since 1997, and it was the most-used webmail service worldwide up until 2012, when it was surpassed by Gmail.

I also have a Gmail account. I've had that since 2007. It is now my primary email address, but that is only because I was told way back when that gmail.com looks better than hotmail.com. That's not totally true. I really switched because back then Microsoft didn't allow Hotmail users to integrate with other 3rd-party services (including their own) like they do now. You pretty much had to use a browser of some flavor to access Hotmail. Users of the Microsoft Office Outlook client probably remember trying to get Hotmail on the desktop only to find out that all you were doing was opening a skinned version of Internet Explorer in Outlook.

But today, for 95% of users, Gmail and Outlook.com (what was Hotmail up until 2012), provide the exact same service. In fact, Outlook's spam filters are way superior to Gmail's. About 10-15% of what ends up in my Gmail spam folder is legitimate email. With Outlook, it's probably somewhere down around 1-2%. What's funny is that I use my Hotmail address primarily as my "spam" email. It's what I use every time I sign up for a new service or give my email address to someone/something I don't fully trust. But Microsoft's spam filters are so good, that I rarely get any.

Mixed in with all of this is that I would suspect most people pushing the down-with-Hotmail agenda are the very same people crying loudly how much better Apple PCs are than Windows PCs. (I choose not to refer to a computer using Windows as simply a 'PC' because, gasp, a Mac is also a PC.) Notice how the author of the above list suggests mac.com as a suitable alternative that "looks better." If I were in a position to evaluate a candidate, a mac.com address would be just as off-putting as anything else, but I certainly would never unilaterally disqualify him or her based solely on that. The funny thing is that Google (provider of Gmail) is just as much, if not more so, a competitor of Apple (provider of mac.com) as Microsoft (provider of Hotmail) is. What is so intrinsically better about Gmail compared to Hotmail/Outlook?

I also use a Mac, in case you're wondering. My laptop is a 15" Early 2011 MacBook Pro running Mountain Lion (MacOSX 10.8.5), and my desktop is a self-built machine running Windows 7 Pro. I truly don't prefer one over the other, and I have yet to discover a single thing that one can do that the other cannot do. In all honesty, though, the next time I buy a desktop, it'll probably be a Mac Mini or iMac. As a newly minted software developer, it is leaps and bounds easier to get started on a software project on MacOS than on Windows.

I haven't really mentioned Yahoo! email because I don't use it, and I have no idea if it's good or not. And, despite the issues they suffered late last year, I suspect much of this applies to Yahoo! mail as well.