Unsolicited advice: In my career counseling class, we learned about O*Net, which seems like a pretty good resource for some of the stuff you bring up in your AskMe question. It's not nearly as compelling as personal stories, of course, but it might be a helpful additional resource for you and your friend.

I saw scarabic and gf walking down Bush Street on Sunday afternoon.

/celebrity sighting

Director of Marketing Research for a computer industry evangelist and his consultants shop.

How did you find this job?

They found my resume on Georgia Tech's alumni website. I quoted a salary and bonus structure that was way over what I knew I was worth, and they asked me to start the next day.

2) What did you do?

Absorb everything I could about the enterprise computing industry's marketing strategies and sales tactics. Usually I was looking for areas where our clients' competition was glossing over weaknesses in their newest lines, yet were our clients' strengths. I also tried to figure out what was occurring during their competition's sales training seminars and the contents of their sales manuals, and then induce any weaknesses. Most of this work probably ended up in the hands of resellers.

One of our darker exploits was monitoring news sites for mentions of various company's sales staffs for things like DUI and such. I completely automated that and turned it over to one of the VPs. I didn't want to know how exactly that was used.

I also wrote white papers on just-over-the-horizon technologies and created new products to sell to our clients, particularly newsletters, an online Q&A forum, and what was essentially a proto-blog.

I also researched cults of web personalities. Our company evangelist was fascinated with the rise of both Matt Howie and Matt Drudge as well as Plastic's use of karma. That led to a prototype of a video blog.

My greatest achievement was analysis that led to IBM overtaking Sun in quarterly server sales to SE Asia.

3) Why did you like it?

I had first choice of contracts to tackle. Since we were independent and our top clients were IBM and HP, we could often sell the same documents to both and use the same research in preparing our company's evangelist and our training consultants. Two of my main sources for leads were Metafilter and Plastic's SubQ. I was paid to surf the web.