Over at her blog, Princess Polymath, software engineer extraordinaire Kirsten Jones thinks aloud about her work life and the one her daughter will discover. Kirsten has built some amazing software magic (I had the pleasure I working alongside her at Socialtext), and now helps engineers extend the Linkedin platform. Early on she learned, by happenstance, that she likes to make information more clear and unnecessary manual tasks go away. But will her daughter like the same?

I’ve been having a lot of discussions with my daughter about what she wants to do for her “job” when she “grows up”. She’s 14 now, at that age where she needs to start putting some focus and attention on how she’ll feed herself once she’s no longer a kid. She’s an amazing person, who loves to do many things at a time (marching band, professional Shakespeare, venture scouts, role playing games, art…) and I know there are lots of jobs she’d just love – and many that she would really detest. I, of course, think she would love my job because it is perfect for me in every way and she shares my genetic code, but really… no.

As an awesome parent, Kirsten already shows she doesn’t get trapped where many do — believing there’s just one thing a person might love doing. There are so many each of us will fall for. Fortunately for her daughter, she’s also not holding out for the offspring to be replicas. Go Mom.

She currently thinks she really wants to be an animator at Pixar. The girl is an amazing artist, don’t get me wrong, but she gets frustrated by the indirectness of computer art – and I’m not sure she’d really enjoy the demanding precision of such an endeavor.

Everyone starts with an inkling. Some spark. Usually many sparks. Then they’re faced with the challenge of learning more about each, and deciding which ones to pursue more (this is where Daily Endeavor is working to help).

But really, I don’t care what she does. I just don’t want her to do a job she hates. I’ve done that, even things I was particular fantastic at (typing title policies at an insurance company) and the entirety of your life is really dragged down when you do a job you dislike.

Amen, sister.

So, how to help my daughter? I’m glad she doesn’t have the mindset I had in high school where you were supposed to breathlessly rush through all 16 years of el-hi-university and then off you go to work without stopping to consider where you were going. I’d love her to take a year or a few after high school to wander around and just be young. She’s studying Japanese, and while I know that at just-about-6-feet she’ll stick out there, I would love her to spend a year in Japan learning about their culture. I envy her this freedom, but can’t wait to see what she does with it.

From where I’m sitting, this is one fortunate daughter. Here’s a Mom who understands there’s no more direct path to discovering what her daughter wants from her work life than iterating. In getting started, her daughter could use inputs on the kinds of jobs that exist and social proof around what to believe, so that’s one of the places we hope to help out.

Hugh MacLeod doesn’t pull punches. He’s not shy about getting straight to the point. I find it amazingly refreshing.

I believe there’s a huge cost in settling. I believe that the people who take the risk to seek out something that truly fires them up live out different and better lives.

Hugh says it succinctly today over at Gapingvoid:

Since December you’ve been able to sign up on Daily Endeavor using your Linkedin account, but I’m excited to share a new feature that takes the integration even deeper — Related People I Know.

Now when you connect with Linkedin on Daily Endeavor you can see who in your network is into what you’re into. When you pull up a Daily Endeavor job profile, first and second degree contacts in your network instantly appear.

When would this be useful? To start, it’s a whole new way to browse your professional network. Now you can leaf through jobs you may be interested in, and the related people you know automatically display inside the job guide.

If you’re doing informational interviews, it just got a whole lot easier. Let’s say you have a dream job in mind — or any type of job you happen to want to learn about — but the hard part is compiling the list of who you could meet. All you need to do is lookup a Daily Endeavor job profile, and instantly find contacts, and friends of friends, who can tell you more about the job you’re eyeing.

This is just the first of many applications in pairing up the social graph with the job graph. We’re really excited to be continue creating more. If there’s ones you want to see, let us know!

By the way, to make this mashup goodness happen our team worked closely with the team at Linkedin, using both their Profile Widget and the hot-out-of-the-oven JSAPI. The developer relations and api teams are great. Thank you gals and guys!

We all have a home on the web. Whether it’s a Linkedin profile, Twitter feed or Facebook page, there’s a definitive place people can go to find you. When there’s a definitive profile, it’s easier to learn about and connect with you.

So everyone who wants to be found has a user profile. Similarly, every company has an About Us page. But what about every job? There’s no single place to learn about every type of job.

Wikipedia does a really good job providing an objective description of many of the industries that exist, but not every job in, say, investment banking is the same, and ongoing conversation about how to get or thrive in an investment banking job is not part of its mission.

There are millions of job listings that narrowly describe the needs of a certain company at a certain time, but any given type of job can have 20 or more different titles, so researching or tracking even one job is a huge hassle.

The idea to build a job graph is a simple one: we believe that every job should have a home page on the web — a definitive job profile. Each profile should be a place where you can learn about the job and join the conversation that’s happening around it. It’s a place where you can show what you know, or share what you want to learn.

While the idea was simple to start, building it has been anything but. Our initial research four years ago found that the largest classification system was the US Department of Labor’s. But there was a problem. Their coverage for the entire US economy added up to about 3,500 types of jobs. That’s less than 2% of our estimate of the 250,000 non-hourly jobs. We needed something much more comprehensive. So we decided to build one from scratch.

For three years we’ve been working with niche experts to develop a graph that’s representative of the types of jobs that exist today. While we’ve made a lot progress (15,000 and counting), we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. Nevertheless, we’re really excited about how a profile for every job can help job seekers better find personal matches, and hiring managers better find the needles in the haystack. If there’s job profile coverage you’d like to see, please let us know!

I was in a conversation this Fall with a friend who was looking to hire someone to do some hairy statistical analysis. They were in a quandry on where to find them. I suggested Quora. Look up one of the questions you want answered, and in the answers, see who’s good. Quora’s not the only place you can see what people are into today, but it’s one of the good ones. Much like when Doug Crets says the new full-fledged education system is already here, it’s just still operating in the shadows, so it goes for recruiting. The future of recruiting talent is already here, it’s just not yet televised.

We’re in the very early stages of a major upheaval (as major as what Monster did to the newspapers, and what Linkedin did to Monster) in how people find jobs and jobs find people. Most of the companies re-creating this space are still quite young, working their way to the proverbial product-market fit. While the picture of how this new world will work for job seekers is much more clear today, there’s still some more sorting to do for how it will work for recruiters. This will come.

One of the places this conversation will be unfolding is at Unleashed Talent next week in SF, care of Jon Bischke & co. I’m heading to it and very much looking forward. One of the reasons I like Jon, and the main reason I’m going, is that he’s a convener – he seems to be continually bringing people together for interesting conversations. Looking at the attendees, this day looks no different.

My thesis is we’re about to see a step change in how jobs find people. I’m looking forward to hearing what others have on their mind.