Mandatory Vacation

Maturity is relative

2009-03-08T21:17:00.000-07:00

These idiots e-mailed again. The ones who said I was charging too much the day I got two offers at that rate. I wouldn't have talked to them at all, but, you know, economy, etc, and it's the first contact I've had in two business days. They still say I'm charging too much, but at the number I quoted them, they're right.

Nothing in life is guaranteed

2009-03-05T21:18:00.000-08:00

The phrase "contract worker" is a misnomer. I can be fired at any time, and they can change the terms of my employment at any time (although I'm free to leave instead). I don't actually know if I'm required to give two weeks notice, but I've never signed anything saying I am, so I suspect not. Nonetheless, I feel it is morally wrong for either party to change the rules midway through the game. When I start a job, I commit to it for the length of time we agree on.

Companies don't seem to see it that way. There can be little things, like my company extending the contract by four months without asking me, and then moving the end date up by a week. I didn't mind too badly, since if I didn't want to keep working I could have quit, and they changed the date far enough in the future that I could plan.

Then there's friend #1, who has more than once been let go early because he, quote, finished all the work. That's a bad incentive system right there, but on the other hand, he was hired to a job and he finished it. That's a bad incentive system, and they should have been upfront about it so he could charge for the risk premium, but it doesn't stay in my craw.

Microsoft's latest bullshit sticks in my craw. They're cutting the pay of all contractors by 10% mid way through the contract (the post says it's unconfirmed, but several friends have since confirmed it). That's not right. People turned down other opportunities in part based on salary expectation, and they know that, and now Microsoft doesn't want to pay for the fact that they recruited the talent when it was scarcer for, tops, 11 months, and generally much shorter.

It gets worse. I didn't know this, but according to the ever informative internet commenters on that site, the contracts they sign with the agencies are binding. They're getting around this by refusing to send more work to agencies that refuse to cut their rates. I had a whole rant against MS prepared, but now I'm pissed at the agencies. They want me to take a pay cut so that they can make money on other people later (and remember that anyone working there now is subject to the hundred day quarantine period between this contract and their next one, so this isn't really guaranteeing them their next job), despite the huge cut they take out of the money Microsoft gives them. Most contractors would remain profitable even after 10% was taken out. Previous to this, my attitude was that I would take a contract with MS if they could pay well enough, since other options are limited, but now I worry about rewarding the agencies' bad behavior.

On the other hand, agencies like Volt and Excell, as well as numerous smaller ones, have built their entire business around MS. At most they have a few other clients to occupy their contractors during their quarantine period. They were made an offer they couldn't refuse. Fuck Microsoft for extending it

2009-03-05T21:15:00.000-08:00

I got two e-mails and a phone call today. Which would be great if I hadn't said to use e-mail and removed my phone number from my public profile (now that I've double checked this, I'll be asking anyone who contacts me in the future how they got the number), and it wasn't the third contact in four days from one particular company, asking for the same information. I checked my records, and what do you know they did the same thing a year and a half ago, when my resume wasn't even available: three e-mails from two people over a week and a half. Once more and I will seriously consider outing them on this blog, except I can't see how that would accomplish anything, they already look like idiots to anyone they try to recruit. I suppose the company they contract for, and it's only one company (you've heard of them), might care, but I doubt it. I'm still debating how snarky my reply should be. One on hand, the economy sucks. On the other hand, their are 400 companies that contract for the megacorp, 200 of which recruit for them alone, and they all have my e-mail address. And it would have to be a boatload of money to justify putting up with these idiots.

Speaking of idiots: today's phone call had something in common with Monday's (which was from my ~~stalkers~~ enthusiastic fans): a triumph of hope over reality. Monday's caller was really, really hoping I'd be available to start in two weeks, despite the fact that the availability date I gave me was five weeks in the future. It didn't hurt to ask. Today's caller was hoping I had five years experience testing databases. Now, recruiters* are stupid, so I can see how he couldn't tell from my resume I only had a year of DB work, because it's all greek to him. But maybe he could have noticed that I only had three and a half years of post-college experience, and my college work wasn't testing. That's just math, although there is the tricky thing where you have to remember years are base 12.

I really, really want to reward the good recruiters. Despite what I said above, my recruiter is actually quite good, and actually understands the things he recruits for. But a given agency only has so many jobs, and I'm not actually willing to take a pay.

Don't be anonymous on Dice

2009-03-04T18:38:00.000-08:00

Turning off anonymity on dice, got two e-mails by end of day. This seems dumb, since I included my real name and e-mail address on my resume. I vaguely remember a similar effect the first time I used dice, although not so severe. What the hell?

I'm also fairly annoyed at one recruiter. He chose the earliest possible time I gave to talk on the phone (which was not my preferred time), then called 20 minutes late. When I refused the call, he did not leave a message, but called back an hour later. I picked up but rescheduled for- wait for it- the preferred time I gave in the original e-mail.

The economy sucks and dice is selling out

2009-03-02T20:33:00.000-08:00

My current contract doesn't end for a month (assuming they stick with this end date- it's changed three times already), but the economy sucks so I put my resume on dice this morning (around 10 AM). It's gotten four views in the intervening 16 hours, and no one has offered me a job at all. I'm really glad I held off making fun of all those people who couldn't find work.

Of course, the economy isn't the only explanation. I put my resume up anonymously because there's no way to share your name but not your phone number, and I'd like to avoid taking 400 calls while I'm working in a conference room with a dozen other employees. I suppose I could use a 555 number, the way certain job posters do, but that seemed cheap, so I just put my real name and e-mail address in the resume.

Or it could be Dice's new policies, which I am not at all happy about. You can pay a fee to get more information about whose searching for you, and to get bumped to the top of searches. I don't see how it could possibly be worth it- eyeballs are abundant compared to resumes in the tech industry. But beyond that, there's no way this could possibly be ethical, since they take money from corporations to search resumes as well. I'm beginning to look for alternatives, but monster does the same thing, plus has terrible database security, and hotjobs hs never impressed me. If anyone has other alternatives, please post and let me know.

The hell is wrong with you people

2009-03-02T19:57:00.000-08:00

Got one phone call today, from the same company that e-mailed me, but apparently it was an independent incident, working from an entry in their private database. Given that, I don't think he had a right to get angry at me for not being available on his timetable. And no, rephrasing the question does not change the fact that I have a pre-existing commitment going well past the day you want me to start your job.

Found a job I'd be perfect for while screwing around on dice. It requires one year less experience than I have, and I tend to try for jobs requiring 1-2 years more, but I'm well suited for it, it would further some goals, and it looks high level enough that I'm considering applying. It's listed by an agency though, so I'm going to give them some time to see if they contact me first.

Note to recruiters: if you're going to copy and paste a text message, rather than translate it into a real requirements list, at least cut out the gender specific pronouns.

The economy sitll sucks

2009-03-02T06:47:00.000-08:00

Resume has been up for slightly less than 24 hours, has been viewed 7 times, and I have one e-mail. Under the circumstances, I'm not going to get super haughty about the fact that they're asking for information they already have.

On the plus side, the economic collapse has done wonders for my traffic numbers

2009-01-15T15:10:00.000-08:00

I usually post on a substantially delayed schedule, to preserve anonymity. Of course, there's some topical things that simply doesn't work for, and the economy is one of them. Of course, I haven't had much to say on it for the past three months, but shhh.

So here's my impression of the job market I'm facing: SDET contractors are still okay. According to my inside source, the number of contracts coming in is normal for the year, although more people are coming to my relatively well off metro area to compete for these jobs. I'm still getting harassed by agencies desperate for a good SDET. So my hypothesis that contractors are

The employees that have jobs aren't doing much better. Benefits have taken a massive cut, and payroll deductions are on the table. My salary has stayed exactly the same.

As for developers, I just don't know. My best source is a co-worker who loudly proclaims that there are no jobs to be had, one just has to sit in the mud and wait for the economy to recover. She's a nice person, but I get the feeling she has higher self esteem than her performance warrants. She's been laid off four times, the longest of those lasted a year (after the tech bubble popped). So we'll call that "no information." If anyone has a story to share, feel free.

Lies my recruiter told me: really, actually lies

2009-01-11T14:59:00.000-08:00

Long ago I wrote that it was best not to indicate one had a long term career goal during an interview, because employers don't want to be your stepping stone. This is bullshit. Or rather, it may be true that they don't want to be a stepping stone, but they really don't want to hire an idiot with no ability to plan for their own future. I have heard this from multiple people with hiring influence at multiple companies. My new advice is as follows:

Indicate that you have a plan, if not a goal. It's okay if that plan is "learn more about industry X and discipline Y and reevaluate in 3 years."
Your plan should not be set in stone.
Goals are okay too, with the same caveat that they should not be set in stone.
The plan you give should have a space for the job you're applying for.

Job prospects in a bad economy

2008-10-18T11:35:00.000-07:00

I have a long standing hypothesis that opportunities for contractors actually go up during recessions, because contractors are an inferior good in the economic sense of the word. For those who aren't up on econ theory: when times are bad, the price of a used car goes up and the price of a new car goes down, even though people prefer new cars to old, because fewer people are buying new cars and more people choose to buy used over new. Likewise, if the price is the same most businesses would rather have a permanent employee than a contractor, because of the benefits of continuity and the reduced cost, but in an uncertain financial environment prefer contractors because getting rid of them is free. Recently, my recruiter confirmed this.

What I did not anticipate was how this would affect recruiting companies. Last week I got eight calls and e-mails (three of which were the same company with the same offer. I sense some inter-department competition). Of those that actually gave positions, rather than instructing me to send them my resume or asking me to do their job for them, they were either for a stable company that has the reserves to ignore the recession, or a company that just got a second round of venture capital that (I assume) is run by idiots. So there are still jobs to be had, and the recruiters are hungry.

When it's okay to use work internet for personal issues

2008-09-25T19:15:00.000-07:00

I'm getting an inordinate number of hits from financial institutions.

HR Newbie: More bad advice

2008-09-13T10:04:00.000-07:00

It is possible to arrive too early to an interview. I have to cope with bad traffic and parking when I'm interviewing, so if things ever went well I might end up getting there more than half an hour before the stated time. I guess the thing to do at that point is hang out outside or in the building lobby, because I can see how arriving too early sends a bad signal.

2008-07-31T21:14:00.000-07:00

Obviously, things have dropped off a bit. After I got a job, the daily who-called-me seemed less important (for the record, two e-mails and two phone calls, but that was anomalous).

But some things I are just too important. For example, there is no good time to use the phrase "skank ho" in a job interview. Although if your rejection letter uses the phrase "you scare us", you probably don't have much to lose.

I either need to hit something or take a shower

2008-07-24T17:23:00.000-07:00

Putting up with bullshit is part of dealing with recruiters. Generally it doesn't bug me, because they're so bad at it that getting upset would be like getting mad at a toddler who insists he's allowed to stay up til 2AM. It's a lie, but it's not like he's put you in jeopardy. So I tolerate when they ask me what kind of day I'm having, even though they seem remarkably uninterested in the answer (Pet peeve: recruiters who take a long time to get around to telling me they're a recruiter, at which point I tell them I'm unavailable, and they say thanksforyourtimebye and hang up before I've even processed it. If you value your time that much, maybe you should get to the point faster).

This guy, on the other hand, is vile. Reading him feels like reading those articles where the writer goes undercover as a used car salesman. Just for an example:

You must never tell the person about the job, even the actual title, until you have conducted a quick work history review. Start the conversation by asking your prospect if she’d be open to discuss an opportunity if it were clearly superior to what she’s doing now. Most people will say yes, then immediately say “Great. Could you please give me a quick overview of your background, and I’ll then give you a quick overview of the job. If it seems mutually interesting we can schedule some time to talk in-depth.” You have applicant control when the person says yes. You lose it if your job is less appealing than the one the person has now. By having the candidate talk first, you can look for potential areas where your job is bigger. If not, you’ll have developed a relationship with the candidate that will allow you to ask for referrals.

Words cannot begin to describe much I want to kick him in the nuts. And the worst thing is that his techniques won't work substantially better than cold-calling, but take a lot longer; if you read carefully, he's focusing on meeting an in-house quota for contacts, not actually placing people in jobs, much less finding good candidates for his client companies. I can't imagine they'll be thrilled to know he's head-hunting using techniques guaranteed to select the stupid and weak-willed.

Bonus evil: You can see his bullshitting in action. Ask a Manger left a comment with some very good objections ("If you call me out of the blue and demand that I give you an overview of my current job before you tell me about the position you’re calling about, I’d be really annoyed"). And he responds by trying to redefine the word "demand" and then implying that the recruitee is somehow imposing on the recruiter (oops, I mean a "highly-regarded executive recruiter who handled multiple executive-level positions"). A tip: the person making cold calls is never the one with the power. That means it's up to you, Mr. highly regarded executive recruiter, to prove why I shouldn't hang up right now.

Resergence

2008-06-04T11:38:00.000-07:00

Two phone calls, after days of low volume communication. When I tell them I already have a job, they always say "Oh, I thought you were on vacation.", which leads me to think I have inadvertently penalized those who actually read my instructions. *sigh*

post-offers update

2008-05-26T19:49:00.000-07:00

Four e-mails, three from the blacklisted company (one of which was for a PM position- the fuck?), one from some other group, one phone call with a third offer, and some back and forth negotiations.

Miscellaneous inteview tip: keep your right hand free

2008-05-26T15:09:00.000-07:00

Always hold things in your left hand, especially as people are leaving or entering the room. You will have to shake hands and it does create awkward moments when you have to juggle your coat, notebook, pen, can of soda, and paper copy of your resume in order to do so. And if you're me, you'll drop something.

Lies my recruiter told me: you're not worth that much

2008-05-23T22:28:00.000-07:00

One of the measures I use to asses whether I'm charging the right amount is how often people refuse to pay it. If no one will pay it, it's obviously too high. If everyone will pay it, it's too low. The rate I gave generally caused recruiters to pause, then say "I'll see what I can do" , which seems like a good hint that I've hit the sweet spot.

One person took a more active approach.

Your rate is too high for SDET positions, so if you don't hear from
many recruiters, I suggest in a couple of weeks you lower your rate a little
bit.

Admittedly, it's a high rate. On the other hand, I had just gotten two offers at that rate. One of which was for the same large company most of her jobs are for. I can't help but think that maybe she's underestimated me.

Now, I wouldn't have minded if she'd simply said "sorry, we don't pay that much." which is a perfectly reasonable thing to say, even if it will cut her off from the top talent. But either she's a complete incompetent who can't find good placements, or she's trying to increase her profit margin by lowering my salary. Neither of these things fills me with a desire to work with her. In fact, it inspired me to make a blacklist, length one. I put up with the hamhanded manipulations of most firms because they're fun to laugh at and if I threw out everyone who tried to push my salary down I'd never work with anyone, but I draw the line at outright lying. A company that is willing to lie that brazenly will take every opportunity it can to squeeze me, and I don't want to spend my time fighting them.

This isn't exactly a huge loss, as these are the morons who have tried and failed to enter me in the system four times. They're also nationwide, and I am very, very tempted to list the corporate name here, but I know too many lawyers. Even though I'd win any defamation suit they brought (the truth being an absolute defense and all), I don't want to risk the loss of anonymity. But if you want to find out whether a potential company excells or not, e-mail me (domain name @gmail.com).

Game over. I win again

2008-05-23T19:06:00.000-07:00

One in-person interview, one phone interview, and three e-mails:

one specific job from a company I already had a relationship with
one from a different person within that same company, telling me my rates are too high (more on that later)
one reply to a previous mail. He had invited me to apply for an SDE position, I explained I was looking for SDET. He wrote back with the promise of many SDET positions, and as proof attached descriptions of five SDE positions he had open.

In addition, I got two excuses to bring back the "choosing a job" tag. More on that later.

Get paid to quit your job

2008-05-23T16:00:00.000-07:00

I haven't used Zappos, but apparently it's an online shoe store that has really good customer service. How do they get it? By paying employees to quit. After four weeks training (at full pay) and one week on the job (also full pay), they offer employees $1000 to leave. And as the company has grown, the amount they pay quitting employees has risen. The argument is that they only want really dedicated people, and what better way to test dedication than paying someone to leave? The problems as I see them are:

Better workers are more likely to leave. The $1000 is a lot more tempting when you expect a month-long job search than when you expect a yearlong search.
People who know they will hate the job might be willing to go through the five weeks to get the $1000 payoff.

The benefits:

The aforementioned weeding out of the undedicated. I find the whole company loyalty thing vaguely creepy, but I can see why they would value it.
Cognitive dissonance will lead the employees who stay to be happier and more dedicated than they otherwise would have been. With absolutely no data, I declare this to be the most valuable effect of the program.
There will be threshold/snowball effects that make employees happier more dedicated still.

Things I would have to know before declaring this a good program:

What employees who take the buyout go on to do
Comparison of any quality metrics between employees who stay and those who go.
Average tenure of employees who stay, compared to similar jobs elsewhere
How much does the program cost Zappos (compared to the benefits calculated from the above data points)
I'd like to know the wages of the Zappos employees, but honestly, all the other data captures the relevant points better

If I remember correctly, Zappos is the same company that pays you if you return shoes. That is a piece of brilliance. Assuming they have some kind of metric to prevent serial returners, it's a great way to demonstrate confidence in their product and compensates for one of internet shopping's big costs, and on the way leads to a lot more impulse purchases.

Good news everyone, the recession is over.

2008-05-22T20:38:00.000-07:00

Two phone calls while I was in an interview, one e-mailed dev contract, two perm positions (one dev at a company that had previously turned me down, one test at my former employer), one large contracting company that had already contacted me (four times) but apparently failed to put me in their database, one test contract I'd already rejected from another recruiter (that one I was completely unqualified for).

I was going to blow off the recontact from the large agency, but figured it couldn't hurt to check. Turns out I'd never gotten into their master database. I suspect the problem was that I told my first contact that I couldn't give her a salary range without hearing their benefits, and she never e-mailed me those.

Are you even trying anymore?

2008-05-21T22:29:00.000-07:00

One half-hearted form letter not specifying a position, one incredibly enthusiastic letter for a position whose requirements have almost zero overlap with my qualifications,* and for a dev position. Well done, internets.

Still the prettiest member of the fellowship

2008-05-20T22:32:00.000-07:00

I was beginning to get concerned when I didn't get any e-mails today. I even initiated a couple of recontacts that came to naught. Then, as I was leaving work, I got a call from a very interested recruiter with a very appropriate job. He's driving out to meet me tomorrow, and I may end up with an interview on Thursday. When it looked like transportation might be an issue, he said he could arrange it for me (it ends up working out). And the job looks quite interesting.

2008-05-20T16:19:00.000-07:00

Other techniques for getting paid what you're worth: give headhunters different numbers. That way you can search for the really lucrative jobs without cutting yourself off completely. I use a complex formula based on the following factors:

Did the recruiter follow my contact instructions?
How annoying is he?
How frustrating was work today?
How much time did I waste in traffic?
How aghast is he that I insist on knowing the non-monetary compensation offered before I list a monetary wage?
How many recruiters have I talked to today?
How bad are my allergies?
Did my cat do something adorable today?

It seems to work fairly well, although to be fair the really high quotes haven't produced anything yet.

Okay, maybe the economy does suck

2008-05-19T23:40:00.000-07:00

No fresh contacts today, but I did get a call on Saturday (wtf?) from a firm I'd already heard from, and discovered a voice mail left last Friday while I was interviewing (the missed call got masked by another from someone I didn't care about).

My resume is up to an even 50 views on Dice, one week after posting. Assuming no duplicate views, that's a 20% conversion rate, which seems perfectly reasonable considering it's easy to confuse my resume for that of a developer.

There's 3 or 4 threads kicking around where I responded to someone who has not yet responded to me. Given that I spent my valuable time politely telling people that their job was completely inappropriate but thanks for considering me, I feel I'm owed some sort of response. Don't make me start deleting mail without responding people.

The wage gap

2008-05-19T15:28:00.000-07:00

Suzanne posted a link to Economic Woman's post on salary negotiation in response to my post on the same topic, and I think it raises some important points. It's well known that women make less than men. The most popular statistic fails to account for profession, education, hours worked, and experience. However, even studies that control for this show some gap. One hypothesis is that women are less successful than men at salary negotiation. Note the words less successful, not bad at. It may be that women don't ask because they don't care (I find this unlikely). It may be that they do ask, but aren't as skilled at it for reasons that are their own fault. It may be that they ask, but their bosses react differently than they would to a man, and so the woman is less successful, or even penalized for doing so. Men may face the same risks in asking for a raise, but have a higher risk tolerance, either due to innate preferences or because women are more sensitive to wage fluctuations (maybe because they're more likely to head single parent households). And for all these reasons and more, women may draw the perfectly rational conclusion that they're better off not asking. I have not studied the research on this in any detail, but none of the news reports I read indicate that the studies done are capable of discriminating between these hypothesises.

So what can you do? I wish I had better answers. I've already talked about how negotiating with managers makes me fearful and uncomfortable, so I'm not exactly a role model. Beyond my advice for general negotiation, I would say:

1. know this research, because knowing is half the battle.

2. be in an in-demand field. Being discriminated against by 90% of employers in a field with 1000 jobs is a lot more fun than being discriminated against by 90% of employers in a field with 10 jobs. Even if that last guy isn't prejudiced, and you somehow land that job, and he pays you market wage, you have no credible threat of exit, because you know, even if he doesn't, that nothing else will pay you as much as he does, and that will sap your will to negotiate for even more. As a bonus, in-demand fields (like software engineering) tend to feature substantially less prejudice, because driving away talent hurts corporations in a way it does not hurt restaurants or even university chemistry departments, where the supply of good candidates far exceeds the demand. Alas, this advice is unuseful to anyone without the talent in and enjoyment of such fields.

3. find a hack that lessens your fear. My hack is using third party agencies: I fear no loss of precious, precious goodwill, since the few ways they have to hurt me (like screwing up my paycheck) will hurt them and are legal actionable in a way that giving me destined-to-fail projects is not. Plus, they can't stand at the coffee pot and glare at me. And they're so brazen in their attempts to push my salary down that I can't possibly feel guilt about fighting back. It would be like feeling bad about filing a police report after you were mugged.

Anyone who's found a useful hack is encouraged to post it here.

Apparently recruiters don't work on Fridays

2008-05-16T23:05:00.000-07:00

One phone call. At 5:30 PM.

One invitation to interview for a position in another state.

I don't see why people are so worried about the economy.

2008-05-15T22:29:00.000-07:00

Only one fresh contact, this time for a permanent position. I don't think they're used to being told you're only looking for contracts. (or "contracts", as she referred to them). Two invites to interview, one of which I've taken and another (from the same guy, same company, different teams) I might follow up with during vacation.

One phone interview, set up by my current agency before I posted my resume on dice. It went okay but not great- they wanted academic knowledge, and I had 0 time to prep since I'm in wrap-up mode at my current job. But they seemed to accept that explanation, and I had some very classic know-what-you-mean-but-not-the-vocabulary-word moments that backed it up. This particular job has a bitch of a commute, so unless they raise the offer another 10% (after raising it 10% just to get me to interview), it's a practice interview anyway.

How to negotiate your salary

2008-05-15T20:50:00.000-07:00

I do not have a natural affinity for salary negotiations, because there's so many damn unknowns, and what if I insult someone and lose the offer, or they find someone better while they're waiting, and dude I already pay more in taxes than some people earn in a year, so why get worked up over it.

This is, of course, bullshit. Someone's going to be making money off of me, and it might as well be me. This a rare moment where agencies are actually add something to the economy. The agency is not smart enough to disguise it's attempt to push my salary down, the techniques it uses to attempt this piss me off and motivate me to fight back, and it doesn't hurt my relationship with the people I'll actually be working with.

That said, back-and-forth negotiation is an uphill struggle, because I'm trained to deal with facts and logic, and the person I'm talking to is trained to screw with words, and has had this conversation many more times than I have. When I had to negotiate a salary bump to compensate for a decrease in benefits, the recruiter talked circles around me. My defense was to simply repeat my points- "I delivered the work, you deliver the money. Benefits are money."- until she caved.* But I hate doing that, and I won't always have their balls in quite such a vice grip, so I'm always looking for simple tricks that simplify things.

The first is, as I mentioned, arguing from data. I happen to have an gold-plated starting point in the form of a well-paid full time offer. Even though I turned it down (and thus can't leverage one against the other), it's a marker of how much I'm worth. Agencies will always try to make you feel like you're asking for an unrealistic amount, but if you stick to data, it's hard for them to do so. I'm already preparing arguments for when they argue that my rates are unrealistic, and it involves making them send me data. Also, keep in mind that no matter how many times they insist the company is only willing to go to X, they are lying. The company is paying them X+20, minimum. What they're negotiating for is their profit margin. Since in an optimum world they wouldn't even exist, I don't think that margin should be high. I've never heard a first number for an hourly contracting rate that couldn't go hire (disclaimer: small sample size).

There's also pre-screening. The rate I listed on dice is really the upper bound of what I realistically expect to get, but that's okay. Recruiters will offer me jobs that pay less, the only jobs it scares off will be those that paid too low for me to consider. Lots of studies have shown that asking for a large amount increases both the money and respect you eventually receive, even if you don't get as much as you ask for. It also should bring me a more interesting class of job, since only the high-level jobs will pay anywhere near that much.

For that extra inch, ask for extra time, either between offer and decision, or decision and start time. I got $2/hour to start a week earlier, and a friend got $5/hour to accept an offer immediately.

Lastly, don't be afraid to walk away. You only need to find one company that's willing to pay your goal, and it's okay if the others can't, because you're not as good a fit or their product isn't profitable enough. I don't like the idea of outright rejecting a job as a negotiating tactic, but I'm not sure if that's actually sound policy. If you're turning down a job for reasons other than money**, accepting it for more money will just make you miserable. If you want only a bit more, outright rejection is too extreme. I would just ask for more money. The only time I'll use rejection as a tactic is when I think they're lowballing me, at which point I'm okay with saying "nope, not enough money, but thanks." This is true even if I don't think they're taking too large a cut of what the originating company is offering them- my skills are more valuable to some companies than others, and I'll go to the ones that value me more highly, thank you very much.

*This story is also a perfect example of things recruiters do to manipulate you. She complained about their costs, and made vaguely threating noises about other benefits. There was a general air that I was horrible person for bringing it up, and was quite possibly taking food out of starving children's mouths. I suspect that if this were actually the case, they wouldn't be quite so eager to administer my next contract.

**On a reasonable scale. Few jobs are so odious I wouldn't do them for a million dollars a week, but even fewer jobs are actually worth that to the company.

Job updates.

2008-05-14T22:06:00.000-07:00

5 contacts, one interview request (rejected)

Agency fails to anticipate that computer scientist can do math when extending offer

2008-05-13T23:46:00.000-07:00

Dudes I contract for-

Since I started working for you, my experience has increased by 50% (measured in strict calender time) and by, conservatively measured, a fuckload in actually accomplishing things. So a 4% raise for my next contract is not going to cut it- not when, under any reasonable set of assumptions, that works out to less than the permanent position I was offered, and especially not when the increase in commute amounts to a per hour pay cut.

And no, [large company] is not planning on paying x. They're planning on paying x+25 or so to you, which based on your desired profit margins works out to x. Do not blame [large company], because I happen to know exactly how much you are paid for me now and what market rate is for corp-to-corp is.

It was someone other than my regular recruiter who made this invitation to interview (the normal one apparently had an off-site meeting all day). And while I'm not saying they deliberately set up a bad cop to let the familiar good cop be a hero and offer me more, I am saying that's exactly what's going to happen.

Day 1 back on dice.

2008-05-13T22:57:00.000-07:00

3 contacts.

One at a company I already talked to, who asked for a copy of my resume and asked for times to call me.

one who led with a demand for several pieces of information she already had, and wanted to know when she could call me. Based on the (short) description and (barely existent) requirements, I think I'm vastly overqualified, but it looks like a short commute so I wrote back anyway.

One who did not ask for information he already had, but did ask for me to call him when convenient, if I was interested. His company website lists benefits, for both salaried and hourly employees. Guess who's getting called back first.

I found one additional job that I am absolutely perfect for, and would really enjoy, that uses some esoteric skills I picked up in college. I liked it so much I actually applied, with a cover letter and everything.

dice is a pain the ass, had better still be useful

2008-05-12T20:53:00.000-07:00

After informing my manager that I would not be accepting the permanent position (a conversation that went as well as I could hope for, and I mean that in the best possible sense), I uploaded my resume to dice (my contract doesn't end for another two weeks, but there's nothing like walking away from money and security to motivate you to find your next hit). Either they changed the system or I completely repressed what I pain in the ass it is. Did they lose all my skills? If so, could they maybe enable a search feature instead of a menu that jumps the scroll bar every time you select something, thus necessitating superfluous mouse movement?

This time, I specifically said to e-mail, not phone, and if you must phone for the love of god don't do so at 7:30.

I am Jack's exciting interview

2008-05-07T11:11:00.000-07:00

Jack had a phone interview at a very interesting job that seems much less likely to kill him. It went well, and he has an in-person in three weeks.

xkcd illustrates a simple truth

2008-05-06T11:24:00.000-07:00

HR Wench: 3rd Party Recruiters: Listen Up

2008-05-05T19:48:00.000-07:00

I get annoyed when recruiters start letters with demands for information. People who contact me should start with what they are offering, not a petulant demand for information that was contained the resume I know they've read. I naively assumed that these recruiters (or rather, the agency, since I've received the same e-mail from multiple people at one firm) simply failed business etiquette 101, but it turns out I should be grateful, since the owners of multi-employee recruiting firms have decided that the location, nature, and salary of a position is classified information that a potential recruit does not need to be told.

I don't see why you need more than one basket to carry eggs

2008-05-05T11:58:00.000-07:00

Google accounted for 77% of job growth in Santa Clara County last year. I couldn't find exact numbers for Microsoft/King County, but they're probably comparable, given that both companiesprivate bus services to deal with the traffic problems they cause.

I think Google has already peaked, so this can't be good for Santa Clara. But then, Microsoft began its descent years ago and itgrew by ~25% in the last few year (data for King County alone not available).

Angry tirade unlikely to convince company to hire you

2008-05-04T11:28:00.000-07:00

You would think this would be obvious, but apparently not. Swivet, a literary agent, has a post up detailing the absolutely psychotic letter she was sent after rejecting someone's manuscript. It does not seem to have altered her opinion of the salability of the manuscript.

How to set up a phone interview

2008-05-04T10:59:00.000-07:00

Recruiter or company: we would like to set up a phone interview. Please send us times.
You: I can do X,Y,Z. (Try to get a variety of days and times).
Company: Okay, we'll do Y. Please confirm.
You: Confirmed.

You do not have an interview until you say confirmed.
These steps will probably take over e-mail, but if time is a factor they may call you.

Succeeding by failing.

2008-05-03T17:43:00.000-07:00

One of the most valuable things I learned in college was a single study I read for psych 101, which I will recreate here. Answer the following three questions, one at a time:

1. You have just taken an important test, and will find out the results in two days. A friend is organizing a very cheap trip to Hawaii in three days. Do you take her up on the offer?

2. You have just passed an important test. A friend is organizing a very cheap trip to Hawaii tomorrow. Do you take her up on the offer?

3. You have just failed an important test. A friend is organizing a very cheap trip to Hawaii tomorrow. Do you take her up on the offer?

Most people answer yes to 2 and 3 but no to 1. Logically, this makes no sense, since the only outcome of question one is question 2 or 3. But the uncertainty of the outcome prevents people from making plans, even if the plan doesn't depend on the uncertain outcome.

Similarly, people will work very hard to avoid an outcome labeled "failure", even if the the consequences of failure aren't that bad. Suppose you've just graduated college and are choosing between starting your own company and working at one of the few corporations that can guarantee long-term, if not lifetime, employment (think Google or Microsoft). Google and Microsoft are sure things. No, you don't know exactly what bonus you'll get next year, but you can count on having a large, stable stream of money. Starting your own company is a huge risk. You're looking at a year or two of absolutely no income even if you succeed- and failure is pretty likely. Why start a company?

As Paul Graham outlines here, you do it for the years after. At least in the tech industry, someone who's started and failed a business is vastly more valuable than someone who spent two years in a cube. And I'm willing to bet this is consistent across the board: security requires a large company, and large companies do not give interesting work to entry level employees- meaning you learn absolutely nothing. Either you take your experience and start another business, or you get hired by someone who's willing to pay a premium for everything you learned.

Sometimes, failure is more than a valuable experience, it's the start of something better. I'm lucky I got fired last year. I'm lucky I didn't get into my first choice of college, since I would never have pursued Computer Science if I had. Now, I'm facing a similar situation: the company I currently contract for has made me a very good offer to go permanent. This place has a lot going for it: I have a lot of autonomy. The work is interesting but not especially taxing. The money would be quite good, if not astronomical. Leaving opens me up to a lot of risk: realistically, I'm not going to get much more money, and may end up with a paycut. The next job might not have such interesting work. God knows how long it will take to get a new job.

Nevertheless, I'm leaving. If I stay, I will always be afraid of leaving, because working here is so easy. And while I learned a hell of lot in my first six months, I don't see the next six being nearly as educational. So I'll take the pay cut and the risk and keep contracting, not only because the behavioral economics are cleaner and I like teasing my perm friends about overtime, but because long-term, that's what's best for my career, even if it involves short term failure.

2008-04-24T21:25:00.000-07:00

A note to recruiters at top secret projects: don't put your entire mission statement in the job posting.

should i ask about vacation at my job interview

2008-04-20T20:13:00.000-07:00

That was a search query that led someone here. The answer is: No. Inquire gently in the HR screening if you must. Otherwise, wait until you have an offer and are negotiating salary and benefits.

The Saga Continues

2008-04-20T20:01:00.000-07:00

My contract job ends in four weeks. I was going to enjoy two weeks visiting my friends and family, but I've got minor oral surgery two weeks after that, which means I'll either still be interviewing (nothing like five hours of talking when you can't feel one side of your mouth) or just starting a new job (drool makes a good impression, right?), so I'm going to see if I can at least get a couple of leads before I get back from vacation. To that end, I sent off updated resumes to a couple of recruiters today. I'm not super-hopeful, since contracting jobs tend to work on a faster pace than that, but I feel better for having done it.

And I'm prettier than he is too.

2008-04-17T21:50:00.000-07:00

Eight months ago I was in a job so stressful I stopped eating and yet constantly wanted to throw up. Then I was fired.

Six months ago I still hadn't recovered my appetite, and was starting to worry I'd never find a job.

This week I have a fun job with lots of autonomy and impact. The company I contract for is putting on full court press to get me to sign on full time. The manager who fired me is now a PM with no reports. Despite not having my resume online anymore, I still get one e-mail a month from my ex-employers or their agents asking me to apply for a new team.*

I win, bitch.

*Not to ruin the triumph, but: Most are third party agents who I assume have no access to my file. But at least one was a real manager. This is what prompted me to look up Dumbass Manager's job- I couldn't believe they'd keep asking me if they had access to my file and his statements carried any weight at all.

Wish I knew this before the court date

2008-04-13T16:55:00.000-07:00

In job hunting, as in so many things, there's a fine line between enthusiasm and stalking. Ask a Manager has a post up on how to avoid ~~a restraining order~~ alienating a potential employer. The rule of thumb is: if you look enthusiastic over this job, it's a good thing. If you look enthusiastic over a job, it's a bad thing.

My personal fault is probably under-enthusiasm. I generally don't get particularly excited about individual jobs, due to a combination of not wanting to be disappointed, fear of looking like a stalker, and genuinely not caring which job out of a set I got. As I get more experience and learn what I like and dislike, I predict I'll start actually turning down interviews and expressing a corresponding enthusiasm for those I do pursue.

All recruiters are not created equal

2008-04-11T20:21:00.000-07:00

Jack: I don't know SQL
The Good Recruiter: Okay, then I won't send you any database admin positions.

Some time later:

The Incompetent Recruiter: I've got a position that's perfect for you. It requires four years of SQL, and one year of Java.
Jack: ....what part of that do you think is a good fit?
The Incompetent Recruiter: Um...you have...*pulls up resume on computer*...C# experience.

Jack's Job Hunt

2008-04-09T23:08:00.000-07:00

The incompetent recruiter has thrown: one attractive job, one completely unrelated job, and one marginally related job.

The good recruiter has thrown: one very appropriate job

The recruiter that gives referral bonuses is on vacation.

Jack's Job Hunt Day 2

2008-04-02T23:50:00.000-07:00

I refer to Jack as Jack in my e-mail. His e-mail is jack.lastname@gmail.com. His resume lists him as Jack Lastname. So why does The Incompetent Recruiter insist on calling him John in his response? Frequently, because TIR is one of people who constantly works your name into e-mails.

I don't know if the fact that my usual problem is people coming up with wacky nicknames for me makes this more or less annoying.

Adventures of Jack

2008-03-31T23:20:00.000-07:00

Starting today, we'll be following my friend Jack, an employed dev who has decided he maybe doesn't want to work himself into a stress based illness and then be yelled at for not keeping himself healthy enough to work another 120 hour week. Today I sent his resume out to a few recruiters I worked with: The Good One, The Incompetent I Currently Work For, and The One That Gives Referral Bonuses. Updates as they become available.

Random crap

2008-03-02T23:37:00.000-08:00

100 things not to say in a job interview

Halting State was a fairly boring book that totally captured much of tech interviewing and working, except with more international espionage. Charles Stross's background as a programmer and indignant Scotsman really showed. And I suspect it's a much better book if you don't consider near future scifi the diet mr. pib of speculative fiction.

And for anyone who's wondering: the friend who didn't know how to interview got passed on to the next stage of the process, and the one who didn't know how find jobs IMed me Friday to let me know he had two job offers already. Alas, our conversation was cut short when he got a phone call with another offer.

Proof I'm not talking out of my ass

2008-02-23T15:45:00.000-08:00

My apologies if I sound like a dead englishwoman, I was listening to the thirteenth tale on my mp3 player and its affected my brain. Anyways....

I have a friend who has been SDET contracting for many years. His latest contract finished, and he's looking for permanent work. On my advice he posted his resume on dice last Saturday. I also forwarded his resume to a number of agencies that had contacted me last time. By EOD Thursday he'd had five recruiter interviews and two technical phone interviews, which is all the more impressive when you remember that Monday was a holiday. And that there's a recession. And that he's looking for a perm position, which is a slower process. In contrast, I believe it took two months to find his last job (to be fair, part of that two months was Christmas season). And that was during a fairly good economy, for a temporary position.

Posting resumes. It works bitches.

It's like advice, but easier

2008-02-07T21:37:00.000-08:00

This advice was originally devised for a friend who's spent the last year and a half doing theoretical computer science work, but has been tempted into interviewing for an applied position by the prospect of ~~hellish hours and something~~ free food. He's got about a week to prepare, and is willing to put serious time into it. This is about half guesswork, since my own position was similar but not identical: I wanted jobs that (while still testing) had a significantly larger coding component than my last job. Not only have some technical skills atrophied, but he's never done a job interview before and doesn't know what to expect. What I said:

The most common interview pattern is: 1-2 phone interviews, then one half or full day in person circuit. If it's full day, you're probably going to have very long breaks.

The phone interviews last anywhere from 15-45 minutes. If there's two, the first is probably with HR. After a bit more time in the working world, I look forward to telling any HR screener that I'll only talk to the hiring manager.
The in-person circuit will have around four 45 minute - 1 hour interviews, with a different person each time. You will almost certainly get more than one question is that time. Adjust your level of detail accordingly.

If an interview takes substantially less time than you were told, you failed. This includes both a single interview running short or being sent home before the time you were told has elapsed. The only exception to this is if the interviewer actually says "wow, you answered those questions so fast, I have nothing left to fill the time with. All the other interviewees took much longer." At that point, worry about the quality of the company.
conversely, running over is a good sign. Getting more interviews then you were told you'd have is a very good sign.
You will be asked if you have any questions. The answer should be yes, and your questions should be insightful.

In addition, here are some general tips for prepping for an interview you're intellectually capable of completing, but have some brain fuzziness on:

Find or create a project that uses the skills you will be tested on. I actually started working for a friend's company, at wages that wouldn't have been worth it even if they didn't cut into my unemployment check. But it was fun, kept me sharp, and made it a little easier to transition back to the working world.* When you run into things you've forgotten the background of, look them up. Hyperspecific example: if it's an unspecified dev or test position, work on strings, lists, and trees.
Work around what you're not sure of. Hyperspecific example: if you don't remember the intricacies of ints, use bignums.
Testers only: develop a schema of ways to test real objects (I've been asked to test toasters, vending machines, and escalators). For breakage testing, I like to use Faith's five kinds of torture: sharp, blunt, hot, cold, loud. Interpreted creatively, these will take you far.

* It does weird ass things to my resume though. I either have a two month gap or list a two month job that doesn't mesh well with the jobs before or after it. My current solution is to mark is as short-term/part-time, and note that the owner was a personal friend when I list him as a reference.

It's not you, it's me

2008-02-02T11:49:00.000-08:00

Back when I was doing the job circuit, I had an interview I thought went really well. Really, really well. But I didn't get the job. I was surprised, but put it down to the fact that the HR rep who found me so impressive had evidently been fired.

Last week I met a friend of friend who worked for that company. Apparently there have been a number of potential hires that the engineering team wanted but were shot down the CTO, who's an idiot and has really antagonized the engineers by doing so.

This isn't the only job that rejected me six months ago and is still unfilled- and the jobs weren't fresh postings when I looked at them. Even the start-up with 0 testers still hasn't hired one. I can't help but think that maybe I wasn't the one with the problem. From now on, I resolve to blame every failed interview on a bad CTO or companies that expect to hire awesome developers who are also testing demons for the same rate they pay the click monkeys. 'Cause there's no way I was at fault. Not at all.

Ask and you shall receive

2008-02-01T19:49:00.001-08:00

It looks like the internet is already trying to solve my problems. Notchup.com (article) is a beta job posting board where you can set a price that companies must pay to interview you. The suggested prices seem to run from $100-$600 or so, although you can set anything you want. This strikes me as a step in the right direction: interviewing takes a nontrivial amount of time, so if you're good enough, companies should pay you for the privilege. It also shows that they're serious about you and aren't going to demand a whole bunch of information, they contact you six months later to let you know the position has been reorged out of of existence. And it's certainly cheaper for them than paying $10k to a headhunter to call you at work.

There are restrictions, of course. They have to approve you before they'll let employers see your resume, with an eye towards graduates of prestigious schools, workers at prestigious companies (although they allow for both fortune 500s and startups), and "in-demand skills" , which I suspect means they'll lower the bar for workers in fields suffering from a labor shortage. They claim to have an algorithm to detect "serial interviewers" who are just in it for the cash, but I don't know how they'd distinguish that from "people who really like their current job." There's a reputation system involved, so my guess is that companies can rate people who they think deliberately spiked the interview. But that's never going to be perfect, and companies will be very wary of paying you to interview for a job you'll never take. I think the next step is for the potential employer to donate to the interviewees favorite charity, so he or she receives no direct financial benefit, yet the company has proven that they are serious.

My dream is for this concept to expand into micro transactions and be able to charge people each time they contact me. It would be a small amount- even $1 would do it- because what I really want is to prevent recruiters from spamming me with every job that has "test" or "java" somewhere in the description (note to recruiters: java and javascript are not the same thing. I know both, but that's a coincidence). I'd also like them to get more contractor friendly, but that would involve a fundamental shift from "better jobs to people who already have pretty good ones" to "enabling honest signally in job hunting through monetary cost." And no matter how unfriendly they are to contractors, I'll be uploading my resume.

(hat tip: my money blog)

using my powers for good

2008-01-31T21:09:00.000-08:00

According to site meter, most of my visitors are recruiting firms, so let me take this opportunity to give you all some advice:

If you are contacting me unsolicited, the first part of your message should be what job you are offering me, not a demand for a resume and home address.
If I have given you the courtesy of writing back, explaining that I am currently under contract but will be available in N months, try to keep your job solicitations to less than weekly. Companies that politely write back expressing their interest get added to list of places to contact when I'm on the market again. Companies that ignore me and send me more inappropriate offers may not get the first round of e-mails.
If you want me to start in two weeks, on a different coast, for a temporary position, the pay had damn well better be "market"
I know that you aren't programmers, and some of the finer technical distinctions may escape you, and there is a fudge factor in both job postings and resumes. But do you notice how none of the languages or systems required for this job are listed under the "languages" section of my resume? That's a clue that I might not be the right person for the job.
Failing that, could you maybe figure out that the one year of experience I have is less than the five years experience this job requires?
Or that "tester" is different than "technical lead"?
It really is insulting for you start a solicitation by demanding information from me. So imagine how pissed off I get when you don't even tell me what the job is.

I realize as I'm writing this that thousands of people would love to have people harassing them to accept a job, so I think I'll stop whining now.

Happy espioging

2007-11-26T20:18:00.000-08:00

Business week has a video podcast up about how to conduct an interview. Go and learn

Only chaos is sustainable

2007-11-18T17:02:00.000-08:00

I happened to be reading this article* on the effect of the minimum wage at the same time I was reading Off the Books,: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. I'll leave discussion of the book as a whole to more qualified folks^, but those two sources, plus a pattern of posts in academic blogs, have helped me cement some thoughts on job having and finding. Specifically: dynamic equilibrium is good, static equilibrium is another word for decay.

For those who haven't taken chemistry in a while: equilibrium means quantitative measures are staying constant- for example, x% of the salt has dissolved in the water. Stable equilibrium is probably closer to what people think of when they mean "stay the same": each molecule is in the same state forever. Dynamic equilibrium means that the overall picture doesn't change- there's still x% of the salt dissolved- but an individual salt molecule may go from dissolved to undissolved hundreds of time.

Now let me use an analogy that doesn't make you wince or fall asleep at your desk, plus fits my point better: the medieval European cathedrals were built out of stone, and more or less didn't need maintenance- they were at a stable equilibrium. Meanwhile, over in Japan, there wasn't enough stone, so they built temples out of wood, which constantly rotted and needed to be replaced. For the century or so, stone looked more stable. But after several hundred years, even stone gets run down. But by that point, no one knew how to build castles. Meanwhile, the constant need for repair meant that temple-maintenance and building skills were alive and well in Japan. My feeling is that only dynamic equilibrium is truly indefinitely maintainable.

How does this relate to job searching? Suppose your goal is to maximize the time you're employed and minimize the time you're unemployed. There are two ways to do this: minimize the time between leaving one job and starting another, and minimize the number of these transition times. So for a given risk tolerance, the longer it takes to find a job, the less likely you are to leave your current one.* Several things affect the time to find a job, but by far the biggest one is the number of appropriate openings in a given time period, relative to the number of people applying to them. Unfortunately, there's a vicious cycle in which the longer it takes to find a new job, the longer people stay in their old jobs.

This would be fine, if everyone was already in their optimal job, but until we implement stable matching, and keep all parties involved from ever changing, that's not going to happen. The best thing for everyone would be to make switching jobs relatively easy and stigma free.

Programmers have this easier than most, because demand outstrips supply, and if you choose your location well you don't have to uproot your life to change jobs. And any occupation in which you freelance has the same benefits. Off the Books discusses how works in the ghetto shorten their inter-job time by having incredible flexibility as to what jobs they do. On the other end of the spectrum are academics, who have months between applying to a job and getting a decision, a huge pool of applicants, and a very small pool of appropriate jobs. And even in good job markets, highly senior people can take a long time to find a job, because churn is slow. My friend's dad is a highly skilled lawyer, but he's place bound in an area without a concentration of appropriate jobs, and it's taking him forever to find something.

In slow-churn areas like liberal art academics, a little bit of discrimination can fuck up someone's entire life. In high churn areas, it might hurt them for a couple of months. High churn areas are a lot more amenable to leaving the workforce for a few years for kids, then popping back in.
It's also a lot easier to coordinate jobs with a spouse if you both can work anywhere relatively quickly (or for that matter, move back to your home town to take care of an ailing parent).

That said, there's not much an individual job seeker can do about this, except choose a quick-turnaround field, so this isn't really helpful in any sense of the word. I just find it interesting.

*I include it for completeness, but it's not the best I've read on the subject, and goes against prevailing consensus.

^Okay, a few comments. 1. Venkates desperately needed a co-author and/or heroic editor. It's incredibly interesting data, but not particularly well presented 2. Like other books I've read on the sociology of poverty in America (which, okay, is one), this one leaves out related phenomena that seem incredibly relevant to me, and it seems to me that they're leaving out data that would make their subjects look bad. In Off the Books, it's welfare. Aside from explaining that one woman wasn't eligible due to past fraud, and a passing mention of food stamps while talking about facilitators, he doesn't touch on welfare at all, and I have to assume that welfare has a huge effect on an urban poor economy.

*My points hold for job searching while employed, but take longer to explain.

Unhelpful advice

2007-11-15T19:15:00.000-08:00

Attractiveness is positively correlated with tips for waitresses. I don't have a hyperlink to my freshman year psych textbook, but it's also correlated with getting hired and not being found criminally insane. I'm going to go evo-psych on you all and suggest that this isn't just a male desire to be surrounded by attractive women. Attractiveness is correlated with current health and childhood health, both of which are correlated with intelligence.

How can you make this work for you? Dress nicely. Wash. Make sure your hair is clean (although a friend tells me that super long hair is unprofessional for women). Plastic surgery is probably overkill.

Don't go too far though. Especially for women applying for knowledge jobs, looking too beautiful or sexual makes you look unprofessional, 'cause really, you can't be both hot and smart. That's just not right.

Think Like Syrup

2007-11-13T19:55:00.000-08:00

Ask The Headhunter has some advice I do agree with: how to make yourself stand out in a job interview. He compares it to sticky websites, which I think is a bit odd, but it works.

More straying from the mission

2007-11-11T19:50:00.000-08:00

Jane Espenson, a writer/producer on Buffy, Firefly, and Battlestar Galactica (not all at once, obviously) has a blog, focused on helping aspiring screen writers perfect their craft, although obviously she's got a lot of strike updates at the moment. I'm really sympathetic to this strike, moreso than any other strike I can remember, but seeing a writer I really like describe her picketing location with multiple exclamation marks is just depressing.

Besides that, it seems like a great resource for prospective screenwriters, a constituency I'm sure reads this blog with rapt attention, and in large numbers.

Code Monkey like tab and mountain dew

2007-11-11T13:07:00.000-08:00

I initially resisted contract work, because I thought that it was mostly click-monkey manual testing, and I wanted something more interesting. This turns out to be absolutely not true- I have done more automation and planning in my first two and a half week at my current (temp) position than I did in my year at my previous job, and I have a lot more responsibility (in a good way). It may partly be a function of size: large companies hire temps mostly to do work they don't want to waste a full time employee on, small companies hire temps to smooth out variations in their work flow without taking on a major obligation.

On the other hand, being a temp lawyer sounds like exactly what I pictured for programming, and I didn't even know that click monkey was even an option for lawyers. Tom the Temp makes me glad I didn't choose law the way Young Female Scientist makes me glad I didn't choose academia. To be fair, lawyer temps are bored and mistreated at $35/hour, which is a hell of a lot better than what some people have. Even people with years of post-graduate education. But it still sounds hellish.

Just another disapointment

2007-11-09T16:42:00.000-08:00

I've come to count on Guerrilla Job Hunting to make me look good, with tips like sending your future boss a pizza with one slice missing or a single shoe. But today they have something reasonable, suggesting super-temping as a way of demoing your skills. Temp to perm is not new for coders, but the super short term work is worth considering.

Lies my Reruiter told me: Dress well

2007-11-06T18:49:00.000-08:00

I don't think anyone should have to be told this, but I benefited from some rather obvious advice, so let's be safe and cover it. Wear nice clothes to an interview. Even if you know for a fact that everyone at your prospective employers wears swim trunks and torn corporate freebie t-shirts, dress nicely. Unless you absolutely know how your interviewers will be dressed that day, Wear a suit. Even hypercasual startups with DDR rooms won't criticize you for it, and you never know when you'll accidentally interview for IBM.

If you can't afford a real suit, go to a thrift store. In fact, do that anyway, suits are expensive. If you really can't afford it, there are charities specifically set up to loan clothes to you for interviews and your first week (at which point you can go to thrift store and buy your own).

When you absolutley positively need four cents overnight

2007-11-04T11:31:00.000-08:00

Do you know the story of the mechanical turk? Way back in 1769 a man claimed he had invented a chess playing machine. It consisted of a mannequin dressed in Turkish style, connected to a large cabinet, filled with gears. Deep blue it was not, but it wasn't playing Kasparov, so it did pretty well. Eventually someone discovered that behind all the gears was a human chess master, and the whole thing seemed less impressive.

If your reaction to that story is "I'd like to be that chess master hidden in a clock, only instead of something interesting and challenging like chess, I'd like to do the same boring task over and over" I have a money making opportunity for you. Amazon's Mechanical Turks is designed to match humans (you) with small jobs that humans do well and machines do poorly, like identifying whether two products are the same or a picture is offensive. The money is not great, but it is there, and you can earn it while watching TV or waiting for something. Unfortunately, the selection of turks is inconsistent- there's a couple of types that offer reasonably good returns, and a lot that imply deep lack of respect for my time ($2 for transcribing a fifteen minute interview? Sure). The good ones go quickly, so at any given time the site may be devoid of them. This makes it hard to fit it into the five minutes a day it might be a really good return on your time.

I like mturks because I'm a sucker for an immediate payout, even if, in theory, I could increase my lifetime earnings by a larger amount by using that time to brush up my database skills (this leads me to suspect that contracting is a good fit for me). It also helps with that feeling of "I'm not doing anything but sitting here burning money" that unemployment sometimes brings.

More advice from other people

2007-11-03T00:58:00.000-07:00

Some guy from some website has posted a list of of things not to do to your resume on some other website. Surely it can't be as awesome as you describe it, I hear you say. To prove I'm not overselling it, let me share the first tip

1. "Responsible for”

The Problem: This is one of the most common, and most amateurish, resume errors. There is no greater example of weak, passive writing than the overused "responsible for." There are two base reasons why this phrase is to be avoided. The first is that it is already understood that the information included in your resume are activities that you were responsible for; this is the equivalent of writing "we cook" before an item listed in a restaurant menu. The second reason is what I alluded to above: "responsible for" is passive, bland, and boring. It does nothing to draw in the reader, and demonstrates no specific or relevant skill. With the average resume being read in approximately seven seconds, the first word or two in each sentence is absolutely critical because it is the information that will be read first and most. Whether anything else in a given sentence will be read at all entirely depends on if the first couple of words strike a chord with the reader. If the hiring manager holding your resume does not spot keywords of interest in those vital locations, then the entire resume is probably going in the trash, no matter how great the rest of your information is.

The Solution: A great way to test the quality of a resume is to read just the first word in each sentence, and see what image those words build of you as an employee. If your first words consist of "responsible for", "helped", "handled", or other passive language, then you´re not creating a powerful or compelling first impression. Open each and every sentence with a power verb that is relevant to the job you are applying for. Words such as "manage", "direct", "administer", and "process" can often be used to replace "responsible for", and are far more effective.

I'll admit, my current resume (the one that got me my current job. Eventually) features this mistake, and that's after campus services fixed it. The previous version was so bad multiple recruiters told me to have it looked at. Maybe I shouldn't be giving resume advice. Anyways, this makes a lot of sense to me, and I'm going to be sure to follow this advice once I have some accomplishments to list.

The others are not quite as fun and magical, but still useful, and the author seems well worth following.

seriously people, do you not want a job?

2007-11-01T21:36:00.000-07:00

My voice mail message is a recitation of my phone number, with a vague hint that if you talk after the beep I might hear it later. I understand that some of you invest a little bit more in your message, but seriously, if you're in the middle of job hunting, keep your voice mail message professional. And honestly, even people who aren't potentially offering you gobs of money don't want to hear a 10 year old song from a dead rapper when they call you. Really, they don't.

Advice aimed directly at my brother.

2007-10-31T20:38:00.000-07:00

Don't schedule an interview on a Friday or over a holiday. Getting between an interviewer and his weekend is slightly less stupid than getting between a mother bear and her cub.

Lies my Recruiter told me: stay plannless.

2007-10-31T20:32:00.000-07:00

This one was actually really useful, assuming the recruiters that told it to me were correct (100% of recruiters who gave me advice agreed on this, but it's a small n). I never knew how to answer the question "where do you want to be in five years." If I had a plan, it was "enjoy the fact that people like you are willing to pay me ridiculous amounts of money for something I find easy. Keep doing what you tell me until the level gets less ludicrous, at which point I'll find someone less well balanced with more money , and do what they tell me to." This seemed like a bad thing to say out loud. I assumed that this question was an oblique test of my ambition and assessment of my own capabilities.

Turns out, nope. They're asking about your plan to find out if "do good work for company X" is in it. I think the original advice I got took this too far: any manager who thinks "My only ambition is to do really well at this job you haven't even offered me." is a good answer is probably not going to support any goals you have or develop. But don't make the job on the table sound like a stepping stone. What worked really well for me was to say "I'm still gathering information on this. I know that what I want right now is to do a job remarkably like the one you're offering me, learn from it, and use that information to evaluate my next step. Possibilities include X and Y, but I want to stay flexible." Thus far I've avoided having X=starting my own company, because if I don't believe myself when I say it, they won't.

Advantages of this approach include: you're showing you really want this particular job, you're not going to run off three months from now, you're not wandering aimlessly hoping someone hires you, and you're adabtable.

The right answer probably varies on the type of position you're looking at. No small software company expects lifetime loyalty. If they limited themselves to people willing to work on one project (or related set of projects) for 20 years their pool would shrink to chlorine and dead mosquitoes. You can emphasize your desire to work with whatever their special technology is. Large companies (Microsoft, IBM, Google) have enough different kinds of work to fulfill some people's need for novelty, so play down any job hopping ambitions you might have (especially since one of those is tired of people using it as a resume booster to get a job at another). I wouldn't get overly specific what type of thing you want to work on, since you'll be expected to change every couple of years (graphics is probably broad enough that you can sell yourself as a guru. Security and perf are fine. Halo 4 Grenade Launcher renderer is not.). Emphasize growth within the organization.

For temp positions, it seems acceptable to me to admit using it as a stepping stone. How much loyalty do they want when their internal rules probably bar them from hiring you for over six months? Just make it clear that you won't leave before the six months if up. If you have a plausible reason why you prefer contracting to perm, you can slip it in here. "Full time position" is a bad answer unless it's temp-to-perm, because they'll wonder what's wrong with you that you can't find one.

I'm still at the stage where growth is the only acceptable plan: at the very least I can dream of being an SDET II. Eventually you hit a point where coasting is acceptable (not everyone gets to be an architect), but I'd be wary of admitting that. My best guess is to act excited about the inevitable treading you'll have to do as new technology arises ("I can't wait to work on the floobertygibbit"). If you're a crusty UNIX guru who hasn't done anything new in 10 years...I dunno, save money while that's still a viable option?

Anyone with better advice, feel free to chip in.

ETA: This advice is wrong. See here for an update.

The Kid Made the Blogosphere

2007-10-29T20:29:00.000-07:00

Yeah, yeah, there's nothing more boring than watching bloggers navel gaze about where their hits are coming from. Seriously, everyone else, stop that, no one cares. But this is totally different, and besides those rules don't apply to me.

First, visit tracking is really cool. My post about Megan McArdle happened to come shortly after she posted a scathing review of a particular Comfort Inn. The airline that stranded her, thus causing the unpleasant interaction, found me by googling her name. They stayed exactly 0 seconds. I didn't actually investigate, but I can't imagine I'm in the top 1000 results in a google search for her name, so I have to applaud their dedication.

Second, I made Confessions of a Community College Dean. This is about as a big a deal to me as some of the book signings I've been to, except that I can brag about meeting Lewis Black in a way I really can't with Dean Dad, because my friends find him substantially less impressive. The fact that my letter was printed a day after I sent it makes it seem like a less impressive achievment. I assumed he had a huge backlog of letters that he picked and chose from, but no, apparently two sentences from me gets an entire post.

Third, 75% of my non-me, non-friend traffic comes from recruiting agencies, and that's just what I can confirm from their IP address. Often they go to a specific post, and it's type-in, not link-following (at least, sitemeter can't tell what referred them), from which I can only conclude a link is being passed around. I would offer to sell ad space to job-seekers, but honestly, they don't stay for that long, and it's not that hard to get a recruiter to look at your resume.

Should have followed that train of throught to the next station.

2007-10-28T22:21:00.000-07:00

I always wondered why I should bother with a cover letter, since I just highlighted relevant bits of information from my resume. I chalked it up to "showing I care", which is a bit stupid, since often I didn't. Now I find out the problem is that I'm an idiot: a letter much like mine is Ask a Managers "what not to do" in this post on how to write a cover letter. If I can't conduct my next job hunt entirely through poorly trained recruiters, I'll definitely refer to this.

Not the Worst Problem to Have

2007-10-28T13:41:00.000-07:00

Eventually I'll stop stealing topics from Ask The Headhunter, but until then... what do you do when you have an offer at one company, but are midway through the application process at others?

You can avoid this problem entirely by scheduling your interviews in order of preference, but that's not always possible, especially if you're unemployed or your current job situation is untenable.

Headhunter thinks that it's perfectly ethical to accept the offer, but continue interviewing, and either rescind your acceptance or quit early in the job, and that this is fact the best option. I categorically disagree. First, it is unethical. If you give your word, you should follow through. Period. Second, it will eventually bite you in the ass. Even if you didn't want that particular right now, you may wish to work for that company, or that person, or that person's friend, somewhere down the line, and you don't want to burn that bridge. Most companies won't take offense if you turn them down for a better offer, especially if you phrase it correctly, but they're not going to take you back after you've cheated them.

Then there are the consequences to other people. Once you accept the job, the company will tell their other applicants the bad news. Best case scenario their second choice is still available, but you've cost them several weeks. Or the person has accepted another job. Either they follow your lead and the chain continues, or they do the ethical thing and stick with their second choice job, in which case you have demonstrably worsened their life.

Headhunter says "In reality, there's little difference between quitting on day one or after several years" but that just isn't true. Turnover is inevitable and accepted. Jerking them around is not, for the reasons I've listed above.

So what should you do? First, evaluate the offer on its own merits. Is it acceptable? Is it worth negotiating? If you'd rather stay unemployed (a decision that rests in part on your estimation of your future prospects), turn them down outright. If they're good but not great, talk to your other potential employers and let them know what's going on. In the software industry, most companies can move very fast in situations like these. In fact, most of them ask if you're currently weighing other offers, and have a system set up to fast track you if you are.

Full disclosure: I've only faced this problem once, and most of the offers were from different units within the same company

But who will bell the cat?

2007-10-27T21:04:00.000-07:00

Ask The Headhunter's has a series on his $30,000 strategy. If I may summarize: quality, not quantity. Don't send your resume out to 400 companies and hope you get a hit. Instead, spend that time finding the one job you are perfect for, make yourself more perfect, and spend the interview demonstrating your perfection. It sounds like a great strategy, if you happen to have enough information to know exactly what they want, the skills that match up to that want, a lack of competition in that area, and the power to make them interview you the way you want. If you lack any of those...good luck.

So 99% of the population, even in high demand fields, will have to aim a bit lower. I'd love to skip the stage where HR asks me whether I'm good with people, but I'm not the one with the power in this situation. And not everyone has the contacts to get good intelligence on several companies, or even one company. I didn't have two personal-contact-based job to rub together, and he wants me to find their five year business plan and how I can shorten it to four years?

I think do think that the mindset he recommends is a good one: you are not trying to get them to give you a job, you are demonstrating your ability to the job. This starts with the resume and cover letter: personalize (corporatize?) them for the job you're applying to. Brush up on the relevant skills if possible. Go in ready to demonstrate your ability to do it. But have an answer prepared when they ask you what your biggest weakness is too.

Comfort yourself with thoughts of how much worse it could be

2007-10-27T18:46:00.000-07:00

Via an unprofiled blogger at Dean Dead, I bring you: Applying to Grad, a livejournal community about getting into grad school. Applying to grad school is like applying to a job, only a lot more work, and frequently the best case scenario is you owe thousands of dollars.

Job Boards are Not Your Friends

2007-10-27T14:54:00.000-07:00

I've talked about my experience with the big job boards. Ask the Headhunter has some choice words for them, career builder in particular

The company's mission is to sell advertising and take care of its shareholders. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you're a job hunter or employer who needs to land a job or fill one, consider this mission statement a disclaimer. CareerBuilder is not in the business of matching people with jobs. It is a marketing and advertising company that uses trivial data base methods to make money from naive job hunters and employers.

Obviously I don't have any insider information on this, but it has a lot of face validity. The corporations are the ones that pay them, they're on the corporations' side. Although apparently they will take my money and bump my "relevancy score". That, to me, is an even bigger red flag: it is impossible to ethically represent two parties with divergent interest: you have to choose one. Taking money from both is an ethical violation, which is illegal in many states (for certain transactions- I'm sure career builders lawyers have look at this).

I don't know if this applies to specialized boards, like dice or Independent School Placement, and I'm sure it doesn't apply to craigslist, which is either free or charges a low flat fee to the employer and doesn't make any claims about helping you. This is also worth keeping in mind when you talk to recruiters- they're nice, but they're paid by the company, not you.

Delusions are like Hope, but more specific

2007-10-26T23:45:00.000-07:00

My recent job loss wasn't the only time my life had failed to proceed according to plan. There was one other. Other than that, I have to say it's been pretty orderly, unless you count "I got what I wanted and it turns out it sucks", in which case very little has followed the plan. But let's be generous and focus on the two times when the universe just flat out told me no. These were both very big disappointments. I had a whole life built up in my head, and it was destroyed.

Something that comforted me both times was reading Megan McArdle (currently at The Atlantic, previously janegalt.ne t). She experienced something similar when 9/11 cost her her upcoming job of awesomeness +1 at a management consultant firm, which torpedoed her only point of entry into the $100k+ great hours live anywhere consulting field. It hurt. A lot. Despite her MBA the best job she could get was as a glorified secretary.

Several years later, she found a job as an economics journalist, which she absolutely loves. And here's the important bit: she never would have found it had she not been laid off and gone through two years of hell. If I hadn't lost my first opportunity, I never would have moved to my current line of work, a move that has without a doubt improved my life. I believed that even in the midst of the unemployment. Setbacks are temporary. Without them, you might never take the risks that allow you to do truly awesome things.

Of course, I'm saying this from a point of privilege. I have a good degree and an excellent resume in a high-paying large-opportunity field

Alas, I can't find the post where she spells out exactly how awesome losing her job led to the real job of awesomeness. But you can see for yourself that she's now a widely journalist with so much clout that she's got her own personal hate blog and a dismissive nickname used by even reputable bloggers on the opposing side. And isn't that what we all aspire to?

Rare moments of competance

2007-10-25T20:02:00.000-07:00

I get such a noisy signal as to whether a given technique or answer went over well (Okay, I didn't get that job. Which of the 400 answers I gave was wrong?) that I'm hesitant to give broad spectrum advice. You can get a lot better answers elsewhere (see sidebar for examples). But all the good, tested advice comes from HR people, and there are some things they just don't get. So here are answers to questions from technical interviewers

The Question: I bought a car from some guy. He's given me two days to return it. I give it to you to test. What do you do to make sure I don't get ripped off?

The Answer: This obviously a multi part answer. But the bit that set me apart (and I know this because he specifically told me) was that one of the steps I listed was to look for documentation on-line. Previously I'd worried that saying that made me look lazy, but apparently it looks efficient, which is just like lazy except employers like it a lot more.

The Question: can you develop GUIs?

The Answer: Yes, but they will be ugly.

Obviously, that doesn't apply if you're being hired as a graphic designer. But if you're a tester or dev, and you know they're specifically asking whether you can design interfaces for in-house tools, this is the only answer that will get you respect.

And now, a technique that I've gotten less feedback on but really seems like it ought to work:

When you're listing test cases, list the circumstances under which they would and would not be valuable. For example, in the car case above, I mentioned that because I was testing a single car for personal use, I would not test to destruction, but if I was the QA Engineer at Ford, I would select some number of cars to push to the absolute limit. This helps you two ways. One, it shows you think about the problem and the best way to approach it, and don't use a one size fits all attack. Two, it fills up time while you think of more appropriate test cases. If the choice is between dead silence while you think (and if you're like me, the harder you think the more bored you look) and an inappropriate test case, labeled as such, go with inappropriate.*

*Note to the socially challenged: this does not generalize. Silence is almost always better than inappropriateness.

The bit about proofreading? Universally Applicable

2007-10-22T08:43:00.000-07:00

Dean Dad is a wonderful source of information for anyone looking for an academic job, both for how to get it and why you might not want to. Today he covers the application process for academic admin jobs, and inadvertently reveals that those search committees have a lot more time on their hands than the business world equivalent. There's only a 50/50 shot a given business will read your cover letter in the tech industry, but college administrators apparently have to write a minimum of four pages, single spaced, to be taken seriously.

Seriously though, do proofread your cover letters.

Freelancing for the socially maladept

2007-10-22T08:40:00.000-07:00

One of my plans when my job hunt hit a brick wall was to freelance. I could pull flash gigs off of craigslist and the mini-job websites at first, eventually developing a multibillion dollar enterprise with my own business card. With metallic print. The fact that my name is the kind of name that was born to precede the words "consulting firm" just proved what a brilliant idea it was. The sites that were going to help me launch Prestigious Name Consulting were:

Scriptlance - the only page I actually signed up for. The Data Entry gigs didn't pay well enough to bother with, given what it would do to my unemployment benefits, and I didn't know enough Flash to compete effectively. I bid on a few real programming projects, but since I was trying to stay flexible (I'll get an awesome job soon, I can feel it) I could only consider small projects. It turns out it's a good thing I didn't spend too much time here, because it suffers from a major flaw/feature: since the point is small, modular jobs that can be done anywhere, you're competing with programmers all over the world, many of whom have much lower costs of living. You'd think speaking English would give you an advantage, but based on the grammar/spelling of the job postings...no. If you do find a good project, using a site like scriptlance has the advantage is that payment is completely secure and anonymous. Scriptlance also has a board for full time job postings, which I can only assume was created to leverage some synergy they think they have.
Rent a coder -and Get A Freelancer - Same basic idea as scriptlance, only I haven't used them.
Craigslist - I perused this fairly heavily, and there are a few gems, mixed in with the "i hav a awesm idea for a game, looking for a programmer to do all the work and share the profits 90/10." Craigslist posters frequently want local programmers, so it doesn't suffer from the same problems as the others. On the other hand, their requirements are a bit stricter: they often want references and demos of past work. And pants are rarely if ever optional.

Secrets of the Job Hunt has a list of more here, but no additional information on how they compare.

[Full Disclosure: The links to the non-craigslist sites are affiliate referral links, and if you sign up and take or give work through them I make money (it doesn't cost you a thing). So if you really hate me, don't use those links. But wouldn't an even better revenge be joining and doing million dollars of work, allowing me to retire in the manner to which I wish to become accustomed. Because then every time I wake up at 4 to a hard day of playing video games, I'll know it's due to you, and it will kill my soul a little bit. Wouldn't that be the perfect revenge?]

So a combination of valuing my time highly, lack of the right skills, hope for a full time job and, in the case of craigslist, fear that I would accidentally respond to a vague yet excruciatingly specific ad in the adult suggestion kept me from taking this too far. The one freelancing gig I did get I got through a combination of a rare skill (one that is otherwise pretty hard to leverage, because there's little demand) and knowing the right person. That gig taught me a valuable lesson about time estimation and how even very simple things can take a very long time, and possibly contributed to my reluctance to try again.

If anyone knows of any other sites, or has feedback on these, let me know

Lies my recruiter Told Me Part 1, True Lies

2007-10-21T20:57:00.000-07:00

Part 1 in the ongoing series "Lies my recruiter told me"

"This will be a fairly techy interview, so brush up on your technical skills"

I knew that I interviewed better in college than I did two years ago, and I knew that at least part of it was because I had lost a lot of the academic knowledge. I even did toy programming projects to keep my skills up. But actually studying programming concepts specifically for an interview would have been cheating. It wasn't until it was specifically pointed out that this was a good idea that I realized that maybe interviewers would prefer me to look up polymorphism rather than guess during the interview (I got it on the second try). In general, I won't look up stuff for first-line phone interviews or snort HR screenings, but it's worthwhile if you know specific things will come up in an in-person.

"At the start of the interview, ask what they want, and tailor your answers to that." You can see why I thought this one was cheating, but it makes sense. As a bonus, it shows that you're really interested in the position. And if you do in the first stage of a circuit, you can look up stuff for the second stage.

I think that about sums it up for good advice. Even then, it was only useful because I was an idiot. We'll get to the funny stuff tomorrow.

Job interview questions

2007-10-20T23:43:00.000-07:00

That is, what should you ask them. Secrets of the Job Hunt list some really good ones here.
Highlights:

1) Why is this position available right now?

6) How much freedom do I have in the decision making process?

My personal favorites are: "what surprised you most about working here?" or "what do you wish you'd known when you were in my position?"

A quick run down of job hunting websites

2007-10-20T19:27:00.000-07:00

Career Builder- I found this one when craigslist compared itself to it. I don't think I found a single job off of this site, but I did get a cool daily e-mail suggesting dozens of inappropriate jobs.
Craigslist- This was the only job posting site I found to be worth checking daily. They're cheap or free, so they get a lot of small start-ups posting. Depending on your outlook, this may or may not be a good thing. I never had a problem with a scam or otherwise bad link in the tech section, but ymmv. The search is keyword only, but I found it worth my while to browse and read appropriate ads. I got almost all of my interviews off of craigslist. It's also worth checking out the computer gigs section if you have sills that are in demand for small projects, like flash or PHP. They have a resume posting board, but there is no way in hell I was posting identifying information to an open board on craigslist.
Dice- Their job postings in my area were okay but not great. As I've hammered into the ground, the real value comes from posting your resume so others can see it, and I have no idea whether dice is better or worse than its competitors in this area. I suspect it's not a huge difference, because recruiters often refer to seeing my resume on some job posting site, not dice specifically, which makes me think they troll them all. The same company owns clearancejobs.com (for those with a security clearance), jobsinthemoney.com (finance jobs), and a few others. I think the specificity is helpful, but not enough to completely replace other sites.
Hotjobs - I think I found a few jobs to apply to, but the rate of new jobs was such that it was only worth checking every weeks. They have a resume posting board that I've never used, so it could either be a panacea of 1998-style tech start up jobs or a cesspool that McDonalds uses when all the pimply teenagers quit over working conditions.
Indeed- This is a specialized search engine that crawls other job postings sites for positions that fit your criteria. You can't tailor search results the way you can when using a specific site, so you have to wade through a lot of crap, and I have no confidence that it catches every applicable position. In general, I found it useful only for finding job search sites to peruse on my own.
Monster- Like hotjobs, monster was filler when craigslist wasn't giving me enough positions to fulfill my obligations to the unemployment office. Unlike hotjobs, I know of a confirmed case of someone posting his resume to monster and getting a callback, leading to a job at a company known for their agonizing death marches. This same company found my resume on dice. So really, I don't have much useful information about monster either.
College Grad- entry levels jobs. I didn't here about this till recently, so I have no idea how good it is.
Your friendly local unemployment office- my state has a computerized job posting board. The quality isn't bad, but the rate of new interesting postings makes monster look like craigslist. It was worth looking through once, and would probably have been worth looking through again a month or two after that, but nothing you could count on.

If anyone else has other sites to suggest, or information about any of these sites, do let me know.

Jobs? We don't need no stinking jobs

2007-10-19T23:49:00.000-07:00

I wanted to start a series of posts on ways to make money other than jobs, but this blog is doing a far more thorough job than I ever will. It contains hundreds if not thousands of web based money making opportunities like paid surveys, selling photos, doing product reviews and such. It's a tad more commercial than I would like, but it looks legit and contains lots of useful links. I'm really regretting finding this after I got employed- it looks like she's making a career of off internet-based opportunities for a lot less stress than I'll face, and she's doing it off of the actual surveys and whatnot, not her referrals and blog ads, which is uncomfortably meta for me. Those "watch me make n thousand dollars a year running this blog about making n thousand dollars a year running a blog" type things make me go nilhistic.

Lies my recruiter told me, prelude

2007-10-19T20:56:00.000-07:00

Initially I was very resistant to working through recruiters, for reasons I don't quite understand now. My best guess is it was a combination of pride ( I was so awesome I should be able to find a job on my own) , avoidance of contract work (the temps I saw were all click monkeys who didn't know what a race condition was*) which I thought was synonymous with recruiters, and a feeling like this was cheating (unexamined feelings of cheating will be a recurring theme here).

Two things precipitated the change. The first was that I accidentally got on a recruiters list when I applied to a specific job posting on craigslist. They asked to submit my resume to another one of their clients. I wasn't qualified for the posting, but in keeping with my general principle of "don't turn down a chance to practice interviewing", I said yes. They turned me down too (I'm assuming they noticed I was not qualified), but they shared an HR agent with another company, who had a job that was an excellent fit for me. This, combined with the cumulative pressure of weeks of failed job hunting, including a grab for the brass ring (that would be precipitator number two), made me think that maybe recruiters weren't so bad.

I tried to apply directly to recruiting agencies, but that was a non-starter. I only knew a few names. Most didn't take direct applications, the closest I got was essentially a job posting board.

I had heard about dice the month before at an otherwise useless mandatory unemployment resources meeting. Don't let the preceding sentence fool you: the woman leading the meeting was absolutely useless, and took a long time demonstrating this. A fellow job seeker mentioned dice as one of the things they tried. I added it to my list of sites to check regularly (craigslist, hot jobs, career builder and monster being the others). I chose to post to dice only because the monster hack was in the news and dice seemed more focused. Honestly, I'm not sure it matters. A friend of a friend did well with monster, another occasionally gets recruiters calling after seeing her personal web page. Dice worked for me.

E-mails and calls flooded in. Two/day, minimum. I will be working two weeks after posting my resume. I don't think the interviews reached one/day, but they would have soon. I suspect I would have done even better had I not had the previously mentioned low-experience problem. And now, I'll be able to solve that.

That said, they're not miracle workers. They're more like walking contact books. Sometimes they overreach their area of expertise. This is the start of a series in which I share advice I was given and ~~make fun of it~~ explain its good and bad features. And there's at least one piece of advice that was really useful. It was insultingly obvious, but I'm an idiot (I told you feelings of cheating would reoccur), so I'm glad they sent it. Copying and pasting a recruiter's e-mail would be plagiarism, but I figure I'm safe if I paraphrase and combine several letters.

*Note to non-technicals: this is a bad

Or maybe I killed all my competition hunting rodents

2007-10-18T17:28:00.001-07:00

When I started this blog oh so long ago, I did a brief search to see who else was covering the same area, in the hopes that I could ~~steal~~ learn from them. The only blogs I found were corporate, by either job search websites or recruiters. I think there's two contributing factors here.

Reason number one bitchslapped Mandatory Vacation four days in: any person you'd want to take advice from will rapidly render their blog obsolete. People in the business of job hunting are the only ones that can keep it up for the time it takes to build a decent site. Even a perpetual contractor will job search at most two or three times a year, and the better he is at job hunting the less time he'll have to describe it. And even if you're in an industry with longer search times, no one knows how long their job search will take. I considered starting this blog many times before, but I was always on the verge of another job, and waited to see if the latest great new thing would work out. (It's not a coincidence I started this blog shortly before being hired. I'd hit bottom job-search wise, leading me to decide that founding this blog wasn't a waste of time, and to investigate avenues I hadn't considered before. As it turned out, those were the right avenues to investigate, and I could have saved myself months if I'd used them first. The lesson? Thou Art Not Too Good For Recruiters)

Reason number two is shame. Trying and failing to find a job hurts. Telling other people about it is opening yourself up to criticism. I probalby wouldn't have been able to do this if I didn't have a rock solid reason that didn't reflect on me as a person to explain the difficulty I was having. Thus, focused, useful, long running job hunting blogs from the perspective of the hunter are going to be thin on the ground. (Please don't let yourself get distracted by the image a man with a spear running through the Serengeti, stabbing the grass in an attempt to hit a small rodent, which easily dodges the spear and says "we were hoping for someone with C# experience." It's just not productive).

But sometimes you get lucky, and an existing blog transitions into a job hunt blog (obviously this is a happier event for job blog readers than the newly christened job blog writer). I haven't found one of those either. But there is Lazy Man, who fulfills half the bill. Like me, Lazy Man just got laid off from his programming position in a tech heavy area. Unlike me he has a large amount of accumulated wealth, several streams of alternative income, and a wife who earns six figures, rendering a new job optional, at least for the short term. Nevertheless, I suspect he'll still have some insights into the process, or at least some process. Advice on founding your own business might be even better than advice on finding a way to work for someone else.

Nice problems to have

2007-10-18T16:55:00.000-07:00

Since I knew I was taking this position, I've received three more calls from different recruiting agencies. I've lost count of how many agencies already had permission to refer me for interviews (it's less than 10. I think.). Now that I'm employed, I won't be needing their services. Immediately. But even if this wasn't a term-limited position, all good things must end, and it would be stupid to throw all those contacts and associated goodwill away. So I'm going through my e-mail, letting each one know that I'm currently unavailable but appreciate their interest and asking to reconnect when my current position expires. The response has been entirely positive. One recruiter even asked if my new company had new openings they might hire her to fill. I can't say this fills me with confidence, but the recruiter who got me my current job didn't realize that there's a difference between compiled languages and scripts*, so I'm not sure it matters.

I should note that I didn't come up with this idea myself. I simply explained the situation honestly to the first recruiter that called after I had the job, and he asked if I'd mind if he kept me on file. I'm not sure it would have occurred to me otherwise, but it should have.

*Note to anyone who's here for the teaching-job blogging: if you were a programmer, and I'd delivered that joke better, you'd be shooting soda out of your nose with laughter. And the soda would be free. But you wouldn't get summers off.

Well that was fast

2007-10-17T17:46:00.000-07:00

I had been job hunting for over two months when I started this blog. The next day, I had a phone interview. The day after that, an in-person. And the day after that, a satisfactory job offer.

I said satisfactory, not great. It's a long commute, and you heard my impression of the people. But I got my goal salary, the benefits (which come from the recruiting agency, not the company itself) are reasonable if not stellar, and when the contract is over I'll be able to round up to two years of experience, making me eligible for many more jobs. Plus there's the, whachallit, actual experience I'll have, which might prove useful in the future. For while the company is boring, the job will actually give me a fair amount of autonomy and responsibility.

So what now? As defined, this blog has the virgin slut problem, where it's about the search for its own end. But fear not, three people who have visited and are not my friends, I have a plan. First, I have a backlog of advice just waiting to replicate itself onto the internet, which should take up some time. Second, this is a temporary position, so six months from now we get to do the whole thing over again (hopefully faster. If it takes this long next time, you might want to take my advice with a grain of salt). I plan on filling the in-between time with posts from my as yet unpseudonymed friend, who is a college senior looking for teaching jobs, and perhaps my brother, who is a college senior looking for programming jobs. And if anyone else out there is job hunting, you can see that this is blog is clearly a good luck charm.

More Praise for Dice

2007-10-16T19:54:00.000-07:00

I previously praised dice as a great way to get interviews. It's better than I knew.

In the first few weeks of job hunting, I submitted my resume to one of the SuperMegaIncorporated companies you find around here. I honestly don't remember if I submitted my resume at large, or to a specific position (they have hundreds if not thousands), but either way I never heard back. And as far as I know, my resume is still lying in a virtual drawer, being eaten by virtual beetle larvae, or goats. But the goats can have my resume, because a recruiter at SuperMegaIncorporated found my resume on dice and would like to talk to me about a position. Not a position I'm qualified for, mind you, but if I limited myself to jobs I qualified for on paper I'd be ruining my wrists testing video games for $9/hour + pizza.

(Note to recruiters: here I am using humor to lighten the stress caused by having exactly the wrong amount of previous work experience, and the subsequent difficulty. I am, in fact, an excellent worker and you should hire me right away)

This brings me to another advantage of recruiters and job posting boards: they know what they want more than you know what they want. Until you're at the write-your-own-ticket stage, you're never going to find a job posting that you fulfill every stated requirement. Corporations know this, and there's usually some give in the system, especially if the position goes unfilled for a long time. But you, the lowly job seeker, has no way of knowing which requirements are optional and which are actually required. Letting them do the sorting can save you a lot of time. Of course, it costs the company a lot of time, but that's their own fault for writing ambiguous requirements.

One last note: a lot of places say they require "A BS in Computer Science." This is bullshit. My BA has raised eyebrows exactly twice, and both people accepted it when I explained that I'd fulfilled exactly the same requirements as a BS. And according to a flyer put out by the advising department at my school, you don't even have to major in CS, just take some classes in it. This is the same department that allows people to major in Medieval Literature, so take it with a grain of salt, but there it is.

Second Verse, Same as the First

2007-10-16T19:28:00.000-07:00

I had the in-person to follow up to yesterday's phone interview, and I can see why that guy was chosen to handle first contact. My interviews were divided evenly between people who didn't know what questions to ask (and said so, repeatedly) and people who didn't speak English.

Now, the non-funny details:

My first interviewer was had clearly never read my resume before, and quite possibly had never read any resume before. He didn't have a lot of questions, and what he did have I answered quickly. There were a lot of silences. He did not ask me to code anything.

The next interviewer spoke English even worse than the previous one. I didn't know you could pronounce "manager" to sound exactly like "major", but she did. I figure she asked the most informative questions of the lot of them (from the companies standpoint), but if "define the difference between black box and white box testing" is in the upper half of questions, I have to assume the screening process just isn't that rigorous. She did not ask me to code anything.

The next interviewers was a tester/test planner, but not an engineer, and may have had an inferiority complex about it. He repeatedly said "I can't ask you any engineering questions." When I answered his questions, I emphasized the planning and resource allocation portions of the answer, and avoided rattling off lines of code, robot-like, to impress him with my l33t neural-coding skills. Although if I could actually hack people with my voice, that would be pretty awesome, and I think I'd deserve the job. But I'd aim for a better one. Perhaps one that had employees under 30. Anyways, I think this guy asked pretty good questions, but only covered very select areas, so were I HR, and I wouldn't let him have the final vote. He, of course, did not ask me to code anything.

My last interviewer was a dev, who assured me he had no experience with testing. Finally, some coding questions, one might think quietly to oneself, and then later say outloud when asked if one had any questions. But one would be wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Many of the questions he did ask were test planning related ("most of what you do is corner cases, right?"), which frustrates me because he admitted he didn't know a good answer from a bad one. The only thing he could evaluate me on was the face validity of the answer and on my confidence and body language. Which, it turns out, you can fake.

So the interview was totally softball, which means I either hit it out of the park or failed before I even got to stage 2, and they were stringing me along for most of it. I'm going to be miffed if I don't get an offer, because I don't feel I was pushed hard enough. Has anyone found ways to turn easy interviews to your advantage? When it's clear they're not asking a lot of questions I try to expand my answers, but that only goes so far.

Always hire a professional

2007-10-15T15:26:00.000-07:00

I just got off the phone from another interview, which was exciting because he clearly had less experience interviewing than I did. Maybe I could use this to my advantage if I was savvier, but for me it's like being held up by a 14 year old who stole his father's gun: he has something to prove, and while he doesn't quite know what it is, he will cut you down if you impugn his ability to do so. You want a nice, professional mugger in these kinds of situations, one who gives clear instructions, takes as much money as he can get in the 60 seconds he given, and is long gone by the time the cops arrive. This interview was the equivalent of being asked "so, how much money do you think I should steal?"

That said, I'm being brought in for an in person interview, so maybe he's adjusted for his inability to ask useful questions

2007-10-15T11:35:00.000-07:00

Friday, I had an interview at a rather awesome company. Today, I got a call back from the (third party) recruiter, letting me know that they were interested but needed to finish interviewing candidates, which is probably the best outcome I could have hoped for. My recruiter also insisted I let her know if I had any other interviews or offers (they're not the only company I'm working with), so she could let awesome company know.

Hurray for upswings

Number one tech job hunting hint

2007-10-14T12:28:00.000-07:00

1. post your resume on dice.com.
2. ...
3. profit

As with any advice given before I actually get a job, there's a limit to how much I can guarantee the results. But it seems promising thus far. I posted my resume after 5 on a Tuesday. By the next day, I'd had nine resume views and four contacts. By the end of the week I'd had almost 40 views, and maybe 10 contacts. Friday was the first day I woke up without an inquiry in my mail box, and that was because Friday's recruiter had the good sense to call me in the afternoon (people, my employment is part-time, work from home. Why on Earth would I be up at 9AM? or 10AM? If I'm conscious before 10:30, it's because my cat let me know he was hungry by chewing through my Achilles tendon).

Most of the contacts are recruiting agencies. Those are my favorite, because the other contacts all seem to be for jobs on the other side of the country or jobs at companies that have already interviewed and rejected me (or, in one memorable case, the company I had worked for and been fired from. I never expected them to realize their mistake so quickly). Recruiters are actually part of step 2, but it would hardly be a South Park reference if I specified step 2. Recruiters will contact you, either with a job in mind or just to get you in their system. From my small sample size, it's often the bigger agencies that call you before they have a job in mind, so it's worth doing. They will then send you on interviews, and eventually you'll impress someone enough that they will ~~attempt to suck out your soul via your brain~~ offer you a job, which will eventually lead to profit, unless, like many Americans, you spend more than you earn, in which case you're still in debt.

Posting on dice is pretty straightforward: you upload a resume and register as having specific skills. Add as many as you can reasonably claim. The big question for me was my privacy settings- initially I hid my contact info, but after I hunted around, it looked like the info was only available to companies with dice Employer accounts, not every stalker with library access, so I opened it up. I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect recruiters, especially at individual companies rather than agencies, want to see that you're a real person before they contact you.

After that, it's the usual routine: respond professionally to inquiries and follow up in a reasonable time frame. You'll get a lot more contacts this way, so you can calibrate things like how much money to ask for, which some people (never me, a paragon of reason and prudence) occasionally need.

Two months ago...

2007-10-14T11:56:00.000-07:00

Two and a half months ago I had a job I hated. Two months ago I was given a chance to leave the job, where by "given a chance" I mean "was told to return my badge and I would be escorted to the front door." This didn't really worry me, because I'm a programmer in a tech-heavy area and had a great resume (if you ignore the fired bit). Two months later...I'm still collecting unemployment*. This blog is my attempt to vent and help others in the same area. And if I could make my former salary in ad revenue, that would be great. But mostly, it's the whining.

I think the biggest problem is that I was fired in the sour spot of experience levels- I'd been working for just over a year when I was pushed out. When I was graduating college, I was full of promise and everyone wanted me. And based on the job boards, there are plenty of positions for people with two or more years of experience. But with one year, you're pretty much sunk. And I doubt I did myself any favors with my early insistence on a short commute, interesting work, no decrease in salary (my former employer was quite generous), and person-to-corp full time position. Worse, while my programming and testing skills have increased, I've forgotten a lot of the academic side of programming, so I interview more poorly than I once did (I used to be an awesome interviewer). After I got rejected from the job I really wanted last week, I made a couple of changes, which I will go over in detail in future posts.

*Technically I'm not unemployed, because I'm working part time for my friend's start up. If I got my theoretical max of hours- which I never have- I might make enough to cover the COBRA payments.