On the 8 Spot

Well I’m as unreliable, lazy, and entitled as the next guy, but that’s not why I’ve hopped jobs in the past. People in my generation have a very low tolerance for bullshit, and software engineering, in general, is a very high bullshit career. If you couple that with the standard load of bullshit you would get from a non-technical Harvard MBA type boss — like many CEOs that you find trying to get rich in Silicon Valley by hiring some engineers to “code up this idea real quick” — it’s no wonder that a good engineer will walk off the job after his one year cliff vesting.

As an engineer, you are told that you’re “lucky to have a job”, because there are “a hundred people lined up outside, ready to take it”. (As chance would have it, there are at least a thousand lined up to take the job of rich prick who tells people what to do). This backlash is the product of diseased thinking. A CEO who makes an engineer work 80 hours a week is a driven entrepreneur, but an engineer asking for a comfy chair is a prima donna. So, when we are up to our knees in golf-course, martini-lunch bullshit, don’t be surprised when we jump ship for a higher salary.

via Why Engineers Hop Jobs.

soo true.

It’s time to finally put the performance review out of its misery.

This corporate sham is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities. Everybody does it, and almost everyone who’s evaluated hates it. It’s a pretentious, bogus practice that produces absolutely nothing that any thinking executive should call a corporate plus.

And yet few people do anything to kill it. Well, it’s time they did.

Don’t get me wrong: Reviewing performance is good; it should happen every day. But employees need evaluations they can believe, not the fraudulent ones they receive. They need evaluations that are dictated by need, not a date on the calendar. They need evaluations that make them strive to improve, not pretend they are perfect.

via Yes, Everyone Really Does Hate Performance Reviews – WSJ.com.

Want to be a person? Remember: Managers tell employees what to do and make sure they do it.

With people, they have conversations about things that matter to them.

via The importance of being a person | IS Survivor Publishing.

Come on if you haven’t had a failed venture when your nearing 30, when you haven’t worked for or been part of a startup, if you haven’t failed at a micro enterprise, you are probably risk averse and would only start a business if it was a sure thing (and the sad thing is nothing is “a sure thing”).

If you’ve worked for the same company since graduating from college and haven’t left

PLEASE READ THE WHOLE THING on the linked blog!!!

In just about every business, there’s a club. To become a member, you have to be a person, and not just an interchangeable, faceless, member-of-the-great-unwashed, one-of-the-troops sack o’ skills.

Companies treat members of the club differently than non-members. They pay members more. They give members more interesting assignments. Members receive the promotions, and their names aren’t on the Reduction In Force rosters.

If you value your career, believe me: You want to be a person.

Selling on price doesn’t achieve that. Neither does selling solely on work products. Both proclaim kinship with cinder blocks and lentils as interchangeable commodities.

via The importance of being a person | IS Survivor Publishing.

First Round Capital 2009 Holiday Card from First Round Capital on Vimeo.

I’ve tendered my resignation a couple of weeks ago (…).  I am having this weird notion that my next job would only be for a tech-startup who wants to build something.  This could easily turn into a rant but my mood picked up thanks to someone. I just saw this video and decided to post it. It was weirdly inspiring to me.

6. Talk with your supervisor.

7. Build an emergency fund.

8. Build an exit strategy.

via The Simple Dollar » Eight Tactics for Dealing with Professional Burnout.

Luckily I’ve been doing nos 1-5 habitually. Now must try to incorporate 6-8! read the whole list and their explanations!

The whole pot was an excellent read. I’ve discussed my utter hate contempt <insert/hurl other insults here> in another post (ok the post was more of a positive post on not needing resumes) here and here.

The lowdown is simple if you have the ability to learn something fast, If you have the mental structure to do good work fast (programming context: for java people its a good grounding in patterns, for other more advice language its a great understanding and experience in meta programming), If you have the requisite basic social skills to be considered a good to great co-worker, you would probably never want for jobs.

Co-wrokers would refer you, and most of the times the resumes is secondary to the recommendation.

You work with someone for around 6 months and you probably know or have a fairly good idea of how well your co-worker learns, and in programming how ugly his or her code is.

If what you are working on is relatively hard and with deadlines that require you to level up your work output, if you can work in a project with some one that has critical time constraints and is still a hard project or problem you tend to have an idea of how he/she react under pressure.

This is something that no certification, no resume will tell you, and a test short of on the job evaluation will never show you these skills or attributes of a person.

I did a really short term contract a year ago, only a single week, in South Carolina trying to adapt a “free” tool for a use it wasn’t really supposed to be able to do. I had never seen the technology before (an XML publishing tool) and it had to interact with a system I knew nothing about (J.D. Edwards) and a week was all the time I had to learn, master, hack and deliver. I managed to succeed in 4 days (the fifth was a half day of just documenting) despite all the barriers and left on a real positive note from the customer and the agency. How do you put this in a resume? An ability to do anything that’s needed by learning rapidly, applying a lifetime of skills and a creative mind. Yeah, that’s a real good resume line:

Able to rapidly learn anything you need and deliver professional results

Talk about a useless resume. Yet it’s true, but lost in a sea of lies on resumes the statement may as well read “234234 dsfsjkhsdf = %432″.

Maybe resumes are still necessary, since the industry can’t figure out how to match employees and employers with a better method. Maybe people should write tests and challenge anyone to pass them (I think some people have tried that) instead of trolling for perjury. Even that isn’t foolproof since tests can be googled and passing tests doesn’t really prove you can actually deliver (I once knew a guy who passed the Java Developer Certification but couldn’t write two lines of code together that worked). Maybe people should read your blog and see if you know anything meaningful. I don’t have an answer, I just wish there was one people could agree on.

Meanwhile maybe I will try with the one line resume “Will write good code for good money”. I’d like to do some short term PHP work in the DFW area, so a short resume would be a plus.

At least it’s not a lie. Who knows, someone might believe it.

the_codist().

If you don’t have a great working environment quit, quit now!

from NYT:

In addition to being brilliant, Dr. Gray was an iconoclast. Speaker after speaker fondly told stories that reflected his disdain for bureaucracy and his independence. Shankar Sastry, dean of the college of engineering at UC Berkeley, noted that when organizers were planning the Saturday tribute, they felt the attire should be business casual; Dr. Gray, however, rarely wore anything but jeans and was once thrown out of the I.B.M. Scientific Center in Los Angeles for failing to meet the company’s dress code.

While working at I.B.M.’s Thomas J. Watson Jr. Research Laboratory in New York, Mr. Gray asked his boss if he could relocate to an I.B.M. laboratory in San Jose. When he was told that he couldn’t, he said, “All right, then, I quit.”

He then got in his Volkswagen, drove across the country and was rehired by an I.B.M. laboratory in California.

“We had a research group in San Francisco because Jim lived in San Francisco, and if he’d wanted to move to Monaco, we’d have a research center in Monaco,” said Rick Rashid, senior vice president for research at Microsoft.