After a year of successfully avoiding real work I finally succumbed to peer pressure and got a legit day job. So far the new place seems cool in alot of ways. They’re a software and technology startup, but big enough to have offices in several cities around the world including one in Manhattan and one out here in the ‘burbs, pretty close to my house, and I’ve be alternating between the two. They have a mature product and the focus is on sales and growth and making our stuff scalable. I’ve been brought in to lead the front-end development on version 2.0 of the product. Most important to me is their line of work. They’re in cloud computing, a bit of a niche market right now, but they’re ahead of the curve and my feeling is that in the next few years everyone is going to need this technology. Our clients already include Verizon, Barclays and Cisco, with more coming on every week. Hello yacht!
But before I get into the new gig, and I should wait until the warm fuzzy glow wears off, I want to reflect on the whole process of finding a job in {{current year}}. Actually I just want to rant about the hubris of your average potential employer. I am a software architect, engineer, designer and developer with 25 years of professional experience, and 40 years total creating software. (I started programming computers when I was 8 years old, the same year I started playing saxophone and doing origami). Believe me I’m at a pretty high level. I’m a world-class developer, the mythical 10x contributor, and my skills extend well beyond the technical into many other areas. Last time I was on the market looking for work was 12 years ago. I’ve switched jobs a few times in that interval, but only because someone I know and trust invited me to join them somewhere. In fact this is only the second or third time I’ve looked for a job in the traditional way. So this is a rare opportunity for some lucky enterprise.
At the start my main goal was to take some time off and explore what’s out there, so I largely let the mountain come to me. Recruiters would cold call constantly, and I’d reply if it seemed like a promising place. They operate in a weird world of sales, and you would not believe the number of bullshit startups out there doing “something around social media and big data”, or something equally dumbass. The software industry was very wild-west in the 90’s, but now it’s become something much worse, more borglike. Most places are run by greedy pointy-head bankers and their henchmen middle managers whose goal it is to pretend that people are interchangeable “resources”. It’s up to the individual to fight the good fight.
The process is designed to put all the risk on the side of the employee. They constantly seek to put you in box and at a disadvantage. Most places require a technical interview, which is fine, cuz they need a way to figure out if you know your shit. But many places aren’t good at this at all, cuz they don’t know their shit. They get hung up on stupid minutia like language syntax, or ask you to middle-school level problems like bizz-buzz. Some places, like Google, do an online session, which is better, but only if they put a guy on it who can communicate articulately and has a clear grasp of the English language. In any event they have no way of judging what makes a great developer at higher levels, so they focus on passable according to some arbitrary metric at lower levels.
In lieu of that some places have a take-home project. I’ve seen a few where they expect you to write a full-on web application with a bulleted list of requirements. I don’t know how they can expect to attract quality talent with an approach like this. My time is valuable, so anything that takes more than an hour or so needs to be compensated. I sure as hell ain’t gonna do a whole day’s work for someone on spec, especially some vaporware outfit I’ve never heard of. In these cases I’d tell them politely I’d expect to paid at my usual consulting rate. They’d either quietly go away or respond with some self-righteous bullshit. Never did one say yeah, it’s only fair, I’ll pay you for a day’s work. I mean would you ask a dentist to show up for a day and pull some teeth, or a lawyer to spend a day in court?
All of this is a signal that the prospective employer doesn’t really know what they’re looking for, can’t recognize talent when they see it, aren’t interested in bringing you on in a relationship of mutual respect, and honestly aren’t serious about filling the position or probably even running their company.
The worst of all of these was America Online. Yes, believe it or not they’re still around, trying to re-invent themselves as a content destination. I don’t know why I accepted the interview, mainly out of curiosity. They were across the street from where I went to school at NYU/ITP, in a trendy loft in Greenwich Village. But when I got there it was a miserable overcrowded open plan office like a sweatshop. It was so noisy I couldn’t imagine how anyone could get any work done. They were all walking ’round with tombstones in their eyes. They guy who would be my boss didn’t even bother showing up, just phoned it in. Another guy, a really fat developer, asked me “Our motto here is work hard, play hard, what does that mean to you?” They had a booth there like a mini TV studio where they did webcasts. The day I was there the guest was some porn star who’d written a book (I’m guessing she had a ghost writer). To top it off, their project and technology seemed interesting at first, but once I started asking questions about it it became clear the whole thing was a horrible hack built in grunt in the worst possible way.
I actually applied for a few jobs on my own, when I came across something interesting, usually prompted by a fit of frustration at the absurdity or it all, and these turned out to be where all the serious leads were at. I had four job offers that were worth considering, and the interviews all had this in common: pretty much as soon as I got there, within minutes, they stopped asking about toy problems and started asking how I would solve the real business and technology problems they had in front of them, although they usually wouldn’t let on that they’d made that transition. This of course led to much richer and more interesting discussions, and as soon as I perceived what was up I knew this place had potential.
In fact my first assignment at my new gig is to implement the solution I sketched out 10 minutes into my interview.
