I can tell you why you’re not being hired but you know already. People like to hire people who look like themselves and fit in with the group. My experience with that was when I moved into the “white, male, over 40” group. I didn’t look like a typical software engineer anymore (a young person’s profession), I didn’t fit in with the group, and I wasn’t adding any diversity points. (Age doesn’t count as diversity, it’s just age.) The saving grace is that my profession is performance oriented so if you know things that others don’t know and you can solve problems that others can’t solve, which is demonstrable at interviews, you can get hired. I do not have a solution to your problem but I wish you the best. Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Hiring
How Long Does it Take to Get Hired?
From LinkedIn News: How long does it take to get hired? That depends on the field of work you’re in, according to a new analysis by LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team looking at confirmed hires on the platform from June 2020 to March 2021. The data shows that technical positions take the longest time to fill (the median turnaround in engineering is 49 days). By contrast, everything moves faster in non-technical fields, such as sales (38 days) and customer service (34 days). I’m a software engineer. I did a phone interview with Company A, two managers on the call, we did a tech screen and the gist of it was, “Great job, we’ll set you up for the next interview a week from tomorrow.” Meanwhile Company B did one Zoom call and was ready to make an offer the next day. Top candidates are not going to stay on the market… Read more →
Do You Want a Programmer or a Pizza?
I teach programming classes for a living. The school has a Slack account and one of the things we use it for is to post relevant job openings. These postings come from the hiring companies and most of them unfortunately simply consist of a copy of the job description: Responsibilities, Requirements, Technical Skills. Bullet points. Trying to hire programmers like ordering a pizza. When I was a hiring manager, HR would try to run job postings like that. The problem was that I wanted to hire good programmers and good programmers have a lot of options regarding where they work. So just as a candidate needs to sell themselves to a company, a company needs to sell itself to candidates. One way of doing this is through job postings. So I rewrote the job postings to make them more enticing. To give you an example of what I mean, here’s… Read more →
It’s a Seller’s Job Market in IT Right Now, Especially for Agile
I recently concluded a 3-month job search. As part of my networking, I met a number of unemployed people in other fields who were having trouble not only getting jobs, but even getting interviews. I talked to a lot of people and averaged about an interview a day, including phone interviews, mostly for development manager jobs. For every development manager job, there are multiple development jobs, so if you’re a developer, your situation is even better than mine was. I live in Southern California, but the demand is not just local. I had multiple contacts from companies outside the SoCal area that can’t find qualified candidates. I’ve been working again for over two months, I no longer have an active résumé on job boards, and I still get emails and calls every day from recruiters all over the country. Agile and Scrum are in demand The situation with Agile and… Read more →
How Great Leaders Inspire Action
The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it’s to hire people who believe what you believe. I always say that, you know, if you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money, but if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears. — Simon Sinek Read more →
Why I Got Into Management
My first 10 years in the software business, I had great managers. They did the management thing and I did the programming thing and we got great results together. Then, after the dot-com boom torpedoed industry hiring standards, I got tired of working for managers who should not have been allowed anywhere near a software project, people who were not fit to direct a professional software developer to a table at the Olive Garden, much less direct their activities on a complex project. I couldn’t possibly have continued to work for people like that — it just made a mockery of all the work I’d done over the years to actually learn something — but I still miss being a developer . . . Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
Talking to Recruiters
The Programmer has been out of work for more than two months now . . . A recruiter called me the other day, and in the course of our conversation, he asked me which “business requirements methods” I’ve used. I said, “I’m not exactly sure what you mean by that.” After a pause, he said, “I’m not really sure what it means either. I’m kind of new at this.” “Well, go ahead and read the next question, then . . .” Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
Getting Tired
The Programmer has been out of work for three weeks now . . . I’m getting tired of trying to sell myself to people who don’t seem to understand what it is I do, outside of how well I “fit” into a narrow job description. I’m getting tired of working in a broken industry. More generally, I’m sick and tired of people and their goddamn opinions about everything. And I’m getting pretty sick and tired of myself, too . . . Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
“Hiring the Best” Explained
An employer is always somewhat reassured by the ignominiousness of his staff. At all costs the slave should be slightly, even much, to be despised. A mass of chronic blemishes, moral and physical, are a justification of the fate which is overwhelming him. The world gets along better that way, because then each man stands in it in the place he deserves. A being who is useful to you should be low, flat, prone to weakness; that is what’s comforting; especially as Baryton paid us really very badly. In cases of acute avarice like this, employers are always a bit suspicious and uneasy. A failure, a debauchee, a black sheep, a devoted black sheep, all that made sense, justified things, fitted in, in fact. Baryton would have been on the whole rather pleased if I had been slightly wanted by the police. That always makes for real devotion. — Louis-Ferdinand… Read more →
Different Drummers
In high school, I was in the school orchestra. There were no auditions; it was just a class you could sign up for, independent of whether or not you had any musical ability. And when a student with no musical ability signed up for the orchestra, what transpired was something like this: Director: What instrument do you play? Student: I don’t really play an instrument. Director: You’re in the percussion section. There were three or four of us in the percussion section who could actually read music and play it, so it was kind of depressing that it was mainly a backwater where musical illiterates were sent to bang on cowbells . . . I recollected my days as a high-school percussionist today when one of our tech leads — tech leads — pulled up some javadocs and announced that a method we were using was “depreciated.” Now if this… Read more →
Hiring the Best
The following email went out at the office: Please stop by and say hello to our newest Project Manager Skip Intro [names changed to protect the guilty]. He is a great person, lives in [a nearby city], tons of experience, and has two black labradors. What more could you ask? Leicester Dedlock Director of Project Management What more could I ask?! We’re hiring project managers and can’t think of anything more to ask them than what kind of pets they have? This explains a lot . . . Thus spoke The Programmer. Related Links Hiring the Best Explained Guest columnist: Céline Read more →
Lead Web Developer: No Experience Required
Who’s TheMan? I’d never heard of TheMan.com until yesterday, when I read that the site had shut down, and replaced what I assume must have at one time been content with the resumes of its out-of-work former employees. You can get a good feel for the company from this Sept. 27, 1999 Time magazine article. Cringe in horror as moronic 27-year-old CEO Calvin Lui closes meetings by barking “All right, dudes, let’s rock and roll!’ Gasp in amazement as he draws analogies between TheMan.com and one of his former employers, the Walt Disney Company! “This could be a major, major public company,” he says. Not a major public company, but a major major public company! Feel his soul-stirring passion to recruit “the A people” for”‘below-average salaries”! Lui was right about one thing though: “I understand that right now we’re a zit compared to everybody else. But in a year, we’re… Read more →