Category Archives: Career Advice

Steve Jobs Used to Wear a Suit and Tie

Posted by mysticstache on

This is one of my favorite articles. I thought I’d report it.

Let’s talk about your appearance.

I’m sure it’s been said before that the only person who could dress like Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs. Conversely, you’re not Steve Jobs so don’t try to dress like him. In fact, for those of you who have no memories of the 80’s Steve Jobs used to wear a suit and tie.

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/08/25/a-front-row-seat-to-steve-jobs-career-by-robert-scoble/

http://technology.ezinemark.com/steve-jobs-death-2011-most-famous-quotes-in-his-life-77371348ffa5.html

Your place of employment has a relaxed dress code, congratulations! Keep in mind “Relaxed Dress Code” means different things to different companies and people who work at the company. As an employer you have to strike an appropriate balance between the comforts of your employees, the image you wish to leave with visiting customers, and what kind of salary benefits are you willing to pay to attract staff that may be averse to wearing more costly attire. However, having an ambiguous or un-enforced dress code will only lead to easily avoidable challenges. Additionally, in larger organizations the enforcement of an ambiguous dress code becomes more tenuous. Leaving each manager or supervisor to his/her own interpretation of how to dress for the office will lead to great variances in what you as the owner or CEO thought should have been a uniform standard.

If the company that employs you has more than 20 employees there is most likely an official description available of acceptable attire for the workplace. You can safely assume you will not receive a reprimand for dressing in accordance to this document. So, do you want to be a face in the crowd, wearing what everyone else wears? Do you want to stand out by pushing the envelope of your company’s policies? Your attitude in these matters gives impressions of how you are going to approach your career while working for an organization. Impressions like “conforms to the rules” can be a positive or a negative depending on management and the industry you work in. “Shows creativity and energy” has the same challenges.

How do your customer’s dress when they visit your office? Nothing makes me feel more awkward than when a group of professionally dressed clients walks into a beautifully designed and maintained reception area only to be visibly accosted by an employee walking by in sweats and flip-flops.

Flip-Flops! I do not care how much you paid, nor how many plastic ornaments adorn them. If your footwear makes that annoying sound of heal slapping shoe, you are wearing Flip-Flops. You should not assume that everyone you meet has some desire to see your feet either. The only profession where Flip-Flops are acceptable is lifeguard.

Remember that first impressions are based mostly on sensory perceptions. You want the person who may decide where you go in a company to have a favorable first impression of you even if it’s just what they see while looking across a room at a crowed company function.

Consider where you are in the organization and where you hope to one day be. If you are a Jr. Software Developer and you wish to someday climb to VP of Software Development, how does the person currently holding that position dress? How do the successful salespeople dress?  I didn’t always think this way, but I found later in my career it was better to dress for the position you want and not the position that you have.  It may be an easier sell to promote you if you look somewhat like the person who currently holds that position. Decision makers may wonder if you have the wardrobe to start a new position if they’ve never seen you in the appropriate attire for it.

There are cultural differences to consider as well. You may be a fan of various European entertainments and wish to emulate their dress. Just because that overweight gentleman is wearing a bright yellow, skin tight polo with the collar turned up seems to pull it off doesn’t mean that you can. First, understand that outfit probably cost him $1,000.00 or more and you’re not going to be able reproduce it with the fare available at Wal-Mart. Second, you must realize that look is only barely acceptable in the more progressive metropolitan areas of the United States. I find nothing more entertaining than watching someone from NYC pushing the trendy envelope in a meeting of professionals in Atlanta.

If you have aspirations to be the next Steve Jobs, I’d suggest you follow his example in all stages of his career as you grow in yours. Until you’ve created the largest most profitable company on the planet, don’t abandon conservative professional attire for stubble, jeans and a black shirt.

Job Req. Sanity Check

Posted by mysticstache on

Let me start by saying I am not an HR guy. Nor have I ever been a full-time recruiter of any sort. So perhaps, I’m way off base with my thoughts on this topic. PLEASE straighten me out if I am because there are a lot of practices within this space that make no sense to me.

I.  The Skill Set Years Experience Mismatch

Lately I have seen a flood of open position postings on the various job boards that will say something to the effect of “Jr. Developer\Recent College Grad\1-2 Years experience” as the headline of the posting. Only to find in the requirements section, experience (which to me means more than just exposure or reading a help doc online) for some 30 different technologies. Maybe, yes maybe with the right set of circumstances a Jr. resource as described in the headline might have started in an environment where he or she was given free rein to provide solutions through whatever means. I was lucky enough to have started my career as the only software developer for a successful Insurance company where I was able to explore whatever new technology came along and experiment with different techniques. I think this is pretty rare. Some companies spend the first 6 months breathing over a new resources shoulder with weekly code reviews before they’re promoted to level on and the code reviews come when the developer is ready. Many companies only let their resources sustain existing code and teach them just the basics to troubleshoot the existing technologies while the more senior staff works on innovation.

So are the hiring managers or recruiters looking for 80% of the required skills? One or two? Software design and development professionals are detail oriented and precise personalities. If I can’t talk about every skill listed, I’m not going to apply for a position.

II.   Competing Technologies

Another favorite of mine is when the laundry list of experience includes market competitors. The posting is looking for someone with 5 years experience and expert knowledge of Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server, or Expert level .NET and Java. First, can you really become expert in 5 years, especially if the maybe 2 of those you were just doing maintenance work (i.e. spell checking websites)? Secondly how many companies invest tens of thousands of dollars in SQL Server and more tens of thousands on Oracle? As a vendor software developer your product may need to support more than one database platform. However, what percentage of the candidates the job market hail from vendor software companies? Are there really any transferrable skills between .NET and Java? It seems to me trying to grow one resource into an expert of both is far more expense than cultivating two specialists and most companies would do the latter.

These types or requirements lead to a lot of confusion for candidates. They don’t know if they should bother applying or not. The recruiters are inundated with resumes that don’t fit the request from the hiring customer.

III.   Automated Recruitment Phone Recruiting

This year in particular I have been flooded with outsourced call center recruiter calls. These calls always follow the same format.

  • I answer the phone to silence
  • A few seconds later someone in a very thick accent says, “Hello may I speak to George?”
  • “Yes this is George.”
  • Faster than any normal human being should be able to speak -“Uh hi. My name is gibberish. gibberish gibberish gibberish gibberish gibberish gibberish gibberish gibberish gibberish gibberish gibberish gibberish …”
  • Me, “Whatever you’re talking about I’m not interested. Thanks.”
  • Hang up.

It’s as bad as the campaign calls around supper time during an election cycle. Who in their right mind thinks this is in any way an effective means to find a qualified candidate? I seriously doubt these individuals understand the technical requirements well enough to successfully phone screen much less are able to fight through the language barrier well enough to have a real conversation about the candidate or the opportunity.

IV.   Don’t Read the Resume

Another new interesting fishing tactic is the mail blast, or I guess that’s what’s going on. Why else am I getting emails for Jr. or Intermediate 5 years or less positions from the job boards where my resume clearly showing 16 years of experience are posted? Or the expert Java Architect roles I was sent when Java J2EE doesn’t appear anywhere on my resume? Recruiters, does this tactic work?

I understand there is a perception in the US job market right now that a lot of people are out of work and some companies are hoping to cash in on getting better qualified candidates for less compensation. This perception has created a recruiter feeding frenzy atmosphere. The truth is most of the top ranked talent is aware of what’s going on and they’re sitting this cycle out, or contracting. The unemployment rate among software development professionals is not nearly as high as other skill sets like manufacturing and construction. I believe this tactics will not be successful, and my land your corporation with a lot of negative feedback on a site like GlassDoor.com.

Work Yourself Out of a Job

Posted by mysticstache on

Has anyone in your management structure ever told you that if they could just clone you 4 or 5 times the company would be worry free? That is great feedback. You have earned yourself many years of job security. In fact you might say you’ve made yourself so indispensable at your current position, you’ll never be able to grow out of it.

 

For a lot of professionals in the world that’s exactly the position they want to be in. Joe is the best administrator BigCo Corp has ever had. No issues with any of the servers under his care. His management gets a little nervous when he takes a vacation because there is no one else who can do what he does the way he does it. Management doesn’t want to add any new variables to the mix and Joe will never be burdened with management training, team building, Agile methodology, mentoring, or other distractions. Likewise, Joe isn’t really all that motivated to share his expertise, both because he doesn’t like trying to explain what he does to others, and because he’s worried about losing some of his organizational expertise currency.

 

If you’re like Joe, read no further, because we’re going to talk about Sally. Sally, another administrator at BigCo Corp, likes having uninterrupted vacations. She has back filled her own position by training a few of her colleagues to do support her when she needs a break. Sally has taken the time to create process and systems documentation and publish it where others can reference it. Management notices that Sally can take care of her normal duties and build a team to add more redundancies to the processes. Management decides to send Sally to team building and management training. Sally becomes Joe’s new boss.

 

More than once in my career I worked really work and waited for my supervisors to recognize my talent and give me that promotion to management. I gotten the “Clone you” comment many times and sat on it. It took some advice for a mentor to open my eyes to the power of creating your own opportunities. You may not be able to personally improve the company’s bottom line and create more revenue that results in more growth and upward movement opportunities. If you do a great job, create a backfill for yourself and haven’t made yourself a pariah in your organizations politics, there’s a great chance you’ll get top consideration when an opportunity does show up.

How are you coming with those TPS reports?

Posted by mysticstache on

Does anyone remember the original “Weekend at Bernie’s”? When the two accountants are pouring over the green and white dot matrix printouts of the accounts on the hot tar roof of their apartment building? That’s the traditional report, pages and pages of numbers. Until the invention of spreadsheets, this was the means by which accountants reviewed the accounts. Larger companies have since outgrown even spreadsheets and demanded larger data storage, like databases. However a majority of the reporting provided from these robust data stores still looks like a spreadsheet.

Detailed row data has its uses. Financial transactions and system audit logs are very useful when displayed as uniform rows of data for visual scanning. You can easily find the row that doesn’t look like the others when searching for an error, but how easy is it to determine transaction volume, or the frequency of a particular event? Are you going to count the lines and keep a tick mark tally on another sheet? You can calculate some of these statistics and group them by date, and compare the groups if all the data is still available at the source. Hopefully the query doesn’t slow down the system while users are trying to do their work on it. Save the data in monthly spreadsheets that are backed up regularly? In most cases, the generation of these reports just becomes a meaningless process and waste of paper.

Business Intelligence (BI), I don’t know who coined the term, is meant to communicate the difference between a report (any formatted delivery of data) and the display of information in a way that aides in the business decision making process. BI reporting answers questions like how are this month’s sales compared to last month’s? Or has there been a statistically significant increase in defects with the new modifications to our product?

Many professionals familiar with BI reporting make the assumption that it’s really only applicable to data collected and aggregated over a large period of time. Contact center management is the best example of why this isn’t the case. A contact center is much like an old Amateur Radio that requires constant tuning to produce the best receiving and transmitting signals. These machines come with a panel full of dials and switches used to make sure the radio and the antenna are in perfect attunement. Similarly, contact center managers are constantly monitoring the call handle and queue times making sure the correct proportion of agents are staffed for email, voice, or chat processing. These managers require timely 15 or 30 minute latent reports to determine short term staffing levels. Most companies see the customer service departments as necessary expenses to keep their customers happy. Decision makers need nearly real-time information to make constant adjustments maximizing the efficiency of the staff and keeping their customers happy.

The challenge for BI professionals is, understanding the users’ needs well enough to deliver the correct solution for the need. There isn’t a one size fits all approach to BI delivery. The assembly manager needs metrics on how many completed plastic toys are failing inspection every half hour. Management needs to compare this month’s inspection failures to the samples before switching to the new vendor, perhaps a few times a week. The executive might want to know how sales are going this year compared to the last five, but she only needs this information on the first of the month when she first walks into the office. Each one of these examples has different requirements for the size of the data set, the amount of time the report needs to be displayed for, and the near or distant data term period access.

What’s the point? Go run a search on any technology job board for Business Intelligence or BI. Employers are looking for qualified BI professionals to deliver reporting solutions way that aide in the business decision making process. It’s a growing space/niche on par with security and mobile development. If you can get past the stigma placed on this practice by developers that “Reporting Work” is somehow inferior to software development, there is a lot of opportunity to be had.

 

 

Politics be Damned! Fess up When You Mess up.

Posted by mysticstache on

When I was quite young, between 3 and 5 I think, I made a mistake and lied about it. My father has always worked on and collected various instruments for commercial and amateur radio communications. One of these radios was on the floor by the couch one morning and I was playing with it. I remember at some point dropping a dime in it. I was scared and my father came over to ask what I was doing.

I remember asking, “What would happen if a dime fell in those slots?”

He asked, “Did you drop a dime in one of those slots?”

“No.” I answered and walked away. I entered the dining room some time later and saw him screwing the case back on the radio we had been discussing.

He turned to me and said, “You know if I had plugged this in it could have blown up in my face because of where that dime landed. It’s always better to admit a mistake so someone can help you fix it faster before anything really bad happens.”

I started my professional carrier at Tower Hill Insurance Group, Inc. in Gainesville, FL in 1997. In the early 1990’s the state of Florida had entered the insurance business because so many carrier had decided the hurricane risk was too great after the devastation left by Amelia. Five years or so big carriers were again willing to take risks in Florida and the new insurance commissioner wanted insurance carriers to buy the policies issued by the state in order to earn the privilege to again sell property casualty insurance products in the state that they abandoned. Tower Hill negotiated an agreement between a carrier and the state where Tower Hill would administrate the transfer, premium collection and claim processing for the policies this carrier purchased. My role in this arrangement was to import the policy information from a huge text file sent on CD once a month for the policies that were renewing for the next month. Those policies would renew with the new carrier.

I was… still pretty new at a lot of this stuff. I had only been out of college and at this job for a year. There was still an ample amount of self-directed on the job learning taking place. Well somehow, the details are a little foggy on wither I misunderstood the file specification or I got things switched around when I was creating the values, but I managed to get all the days and months for the effective and expiration dates switched. Yes I managed to create the European formatted dates. Worse yet… it was 3 months into the imports that I found the problem.

Give me some credit, I had a self-imposed sanity check, and found my own mistake before our policy management software vendor ever detected an issue, and just 5 days before we had a scheduled audit… Do I take vacation, abruptly quit, or just go get absurdly drunk?

Actually, I thought of my father’s advice. I took my problem to my manager who was gifted with a saintly proportion of patience and understanding. Mr. Chris Allen as I remember it laughed at me, shook his head, and said, “Common we need to go tell Keaton”. That’s Mr. Benson VP of IT.

“Wait, I have to go with you and explain what happened?” I said.

“Yup.”

Other than thinking I was either getting fired or possibly shot, I only remember one other detail of that situation. As we were walking to the vendor reps office in our building Keaton stopped me and said, “Look George, if you’re not making any mistakes… you’re not working hard.”

That was the biggest motivator of all time. Yeah it was hard, and involved a lot of manual checking from the data entry team, and a torrid of sarcasm form the vendor rep who was threatened by the fact I could write robust GUI apps in 1/10th the time his company could put out a patch. But we got it fixed, and we had a great story of how our processes averted a disaster to give to the carrier’s auditor which earned us shiny gold stars on the audit report for honestly, ethics, compliance, and dedication to accuracy.

Steve Jobs Used to Wear a Suit and Tie

Posted by mysticstache on

Let’s talk about your appearance.

I’m sure it’s been said before that the only person who could dress like Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs. Conversely, you’re not Steve Jobs so don’t try to dress like him. In fact for those of you who have no memories of the 80’s Steve Jobs used to wear a suit and tie.

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/08/25/a-front-row-seat-to-steve-jobs-career-by-robert-scoble/

http://technology.ezinemark.com/steve-jobs-death-2011-most-famous-quotes-in-his-life-77371348ffa5.html

Your place of employment has a relaxed dress code, congratulations! Keep in mind “Relaxed Dress Code” means different things to different companies and people who work at the company. As an employer you have to strike an appropriate balance between the comforts of your employees, the image you wish to leave with visiting customers, and what kind of salary benefits are you willing to pay to attract staff that may be averse to wearing more costly attire. However, having an ambiguous or un-enforced dress code will only lead to easily avoidable challenges. Additionally, in larger organizations the enforcement of an ambiguous dress code becomes more tenuous. Leaving each manager or supervisor to his/her own interpretation of how to dress for the office will lead to great variances in what you as the owner or CEO thought should have been a uniform standard.

If the company that employs you has more than 20 employees there is most likely an official description available of acceptable attire for the workplace. You can safely assume you will not receive a reprimand for dressing in accordance to this document. So, do you want to be a face in the crowd, wearing what everyone else wears? Do you want to stand out by pushing the envelope of your company’s policies? Your attitude in these matters gives impressions of how you are going to approach your career while working for an organization. Impressions like “conforms to the rules” can be a positive or a negative depending on management and the industry you work in. “Shows creativity and energy” has the same challenges.

How do your customer’s dress when they visit your office? Nothing makes me feel more awkward than when a group of professionally dressed clients walks into a beautifully designed and maintained reception area only to be visibly accosted by an employee walking by in sweats and flip-flops.

Flip-Flops! I do not care how much you paid, nor how many plastic ornaments adorn them. If your footwear makes that annoying sound of heal slapping shoe, you are wearing Flip-Flops. You should not assume that everyone you meet has some desire to see your feet either. The only profession where Flip-Flops are acceptable is lifeguard.

Remember that first impressions are based mostly on sensory perceptions. You want the person who may decide where you go in a company to have a favorable first impression of you even if it’s just what they see while looking across a room at a crowed company function.

Consider where you are in the organization and where you hope to one day be. If you are a Jr. Software Developer and you wish to someday climb to VP of Software Development, how does the person currently holding that position dress? How do the successful salespeople dress?  I didn’t always think this way, but I found later in my career it was better to dress for the position you want and not the position that you have.  It may be an easier sell to promote you if you look somewhat like the person who currently holds that position. Decision makers may wonder if you have the wardrobe to start a new position if they’ve never seen you in the appropriate attire for it.

There are cultural differences to consider as well. You may be a fan of various European entertainments and wish to emulate their dress. Just because that overweight gentleman is wearing a bright yellow, skin tight polo with the collar turned up seems to pull it off doesn’t mean that you can. First, understand that outfit probably cost him $1,000.00 or more and you’re not going to be able reproduce it with the fare available at Wal-Mart. Second, you must realize that look is only barely acceptable in the more progressive metropolitan areas of the United States. I find nothing more entertaining than watching someone from NYC pushing the trendy envelope in a meeting of professionals in Atlanta.

If you have aspirations to be the next Steve Jobs, I’d suggest you follow his example in all stages of his career as you grow in yours. Until you’ve created the largest most profitable company on the planet, don’t abandon conservative professional attire for stubble, jeans and a black shirt.