Pencils Down

I have been in the unlucky position of looking for a new position in the current environment.  I had thought from past experience that early January would be a fruitful time to look.  Also, given the financial turnaround that most firms have experienced in the last two years I had expected some reasonableness on the job front.

Instead I see an environment full of fear and hesitation:

• Companies have avoided doing lots of work for some time that has to be done or they may go out of business
• New product development deadlines are approaching that must be done or vc’s, funding sources, etc… will pull out leaving the entity at risk of surviving

Given the pressures to get something done there is a constant stringing along of candidates for budgeted work.  First contact a week out.  Initial meetings scheduled in another week.  Decision time possibly in another week.

I think these projects are funded.  So, money is not the issue – they will try to bargain, but that is the norm for everything.

There are candidates available to do the work with the skill set.  So, a dearth of prospects is not the issue.  I know job postings are getting swamped.

There is a definite timetable for producing the product, feature.  Hiring managers have the experience to know how long the pieces will take.

There are specs on what has to be done.  There isn’t much vagueness involved.  Gone are the days of napkin idea products.

There was a quote from the lead singer of the Fine Young Cannibals (yes I am that old and yes I really liked the band’s music) to the effect not making a decision is making a decision.  In other words the companies that are delaying projects are effectively deciding to go out of business.

It’s not rational, but fear isn’t rational.  It’s emotional.  I think mixing emotions with business is a disaster.

Interviewed at a small company.  They have a hold on a market niche for the last n years.  They have mostly been together for the last n years.  The prototypical lifestyle company.

Now one of their own is leaving.  All of that assumed understanding over the years is showing up as a lack of communication and follow-through.  The developer leaving has been off the range for years:

• home grown web service – doesn’t like SOAP
• obscure database – has a neato auto-maintenance feature, but nothing else
• no ORM – it works much faster without it.  developed his own higher-level constructs like Expression builders.
• really extensive app server – but there are just customers, orders, etc… in there.  what is all this code doing?
• ignored the selling product – it uses MySQL, how yucky.  it’s mostly a Swing app, how uncouth.

Worst of all management had no idea what this guy was doing.  When they asked about interfacing some 3rd party app – he said sure, and started coding something homegrown.  When they asked about integrating the selling product – he said sure, and started coding the next homegrown section.  Piece after piece after piece.

What a nightmare.

Ah, the joys of looking for a new contract.  This was one of a stream of emails from an agency as to each little keyword that was in the job description.  Another was “Spring MVC” which I was told was some special version of Spring and I obviously don’t have experience doing that so my resume will not be forwarded to the manager.

It makes you kind of wonder what kind of people go for the agent job.  I bet they believe in that old saying about a good salesperson being able to sell anything.  Who cares if you don’t have a clue about what this ‘person’ does or has been doing for a living?  Your job is to cross off every word in the job description against the same wording appearing in the resume.  You don’t need no stinkin knowledge.  (Apologies to that old Bogart film)

This was at a pretty good agency as well.  Pretty good in the people had a clue, at least a few years ago.  I guess times change.  People do anything for a job.

Of course, I am curious how well the agent’s resume matched up to the agency job description.  But I don’t think I really want to know.

I know of company that is getting a big project soon.  Current pm staff is swamped, so they decided to look for a ‘technical’ pm.  I didn’t think it would be unusual for a pm to know something about programming or database queries and the like.

They got hundreds of responses to the job posting, but not one qualified by having any technical skills!  The job description was pretty explicit about the expected skill set required for the position.

Why would this happen? 

Are pm’s so caught up in the latest from PMSI (?sp) that they are ignoring the auxiliary skills needed for the job?  How far does that go?  Is using Excel a stretch?

Or are all the current technical pm’s with the skill set satisfied with the current employment.  Again, unlikely.

Talked with a big shop in town.  Met with a founder and a vp.  Got along great.

Job was mid-level, so had to talk to sw director and an architect.

Director went over a standard question list for all developers.  Great.

Architect interjected random questions.  Most of them did not have an answer, were trick questions, or otherwise pretty off tangent.

And the coup-de-grace: Gee, I graduated about the same time you did.  We must be the same age.

Gee, if I known you guys were jerks I would have taken my tape recorder.

Talking to a number of companies that are looking for software people.  I guess the first thing to notice is: there are quite a few postings out there these days.  Take a glance at craigslist for your area, guaranteed at least a hundred jobs per day.

Secondly, talking to a small shop in town they are turning down work below a certain $N,000.  Talking further, the bigger shops in town are turning down work for less than $N0,000.

It really feels like the press has been so caught up with the stupidness of banks lending money to people that could never pay.  The result is they are ignoring the apparent large scale demand for services, at least for technical people.

Third hit point was a survey run by a pretty good outfit that should only have gone to hiring managers.  The number one question was “how are you dealing with the shortage of technical pool?”.

I guess things are still in pretty good shape (for s/w companies anyway).