DaedTech

Stories about Software

Jan
7

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How to Detect Sucker Culture while Interviewing

Category: You Asked For It Tags: , , | 35 Comments

I had a reader question come in that was a bit sensitive and specific, so I won’t post it here.  It pertained to receiving a job offer that had some peculiarities around the “paid time off” (PTO) situation.  Given the time-sensitive nature of such a thing, rather than add it to my Trello backlog of post topics, I shot him an email offering a few quick thoughts.  This led to a brief discussion of hiring and PTO in general, and a more general question.

The problem is, I don’t know a way to figure out [whether they have a heavy overtime culture] before you join a company.  How do you ask ‘How many hours will I be working?’

This is a classic conundrum.  Job interviewing advice 101 says, “don’t talk about pay or vacation — impress them, secure the offer, and then negotiate once they like you.”  If you ask about hours or vacation during the interview, you might create the impression that you’re a loafer, causing the employer to pass on you.

In my popular post about “sucker culture” I suggested that you shouldn’t feel guilty for not pouring in extra hours for free.  I then offered a follow up post with ideas for escaping that culture when you’re in it.  But it occurs to me that I haven’t talked about avoiding it altogether.  And that’s really what’s being asked here: how do you avoid sucker culture in the first place, without torpedoing your chances during an interview?

WorkHarder

The advice I’m going to offer here is, for the most part, advice that errs on the side of caution and not hurting your chances during the interview process.  So, as you examine the following strategies, bear in mind that they may result in false negatives for exposing a sucker culture.

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Dec
30

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The Best Way to Hire Developers

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , | 49 Comments

Editorial Note: I originally wrote this post for the Infragistics blog.  You can find the original here, at their site.  There’s a lot of good stuff over there, so go give it a look.

The other night, I was remembering what might have been my most impressive performance in the interview process.  What makes this performance particularly interesting, however, is not how well I did, but rather how I did well.  And the how left me feeling unsatisfied with myself and with the process.

I was interviewing for a software development position, and this particular organization’s interview process was (1) phone interview, (2) programming exercise, (3) in-person interview. The phone interview went pretty well, and the recruiter had told me that the company was excited about me – a mildly good sign, for whatever it was worth.

However accurate the recruiter’s assessment may or may not have been, the company’s feelings were positive enough to give me the programming exercise.  This all occurred back when I was in grad school, and, at the time of this particular interview, I was in a class called “Advanced Database Design,” in which we explored persistence options beyond the traditional, relational database.  This was a bit of an avant garde class, at the time, because the NoSQL movement had yet to gain a ton of steam.

When they handed me the programming exercise, I had just, in this very class, wrapped up a chapter in which we’d studied using R-Trees to store geographical information.  This unit of study included what they were, how they were used, and a bit of pseudocode to really drive the point home.  As fate would have it, the R-Tree happened to be an extremely elegant solution to the programming exercise for this interview.

BigPileOfMoney

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Dec
1

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Our Job Titles: Developer, Programmer or Software Engineer?

Category: You Asked For It Tags: | 13 Comments

If I look at the desired length of blog posts across the sites of customers for whom I’d write, it’s around 1,000 words.  Given the length of Monday’s wildly popular post, that means I’ve got about 500 words left for the week.  So today’s will be relatively short and sweet, lest I deplete the world’s word reserves.  This is a reader question about what I think the difference is between “programmer,” “software engineer” and “software developer.”  (I won’t block quote because that was pretty much all there was to the question).

Software Job Titles: A Rorschach Test

My take is simple: the difference is a Rorschach test of what the terms mean to you.  If you google around a bit, you’ll find articles like this one, that’s pretty well written or this one, by Scott Hanselman, with an awesome Venn Diagram.

But all such posts that I’ve seen and conversations that I’ve heard seem to make the a priori assumption that since there are different words, they must have distinct meanings.  After all, we try to keep things DRY in this line of work; if they weren’t different things, why would there be different words?  There are then quests to establish a taxonomy that seems to vary for everyone establishing it.

My Own Experience Creating Titles: Trying to Make People Marketable

I was once responsible for creating a software department’s org chart, both in terms of titles and reporting responsibility.  This meant that I had an utterly blank slate from which to choose.  Anything was in play, and the folks working there could thus have become developers, programmers, software engineers, or code magicians at my whim.

I made the base position title “software engineer,” and do you want to know why?  I didn’t do a careful assessment of their exact roles and responsibilities and create a taxonomy.  Instead, I researched which title commanded the highest average market pay in the area at the time, and gave them that advantage, hoping that it would bring them a little compound salary interest throughout their careers.

RobotWithLotsOfMoney

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Nov
29

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The Beggar CEO and Sucker Culture

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , | 123 Comments

The other day, I was doing something on LinkedIn, when I noticed a post title that somehow made its way into my feed: “Why Don’t My Employees Work Harder?”  I clicked through out of curiosity and found that this was a corporate Dear Abby sort of thing.  A CEO identifying herself as “Victoria” submitted the following as a question to Liz Ryan, who serves as Abby.

Dear Liz,

I know that leadership is all about trust and I do trust my employees, but I wish they would show a little more effort. They come in on time and they get their work done and that’s it.

I leave my office around 6:15 p.m. most nights and I don’t think that’s an especially long workday. But the parking lot is nearly empty every night when I leave. Why am I always one of the last half-dozen people out the door?

When I started this company six years ago there was a lot more team spirit. Now I have to come up with incentives to get people to put in extra effort.

I haven’t threatened anyone or threatened to cut the bottom ten percent of the team or any of that but I did tell my managers that I want them to incorporate not only output but also effort into their performance review rankings.

I want to reward the people who work the hardest here and make it clear that anyone who wants a ‘dial-it-in’ type job is not a good fit. I don’t think a growing, $10M company should be a place where people work from nine to five and then go home. What do you advise?

Thanks,

Victoria

Clipboard

I tweeted my gut reaction to this off the cuff, and it got a lot of traction for a random tweet on a holiday morning.

I then read through Liz’s response, which was patient, well-reasoned, and it brought up something called “weenie management,” so that alone is sort of oddly awesome. It also pretty resoundingly dressed Victoria down, which, I think was warranted.  And yet, in spite of expressing my disgust on twitter and seeing a somewhat satisfactory response to Victoria, I still felt sort of bleak and depressed about the whole thing.  I stewed on it further and realized what my response would have been, had I been Liz. Read More

Nov
17

By

The Aspiring Free Agent Survival Guide

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , , | 8 Comments

It often feels as though I have no idea what I’m talking about.  I don’t say this in an attempt to garner sympathy and I’m not really suffering from impostor syndrome (at least not in this domain).  It’s more that running my own show, business-wise, has demanded of me a form of trial-by-fire, just-in-time learning.  It’s as though I moved to a small village in Germany, in spite of the fact that I don’t speak a lick of the language.

But in muddling my way through all of the details, large and small, I’ve actually managed to pick up a fair bit.  What I’d like to offer today is a preparedness guide of sorts.  The free agent’s life is an attractive one in a lot of ways, and I definitely recommend at least considering it.

I have no regrets, myself.  But I do acknowledge that it can seem like a pretty daunting leap, particularly if you’re well established in life and have responsibilities.  People telling you to take the plunge probably seem like friends swimming in an chilly lake, already used to the water, telling you that it’s fine.   I’m not that used to the water yet, though, so I can still appreciate your position.  It’s cold, but it’s refreshing.  And I’d like to offer some thoughts before I get too acclimated to the temperature.

ColdSwimming

So here are those thoughts.  These are things to be aware of if you contemplate, however idly, the free agent life. Read More

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