DaedTech

Stories about Software

Aug
27

By

Breaking Free of the Golden Handcuffs

Category: You Asked For It Tags: , | 9 Comments

In a comment on my post about how to resign from your company, I was asked about advice for a situation where you don’t like your job, but they’re paying more than any other competitors in the industry.  In other words, what to do when leaving the company would mean that you’d personally take a haircut, financially speaking, and have to go somewhere for a smaller paycheck.

I refer to this situation as “golden handcuffs,” though I Think that term applies more to firms specifically offering you financial incentives aimed at retention, such as delayed vesting in your 401K, lump sum bonuses for staying on, etc.  I personally think that a salary well above fair market value (which is, ipso facto, what we’re discussing here) is just another form of this — we’ll make you stay by offering you money you can only make by staying.

But regardless of terminology, the question is, “what do I do about this state of affairs?”  As I see it, there are a number of solutions.  I’ll briefly cover some common sense ones first, and then get to the more interesting solutions.

Obvious Solutions

First of all, you could always just leave and take a reduced salary.  You’d obviously need to set your affairs in order financially to accommodate for the lower paychecks that would be coming your way.  A good way to do this might be to estimate what you’d command on the market, ratchet down your budget accordingly, and put the surplus in savings for a bit to help smooth the transition when you do make the move.

Another obvious solution is that you could simply “suck it up” and keep at your current job.  It’s all well and good for people to say “money isn’t everything,” but money does have real world, practical uses, like medical bills, mortgages, and children’s tuition.  It might be that, however much you don’t enjoy what you’re doing at work, you need the money and will just have to grin and bear it (though this can be a reasonably temporary solution where you bide your time until you’re clear of some obligations).

Last up here is the Hail Mary, which is sort of a modified version of “suck it up,” wherein you go out looking and interviewing but with the stipulation that you receive pay comparable to what you currently get.  It could always be that you’re simply assuming that you’re overvalued but really you aren’t.  Honestly, the single biggest predictor of your next salary is your current salary.  You might be surprised at how readily a new firm will pay you what you’re making or a bit more.  But, if you’re accurate in your self-valuation, you wind up in “suck it up” mode indefinitely, but at least you’re constantly looking.

Now, with those out of the way, here are some interesting options.

Supplement Your Income

So, you have a job that you really don’t like and you’re there 40 hours per week (and not a minute more, amirite!?)  Perhaps you don’t even give them quite that many because of organizational inefficiency or unstructured-unstructured time and maybe that’s even why you want to leave.  Whatever the case may be, there’s a decent chance that you’re not exactly dedicating all of your spare brainpower to your current gig for as long as your golden handcuffs keep you and the company reluctantly married.

Take some of your spare time (or perhaps some of your unstructured-unstructured time at the office) and secure another line of income.  This could be something like moonlighting or consulting for money, but the reality here is that you’re tying up extra hours on top of (or in lieu of) current work hours.  So, even if this gets you extra income to make the jump to something lower paying, you might have to work 40+20=60 hours at the new gig to have the same income as just 40 at your current gig.

A better solution is to work on something that generates passive income for you.  It could be something like a rental property (I mean, you typically don’t wind up with golden handcuffs without a bit of gold in the mix), but it could be something more in line with your day-to-day.  For me, Pluralsight authorship has helped to give me a decent amount of career flexibility.  Perhaps you could monetize a blog, write a book, or something else along these lines.  This is not an overnight solution, but it’s a career option to consider over the long haul.

(Please note, I’m not encouraging you to misappropriate your company’s time to pursue your own financial interests.  If you choose to do that, it’s purely your own ethical conundrum — I’m encouraging you to economize downtime not otherwise accounted for, such as commutes, quiet home time, or cases where you literally have nothing to do at the office and couldn’t even be helping the organization with a side project)

Orchestrate a Non-Lateral Move

Speaking of what to do in your spare time that could help, how about brushing up or solidifying your credentials toward the next career step?  Are you a software developer?  Time to shoot for Senior Software Developer.  Already a Senior?  Shoot for Architect?  Already an Architect?  Dev Manager.  You get the idea.

This type of career jump can be somewhat hard to negotiate, but it comes with an expected increase, that, in the case of golden handcuffs, might translate to a lateral move from a salary perspective.  However, it’s anything but lateral for you as you’re now in a position to resume a career of growth and get COLAs and merit increases that pace the industry.

Admittedly, this can be difficult, but it can also be doable.  Identify the position title that you’re after, and then look at common job descriptions for it, focusing on the responsibilities.  Those are the things that you want to be able to tell people in an interview that you are currently doing.  So, if you’re gunning for Architect, ask to sit in on formal code reviews or architecture meetings or whatever the grand code poobahs at your company do.  Work your way into these types of responsibilities and then, in interviews for this career-advancing move, you can say, “well, it’s not official in my position title, but I have been doing the role of X for a while now.”  It’s not as much of a no-brainer as going from Architect at Acme Inc to Architect at Beta Inc, but it should get you a fighting chance.

Make Your Skill Set More Marketable

So, let’s say that you lack the spare time to secure passive/other income (perhaps you hate your job because they work you 60 thankless hours per week) and you don’t think you can swing a non-lateral promotion.  What you can do is identify why you’re comparably devalued on the market and then do something about that.

A common scenario might be that you’re using dated or obscure techs.  Your company pays you handsomely to maintain a maze of code written in Cobol and VB5 because there are like 4 other people in the world with that combination of skills and they refuse to lose you.  Meanwhile, you hate writing code in Cobol and VB5, but recruiters aren’t exactly knocking down your door and calling you a “A Full-Stack Ninja Rockstar.”  Well, your company is probably good and hosed no matter what, but there’s no need for you to keep sinking with that ship as they buy weird, old decommissioned machines capable of running a compiler that no longer exists.

If you have spare time, start writing some Ruby or C# or whatever in your spare time.  If you don’t (because they’re mercilessly working you 60 hours per week), start finding ways to bring the new stuff into your day-to-day.  Sell management on letting you write some new functionality in a more modern language.  Or just do it, reasoning that it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.  Find a way to get some kind of modern tech plausibly onto your resume, and watch your options improve.

Change Your Company

I’m not sure who said it originally, but I first heard a quote that I love from the .NET Rocks guys.  “Change your company… or change your company.”  The context, as you might imagine is that if you’re unhappy, you should try to change the way your company does things and, failing that, you should leave for a more suitable company.  What I’m advising you, Golden Handcuffs, is actually the converse of that — quitting ain’t an option for you, so try changing your company.

Anarchist

A company offering you golden handcuffs presumably needs you around.  This gives you some bargaining leverage.  If you’re exhausted or miserable because of working conditions, talk to HR about it.  If it’s the techs or the fact that you’re surrounded by Expert Beginners, start a grassroots movement toward improvement.  Or, perhaps, secure an assignment where you’re more on your own and can have some creative freedom and autonomy.

The key here is to identify the things about the company that make you happy and develop actual strategies for addressing them.  Changing an organization can be exhausting and it’s often a long-play, but it’s doable.  In my career, at times, I’ve emerged from such efforts battered, tired, and war-torn, but ultimately successful to some degree.  You can do this too — the pay is already good, so make the rest of it good.

Time Is On Your Side

To wrap up, I’ll note that the one common thread here in your favor tends to be time, provided you’re not just twiddling your thumbs, running out the clock to retirement (and even then, you might argue that it’s on your side).  Most of these solutions take time to implement and will have a higher probability of success, the longer that you can stick out your current situation.  For instance, I’ve implemented organizational changes that only really took root after I’d left, and it took me years of blogging, writing, and mentoring before I turned any of my moonlighting activities into passive revenue streams.  Had I been desperate for a change but unable to secure a competitive paycheck, these things wouldn’t have been my game-changer by any means.

It may sound like cold comfort if you’re in this situation right now, but assuming you can’t simply take the income hit or continue to suffer indefinitely and check out, you’re going to have to strategize and bide your time.  But it’s my experience that once you lay out a plan and start acting on it, you’ll feel a renewed sense of purpose and see that proverbial (cliched) light at the end of the tunnel.  There’s a pretty good chance, in fact, that lacking a feeling of real purpose is at least part of what’s bumming you out about your job in the first place, since it’s clearly not money.  Here’s a chance to take it back.

By the way, if you liked this post and you're new here, check out this page as a good place to start for more content that you might enjoy.

Aug
20

By

A Developer’s Guide to Recruiters

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , |

More and more of my posts these days are in response to reader questions, but this one actually isn’t. However, I’ve been asked about specific aspects of this general theme frequently enough that I figured this was a good subject to cover. I’ve dealt with a lot of recruiters in my career, both as a candidate and a candidate seeker, and this has put me in a position to at least have an informed opinion about the subject. It’s something that’s at times overwhelming and often counter-intuitive, so hang with me, and let’s take a tour through the subject. Even if you’re a savvy job-hopping veteran, maybe I can at least offer you a different technologists’s perspective.

First Up, Check Yourself

Okay, so there are a lot of recruiters out there, and you’ve probably seen a less than stellar display from some of them. “5 Years of Experience with Swift.” “Mad XML coding skills.” “C-Pound a plus.” It’s common for developers to laugh together at these antics. There are even (hilarious) twitter accounts lampooning this. It can also be annoying to get repetitive emails from some organization about jobs that are not fits for you or to have a guy call you three times in a day, saying things like, “I couldn’t help but notice you hadn’t returned my first two calls.” I get that.

But here’s the thing. You’re incredibly, ridiculously fortunate to be in a position where so many people are saying, “hey, please come interview for this job for more pay” that you find it annoying. I’m not saying “you’re fortunate” in the sense that you lucked into it — I know this isn’t easy work — but that you’re fortunate the market is and remains so strong. It can be overwhelming at times, but imagine the alternative of being stuck in a dead end job and being thrilled when some company wants to schedule a phone interview after you’ve sent out 100 resumes through monster.com or something. You might not even know what monster.com is, and that’s because you don’t have to go looking for jobs like other people. That’s the reason that recruiters exist — because the only way to find software developers is to go prying them loose from other firms, and it’s not like CTOs are going to take it upon themselves to start cold-calling competitors’ developers to offer them interview opportunities (though some larger companies do have staff recruiters that do this).

Also to consider is that recruiters are humans, and often they are humans probably no more interested in cold calling you than you are in receiving cold calls from them. Their paycheck depends on calling up a bunch of people who are most likely to sigh angrily and tell them to lose their numbers. That’s not exactly the stuff dreams are made of, so you might extend them a touch of sympathy and understanding if they’ve built up a thick skin and don’t seem overly sensitive to your social signals. They’re out there trying to make a living by getting you job interviews.

The Nature of the Game

Alright, up front caveats aside, the next thing to understand is how the game actually works. Follow the money and understand everyone’s motivations. Understanding everyone’s motivations is the key to knowing whether you’re being fed a line or whether you should take what you’re being told at face value.

Recruiters are sales people. Their customers are companies that need software developers. Their product is mutually beneficial employment agreements, which really means that their product is you, developer. Recruiters sell you to companies. Kinda literally. Typically, their cut is 20% of your first year’s pay, give or take. So, if Devs’R’Us places you with Acme Inc for a starting salary of 100K, Acme Inc. writes Devs’R’Us a check for 20K, and the individual recruiter (typically) gets some kind of commission on this. (This obviously doesn’t apply to companies with internal recruiting staffs, except that I’d wager their recruiters are still incentivized with a commission structure.) If things blow up before an allotted time period (often 6 months) and you and the company part ways, recruiting firm has to cough back up their cut in the form of a refund.

So, you’re a “customer” of recruiters the same way that you’re a “customer” of Facebook or Google — you aren’t. You get a benefit for free by allowing something of yours to be sold to a bidder (your labor, in the case of recruiters, your ice bucket challenge videos in the case of Facebook, and everything short of your soul in the case of Google). Understanding this is the key to understanding recruiter behavior.

Amway

So Hot and then So Cold

This leads to sort of a weird arrangement. Typically, when you hear from a recruiter, you’re more than likely to ignore them or politely decline their invitations. But, if you don’t — if you show some interest — suddenly they’ll start blowing up your phone with interviews on which they want to send you. “Let’s pencil you in tomorrow morning for a phone call with Intertrode and how does your Thursday look for an in-person with Initech, and also my boss, the senior recruiter, would like to get on a call with you, and…” Wow. But then you say no thanks on Initech and Intertrode says no thanks on you, and suddenly you never hear from the recruiter again. Curious, you call and leave a message, and nothing. Maybe they get back to you halfheartedly.

Here’s the reason that this is happening. When you decide to stop ignoring the recruiters of the world, you suddenly become “fair game.” What the recruiter then does is evaluate every one of its clients that are seeking candidates and send you on a bunch of speed dates, trying to be the one to place you before anyone else snatches you up. But if none of those things works out, you’re yesterday’s news and not really worth revisiting until later when they’ve filled enough positions and taken on enough new openings that they can cross reference you against a bunch of new things.

Of course, not all recruiting firms are identical in their approach, but this is extremely common. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from a recruiter that was extremely excited about a few gigs or even a single gig, and then radio silence for 3 or 6 months, only to have this repeated again and again. Recruiters’ clients are the companies, so they systematically go looking for people that would match that particular vacancy. Once they find you to match that one, they’ll economize by considering you for any others as well, but after that initial wave, it’s on to the next set of people.

If you can find a recruiter or a recruiting firm that is developer-focused — that is, one that gets your resume and talks to you, and then regularly checks in with you about potential positions — hang onto this one and partner with them on a long timeline. This is not common and it’s a nice resource for you.

They Say the Damndest Things

When you’re actively engaged in the interview process courtesy of a recruiter, the recruiter wants everything to go well. They want you to show up on time for the interview and make a good impression. They want the interview to go well and both sides to be impressed. They want things to sail along, resulting in offer, acceptance, and employment for at least six months. Cynically, that’s it, anyway. In reality, they probably want both sides pleased over the semi-long term so that companies keep giving them business (though they also depend on market fluidity, so they probably don’t want anyone sticking anywhere for too long). They want to pluck you from companies and put you in a new job as quickly as possible because higher churn rate means more money. Toward that end, they’ll say a lot of things, some of which are solid advice (such as their position on counter offers, described here), and some of which are nonsense.

Bear in mind their goal and the fact that they don’t mind a bit of reality distortion to achieve that goal, and it’ll be easier to understand why they say what they do and whether you should believe it. Here are some things that I’ve heard multiple times from different sources that you shouldn’t let fool you:

  • “Why don’t you come in for an in person interview with us?”  Nah, don’t do that.  It’s not a good use of your time.  They basically want to make sure that you’re not going to embarrass them and cause them to look silly to their clients, so they’d prefer to make sure you can dress and act like a human.  You can offer to do a chat over Skype, and they’ll usually be fine with that.  I personally just decline outright with no offer of anything because there are plenty of fish in the sea.  Almost invariable they say, “oh, yeah, that’s okay.”  If you’re employed, you don’t get that many absence excuses — don’t waste the ones you have going to meet with recruiters.  A lot of the savvier recruiters will often ask to meet you 20 minutes before your interview, so you could even suggest something like that.
  • “It’s okay for you to call in sick again, people do it all the time.”  No, that’s not true.  People don’t call in sick on a Monday morning and then again on a Wednesday afternoon “all the time.”  To be clear, the recruiter doesn’t care a lick if you get in trouble or jeopardize your current role — in fact, they’d probably prefer it because it would make you more likely to accept an offer, should one be made.  Do not ever listen to recruiter ‘advice’ about how to handle your job search when it comes to your current employer.
  • “We really need to get you over there today or tomorrow because they’re probably going to fill this role soon.”  Don’t rearrange your schedule as part of a pressure sale.  One of two things is happening here.  The first is that the recruiter is trying to light a fire under you to move quickly, in which case, who cares.  Schedule things when they make sense for you, not to let the recruiter squeeze in a commission before month’s end.  The other case is that the company is really scrambling to fill a role, and if that’s the case, you’re probably better off moving on anyway.  I mean, can you picture a company like Amazon, Facebook or Google saying “we really need a warm body in here in the next few days, so even though your resume is impressive, if you’re not here by Wednesday we can’t use you?”  That sort of reeks of desperation and I would consider it a red flag.
  • “Yeah, it’s not technically a senior title, if that’s the kind of thing that matters to you, but this is a great opportunity that you should take.”  Senior title.  Certain pay grade.  Certain benefits/perks, whatever.  If you have requirements you’ve made clear up front, don’t let them wheedle/coax/beg/manipulate/browbeat/guilt you into thinking that you’re being silly or overly picky.  Your requirements are requirements for a reason, but the recruiters don’t care at all about that reason or your ambitions.  If you want to leave your current role to become a “Senior Software Engineer” somewhere, don’t let them cause you to doubt your goals.  They want their placement fee, no matter what your title/pay/benefits/etc.
  • “Look, I make more money if you make more money, so I want to get you as high a salary as possible, but you really should take this offer as-is.”  Yeah, well, let’s talk expected value.  If there’s a 100% chance of offer acceptance of a 100K offer, there’s a 100% chance of the recruiter getting 20K for an expected value of 20K.  If there’s a 50/50 chance of an offer acceptance at 110K, the negotiated wage, the recruiter has an expected value of only 11K (50% chance of 22K and 50% chance of zero-Ks).  And they know it.  Like real estate agents, they don’t want you to have the highest wage — they want you to sign the offer.
  • “This is really a great opportunity and you should take it.  I’ve helped place billions of developers just like you and I know a little something about this industry.  Think of how much it will benefit your career and your personal life and everything else to blah, blah, blah….”   You don’t need life coaching from a recruiter.  This ‘advice’ when there’s an offer in hand is something you should utterly and completely ignore.  Think of the conflict of interest.  It’s like a car salesman telling you how important car ownership is when you’re contemplating a purchase.  Of course they’re going to say it, whether or not it’s true.  So it’s literally just noise.  Tune out the recruiter and make your decision.

You may hear these exact things, variants thereof, or even arguments I haven’t encountered, but the important thing is always to keep in mind how they make their money and what their motivations are.  Their goals are mostly aligned with yours — you both want you to be placed in a new role that makes you happy.  But to you “makes you happy” is most important and to them “placed in a new role” is most important.

Working Effectively with Recruiters

With your goal and their goal being pretty similar, it’s not terribly hard for your relationship with them to be a beneficial one.  Here are some tips that I’ll offer for getting the most out of working with recruiter:

  • Decide your requirements for changing jobs ahead of time and be crystal clear about them when talking to any recruiter.  In fact, state up front that you’ll immediately shut down the interview process if at any point you discover one of them won’t be met.  If they believe you on this count, they’ll have no incentive to try to shoe-horn you into something with the hopes that they’ll figure out how to persuade you to take it.
  • Be firm about things, but be polite.  Sales pitches of any sort can be annoying, but keep your cool.  Stick to your guns, make your position clear, but resist the temptation to get worked up in any way.  They are, after all, trying to help you in general.
  • Screen your phone calls.  If you’re actively engaged with a number of recruiters in a job search, you’ll probably get a lot of calls that might be awkward to take during the day.  They might also be pinging you with needless status updates or check-ins.  Your mileage may vary, but I’ve generally found it helpful to let them leave messages and call them back later.
  • In advance of dealing with recruiters, decide on your preferred times of day/week for phone interviews and recruiter calls and also decide on your preferred medium of communication, such as email, text, phone call, whatever.  Make this clear to the recruiter up front.
  • Let them address and cover your mistakes.  Just like they’re trying to sell you on the company, they’re trying to sell the company on you.  If you had a brain fart and thought your phone interview was tomorrow morning instead of this morning, call the recruiter and ask what to do.  Most likely, they’ll apologize to the company and say it was their miscommunication.  Smoothing over logistical snafus is something they’re good at and usually willing to do.
  • Let them help you negotiate and do things like thank you notes.  I know I said that they’ll want you to accept offers as is, but once it’s clear that you won’t be deterred from negotiating, they’ll turn right around and apply the same shtick to the company about you.  Having this intermediary is nice because it defrays conflict between you and someone who is about to be your employer.  In general, the recruiting firm is good at maintaining the best face of both you and the company to the other party.
  • Avoid giving recruiters specifics of leads/offers you’ve obtained through other recruiters.  They’re clearly just going to try to talk you out of whatever it is, so there’s really no need to have the conversation.
  • Whatever happens, don’t take it personally.  Ideally, you land a job, and the company, recruiter and you are all happy.  But maybe you get two offers and then decide to take the other one.  Maybe you even accept an offer and then quickly switch to taking a better one (or decide to stay put).  Maybe you pass on an offer.  There are a lot of end-games where recruiters might resort to more desperate techniques: lecturing you, affecting anger, sadness or disappointment, telling you that you’ll never get a better offer, even vaguely threatening you.  It’s all part of the game.  I promise you that no matter what they might say to you and how you might react, they’ll call you in three months about a new full stack senior role as if nothing ever happened.  It might be offensive to you, but it’s just part of the game.

Recruiters provide a service that matters to our industry where job hopping is common and demand is through the roof.  They grease the skids for us to be able to move fluidly between gigs.  The paradigm isn’t ideal, but it’s the best we have for now, so you might as well get used to the idea that you’re going to be playing this game and then, and enlist their help to play it well.

Recruiters are really just sales people, and the relationship between developers and sales people is generally a somewhat reluctant ones.  We’re makers that want to build things so well crafted that adoption is a no-brainer and requires no selling.  Sales people are relationship-oriented and deal mainly in people.  Within organizations, these groups often have natural friction, so the friction only increases when the software people are the product being sold.  But if you can get past the intense weirdness of this arrangement and work effectively with recruiters, it will only benefit your career.  Work with a lot, find firms that you like and work well with, and remember them for next time you’re on the market.  You won’t regret it.

Jul
30

By

How To Quit Your Job

Category: You Asked For It Tags: , | 10 Comments

Before you get any ideas, this isn’t about Amway; I’m not going to follow “how to quit your job” with an ellipsis and then a bunch of promises about how you can make a 7 figure income emailing pictures of cats to people. In fact, this post has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not you depend on having a job. I’m not offering advice on how not to need a job or how to “quit the game” or anything like that. I’m speaking quite literally about how to resign from your job when the time comes (usually when you’ve accepted an offer from another organization) and all of the considerations around that. I’ve received a surprising (to me anyway) number of requests for advice on this topic, so I thought I’d share my thoughts. As someone who has managed people and who has moved around some, I certainly have perspective on the matter that, perhaps, you will find worthwhile.

This "How to Quit Your Job" post is not about cat memes, like the one pictured here.

Before I get right down to it, I’d like to make a quick note about “rage-quitting.” Don’t rage quit; be a grownup. Okay, moving on.

Prelude to Quitting

Before you decide to quit a job (consciously, anyway) you generally dip your toe into the job market, sending off some resumes, doing some phone interviews, etc. This is the phase in which it feels like you’re doing something kind of wrong but exhilarating — cheating on your current employer (or at least flirting). You’ve grown tired of your situation and you’re starting to daydream about a new one where they don’t follow such a stupid development methodology, you won’t have to deal with Steve from two rows over anymore, and they even have ping pong tables. Ping pong — do you hear me?! So why does this make you feel a little guilty? Well, it should — the game is setup this way. You have to sneak around, claiming to be sick when you’re not and doing other quasi-unscrupulous things. It’s a bummer, but it’s the way the game is played, unfortunately. Perhaps a better system will come along and obviate this practice.

Until that happens, however, you have to make do. It might be tempting to tell your employer what you’re doing either for the sake of honesty or to make them sweat, but resist this impulse. You don’t want to tip your hand at all because it’s option-limiting for you. If you throw in their face that you’re out job-hunting, they may scramble to please/keep you in the short term, but they’ll certainly start forming contingency plans in the long term. And, it also makes you sound like a prima donna.

If you think that your employer can correct whatever is causing you to want to look elsewhere, state your case without threats. If you’re paid below market value, come in with data from salary.com, your last few performance reviews, and a level-headed pitch for more money. Same general idea if you think you should have more responsibility or a better title. Don’t bring threats into it — and make no mistake, that’s what telling them you’re going to look for other jobs is — instead, sell yourself. If it doesn’t work, thank them for their consideration, tell them they’ve actually convinced you that they have the right of it, and start lining up interviews. Hey, you gave them a chance.

When you’re lining up interviews, space them out and separate the wheat from the chaff. (This is mainly applicable to programmers, who will be inundated with interview requests in today’s economy.) It can be tempting, especially if you’re disgruntled, to book 12 interviews over a Monday-through-Friday span, but what plausible, non-suspicious reason do you have for a run of absence like that? Your supply of mornings to come in late, afternoons to sneak out early, and random “sick” days is going to be quite limited, particularly if you’ve just made a pitch for a better title and been refused. Use these wisely. Filter out all but the best opportunities. Don’t take ‘interviews’ with recruiters (they’ll cave — just tell ’em you’ll call a different recruiter). Feel free to push back on things and let them go for a week or two. It’ll be okay.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and your current job is in hand, earning you money. Until you have an offer, it’s clearly your best prospect.

Dotting I’s and Crossing T’s

After a bit of sneaking around, your activities paid off. You managed to snag a good offer and you’re ready to march in and let everyone know that you’re moving on to bigger and better things. Settle down, because you have work to do first. First of all, you need to sign the offer and have it returned to you, counter-signed, before you have anything of substance (and theoretically, an employer can even go back on a signed offer letter — it’s not a contract, per se — even though it would be bad faith). Next, you need to see what the offer is contingent upon.

Are they going to call your references? Do a background check? Credit check? Drug test? Something you’ve never heard of before like an obstacle course or feats of strength? These things aren’t mere formalities — they’re grounds for rescinding the offer. Do not give notice at your current job until all of these things are taken care of. Never done any drugs in your life and nothing in your background to hide, you say? Great, but that doesn’t mean a false positive is impossible. It’d certainly be a bummer if your offer got yanked because some other Joe Smith made the local police blotter for stealing a car. It’s a situation that could likely be straightened out, but you’re in no-man’s-land until it is.

Make sure there are no possible obstacles before you take an irrevocable step with your current employer who is, still, even with contingent offer in hand, your best prospect.

Actual Resignation

Alright, so no one dropped a bunch of poppy seeds into your urine and no one sharing your name stole any cars recently, so everything went smoothly with the offer and contingencies. Now, you’re ready to make it official. But, what to do? Tell your manager in passing? A phone call? An email, since that’ll be an awkward conversation? How do you drop this bombshell? None of the above. You’re going to type up a letter of resignation, sign it, and bring it along with you to a one on one meeting that you’ll request with your direct supervisor (perhaps someone above that person in the chain in an odd situation such as your boss being on vacation for a week or something).

Yikes, so what to type in the letter? Not much. Make it very short, polite and unremarkable. Here’s more or less what I use:

Dear {Boss}:

Please accept this as my formal resignation from the position of {your official title} at {official company name}, with my last day being {date of last day}. I very much appreciate you giving me the opportunity to work for {informal/abbreviated company name}.

This decision was made very difficult by the fact that I have thoroughly enjoyed my time and experience here. Please let me know how I can be of assistance with any knowledge transfer or final work over the next {duration of notice period}.

Again, thank you very much for the opportunity to work for you.

Sincerely,

{your first and last name}

Put a header with your address on top of it on the right and the company’s address, C/O your boss on the left below it, leave 5 lines between Sincerely and your name, and sign it once you print it. This is not the venue for a soliloquy on how you’ve grown with the company, and it’s not the place to skewer people you hate. This is basically just going to go in a folder somewhere as proof for HR that you left voluntarily rather than them firing you. It’s not likely anyone will even read it.

With that in hand, schedule some time with your boss to talk and, when in there, get to the point. Say something like, “I just want to let you know that I’m going to be resigning, effective X date, and I’m happy to help with any knowledge transfer or whatever you need, and here’s a letter to that effect.” Don’t send an email or make a phone call or leave a note or something. Grab a few minutes of the manager’s time, look him or her in the eye, and offer your resignation.

Also, offer two to three weeks of notice. Two weeks is pretty standard, and most prospective new employers will understand up to three weeks of notice before you start (a little extra notice and maybe a long weekend for you to decompress or something). Giving less than two weeks is poor form (and no new boss should expect this of you). Giving more than three weeks seems like it’d be a really courteous thing to do, but in reality, it’s just kind of awkward. You take on a dead man/woman walking status once people know that you’re leaving and things get kind of weird. You really don’t want to drag this out for too long.

Keep it Classy

Once you’ve handed in your resignation, the reaction you face is likely to vary. If you’re close with your manager and have a good working relationship, they probably expect it. If not, you’re going to be catching the person off guard, so expect reactions that range from disappointment to dismay to anger to sadness. On occasion, you might even get happiness, if they don’t like you (or if they really like you and don’t like the company very much). Having been on the manager’s end of the table, I can tell you that you’re almost never expecting someone dropping by your office to say, “hey, I quit,” so expect a bit of unguarded emotion from the manager before they get their bearings.

All that said, it’s fairly unusual for a manager to have a real outburst of any kind. The most common reaction will be to ask you why you’re quitting (even if they already know), and at this point, it’s vital to stay classy. There’s nothing for you to gain by launching a volley of negativity at them — just say that you have an opportunity that you think is a better fit or a chance to advance your career or whatever. Be positive about your new gig — not negative about the current one.

On the rare occasion that you are subject to a hissy fit, take the high road. Deep breaths, calming thoughts, and level-headed coolness are your allies. If it gets too heated, you can always leave the room (I mean, what are they going to do to you?). Go in knowing that yours is a position of strength and don’t worry about things like, “what if they fire me on the spot?” Not to say that it would never happen, but a manager or higher-up berating or even firing a quitting employee is spectacularly stupid. If they’re doing that they might as well hang a sign in the building that says, “if you’re going to quit, you’re better off doing it without notice!” Managers and leaders need notice to arrange a replacement, line up knowledge transfer, craft a message about the departure, etc. Knowing all of that should help you stay calm in the face of whatever happens. But, nothing much will probably happen beyond the obligatory, “sure hate to see ya go, but good luck!”

AngryArch

The Counter-Offer

Assuming that your boss or someone higher in the food chain hasn’t acted like an idiot in reaction to your quitting, a common thing to which you’ll be exposed is the counter-offer. Michael Lopp calls this an attempt at a “diving save.” On Monday, you tell your boss that you quit, and later that afternoon or evening, boss has a meeting with the CTO, some other managers, and maybe even the CEO in which they discuss your offer of notice. Since programmers are so hard to hire and keep these days, it’s decided that they have to try to keep you. So, Tuesday morning when you come in, you have a meeting invite asking you to come to that conference room way across the building with the leather chairs and the little fridge with sodas in it, and there on the meeting roster are a bunch of people that have always been too important to be in meetings with the likes of you. Until today, that is.

In this room, they smile and offer you a soda, and they tell you how important you are to the company. They tell you that they have your best interests at heart, and they warn you that a lot of people who leave wind up being unhappy elsewhere. Then, they lay the good stuff on you. They’ll bump you from Software Engineer III to Software Engineer IV and bump your pay by 9, count-em 9 thousand dollars per year. You lick your lips and do a little quick math, realizing that’s $750 extra dollars per month and, even after tax, a pretty nice car payment for the new car you’ve been needing. Heck, it’s even more of a bump than the offer you got from the new company. Should you take it?

If you want to hear arguments as to why counter-offers are a bad idea, just ask any recruiter to whom you talk. Recruiters work by taking a percentage of your first year’s salary from the company that hires you, and they lose that cut if you sign and then decide to stay. Counter-offers are recruiters’ mortal enemy, so if you ask them about whether you should accept a counter offer, you will be treated to a polished, well-rehearsed, convincing argument that counter-offers are such a terrible idea that it’s not unheard of for them to lead to cancer. They’ll tell you about how the company is in a bind but once you agree they’ll start trying to replace you. They’ll tell you that bosses don’t like to have a gun placed to their head and will resent you. They’ll tell you about the dreaded HR matrix and how if you accept a counter offer you won’t get a promotion for 8 years.

But here’s something I’ve never heard them say, and the reason I tend to think that accepting counter offers is a bad idea. Returning to the relationship metaphor from earlier when I mentioned the idea of “sneaking around” on your employer, consider what a resignation is. You’ve had kind of a vacant stare for a while and a feeling that something just isn’t working. You go out, flirt a little with other companies and then decide, “you know what — it’s over — time for a change!” You muster up the courage to take that plunge and have that difficult conversation, and your partner is then hurt and perhaps a bit in denial. After sleeping on it, though, bargaining starts the next day. “Alright, I know you said that you aren’t happy, so here’s what I’m going to do: you get to pick the pizza topping every Saturday instead of us alternating, you never have to come to my parents’ house except on Christmas, and I’ll take over the dishes and the vacuuming.” You’ve initiated a breakup due to existential unhappiness and the other party responds with an appealing set of superficial improvements. So do you then say, “Gosh, I was pretty unhappy, but really, every Saturday night we can have mushrooms and pepperoni? Hello, relationship bliss!” If so, how long before the blank stare comes back?

In the article I linked, Lopp says the following of the diving save:

Diving Saves are usually a sign of poor leadership. People rarely just up and leave. There are a slew of obvious warning signs I’ve documented elsewhere, but the real first question you have to ask yourself once you get over the shock of an unexpected resignation is: “Did you really not see it coming? Really?”

The question then becomes whether you really want to work at a place that only addresses your discontentment at the absolute last conceivable moment. Do you want to work at a place that’s only interested in your happiness when faced with your eminent departure? There’s probably a reason that you want to go, and that reason is probably tied heavily into a corporate culture where you’ve felt that no one who mattered was interested in championing your cause. You’re going to get that $750 and buy a car, and then it won’t be an awesome sum of money but rather ho-hum, just what you make. Your life will be basically the same as it was before they shoveled that money your way in a desperate attempt to keep you. They’re not going to consider you almost leaving a wake-up call to stop taking you for granted; they’re going to consider you a problem solved via bribe.

The Awkward Two Weeks And Exit Interview

Let’s assume you’ve politely declined any counter-offers that are made and you’re just riding out your last two weeks. First of all, continue staying classy and maintain a positive attitude. This is not the time to tell off people that you don’t like or make a lot of snarky comments. Be polite and helpful with knowledge transfer activities and finishing up any last work. If you disagree with who is going to be replacing you on things, keep that to yourself. These shouldn’t be hard things to do and it shouldn’t be hard to stay optimistic — you’re going to be free soon and there’s a light shining very clearly at the end of the tunnel.

At some point, HR will want to bring you in for an exit interview in which they ask all sorts of candid questions about your time with the company. Let me be clear about this — there is zero upside for you when it comes to being honest about criticism of the company. The smartest course of action is for you to walk in there, smile, and tell them how wonderful the company is and that you really hate to leave but it’s just too good an opportunity to pass up. Why? Well, what’s going to happen is that your responses are going to be reviewed by various manager and VP types as matters of feedback for improving the company. So the very people that might later offer you references or even hire you back later (stranger things do happen) are going to be seeing your feedback. And, those people are humans who probably won’t enjoy reading about how they’re “completely clueless” or “incompetent” or whatever you might feel like saying.

I’m not telling you not to be honest. I’m just telling you that there’s no benefit to you in being honest beyond how momentarily cathartic it might be to tell someone what you’ve really thought this whole time. It might be that you have friends working there and someone giving feedback about how everyone hates some activity or has real problems with some person might help your friends that will continue to work there. Fine, great, go for it if you want. Just understand that there’s no upside for you and there’s definite potential for downside.

Last Day and Beyond

Your last day will probably be the weirdest. You should spend some time making the rounds, saying your goodbyes, exchanging contact info, and wishing people well. I would also recommend an offer, if appropriate and within the bounds of your new employment agreement, to consult here and there if your former group/boss needs it. Typically this sort of consultation is easy, extra money for you and ensures a good professional relationship on an ongoing basis. Even just the offer will probably be well received, even if politely declined.

Once you’ve left, keep contact with your friends if so desired, and perhaps go for a drink or meal now and then. But on top of that, I’d keep in touch with former managers or people in authority positions as well. At minimum, if they like you, they can be excellent references. But on top of that, they may leave and go elsewhere and want to hire people. Or the landscape may change at your former employer and it might be worth considering again for you. Or maybe none of that is the case, but hey, what does it cost you to be friendly and exchange an email with someone every now and then? I’ve been around for a while in this industry and in a variety of roles and I never once have found myself thinking, “ugh, I wish I hadn’t stayed in touch with that guy!”

Throughout the whole bizarre and awkward process of leaving a job, the main thing to remember is to be classy and professional and always to take the high road. It can be tempting to do otherwise and leave in a blaze of sour grapes, telling people what you really think. But your career is really a fancy wrapper around the concept of your own earning power, and your earning power is your ticket to comfort and security throughout your life. It’s not worth jeopardizing for a youtube-able moment that might go mildly viral for a few days or something. Take the long view and do your best to leave organizations with an even more positive view of you than they had when they made you the initial offer.

Jul
11

By

What’s Your Greatest Weakness: The Employer-Candidate Impedance Mismatch

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , | 12 Comments

I recently posted about why you shouldn’t take interview rejection to heart.   I promised at least another post, if not more, to follow on that one, and here I am, making good.  This is where I question the value of interviews as we know them and describe what I consider to be vaguely depressing about the way we come into work.  Naturally, I’ll start this off with a non sequitur about circuitry.

In the world of circuitry, there’s a concept known as “impedance matching,” which, (over) simplified, says that you should match the output impedance of one component to the input impedance of the component into which the first one feeds. In this fashion, you prevent inefficiencies in or possible damage to the circuit that you’re constructing. The term was co-opted and inverted in the world of software (“impedance mismatch“) to describe the awkward transformations that occur when object oriented applications use relational databases to store information. Colloquially, you might say “you’ve got two puzzle pieces that don’t fit together quite right and you’re jamming them together.”

And so it goes, I would argue, with employee-employer matches in the corporate world. Of course, it doesn’t seem like it on the surface when you consider labor as a simple market transaction (or even when you factor in the middle-man, quasi-rent-seeking behavior of technical recruiters). A job seeker is selling labor and an employer demands labor, so the two negotiate on the price, with each trying to maximize its own interest (pay, but also benefits, days off, cultural perks, etc). Cut and dry, right?

Well, not so fast. Employers don’t make hires in a vacuum but rather they commonly hire people with some regularity and have a “general hiring strategy.” Employees do, on the other hand, get hired in a vacuum and their only strategy is maximizing their situation using rational self interest. So employees seek to maximize the perks with the best offer, but I would argue that companies in their hiring optimize for eliminating worst case scenarios rather than maximizing the upside of any individual hire. Put simply using examples and probability theory, consider the following scenario.

A company has a choice. They can hire Alice or Bob. Bob is a known commodity and a decent software developer. He’s not going to blow anyone’s socks off, but he’s not going to check in terrible code. Alice, on the other hand, is a divergent thinker and extremely creative. Based on her history, there’s a 75% chance that she will be a game-changing hire in a good way, delivering way more value than most people, improving those around her, and bringing true innovation to bear. But, there’s a 25% chance that all of the things that make her special will fail to mesh with the existing team, and there will be fireworks followed by a flameout in short order.

In my experience, most companies will tend toward hiring Bob, even though the expected value of offering the job to Alice is higher (calculated, say, by Bob having a 100% chance of delivering a 5 out of 10 and Alice having a 75% chance of delivering a 10 and a 25% chance of delivering a 0). Established companies favor avoiding disaster more than reaching for the stars. Bob has a zero percent chance of delivering a zero, so Bob it is. And so, we have an impedance mismatch between the zero sum games being played by both sides. Applicants operate in a world where each side is maximizing expected value, but companies play in a world where they are minimizing worst case scenarios.

This has a resulted in a depressing process by which job offers tend to happen — an interviewing process focused at every turn on “screening.” Take this test. Let’s do a phone screen. Come in for a first round interview. All of these activities are generally oriented around thinning the herd rather than finding the leader, and they’re also intrinsically tolerant of false negatives. Gotta break some eggs to make an omelette or, in other words, “sure, you’ll reject some qualified candidates, but you’ll (theoretically) guarantee that no complete duds will be hired.”

But once you make it past the “screening” hurdles, it switches gears and really does become a matter of selecting the preferred candidate.  That is, in most candidate searches, once all but a handful are screened, the question becomes “which of these do we like best?”  And this question is answered by talking to the candidates for a few hours and then choosing one (or perhaps more, depending on whether hiring is being done for a specific position or to compensate for attrition/allow growth).  So, let’s think about that — after a comparably objective filtering out process comes a largely subjective game of “based on a conversation of a few hours, let’s find someone to spend the next several years with.”

I have an operating hypothesis that I’m not really in any position to test for the time being.  So, be warned — here comes some frankly unsubstantiated conjecture.  My hypothesis is that this reductionist “pick the best of five” activity would be no different, statistically, than random selection of a candidate.  However much we might think that this personal interaction-based reading of the tea leaves brings the ‘best’ candidate to the top, it really doesn’t matter.  For every “bad attitude” candidate you successfully pass on, you’ll filter out “better attitude having bad day.”  For every candidate you hire because she nails the “what’s your greatest weakness” question due to cultural fit, you’ll hire someone whose greatest weakness is being a lying but convincing sociopath.  The “interview five, pick one” process strikes me as the same kind of process I go through when squinting at mutual funds for 10 or 15 minutes before deciding how to allocate my 401K.  I have no idea what I’m doing, so I just pick one and hope that everything works out.  My hasty “research” is entirely a self-administered placebo designed to make me feel better about some kind of due diligence.  And that’s how we, as a society, hire people.

So, the typical hiring process is one that is designed to first filter outliers and then secondarily to pick from the best of those still standing.  But there are two core problems.  Filtering outliers means filtering all outliers and not just the bad ones, meaning a potential drive toward mediocrity (or at least standard) and picking from among the best is essentially (axiomatically, here) window dressing on random choice.  So the candidate search, for all its clever questions, stress interviews, fancy clothes, synergies and whatever else we dream up really just boils down to “filter for slightly above average and pick at random.”  And I’m pretty sure that you could do that with submitted SAT scores and a dartboard, saving everyone time, money, and dry-cleaning bills.

Before you think I’m some kind of self-righteous voice from the clouds with everything figured out, I’m not.  I’ve conducted and participated in this process, willingly, from both sides.  I think everyone would agree that candidate selection is a reductionist activity with an insanely high margin for error and the fact that many companies have actual protocol in place for dealing with hiring misses attests to that very fact.  Gains made by introspection tend to be heuristic and not algorithmic, but I’ve played the good soldier with the rationale of “this is the worst way of doing it, except for all of the other ways I’ve considered.”

I still don’t have a particularly concrete solution, but I do have the beginnings of some ideas.  Github is quickly becoming an industry standard place to say, “look what I can do, left to my own devices.”  Stack Overflow is a place where not only can developers showcase their knowledge and accumulate points, but they can prove to would-be employers that their peers consider them to be knowledgeable.  Blogs are somewhere that interested employers can go to see whether a candidate would be a good fit in a waterfall shop. Coderbits pulls a lot of theses sources together into a single point of information.  These sources of information are freely available, asynchronous, and aggregate.  My life is summed up much better in these venues than it is by me sitting in a conference room, wearing a suit, and talking about a time I faced and overcame a challenge.

But I think there’s room for additional improvement as well.  How better to know whether a candidate will do well on a project than putting that candidate onto that project?  What I’m about to talk about is not currently tenable, but imagine if it were.  Imagine if there were a way that an organization could structure its work in such a way that onboarding time was virtually nil and so prospective developers could be tossed an assignment and get started on contract.  Is it working out after a week?  Great!  A month?  Great!  Now it’s been six months?  Great — let’s move to a more permanent W2 arrangement and thus from dating to marriage.

Employers could dispense with the prognostication games and tests and simply shuffle ‘candidates’ in and out, keeping the ones that were the best fit while passing on the ones that weren’t.  For candidates, this is great too.  You’d no longer be faced with these, “do I take this huge, life changing leap or pass and watch my situation deteriorate?” decisions and be able to generate income while shopping around.  A mutual feeling out period would allow a fit based on experience, rather than conjecture and games.

There are two enormous hurdles to this.  The first is the problem of benefits and the mind-numblingly unfortunate practice of health insurance being tied to employment.  If the USA has a spasm of collective sanity in this regard, perhaps that problem will go away at some point.  The second problem is actually making it viable for organizations to take on developers and have them go from unknown to “writing productive code” in a single day.  And solving that problem is also non-trivial.

But personally, I’d like to see more discussion around hiring processes that involve trial periods and shortening of obligatory worker-labor consumer relationships.  This isn’t to say that I think everyone should endure the stress of a job search on an almost constant basis, but rather that I think it should be easier for people and organizations to move seamlessly into arrangements that are better fits.  We should dispense with the pretense that indefinite stays are the norm and recognize that it’s going to vary widely by individual taste and personalities and projects involved.  In the end, moving in a direction like this could conceivably do wonders for morale across the industry and go a long way toward eliminating institutional knowledge hoarding in favor of beneficial cross pollination.

Update: This post has been in my drafts folder for a week, but I happened recently to stumble on this video:

“Pick the fourth resume from the top.” I’m not alone in my hypothesis that random selection would be a reasonable replacement for conversational interviews.

Jun
11

By

The Zen of Rejection: Let Companies Go In That Other Direction

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

The Courtship

There’s nothing like the beginning of a job search. It’s often born out of a time of transition or frustration, and perhaps uncertainty and worry, but no matter how it starts, there’s a rush and glow as you start to peruse the jobs that are out there. Why do you feel a rush and get a glow, no matter how unhappy you’d been feeling up to that point? Well, it’s because the world comes alive with possibilities as you look at Dice or Stackoverflow Careers or whatever. These aren’t just jobs — they’re the next chapter in your life.

And oh, how appealing they are. And it’s not just because you’re unemployed or sick of your current situation or just wanting a change of pace — it’s because they’re wonderful. They do Agile to your Waterfall and let you flex your hours instead of a rigid 9 to 5. That 401k match sure looks nice too, and they’re using the latest version of the language and the IDE. But, oh, there’s so much more. Casual dress. Free food and soda. Why, they even have a chef to cook you gourmet lunches and stationary bike-desks that you can use to exercise while you work. You can bring your dog in. They have X-Boxes and Playstations and Wiis. It’s really more like going on a cruise than going to work, and they’re beckoning to you, welcoming you, and telling you to become part of their exclusive club — nay, their family. You too can be one of the group of smiling, diverse people pictured in the “Careers” section on their website, having the absolute time of your life.

DreamJob

You submit your application. Really, how could you not? This is your chance at happiness, but now, the nerves set in. What if they don’t call you? But then they do, and the nerves only increase. What if you’re stumped in the phone screen? What if you screw up and tell them that you’re leaving because you don’t like your boss instead of what you’re supposed to say: “I’m just excited at the prospect of joining your organization?” But whew, you manage to avoid too much honesty and to secure an invitation to talk in person. Now, at this point, you put on your absolute best outfit, get in your car to drive over and make sure you get there very early, all the while telling yourself, “whatever you do, don’t be yourself — be that confident, diplomatic, smooth-talking version of yourself that will make you want to collapse from exhaustion the moment you leave.”

The interview passes in a surreal whirlwind as you meet with 8 different people, improvise on strange questions, answer with relief when you know what to say, pivot subtly when you don’t know what to say, remember not to fidget, and smile the whole time. You walk out into the parking lot, sweating under your nice clothes as you heave a huge sigh of relief, make yourself comfortable in your car, and get ready to plop down on your couch at home with a beer. But even that relief is short-lived, because now you have to wait to hear back, which makes the days seem like weeks, and weeks seem like years.

Finally, it comes: the offer. Now, it’s time for giddiness, assuming the pay, benefits and title are in line. You’ve been invited to Shangri La, and you’ve gratefully accepted. You gear up for the first day there, not knowing quite what to expect. And really, how could you? You’ve gone to great lengths to show them a completely air-brushed version of yourself in response to the unrealistic utopia they’ve shown you. So now, starting on your first day, you can see what the other looks like when it’s no longer the evening of the grand ball. Oh, but you’re already married. Better hope no one’s coach turns into a pumpkin (but here’s the catch: to some degree or another, it will, on both sides).

And that’s if everything goes really well. But what if it doesn’t? What if they decide to “go in another direction?” Oh, the rejection, disappointment, angst, and heartbreak.

Culture Shock

I’ve sort of mulled over how to make this point without sounding like a conceited jerk, but that’ll be hard, so I think I’ll just power through it and hope that most of my readership can relate. We’re programmers, and programmers are generally pretty intelligent. I’d imagine that most of you reading are no strangers to overachieving.

When I was growing up and attending school, test time was my time to shine. Whether it was getting into the advanced track math classes, taking standardized tests, trying out for clubs, applying to colleges, or pretty much anything else you can think of, those were things where I showed up and won. I got straight A’s in high school and graduated valedictorian. I won academic scholarships. I was never even cut from a high school sports team. In the sieve of primary and secondary school stratification, I was always the one that received the metaphorical job offer, and I’m sure it was the same for many of you. We grew up in a culture where a bunch of kids in a room working on a test meant you were about to get some accolades and general validation. If the real world were like high school, we’d all have had to rent storage to house all of our offer letters. Wake-ups would come later.

The first one I got, personally, was in my orientation week at college. The Carnegie Mellon CS department is pretty selective, and to prove that we were no longer in the minor leagues, so to speak, they asked all of us in our entering class of 150 people or so to raise our hands if we’d been the valedictorian of our high school. Something like a third of the hands in the room went up, and my jaw dropped. I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, and I no longer won anything just by showing up.

But if college was tough in this circumstance and some that would follow, the “real world” was downright depressing and seemed to have no interest in a fresh computer science grad (graduating at the end of 2001 as the dotcom bubble was bursting sure didn’t help). I failed job interviews before they even talked to me. I sent out resumes and they crossed the event horizon of some HR black hole. I’d get the occasional phone interview and then a “no thanks,” email if they bothered responding at all. In my life growing up, I’d barely ever heard, “I’m sorry, but we’re going in a different direction,” and now I was lucky to hear it because at least I was hearing something. The effect on my self esteem was profound. At the time, I thought my degree to be useless and I felt that some sort of confusing betrayal had occurred, rendering past academic success entirely non-predictive of continued success in this cruel new world I had entered.

Returned Mojo, Anger, and Preemptive Rejection

Eventually, I did get a job. I somehow managed to convince someone to hire me, and I was incredibly grateful and terrified. I was grateful because I could stop moonlighting and taking retail jobs to make ends meet, but terrified because if I’d learned anything from the job search it was that I was great at school but bad at life. But I made it in the real world. In fact, I more than made it. After a stumbling out of the gate, once I was employed, I consistently earned excellent performance reviews and was rapidly advanced and given greater and greater responsibility.

I started to regain some dignity and then some swagger. I was no longer “kid with no industry experience” — I was a software engineer that took business trips, met with clients and, most importantly, got things done. During this time, I also started earning my MS degree in Computer Science via night school, and by the time I hit the job market again in coming years, I was ready.

In fact, I was more than ready. I had learned my lessons from the previous job search and hit the ground running when I wanted a change, doing all of the right things. Interviews were easy to get for someone with my (now miraculously no longer useless) degree pedigree and years of experience in several programming languages, and I did well enough to receive offers. And this time, I’d figured out an important fact: any company that didn’t make me an offer clearly had a flawed interview process. Any form of rejection I haughtily interpreted as ipso facto process failure on their part. This arrogant self-righteousness, I believe, was misdirected resentment at my culture shock from the first go-round. I had done well in school, and then done well in the business world, and was getting offers from most companies with which I interviewed, so how dare those other companies and the ones from years ago make me doubt myself the way I had, very deeply, as a new grad?

As the “chip on the shoulder” mentality started to fade a bit (with me maturing and realizing this was petulant and comically egotistical), left in its place was a more antiseptic tendency to preemptively reject certain companies. I didn’t like rejection any better than at any time in my life — who does — but I didn’t view it as an insult or a mistake, either. I came closer to seeing it this way: “if I don’t apply, I’ll never be rejected, but if I apply and am rejected, I’d always have to say, if asked under oath, that I wasn’t good enough for that company.” By this time, I had become a good sport about “thanks but no thanks,” but I sought to avoid it. If, based on the job requirements or phone screen, it seemed like an interview might not go well, I told the company, “no thanks,” before they could tell me the same. Aha! The rejector has become the rejected! Take that! I would only play in games where I felt the deck had been stacked in my favor, which is good for a small king in a small kingdom, but bad if you ever want to reach and push yourself.

The Reality and Rejection Zen

I spent a lot of years going through this progression of my view on interviews. The feelings of inferiority, regaining my confidence but compensating with righteous indignation, and picking and choosing my spots to minimize rejection all played into an internal mantra of “there’s so much wrong with the interview process and it’s so reductionist, and I won’t do that to people.” If I were a character in Animal Farm, I would be Napolean, however. Like him, I wound up becoming that against which I railed. As my career wound on and I was in a position to make hiring decisions, I surprised myself by being reductionist. “Oh, that was the woman who didn’t really understand what unit tests were,” or “that was the guy who stumbled weirdly when trying to explain why he liked ASP MVC instead of ASP Webforms.” Human lives — and probably imminently capable humans — reduced to a single mistake they had made or passed over in consideration for someone who had happened to impress that day.

It was from this perspective that I realized the sad reality of the interview process. I had been viewing it wrong all along; you’re not really “rejected” from jobs and the interview process isn’t an evaluation of your intrinsic worth in the same way that something like the SAT purports to be (even at companies that make it a point to try to make their interview process exactly that). At best (and probably more in the realm of ideal), it’s an evaluation of mutual fit — something like, “we have a team with characteristics X and Y, and we’re looking for compatibility with X and Y, but also someone who brings Z.” You can be a wonderful human, full of X and Y, but not familiar with or interested in Z, and the position won’t be a good mutual fit. For instance, if I’m hiring someone to be a DBA and your interest is in client side web programming, neither of us pursuing things past the phone interview phase is not a rejection.

What I finally understood, particularly after seeing how the sausage is made and then making it when it comes to candidate selection, is that an interview is really more like you calling up a buddy and saying, “hey, wanna go see that new X-Men movie tonight?” Most likely, the answer will be no because there are a million reasons it could be no. Your buddy might be sick, he might be working late, he might have a date, he might be watching a game on TV, he might be annoyed with you, he might not like movies… the list goes on forever. Some of his reasons could be related to you and some completely based on other factors.

So it is with the interview process. A company may think you’re great and perfectly able to do the work, but have someone else in mind that’s just an absolute perfect match. Or the CEO might be forcing them to hire his nephew. Or they might have decided not to hire after all. In fact, it could be that they never intended to hire, and the whole process was a sham to humor some muckety muck (and before you doubt me, I’ve seen this happen). Again, as many reasons as stars in the night sky.

Once I wrapped my head around this, I stopped fearing or much caring about interview “rejection” beyond simple disappointment that I didn’t get a job about which I was excited or perhaps regret at the fruitless time investment. It was as if I’d called my friend about the movie and he’d said offhandedly, “meh, not tonight.” The response then becomes, “okie dokie, maybe some other time.” A little disappointment is in order if you were hoping to go together but, hey, you have other friends and you could always go on your own.

This is how I got over the feeling that interviews are some measure of your competence or worth — a feeling that I have no doubt is quite pervasive among those reading as well, even if you tell yourself or others that you’re fine with it. So next time you don’t get a job offer, imagine saying in your head, “well, maybe we’ll catch the movie work together some other time or maybe I’ll just invite someone else apply somewhere else.” It seems silly, but I invite you to try it. I imagine that you’ll find it takes the sting out of that call/email/letter/non-response to some degree, if not totally. At the very least, I hope my story might help your confidence not be shaken.

This is the end of the first part of this series, but I anticipate several more. Stay tuned for next time when I tell you why this zen state that I’ve reached depresses me in a kind of detached way and as I delve into how seriously, seriously dysfunctional I think the employee-employer pairing process is in our society (including the likely controversial assertion that the interview process might conceivably not be worth doing). By the end of the series along these lines, I’m hoping to collect my thoughts enough to end on an up note, offering ideas as to how things could be improved.

« Older Posts
Newer Posts »