Monday, June 30, 2008

A Company Really Responds to a Job Ad

Well I replied to their job ad on Dice and lo and behold I got a ring from them one hour later! So this does happen sometimes. (I am used to applying for jobs with various companies and never ever ever hearing back from them.)

-ulianov

Friday, June 27, 2008

The Trouble with Global Agencies

Well, a "global" or a "nation-wide" agency (e.g. Oxford) is bound to have multiple offices in various places.

The people who staff these outlets don't seem to communicate with each other and one can get multiple calls from recruiters working for the same agency. (See my other postings.)

Another problem is that these people are more superficial than the ones from the small/local agencies. The former, being low-life scum, only pick up the e-mail address and telephone numbers from Resumes and call people at random. They don't even read BIG RED NOTICES ON TOP "do not call unless pay is X".

I don't even bother to tell them to sod off any more.

-ulianov

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Recruiters and Relocation

I was talking to my recruiter genie and complaining that I get calls for LAMP jobs in CO for 55 to 60k in spite of big bold red notes I put in my resume about the pay level and that I am not considering going to Colorado, and here is what she had to say:
Recruiting firms teach recruiters that that stuff doesn't matter, and neither does people saying they will not relocate. The recruiter is supposed to convince them to. It's stupid.
-ulianov

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Interview w/ A Three-Letter Company (Not Blue Tho)

Went to Southboro to meet these guys. I landed this interview via a call from one of their HR guys.

They were very nice and asked a lot of questions about prototyping & code debugging. Very interesting opportunity: they do advance technology scouting for other groups in the company.

It was one of the nicest interviews I've had in a long time.

Jul 7 update: I did not get the job, the feed-back (HR were nice and gave me some) was:
[...] the leading candidate is internal, so by default, has somewhat of an edge (knows the product well, the company, etc.). Trust me when I tell you that you did extremely well on the interview. They are a tough group to impress and you did that.
Bummer. No matter how well I perform it still does not stick.

-ulianov

Corporate Recruiters vs. Agency/Freelance Recruiters

It just dawned on me that there are two categories of recruiters:
1. agency/freelance ones who bombard companies with requests for positions and then go find candidates;
2. the corporate ones who are part of the HR.

In general one can discuss money and other things with the former (you may recall that I blogged about one who was holier than thou about this).

The latter ones are a bit less useful as they prefer to hide behind the finger and decline all talks about $$$ referring me to the offer phase if any.

This is a unadulterated waste of time on my side as generally I have to waste half a day to two days to get to their premises and charm the snakes only to find out in the end that the pay is pitiful.

Yet recently I stumbled on one of the latter kind who said that he took notice of the line in my Resume warning about no calls under 120k and that altho he cannot go into details the sum is the pay level at his three-letter company.

-ulianov

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Interview w/ V**eoIQ in Bedford, MA

Drove half hour to Bedford on some winding roads (did not want to take route on Hwys 2->495->3) and got to meet the folks of V**eoIQ.

They are nice and relaxed but a bit unfocused: they use C, Java and .Net in their software stack and that biases their hiring needs.

I applied for a platform job (C/Linux/drivers/troubleshooting) yet they wished for somebody that was good at C++ too. I am not. While I think there may be people out there with this background I do not suppose there are many of them, as C++/UML is a craft on its own.

Predictably I did not get the job (well I told them upfront I am no C++ fan). While the hiring manager who talked to me over the phone seemed OK with that [that's why I went there to meet them in person], the VP of Eng. was not thus I wasted four hours on the road+interview out of my work day.

Altho unrelated to the V**eoIQ, the building that housed them was reeking of a rancid smell. It made me quite sick to my stomach and quite unenthusiastic. I suppose it came from the pool supply company next door.

-ulianov

Monday, June 23, 2008

Why I Left a Previous Job

Well, I spent 3 1/4 years in that place and I saw it in the beginning as a fun-to-work-at startup, then being purchased by a giant company and witnessed it getting process-ified into a rigid organisation.

Mind you I was all for processes but my interest was only to improve code quality [as I was at the receiving end of super-nasty bugs in code I never wrote].

The new management process-ified things blindly left and right, imposed quality checks but the quality processes were followed only formally, i.e. not in their spirit.

There were only two good outcomes out of that:
1. checked in code did not break the build any more and
2. super-bugs were not usually found one day before GA [sometimes they were found and relegated on purpose to "point-one" releases].

Other than that all we got was stacks of red tape and endless useless forms to fill. The time-tracking system was a VisualBasic webapp that was just gross.

IEEE has a very interesting article on this and here is a relevant portion:
The process-imposter organization bases its practices on a slavish devotion to process for process’s sake. These organizations look at process-oriented organizations such as NASA’s Software Engineering Laboratory and IBM’s former Federal Systems Division. They observe that those organizations generate lots of documents and hold frequent meetings. They conclude that if they generate an equivalent number of documents and hold a comparable number of meetings they will be similarly successful. If they generate more documentation and hold more meetings, they will be even more successful! But they don’t understand that the documentation and the meetings are not responsible for the success; they are the side effects of a few specific effective processes. We call these organizations bureaucratic because they put the form of software processes above the substance. Their misuse of process is demotivating, which hurts productivity. And they’re not very enjoyable to work for.
Mind you I felt like the last two sentences.

Also the fact that during all my time there I had to pick up after a few people that exhibited the cargo cult programming syndrome did not help either.

-ulianov

Friday, June 20, 2008

Another Oxford Drone Calls

I got another call today from an Oxford recruiter. Made a mistake and did not tell her to sod off from the get-go.

She did not have a job at hand, she did not like I am not available for work yesterday and she insisted that I come to downtown Boston to meet with her on Monday.

This may be OK on Planet Oxford but as I was trying to explain to her:
1. it would take me at least 1 1/2 hour to go to/from the burbs to Boston just to meet her;
2. my contract is still running so I would rather work and make money than go downtown and waste about three hours in the process;
3. I have other quasi-firm things lined up in the pipeline that do not require me to go and waste time on a face-to-face with a recruiter [other recruiters don't require that!].

So the was either old-school [I've met this sort of recruiter before] or she was just plain stupid. You decide.

-ulianov

P.S. Talked to a fellow contractor, he said Oxford tried to apply the same BS to him.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Funny Job Ad on Dice

A recruiter might have torn a page from my book: he writes on Dice [bold typeface in original ad]:
To submit your resume for this position, you must include BOTH your desired annual salary and current annual salary broken down between base + bonus! NO EXCEPTIONS!
Further on he specifies:
Major Pluses to have: [...] Current or previous employment at Avid, Sea Change (in New Hampshire), Broadbus, or similar companies.
This guy is fishing [I work for one of these companies].

-ulianov

Monday, June 16, 2008

Law of Unintended Consequences

A.P. quotes my blog in a blog comment and says:

From a candidate perspective, we are viewed more
and more as a necessary evil (see [link to my
blog
] for an example of this) while from a
client perspective - especially since the
introduction of the internet and job boards
such as monster.com, we are viewed as paper
pushers (resumes) and shotgun hunters (throw
it against the wall and see if it sticks).
IMO he is one of the few recruiters that has achieved a high level of sentient-ness and he understands his station in life.

I looked at my visitation logs and I've seen him a few times. Now I can put a name on an IPv4 address ;) He has his own website & blog and seems to care about us grunts who use his services.

Re: necessary evil recruiters are a step forward from using newspapers and newsgroups (van.jobs, etc) to hunt for jobs. Some small companies who know better [or are cheap] don't use jobs boards and recruiters, they will post on local newsgroups, but that's a secret.

I did not intend this blog as a tool or mirror for recruiters but based on usage patterns seems to be just that. Maybe I should install an anti-recruiter filter that upon detection replaces the blog content with
Eenie Minnie Minie Moe / No job here off you go!
and turns his computer into Stilton cheese ;)

-ulianov

Sunday, June 15, 2008

A Recruiter That is Worse Than a Spammer

I don't know what to make of this e-mail, it has it all:
0. badly formatted Subject, weird opening line;
1. LAMP job, crappy pay;
2. recruiter did not read my Resume;
3. dizzying broken English: what is a rek? what is an "all inclusive rate"? [are we in the hospitality industry?] does one habitually get comfortable with job offers? and what is a modify resume?
4. even manages to be insulting: "you are comfortable with the rate or not" and he calls me a Partner (never spoke to this low-life).

All in the span of three short paragraphs. He's either a pro at being insulting or extremely stupid. Even spammers don't irk me that much.

-ulianov
Subject: DIRECT CLIENT REK::::"Perl/PHP Web Developer
with XXXX, Durham, NC"............please
respond immediately

Hi Partner,

Hope you are doing great. I have one more urgent
rek on “PERL/PHP WEB DEVELOPER with XXXX
in Durham, NC”.

If you feel comfortable with the rek please get
back to me with your modify resume as per client
rek.

And please let me know whether you are comfortable
with the rate or not.

Title : Perl/PHP Web Developer with Cisco experience
Location : Durham, NC
Duration : 24 months
RATE : $45/HR of all inclusive

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Feed-Back from Interviews

Many a bad recruiter call you, send you to an interview and then nada for weeks.

The good ones recognize the problem and recommend their brethren to always follow up. I am glad some of them see my point.

For me the feed-back either positive or negative is invaluable as it reflects the way other people see me professionally so next time I should not have to make the same mistake.

-ulianov

Friday, June 13, 2008

Another Surreal Encounter with a Recruiter

I got a call from a withheld number today. The person at the other end was handling the phone [I could hear it], did not speak and in the background there was a weird tape playing and talking rubbish like
You are a good reader. You have an ego. Never Give Up.
As I use this phone number only for recruiters I can say that yes, they use motivational tapes. Maybe they have a low-low self esteem? ;)

-ulianov

Sshh! Recruiters Comunicate Among Themselves

It turns out that recruiters have their own haunts (http://www.recruitingblogs.com/) for blogging and asking questions.

This one by my acquaintance C.F. discusses why candidates refuse to even hear about jobs at some companies.

I had to say NO! on my own recently: a recruiter asked whether he can submit me to a company in MA that has been purchased by a large Chinese corporation.

I have had such an experience with a company like this in Vancouver, BC and I find that:
1. they are very rigid;
2. nothing percolates up the ladder;
3. new ideas/improvements are not welcome;
4. overseas Chinese management is very stubborn;
5. they are very cheap, even stingy when it comes to salaries and benefits.
In the end I left for a better offer out of sheer boredom and the fact that another company were offering me 30% more (the new offer was industry average). Funny but the Chinese company offered to match the offer on the spot.

In short my opinion is that they want drones to do their bidding.

-ulianov

Thursday, June 12, 2008

What Makes a Gōōd Résūmé?

I've heard many opinions from recruiters and employers about my Resume:
1. Recruiters want as many details as possible so they can search keywords and can present relevant experience;
2. Employers/technical types want the same as recruiters as they can understand a candidate's background and serves as material to sound the candidate's experience and skills in certain areas in the interview(s);
3. Employers/suit or MBA types want two-page Resumes that gives them a rough idea of what you can do.

It is up to you to to find a balance. I find that keeping a short and a full version helps.

A good Resume must have on the first page:
0. your NAME;
1. your contact information;
2. [for a Jr. person: education and GPA];
3. a short list of your previous jobs;
4. a list of your skills and how many years you spent using them;
5. title and duration at the most recent job and some details;

Past positions must be presented newer-first.

Never include information like SSN (US), SIN (Canada), age, marital status, ethnicity. They are not allowed to ask for that and there is no need-to-know.

-ulianov

Mar 2 update: I deleted the old post and re-posted as there are too many irrelevant hits from Google on the title. I also mangled the title to use some Unicode transliteration to cut down on these hits.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Sometimes the Recruiter Does Know Better

R.F. of Newburyport, MA (who's among the few good ones in Mass) sent me to a pre-screening interview with a company in Boxboro, MA.

He gave me a "cheat sheet" with things that the hiring manager is known to ask and advised me to read & follow it.

Indeed the hiring manager did just that but I kinda blew it as did not follow the script -- I answered the question with a twist. As to other topics I was asked I gave the answers with practical/historical examples of why and how. Maybe I was a bit didactical.

He didn't quite like that and turned me down. The feed-back was that he did not like the way I communicated. In my defense I must say that I was tired (I always sleep badly before an interview) so maybe I missed a few cues verbal or not when interacting with the guy.

Moral is if you know the recruiter is good and he/she gives you good advice about a certain employer then you'd better follow it.

Jul 7 update: It appears that C**ssbeam is still advertising the job till this day. The hiring manager was complaining about not finding people skilled enough (he was looking for somebody who could maintain their own kernel patches, port them forward to new releases and possibly pushing them into mainline Linux).

On the other hand I suspect based on his need for scripted interaction and inflexibility in interacting with me that he has his own problems in dealing with (new) people.

In hindsight the moral is this: if I were desperate to get the job I should have sang to his tune and jumped as high as he told me to. On the other hand this interaction pattern would have extended into my employment there and I am anything but a yesman.

-ulianov

Two ASAP! Calls for Rhode Island

Some company that makes gaming machines is hiring in RI and this ripples into some recruiters' psyche.

Yesterday I got two phone calls from two different nincompoops who fished my Resume on monster. They did not pay attention to my location preferences. Bummer.

It's got so bad that I had to slap "NO CALLS FOR OREGON" on the top of my Resume. (Yes! In red!) Maybe I should do the same for RI.

My black list of crappy agencies has now ten entries and it's growing by the day. At this rate I shall see myself morph into a CreditRecruiter Bureau.

(BTW: I call the Credit Bureaus the Gestapo for they collect my personals and they sell it to dubious credit card companies.)

-ulianov

Some Recruiters are Worse Than Telemarketers

Some recruiters (especially from outsourcing agencies) call on the phone and following their script they say "I am X from [agency] Y and I have an opportunity. I have a few questions for you".

If you interrupt them and say "Where?" or "What's the pay rate?" they get confused and you have to repeat the question. Their poor command of English and crappy VoIP telephone lines don't help either.

So you end up wasting five minutes on the phone trying to extract relevant information from the drone to find out in the end that they want you to move to Silicon Valley and be paid at 60% of market value. Some even try to bargain with you. Yuck.

Five minutes don't seem like a lot of time but if you get this three or four times a day it adds up to a lot of irritation.

Now, telemarketers are in my opinion a lesser evil because one can use donotcall.gov, utter to them the magic words "Put this number on your do not call list" or simply not answer a call with a withheld number.

One does not have these options with this kind of recruiters. One can tell them not to call but they don't have a master list so you can get a call from another drone of the same agency the next day.

-ulianov

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Resume Writer Reads my Blog

A gang of resume writers disagree with my take on Cover Letters and mistake me for a career expert (hey! I'm just a grunt who's looking for a job, but I've done that quite successfully for 10 years).

They have a self-serving theory (and BS IMNSHO):

Letter-writing may not be relevant to all jobs,
but willingness to go the extra mile and attention
to detail are. The presence of a cover letter helps
prove you possess those qualities; the absence
implies you don't.

Step back one second and think: they are Resume writers. A Cover Letter is part of their livelihood -- if someone says it's not required that's one less revenue stream for them as the theory goes that these letters must be custom tailored to each employer.

BTW: I had an interview this morning and the hiring manager said that he had to go thru a stack of 50-60 Resumes and he only looked at the 1st page for 10 seconds max. How many seconds did he devote to Cover Letters? I guess none. So hiring managers don't care about these letters. Good.

And speaking of attention to detail... my Resume is so long (9 pages) and so detailed that one cannot allege that I don't have this skill. Yes, they imply that there is the "human detail" but IMO recruiters are to be dealt with in bulk unless they are really good.

It is easy to offer "professional" opinions but finding a good job and dealing with recruiters is not.

-ulianov

P.S. As always my opinions and experience pertain only to the IT field.

A Recruiter's Predatory Tactic

Something that irritates me up the wall is when a recruiter calls into the company PBX and then connects to my extension by randomly looking up my name, e.g. spells blindly "2582" [not my actual extension].

Then he/she asks "May I speak to X Y [my name]?" and starts BS-ing me.

This makes me postpone setting up my voicemail until my manager reads me the riot act which is usually three months.

But this is pointless of him/her as I have always been a grunt, never had a customer-facing job (except once at an ISP) and family, friends and recruiters call me on my cell phone.

Jun 13 update: In a moment of sincerity a senior manager once told me that when he wants to get rid of a undesirable f/t subordinate he doesn't fire him (as this can be costly in Canada) but he calls up a recruiter buddy and tells the recruiter to lure the undesirable away on another job thus making him leave on his own steam.

That's another reason why I never take recruiters' calls at work.

-ulianov

P.S. I never give out my work phone number except for work-related reasons. Cell phones are good as an excuse ("my battery was dead") and can be ignored at will.

Monday, June 9, 2008

Most Job-Hunting Books Are Useless

Everything these books say is true and is somewhat useful but they are bollocks.

(The way they suggest to look for companies by going to the Public Library is useless.)

They are at good at the beginning of one's career or if one has been on a job for longer that he/she can remember.

What these treatises don't tell you is that the main factors in being successful at finding the job are:
1. state of the economy, especially the IT side: [think post-bubble, the years 2001-2003];
2. location: I am in IT so Vancouver, BC is not really a haven teeming with hight tech companies;
3. your skill set (this will only set your foot in the door): having done lots of stuff makes one highly desirable in most situations; if one stayed in one company and doing the same stuff for a decade that is not a good indicator of flexibility and competency [may be wrong here but I've seen this kind of people];
4. if at the interview the people like you; this is extremely important and you will know immediately as you will feel whether you like them [be honest with yourself!].

One can lie on the Resume, can lie to the Recruiter, (should not) lie at the interview but one cannot make people like him/her. Some people have this natural talent but I (like most IT people) don't.

-ulianov

Friday, June 6, 2008

Re: Is the Cover Letter Dead?

C.F. asks in her blog: Is the Cover Letter Dead?

As far as I can tell from my 10 years of experience of job hunting across 3 countries and 2 continents cover letters are history.

In the good old days of the glossy-paper Resume they might have had an effect.

Nowadays the cover letter has been replaced by a line or two I send when I respond to a recruiter's solicitation. Besides it is rare that companies advertise jobs on job boards by themselves so writing a "love letter" to a recruiter that will want to grill you over the phone anyhow is pointless.

Cover letters might have worked with cold calls but a) I am not good at it and b) they are tossed in the trash anyway.

-ulianov

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Why are Perl Jobs Paid so Low?

B.N. of Cleveland, OH phoned and e-mailed me about a f/t perm. Perl job in Boston, MA (description below).

I talked to him and he said that the pay is max 100K+benefits.

Now the job require a lot of experience and skill yet the pay level is low IMO. I wonder why it is so? I have had calls about Perl jobs in the past 6 months and they seem to be on the low side of the pay scale in the US and downright laughable in Canada (CAD 65K).

I reckon Perl jobs are classified as Sysadmin (or worse LAMP) jobs. This is too bad as Perl is fun and has been used to build large systems that are not oriented towards serving Web pages.

-ulianov

Candidates must have extensive knowledge of:
1) Unix OS, HTTP/S
2) C++, NSAPI, PERL, HTML, JavaScript
3) High-throughput software design techniques and strategies
4) Multi-processing code design patterns
5) Connection management and multi-threading application design
6) Systems design for application deployment
7) Software version control and build practices using Clearcase and ANT
8) Publish / Subscribe metaphor
9) Shared memory management and data cache.

Ideal candidates would also have experience in:
1) Financial services industry
2) Market symbology and financial instrument attributes
3) Basic systems administration duties
4) Network technology including TCP/IP, DNS and traffic load balancing
5) Database modeling and design, specifically Oracle and be proficient in writing PL/SQL, complex queries.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Most Recruiters Withhold Their Caller ID - Lack of Thinking or Plain Stupidity?

Most recruiters call from withheld numbers which may seem like a good idea on Planet Recruiter but I (as most people) screen my calls and send them to Voicemail.

Then they leave a message in which they spell their name and phone number (usually the number is given twice).

So what IS the point in withholding their number if they give it out anyway?

-ulianov

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Polichinelle's Secret About Recruiters

My recruiter genie confessed to me a month ago that people hate recruiters. No wonder.

Today she elaborated:

It's not recruiters people hate... The job function of a
recruiter is essential.

There are just so many people that should have never gotten
into the staffing industry in any way that end up bouncing
around to different recruiting firms for a few months each
before being let go.

And they are the ones that do the THINGS that make people
think they "hate recruiters": sending the irrelevant
emails, etc.

Myself I have no feelings of this kind, I find them a necessary evil. As to her comment: if it walks like like a duck and quacks like a duck for me it is still a recruiter, in other words she is right but unfortunately the bottom line is the same for me.

However unlike most people I have no problem being rude to them (to the extreme if need be) when they exhibit one or more of the Capital Sins that I describe in this blog.

-ulianov

Monday, June 2, 2008

Surreal Encounter with Recruiters

Today I got two nincompoops calling me based on my Resume on monster.

First one wanted me to go to Oregon [no, no, not Oregon!], presumably to I**el. Told him to sod off nevertheless he e-mailed me afterwards. The subject of his e-mail was "BACKFILL POSITION"; so we're digging now.

I shall change my Resume on monster to read in font size 40 "NO CALLS FOR OREGON".

Second nincompoop actually is from the agency I work for (!). This is utter lack of professionalism on his side. The funny part is that his SMTP MTA did not set a 'Message-ID' header so my gatekeeper script kept sending him e-mails asking him to pass authorisation. He got five of those. Hope he gets brown pants tomorrow ;)

I fixed the gatekeeper to use the CRC-32 of the Subject header in lieu of Message-ID when the latter is missing. Thus great software is being built on top of a huge pile of corner cases.

-ulianov

Sunday, June 1, 2008

Recruiters' Capital Sins (Part 7)

Another sin intrinsic to IT recruiter is that actually they don't have a clue what are the technologies required by the job they are recruiting for.

(Most don't hold technical degrees, they come from soft sciences. If they were engineers they would likely be on the job and not peddling jobs. This is the misanthrope in me speaking.)

This is not necessarily their fault: they must know how to talk people into things (A.G. of M$ comes to mind) and how to evaluate candidates for non-technical traits.

But not understanding the nature of the job makes the job seeker's life miserable during hard times when employers ask for nonsensical things (e.g. 15 years of experience administering Solaris, MCSE and 10 years of administering Windows NT -- no self-respecting UN*X Sysadmin will touch M$ clickware).

During such times recruiters are pressed to find candidates that check mark ALL requirements regardless how oxymoronic they are.

Alternatively I could lie (imagine a fake accent: "Ja, ja Ich bin Good with Windows, Jaa") to get past the recruiter but I've never lied/mis-represented my professional skills.

Most people just lie to recruiters with delight.

-ulianov