Actually, the ‘upgrade’ wasn’t an upgrade so much as a switch back. I’ve been on ubuntu from dapper through fiesty, and switched over to mandriva 2008 yesterday. I thought I’d backed everything up, but I’d forgot a few things.
doesn’t sound like much, except that’s where my development php code was, as well as my mysql databases. *Most* of it was not that useful – demo code, etc. But, I did have my work development blog there, so I’ve just lost 2 months of posts. OUCH! 
I was talking to a recruiter the other day (I’ve been contacted a whole lot lately for some reason) and she asked about the reference to “mensa” in my extracurricular/other section. I’m not even 100% sure why I put that there – I haven’t updated that section in a while. I asked her if it sent the wrong message – like “I’m so smart” or something like that. She didn’t really have a solid answer, just repeated the question about why I’d put that on there.
So I’ll throw this question out to y’all. If you were interviewing someone and saw “mensa” on the resume, would you discard it? Would you think the candidate was being a show-off or had an inflated ego? After thinking it through a bit, I think my original reasoning was to hopefully demonstrate that I had some level of raw capability such that if I was thrown a new technology I’d be able to pick it up pretty quickly. Now, I’m not saying I can pick up *any* technology under the sun in 10 minutes, but I’m usually able to pick up the basics and then some of most tasks/situations/technologies pretty quickly.
When putting things on a resume, should you only put *accomplishments* that indicated a great deal of effort went in to them? Maybe that’s what I was leaning towards, but I’m talking myself out of it now. Some people might pass the bar in one attempt, and others make take 3 attempts. One might argue that “3 timer” had to put more effort in to it, but in that case indicating effort – “I took it 3 times” – probably doesn’t look very good to some people (tho it might indicate a stick-to-it-iveness they admire).
I think I’ll keep it on there, although it’s one of those things that, to me, really isn’t an ‘accomplishment’ – it just is. I mean, filling out the form was an accomplishment, and them cashing my membership check was an accomplishment, I guess. 
But mostly it’s like being right-handed or brown-eyed or whatever. It’s a biological trait, but it happens to be that this particular biological trait comes in handy in the tech field, much like being 6’9″ might come in handy in the NBA. Being tall doesn’t mean you’ll definitely be a superstar basketball player, but it generally doesn’t hurt. A friend of mine recently got his MS MVP certification. I’m sure he’ll be putting that on his resume, but it’s also something that he worked at and developed over a couple years.
I got a call the other day from a recruiter looking to get me to move to the US Virgin Islands. I was a bit curious where she’d found my resume, so I looked in my logs to see the referrer info. She’d typed in lamp software architect – no quotes or anything. My resume came up on the first page of google! I tried some other permutations – php software architect, lamp developer, lamp software developer, etc., but I was nowhere to be found. I’ve no idea how long I’ve been up there, but don’t expect to be up there very long. It would certainly have been nicer if it was up there for something specifically with PHP in it, but whatever – beggars/choosers and all that. What was funnier though was that the job she was placing for was #9 in the same result set. 
So, I’ve now been at my new workplace (opensourceriskmanagement) for a week. Well, not quite. I was only *there* (in Durham) for 2.5 days last week. Since last Wednesday evening, I’ve been in San Jose, CA, attending meetings with current and prospective clients, and doing code audits. My Black Duck experience today was less than 100%, in that the server environment wasn’t set up for my code scan, the server crashed twice (necessitating reboots both times), and I really didn’t get going until 2:30. I’m going to have to stay another night here – so I will have been away from home for 8 days during my first two weeks!.
I don’t want to be doing this every week, but I do have to say it’s been a rather exciting first week. I wish I could say more, but I can’t. This is probably the most frustrating thing about the job – I’m meeting some interesting and powerful people, and learning about some very interesting behind-the-scenes things going on at very large companies, but I can’t *write* anything about any of it.
I’m used to writing about issues at work, but that’ll need to stop, at least with respect to naming names. To the extent that I’m able to share some of my more interesting experiences, I will, but I don’t expect to be able to do that too much, at least to start with.
Overall, there’s quite a lot of potential here, though, which I’m very excited about. I’ll also add that if you’re at a company that uses open source software in your products, and you’d like to have some expert auditing and assessment of your risks and compliance with open source licensing obligations, drop me a line.
The guys at worked pitched in and got me a custom-designed cake. This pretty much summed up my 22 months here. <voice=”dr_nick”>Thanks, everybody!</voice>
There comes a time when you move on from one work environment to the next. I recently had that time come, and I accepted a position with Open Source Risk Management. This was one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make careerwise, for a number of reasons. On the practical side, it’s a much further drive, and will also involve frequent travel (probably up to 50% in some months). On the intangible side, it’s a bit outside my comfort zone, shall we say. I’ve been developing software in various capacities for over 12 years, and have been at the forefront of new technology adoption in some situations. I’ve watch the LAMP stack grow and mature, developed in multiple platforms, seen all the myriad changes happen during that time in the tech world, and seen them from the eyes of an active participant. That’s about to change.
My initial role at OSRM will be mostly conducting code reviews – auditing code projects to ensure no open source license violations exist, and suggesting architectural remedies when violations have occurred. I’ve no illusions about this – some of this work will most likely be boring. But much of it will be, I believe, more exciting and more of a challenge than I’ve had in a while. Having to move between companies and projects, meet= new people, quickly ascertain what’s going on with code, and other things like that will be a welcome change from the current situation. I also intend to be able to grow new skills in this new position, and hopefully will be able to influence the direction of the company’s growth as well.
All in all, it’s exciting and new, but I’ve having to leave behind a great group of people I’ve worked with the past 22 months. These were the primary reasons I’d stayed as long as I have. I’ve rarely worked in an org where I was able to get along both personally and professionally with such a large number of people. I’m not saying we never got on each others’ nerves – I know I’ve stepped on toes and rubbed people the wrong way on occasion. And I was on the receiving end of those gaffes sometimes as well. But we have always been able to put those aside and work, laugh and play together when called for. I’m grateful that I’ve had a chance to know each one, and will hopefully keep in touch with them as well.
I’ll probably write more about this later. Things have only wrapped up here now, but the overwhelming impression was definitely positive. The polish, energy, excitement and ideas here was fantastic. It only brings me down a bit to realize that many of these ideas and concepts won’t translate back to work. A former colleague was here, and he left the job because of the stagnation. He was there about 2 years, and had his fill. I’ve been there 20 months and am getting to the same point he was.
I’d love to be able to reinvigorate our company culture – shake things up, get things moving again, inspire people to greatness (at least the tech/development side of things!). However, I don’t think it’ll happen. The roles are set, the culture is fairly stagnate, and there’s no spirit of curiosity, experimentation and other traits which were on display in abundance here. I realize conference goers are a self-selected bunch, and that the ‘real world’ can’t be made of everyone thinking 100% the same all the time. That’s not quite my point.
We will likely never get to the point where our systems are a pleasure to develop on. We have too much legacy infrastructure, and changing it requires too much work to ever be considered. So, like many shops, we continue to patch new ideas on top of old code in essentially a ragtag fashion, and which further compounds existing problems. The systems *work*, and will continue to work, which is all the business side of things really care about. But we can not react *quickly* and efficiently due to the overwhelming mediocrity of the existing systems. We can react quickly, but do hack jobs. We can try to be efficient and ‘proper’ about things, but that can not happen quickly due to the spaghetti nature of much of the systems. It’s the classic “fast good cheap, pick any two” triangle.
What I got from being here and talking with other people is that it doesn’t have to be that way, or at least not as pronounced as we currently experience the dilemma. Talking with other people who do continuous integration, unit tests, proper QA, have the requisite tools, environments, management and so on gives me hope that it really *can* be done (and is done in some quarters). At the same time, it is discouraging because it becomes more apparent that where I’m at now likely won’t transition to that. Because, ultimately, the development side of a business is just a reflection of the rest of the business – its priorities, values and so on. The developers can’t be ‘agile’ themselves without buy-in from the rest of the company, because all parties are completely intertwined.
So, should I continue to come to conferences like these? It ends up being a double edged sword – great ideas, good people, but a realization that I am not as satisfied as I would like to be, and that I’m unable to affect the proper change where I’m at. Ultimately I will continue to attend conferences (codemash, convergesouth and possibly DCPHP) because it does give me the chance for good personal growth and development, but these aren’t things that have much impact in my primary day to day job.
I’m still working on my PHP job hunter book project, which is getting closer to completion. This post doesn’t have much to do with that except to give an update, then segue in to a related bit. I just stumbled on this post from a few years ago. What I found interesting was the differing views that the respondents had on certain topics, like writing code at an interview. An excerpt:
Bruce Eckel: I ask candidates to create an object model of a chicken. This eliminates any problems with uncertainties about the problem domain, because everyone knows what a chicken is. I think it also jars people away from the technical details of a computer. It tests to see if they are capable of thinking about the big picture.
Scott Meyers: I hate anything that asks me to design on the spot. That’s asking to demonstrate a skill rarely required on the job in a high-stress environment, where it is difficult for a candidate to accurately prove their abilities. I think it’s fundamentally an unfair thing to request of a candidate.
Matt Gerrans: I don’t like when I’m asked to write a program that does X on a piece of paper. Don’t ask the candidate to write a program on paper. That is a waste of time and sweat. People don’t write software on paper, they do it with computers using auto-completion, macros, indexed API documentation, and context-sensitive help. They think about it, refactor it, and even rewrite it. If you want to see a person’s work, ask them to write some small module or implement some interface before the interview and bring the code on a notebook PC or on hard copy. Then you can review it and discuss the design, coding style, and decisions that went into it. This will give you a much more realistic and useful assessment of a person’s work and style.
I particularly liked Matt’s answer, yet I’ve found it to be quite a rare occurance. Thinking back to interviews at the last few places I’ve been (including this one), I’ve never been asked for code examples. In fact, I brought some to interview here, and was told explicitly that they didn’t want to look at that sort of stuff. One of the rationales later given was that “anyone can just copy any code and claim it’s theirs – it doesn’t prove anything.”
I’d agree, just showing code on paper doesn’t, but asking someone to explain how and why they developed things in a certain way, and being able to see it in black and white (or on screen) is much more powerful than simply talking about ideas, or even whiteboarding those ideas. It allows some people to BS their way past less-than-experienced interviewers. If you’re interviewing for a development position, I would think it would be mandatory to see code samples and to walk through those code samples one on one to get a feel for how the person thinks. I’m just not sure why it’s not done more often. Is it that many developers don’t feel they’re up to the task of judging others? Does it feel more like art than science?
This article explains the whole thing in more detail, but the first line says it all:
When it comes to vacation, Netflix has a simple policy: take as much as you’d like. Just make sure your work is done.
Wow. Quite a forward thinking company, imo. Or perhaps this policy will be shown to be the most counterproductive thing over the next few years. I suspect it won’t though. I also suspect there’s not many people who actually do take off 2 months in a row, but knowing that you can take a few days here or there, or schedule work around family events and such as a matter of policy rather than having to ask permission is quite a positive step, in my view.
The article also talks about some other companies (Best Buy, for example) and how they are also revisiting vacation and time off policies. I believe I’d read something about Best Buy’s policies in the book “The One Thing You Need to Know” (great book from Marcus Buckingham!) but I can’t recall the specifics.
Do you have extraordinary vacation/flextime policies where you work?
There was a lot of hoo-ha last week about Circuit City laying off 3400 employees. I found a local paper from EMU had a story about it as well, which gives a SE Michigan perspective ($10 is a ‘living wage’ in Ann Arbor, apparently). And this morning driving back from Chicago there was a radio story about it inviting people to call in with similar stories. There wasn’t enough time to call and voice my opinion, so I’ll write it here.
Best Buy needs to hire those people, and make a big PR move about doing so. The cynic in me says they could even lay them off 6 months from now after the PR had died down a bit. Cynicism aside, the move would be a big competitive blow, not just from a PR standpoint, but from a loyalty standpoint of the workers involved. I’m stereotyping, but most of the workers there seem to be mid 20s, probably working through college or perhaps have a second job. As they progress through life, they have a choice as to where to shop. Likely many of those 3400, and their friends and family won’t shop at Circuit City. They *may* shop at Best Buy, but there are also many other outlets to buy most items at. Best Buy hiring these employees would buy a huge amount of goodwill that no amount of personalized flyers can (I just got a ‘birthday card’ for 10% off from Best Buy).
Additionally, the comepetive intelligence gained from these employees’ tenures – they were the highest paid which would tend to indicate better skills, likely seniority and leadership to some extent – would have a long lasting impact on how Best Buy competes with Circuit City. They already do a pretty good job, and you wouldn’t want to be taking all CC info and copying it – they’re losing money and laying off people after all! But the insights as to how some of the current staff left behind work/think would be at least a short term valuable asset.
In short, BBY, hire the CC layoffs now!
I've been working with the web since 1994, and with a variety of web technologies since 1996 - PHP, ASP, Perl, CF, Java, Grails and .Net. My main areas of expertise are in PHP and Grails these days.
I run GroovyMag and JSMag, monthly PDF magazines focused on Groovy and JavaScript, and also host the WebDevRadio podcast series.
I can be reached at michael@kimsal.com or mgkimsal@gmail.com :)
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