DEV Community: Donald

I don't care about your commission

Donald — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 02:58:14 +0000

Since DEV is working on my browser again, I can finally comment.

And I decided the best thing to talk about is our favorite thing in the whole word--(external) recruiters.

I'm not Jack Arnold... yet.

A lot has changed since I was 19 when faceless staffing agencies would spam my email and/or phone just because I made the mistake of using Monster or CareerBuilder (in 2006).

I got better at filtering out junk, so I don't get too many Java-when-I'm-doing-C#-or-Python jobs, or the persistent-yet-lazy recruiters who encourage me to indiscriminately carpet bomb applications.

I've gotten pretty good at spotting Sisyphus-caliber time wasters and consequently have become very picky. If a job doesn't cure cancer, bake cookies, and help me lose 30 lbs (or 14 kg if you're a communist, but round it to 15 since that sounds funnier), I'm out. I've been treated badly enough to not waste too much time on bad opportunities.

What could possibly go wrong?

Recently, a few recruiters contacted me. Vague description of client, I'm a great fit, etc.

Of those, I entertained 2, but one specifically is the subject of this post.

Their client is well-known where I live. Most of the time it feels like anyone who works in IT does or has worked there.

I've never really wanted to work at the client in question, but I had no real personal experience to go on. Plus, a colleague recently left to work there, so I figured it's worth looking into.

But the candidate experience in tech is more broken than Uber's business model, so adding a recruiter to this process had the potential for problems. Which is what happened.

Once I did the recruiter screen, I got a more detailed job description. There were already red flags off the bat.

In this company, senior, lead, and architect have very specific meanings. This was an "architect" role, but it suspiciously looked like what they'd consider a senior developer. On top of that, the job responsibilities didn't match the job requirements. Like, at all.

This company is also well-known for strictly adhering to a particular technology stack, and the only time I've seen deviations from this stack have been from recruiters' job descriptions.

The job requirements left more questions than answers. Why the different tech stack for a company notorious for sticking to one and one only? Why is the job emphasizing one technology, but there's fare less mention of it in the job requirements?

After some more investigation, the role was something I was iffy about. It was basically developing tools for internal developers, which I was uneasy about. (Early on in my career, I had a great reputation, but I was only known by other devs. Not very profitable.) But I thought I should verify that in an interview, so I didn't let that doubt dissuade me.

So, here was a job with some red flags and some things that I thought might not be right for me if true. I sent my resume to the recruiter anyway.

This was where I got irritated

Their client was interested, and the recruiter giddily called and messaged me a few times within the start of the business day to schedule a meeting. Tomorrow afternoon or two days from that time in the morning. I opted for the latter. Got an email confirmation some time later. (It also came with a tweaked job description that further highlighted the inconsistencies of the job duties and the job requirements.) The time was correct.

...But I didn't realize the day was wrong until later.

So when the (wrong) day came, I was confused when the recruiter asked me about the interview. Wasn't that tomorrow? I thought. So I asked the recruiter if it was supposed to be that day or the next day. I also checked the email to see they scheduled it for this day instead of the next day.

Er, but there was one problem.

I didn't get any calls at that time. In fact, no missed calls, and no calls from numbers I didn't recognize.

I replied saying I thought we scheduled that for another day, but even so, I did not get a call.

Nevertheless, the recruiter said he would confirm the times and get back to me.

He did the following day. 30 minutes before I was supposed to have my half-hour interview.

Spoilers: nobody called.

The ever-eager recruiter called almost immediately after the interview was supposed to end asking for feedback. I said, again, that nobody called.

Embarrassed and nonplussed, he tried to quash the awkwardness by asking me if I would have time in the afternoon.

But I had had enough.

In preparing for the interview and reading the new job description I got, I got that feeling that this job just doesn't add up. One bullet point in the job requirements that was relevant to the job duties (plus some added buzzwords in that bullet point), and the rest maybe could be relevant.

The job title and the most relevant bullet point of the job requirements raised some questions. The kind of questions that sounded like a bait and switch. Or maybe they decided they needed buzzword x, but haven't selected a tool to use for it and are throwing buzzwords in the job requirements after a quick overview said they might needs these skills if they implement buzzword x.

For example, say it was a CI/CD job, and there was only one bullet point about CI, and it wanted you to know one of the many CI tools available. In a 10,000-ish employee company on a team with heavy restrictions. (One team isn't using Team City while another uses Jenkins or CircleCI, here.)

Oh, and you should know Node.js, and maybe Express.

And npm.

And yarn.

And Typescript and ES6.

And do you know ML and AI, too?

That's what this read like.

This is the type of job like my first tech job. I was hired as a "web designer," interviewed and showed my portfolio, but day one I was managing keywords in Google AdWords. In other words: it sounded like they had no idea what they wanted.

Now couple that with just simply ghosting a phone interview. The hiring manager, of all people. Every excuse I could imagine for doing that (once or twice, depending on who made the mistake the first time.) tells me that the candidate isn't as important as whatever was happening to even deign to communicate the need to reschedule. And if, as a candidate, you aren't important enough to get a "Hey, I know we're supposed to talk, but would you be open to a new time?" surely they wouldn't treat you better as an employee.

Stating the obvious

So I politely said I'm not longer interested. But the recruiter pushed for a reason (apparently ghosting isn't sufficient) to give to the recruiting firm's salesperson.

I thought that would be obvious, but I thought it was a poor experience and a bad fit.

The job description and requirements tell two different stories.
The role didn't sound right for my career aspirations.
They didn't bother to communicate. The expectation is I should be free whenever they decide and don't need to offer basic courtesy. That's dysfunctional.

So I gave more diplomatic versions of #1 and #3, thinking that would be enough, and, as most recruiters I've talked to do, would fade into obscurity.

But wait, that's not it

I didn't write this to complain about a bad recruiting experience. If it ended here, I wouldn't be writing this wondering how much of my loquaciousness I need to cut down so you'll read it.

No, some time later that day, the recruiter's salesperson (whom I've never talked to) text messages me asking if I had time for a "quick chat" later.

There's only one purpose for this, and it's an attempt to get me to reconsider. How do I know it wasn't something else? There was no apology, no explanation, no excuse. Just a rash attempt at trying to save this deal.

Besides the fact I still have a job to do, I said I'm not interested. Since they took a look at my resume and asked about my experience at the most recent places I've worked at, surely they saw the job where I was a Sales Engineer.

That means I'm pretty well aware of the tactics to try to "Save the Deal." I made it clear there's no saving this one. There's a lot of romanticism in sales about saving a customer or a deal that may get sunk because of dissatisfaction. (It's a lot of feel-good junk that makes for great storytelling during sales enablement, but it's not the norm.)

But when it comes to recruiting, I'm the product, not the customer. Any motivation to make me happy converges to just one motivation: the commission.

Why should I care about your commission?

If they submitted multiple candidates, and the client liked another one better, we wouldn't be going through this. They would pretend to care and then ghost.

The reason they were so persistent even after I turned it down was not because of the cute stories you read on LinkedIn. It was very simply self-serving.

That doesn't bother me. Everyone says the candidate experience is broken--especially in tech. I'm too jaded and cynical to believe there's a fix for it, so I tend to towards being pragmatic. If you're not demonstrating you care about my needs, I'm not going to obligate myself to help you make your numbers. Find another "product."

When a job opportunity looks like it's going to waste my time, I put a stop to it. Respect is a two-way street, and sorry, no amount of "innovative, cutting edge work," table tennis, and Remote Fridays will change that.

What's your software niche?

Donald — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 22:10:09 +0000

Here's the background: I've been reading a lot of advice articles who all suggest one thing, whether you want to freelance, start a business, or find a job, and that is to find a niche. The idea is that there's a lot of competition, and you'll struggle competing on price if you make yourself too "general."

I've reflected on my career, however, as being just that. I've struggled with specializing, because what happens most often is I'll specialize, an employer will have a unique requirement that I can do, I do it well, and, at least theoretically, whatever time I could've spent specializing in one area I lost doing different things. In all honesty, this is because my roles usually were tied to marketing. For example, working at marketing agencies or marketing/communications departments but in a strictly development capacity. Even what I do now, despite being a company that provides payment services, I'm working on projects related to marketing. So, of course, when I think about what my niche is, I figure it must be tied to marketing.

But this isn't so much about me looking for help figuring out my niche. Actually, what I want to know is what you see your niche as. If you were to look for work (be it a job or a project engagement if you're freelancing/self-employed, or if you had a product startup), what would you focus on?

Throwing in the towel and new beginnings

Donald — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 16:22:19 +0000

If you ended up here from jogral.co, while the content in this post is true (Jogral the brand is going away, but Jogral the business is not), I'm temporarily redirecting to this post for the time being. The old website, however, is going away.

Starting another business

In summer 2016, my wife had a critical medical problem that resulted in 2 weeks of going back and forth to the emergency room to find absolutely nothing but some vague suggestions that may help in a problem that may not exist.

The job I had at the time was well-paying--until you look at health insurance, then you realize how people can get so close to being bankrupted by the mere act of trying to get better. So, I decided my long-term goal of finally starting another business got accelerated.

But, I had nothing I could think of. I didn't want to make custom software for people, because it was miserable for me and rife with under-appreciation across the industry. I tried consulting, but I hated selling (if we use the definition you find from sales coaches, social media, and other "one-size-fits-all" strategies) and had no real contacts (too many sales meetings ended up being a waste).

Then, I tried to make software, because one thing I really enjoy doing is mentoring and teaching, so I made an LMS around that. Organizations didn't care unless it was very cheap or I could do some consulting above, which usually translated to, "Can you build me this app?"

My experience at Jogral

These forays became what I called Jogral. I tried all the steps to try to get business: focusing on a niche, partnering with other businesses, doing talks--you name it!

The talks I did had a total of 1 attendee, none of the niches worked out, and the partnering was a lot of wasted time.

What was the biggest realization, though, was that I hated all of it. I hated writing code, I hated thinking about technology and the business and blah blah blah. The only reason I was even doing a tech consultancy/software company was that I've done it for so long.

But it wasn't what I wanted. I was tired of someone telling me "Everyone should want what you're selling," just to have them not understand or not be interested in how their routine costs them money. I learned a lot about human nature, and I got even more jaded. Nobody wanted what I had to sell, or if they did, they just disappeared after paying for awhile.

The epiphany

I hated technology. I remember when I got that job I talked about earlier, I was shifting from a developer role to a sales one. I didn't miss opening an IDE at all. Sometimes for a demo I wrote some code, but it was the best kind of code: code I only had to write when I wanted to.

The truth is that tech was my fallback. My first business was doing Japanese-English translations. I made money, but it wasn't really working. I was 19, and I couldn't afford to grow the business to where I was at least breaking even. So I joined a tech company.

When I sat and thought about my career journey, I realized that this was a fallback for me. Not something I wanted to invest I was "passionate" about.

Then I thought about my compensation over the years. What has a tech career done for me? Barely keep my head above water. The stories of huge salaries and equity you can cash out on never happened to me.

Add to that, I was a young, bitter, jaded tech worker with 2 young kids that I didn't even want to deal with because of tech. Not until I started Jogral did I really start being the husband and dad I wanted to be.

Tech has done more harm than good for me. A common talking point is how unwelcoming it is to non-whites. While I think the conversation requires nuance, I can tell you I've absolutely had to deal with racism in tech. This is just icing, though. The primary reason tech is "unwelcoming" to me is less to do with systemic blah blah blah and more that it is often unrewarding and doubly so when you realize you don't need to be a "good person" to run a tech company, meaning anyone from an upstanding citizen to a carcinogen of a human being can found a company and have it be successful.

The turnaround

Practically, I decided to try a few more things before ending Jogral. I did recruiting for 2 months, but I wanted to really sit and think about what I want to do that I'll be more willing to do something laborious (like selling).

I don't have a fully developed solution, but I have thought about what I try to do no matter what's happening.

In the process of all of this, I've found satisfaction in cooking (although I've been doing more baking, which wasn't what I intended, but I'm enjoying it) and learning languages and cultures.

Last year, I started learning Modern Greek. (I learned Ancient Greek in college.) Like I did when I learned Portuguese, I started cooking Greek food (although I made Brazilian food when I started learning Portuguese). The fondest memories of my career have been not just the training, but working with other markets and cultures. I launched the digital presence for a Japanese subsidiary at one company, trained Canadian and Australian teams, too; I worked with (mostly) a Brazilian subsidiary at another.

I've always wanted to journal my experience learning a language and what's going on in a culture, and I've started that this month.

Nearly every day, I take my notebook and write down an idea--any (non-tech) idea--of something I could do. Right now, I'm working at a tech startup, which has definitely helped, and that's given me the opportunity to think about non-tech ventures. It's been rewarding, because it's helped me think about my values and what I want. Doubly better, the startup shares a lot of my values about how a tech company should be, and it's made it easier to still work in tech.

The beginnings

There's quite a few options for me. Jogral didn't take off, but now I don't feel guilty about it.

My earlier businesses I learned lessons mostly about business. With Jogral, I learned lessons about me. Jogral became a lot of things that just didn't do it for me, and I had a lot of people pushing me to keep it going. Granted, a number of those people had an incentive to keep me going, (I was paying them.) and I got to think about that during my post-mortem.

I don't know what I'm doing next yet, but I know I can choose. Whatever it is, my goal is to focus on my interest in languages and cultures. Whether that means import/export or something else, I don't know, but I do know it won't be my fallback.

It'll be my first choice.

Why did you start programming?

Donald — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 19:51:38 +0000

What's the weirdest coding practice you've seen?

Donald — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 00:24:12 +0000

Inspired by kodengo's post, what's the weirdest thing you've seen in code?

For me, I managed a CRUD app that used Oracle as a DB. We had a mix of pure queries and stored procedures, so in the app (.NET), we had to create a bunch of parameters.

Nearly every file that executed queries and procedures had this setup, but one had this for over 30 parameters! Something like.

OracleParameter prm_FNAME = new OracleParameter("FIRST_NAME", OracleType.Char, 32);
prm_FNAME.SourceColumn = "FIRST_NAME";
prm_FNAME.Direction = ParameterDirection.Input;
prm_FNAME.IsNullable = true;
prm_FNAME.Value = strFirstName;

OracleParameter prm_LNAME = new OracleParameter("LAST_NAME", OracleType.Char, 32);
prm_LNAME.SourceColumn = "LAST_NAME";
prm_LNAME.Direction = ParameterDirection.Input;
prm_LNAME.IsNullable = true;
prm_LNAME.Value = strLastName;

...

OracleParameter prm_RETVAL = new OracleParameter("RET_VAL", OracleType.Char);
prm_RETVAL.Direction = ParameterDirection.Output;

List<OracleParameter> params = new List<OracleParameter>();
params.Add(prm_FNAME);
params.Add(prm_LNAME);
...
params.Add(prm_RETVAL);

for (int i = 0; i < params.Length; i++) {
    oraCommand.Parameters.Add(params[i]);
}

oraCommand.ExecuteNonQuery();

string value = params[params.Length - 1].Value;

return value;

I haven't worked at this place in years, but I still remember code like this. After asking, I later found that

Nobody else found anything wrong with this codebase
Nobody on the team knew what a Dictionary was

What's the worst thing you've seen?

What interests devs/technical people about sales?

Donald — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:03:10 +0000

A few weeks ago, I sent a survey around a few online tech-related groups I'm on. I was looking for things to talk about on my blog, as I wasn't getting anywhere with the audience I wanted to sell to.

The #1 topic people wanted to hear me talk about was sales.

When I started as a programmer, sales was typically considered a nuisance because of the age-old problem of over-selling capabilities. Devs, of course, couldn't talk to the customer at most companies, so the "sales engineer" role evolved to be a sales role for tech people.

I'm curious what everyone here thinks. Does anything interest you about sales?

Is coding a work-for-free popularity contest?

Donald — Thu, 05 Apr 2018 03:21:18 +0000

I was a career-changer. In 2015, I stopped being a dev to go to sales. I won't get into that adventure here, but as I'm trying to figure out where the next chapter in my career should go, most employers would try to pigeonhole me into being a dev and I can't really seem to find consulting work where my target customer just sees me as the Code Guy.

Anyway, one reason I changed out of development was that there were always 2 subtly-implied qualities to get a better dev role than what I had at the time:

Work for free (in your free time)
Be real popular

Building a "brand" takes lots of time, and most of that seems to require your free time to do. In another post, someone said there's an expectation that you're devoting 100% of your time towards development, and the older I get, the less I want to.

Is it even realistic to advance your career anymore without obsessing over the latest technology, meetups, speaking events, conferences, etc.?