Reference update

I didn't hear back anything from my former colleague's first interview. However I did hear from recruiters twice in the past week doing reference checks on him.

The first one was from a large well known tech firm. The second was from a startup company.

The woman from the large firm seemed to be looking for an overall feel for what my colleague was like. She asked me how long I'd known him; how long we worked together on projects; what specific technologies did he work with; what was his biggest strength; what was his biggest weakness; did he get along well with others. We talked for around 15 minutes.

The end of the discussion was interesting. The recruiter started asking me about my skill set. I told here we're a Java shop and I'd been working on basically the same stuff as my former co-worker. She said they are interested in J2EE and Oracle and asked me if I would interested in applying to her company. I told her I'm not presently looking. She suggested she'd e-mail me and I could reply with a resume to get on each others rader screens in case things change in the future. I said sure - Why not? Strangely she hasn't followed up on that e-mail. Oh well she must have forgot after she hung up.


The second company wanted to talk to me during the daytime. I had said when I agreed to give a reference that a phone chat was available in the evening hours. The fellow e-mailed me back and said he'd try to call me that evening.

I haven't heard from him since though. He must have had to go out of town or had some unimaginably high priority thing. After all, in a small startup with a very small programming team, what's more important than getting in great developers. A bad hire could cause the company to fail, and a great hire could be a difference maker. So like Google you'd expect he'd make the effort to do the follow up to get as much data as he could on this potential hire to be sure he was getting someone very good. What's more important to the success of a software startup than hiring outstanding programmers? Not much.

He feels he might get offers from both companies. He may be favoring the startup because it is closer to his house. I reminded him in the chat that the hours can get long at startups, but he's done the startup thing at least twice now so he knows what to expect.