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.

Test team

We're a small team, around a dozen developers and a handful of testers. Two or three times a year the developers have to temporarily join the test team to help complete a test cycle for a product release. Myself and around three other programmers have been with the test team the last week or so. Hopefully we'll be finished up by the end of this week.

Testing is an interesting experience. I don't mind doing it once in a while. I always test my own code of course, but testing other people's work is interesting. You get to try to think like a customer.

With testing, my take on it is that the name of the game is automation. I think our test team should work on ways to increase use of automated testing. There's some, but not as much as there could be. I was testing three APIs. One internal API is my own API; and two other APIs developed by others. For my own API, after I tested it out OK, there was a gap between candidate releases. The test team lead said OK to my request to use the time to create an automated test suite for the my own API.

It took me around two days to assemble the individual loose tests for each API function into a one pass driver that calls all of them. I suspect I've already saved in the subsequent baselines close to the amount of time I spent creating the automated test driver.


For the other APIs, we have a GUI driver that will set up and call each API function with data the GUI user enters interactively. This is OK for a programmer to test individual APIs as they are added, modified or debugged. However it doesn't scale well and is labour intensive and isn't well suited to rigorous regression testing.

So after this cycle I'm going to push to get some time to create a driver for the other two APIs as well. That may save me truckloads of weekend time in the future.

Reference

I former co-worker who got caught up in the recent RIF got in touch with me recently. Luckily for him he's already lined up a couple of interviews. Hopefully he'll be back working in high tech soon.

He contacted me to ask if he could use me as a reference. I said OK. He's a pretty good guy. This is the first time someone asked me to be a reference. Maybe I'm getting somewhere in high tech after over nine years doing it, if someone asks if they can use me as a reference. I kind of hope his potential employer contacts me. I'm curious what kind of questions reference checkers ask. I'll post what happens if they do get in touch.

I don't think employers are generally too keen on their people being references for former co-workers. The problem is that once their people talk to recruiters at all, the recruiters know who they are and could start to target them to jump. This is especially bad after a downsizing since you'll be short staffed anyway and hiring someone new to fill for someone quitting is just not very likely to happen. So you'll just be even weaker. I think one of the last things an employer wants after a RIF is for any of the survivors to voluntarily leave.

Job search tips

I e-mailed a former co-worker who got caught up in the RIF last week. I wanted to wish him well in his search for a new job. We'd worked together on a number of projects over the last five years. I was his team leader on projects for around 2 years. I sent him these tips that I had picked up over the years.

* update your online resume on monster, workopolis, hotjobs, etc at least once a week. Many searchers look for active job seekers and they use the last update time of the resume as a guide. The "update" can be as simple as adding and deleting a trailing space at the end of a paragraph, or reordering some information in a sentence. So the content stays the same but your "last update time" always indicates an active job seeker.

* when a job is posted online, the company generally gets a crush of applications. They often will just look at the first 50 or so to get a shortlist to interview. One thing that I've heard works is to be in the first 20 respondents. This can be done by getting up quite early, say 4-5 AM. Log in to the job sites. If there is a job you match then send your saved resume. That should get you in the top 20 of repliers. That could give you an edge. If there's nothing that's fine, just go back to bed and it should only take around 5-15 minutes total.

RIF

We downsized again recently, 10%, as part of the quarterly announcement. A few people in our office were affected. This included some good people who had made valuable contributions. Luckily for me I managed to survive this cut, like the previous layoffs. It's not real surprising just because tech companies rarely just do one round of layoffs. There's usually at least a second round. Hopefully this will be the last. I'm not sure how many more I could get through.

So there's a new acronym I hadn't heard before for it. Reduction In Force (RIF). That's scary, it's just too close to RIP, which it is the same as on some levels.

So you don't want to get RIF'ed.

Yahoo

I use Yahoo. I like it, it's pretty good. I've never given them any money directly but I've used their games, finance, e-mail (until I switched to GMail). I still use Yahoo as my start page. The recent changes in the personal Yahoo pages with the Ajax and moving the blocks around are really impressive. Very smooth and slick. Nice job Yahoo.

Sometimes I find Yahoo comes across as deceptively simple. A lot of what they do is actually quite sophisticated. The programmers there are working on and solving some extremely difficult problems. Plus they manage to portray themselves with this favorable underdog image against Microsoft and Google.

When I use Yahoo I sometimes think it would be pretty interesting and challenging to work there as a programmer. If I was an elite CS major coming out of a top ranked school like Stanford, then I could pick where I wanted to join among Microsoft, Google, Apple or Yahoo. In that enviable situation I'd give very strong consideration to picking Yahoo. I'd give them an at least an equal chance going in.