Geek Update for March

"Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking."
--[William B.Sprague]

Recap:

The month of March has been a roller coaster of action and emotion.  This Blog is just one piece of the puzzle in my decision to re-invent myself and focus on becoming a better person in general.  Being a Geek is who I am and drives the core of all of this.  However, March turned into way more than just dusting off the old C++ compiler.  One of the major decisions last month was to leave my current job.  It has been an adventure to say the least and a very rewarding experience.  I do regret leaving all the great folks at Ci/FATPOT behind, but it is simply the right thing to do for my family, career, and I believe even for the company as well.

The Geek side of things stayed pretty active.  ASP.NET and C# are up and running which may work well for a potential opportunity in Afghanistan.  I also stood up three separate Ubuntu environments so I would have clean playgrounds for different research topics.  One will be for JAVA/PHP web work.  The second is C++/Qt to play around with algorithms.  The third is a Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.4) to get back to my Operating System research roots by playing around with ChromeOS.  I also spent some time on topcoder.com getting my account back up to speed since I haven't been on the site since 2004.  TopCoder is pretty neat because you can pick what aspect of software development you like and actually compete for real money.  Nothing like getting paid for making yourself smarter.

"Help Wanted"

I have never actually looked for a job before.  Sure, I filled out a bunch of applications at fast food joints when I was 16.  But this is a completely different ball game.  In the past 30 days I have completely rewritten my resume, attended a job fair, interviewed or submitted applications to 25 different companies, and spent hours scouring through job boards and recruiter sites.  Some efforts have gleaned some results.  Others resulted in failure.  Most efforts to date have actually seemed wasted.  The interface to companies are somewhat cold and mechanical.  Even the biggest Fortune 500 companies have shockingly bad job portals.  If you are looking, or thinking about looking, here is what I have seen in the last month:

• Black Holes - Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and McKesson have shown no sign of intelligent life.  You get a thank you email for submitting to their system.  But after that, you have no way of knowing if you are under consideration or not.  In most of these cases it has been over 21 days without even a courtesy email to say my resume didn't fit.  Follow up phone calls with the recruiters who attended the job fair have also been fruitless.  They seemed interested then, but now is unknown.
• Almost Black Holes - Hewlett Packard (HP) uses Taleo for their job portal which has a decent search interface but gives inconsistent results.  You can pick jobs to track under the job cart and then decide from your cart which ones to apply to.  HP lists over 5000 open positions and shows up at job fairs, so one would think their recruiters would be responsive.  This has not been the case.  I applied for four different positions at HP.  I can see slightly different aspects to each job, but no idea what they mean.  Of the four, one says closed so that is easy.  The other three say active.  I can view/edit/withdraw on one, view/edit on the second, and only view on the 3rd.  I would guess this somehow ties to where I lie in the process, but no idea since no human has tried to reach me.
• Mixed Bag - Google has their own custom job search portal which leaves much to be desired.  You can search jobs and "star" ones you are interested in.  But after that, you have no way of tracking which ones you have applied to or what their status is.  Many jobs have been posted there for years.  I applied to 6 different positions at Google.  One position that included a referral from a Googler got an instant result with engagement from a recruiter and a phone screen.  I apparently did not do so well on the phone screen and they emailed me to say my resume was not a good match and that I could contact them if I had questions.  A) They had my resume before the screen and B) I did ask for feedback and got no response.  I appreciate they can afford to be picky...being rude is another thing.
• Solid - Northrop Grumman and Enterprise Holdings were responsive in both their system design and taking action on the applications.  I would still rate their job portals as mediocre at best.  But at least you can figure out where you stand.
• Recruiters - Useless IMO.  Within hours of indicating I was searching in some key places I started getting phone calls from recruiters.  I put the time in to fill out a profile for them and then never heard a peep.  I get that the job market is tough in some sectors, but it shouldn't be that hard to start lining up Technical Project Manager opportunities.  There are oodles of them listed out there hiring right now.
• LinkedIn and Network - The advice is true that this is your best source if you already have a career in progress.  The people who have actually worked with you know you best and gain pleasure out of helping you succeed.  All four of the interviews and job offers I have received to date have been directly associated with professional contacts.  

Tsugi!

For April, I will be focussed on educating myself.  I plan to get through "Making Things Happen" on the TPM side and "OOP Demystified" on the engineer side.  OOP is a gentle review for me on C++, but will be fun by trying to work through each step in JAVA and C# as well.  Who knows what else the job search will bring as well.

TPM Wisdom

Control the message!  Invariably projects will involve teams and someone on the team will decide to open their mouth.  Never stop hammering into your team the need to keep you in the loop on every conversation and act as an approval point for anything that will get said to the customer.  Failure to do this will generally result in an uncomfortable conversation with the customer where you look like you aren't in control.  The demonstration and sometimes even the illusion of control is what keeps the customer on your side.  It's your responsibility to control what the customer hears.