Mmm, what's that smell: Coffee or sweat? How to avoid a crap IT job Do not try picking up a girl with the line: “You’re not as fat as my current girlfriend; if you sleep with me I’ll drop her as soon as she’s finished painting our bedroom.” Trust me on this, it doesn’t work. It should set off alarm bells in anyone's head. Yet during job interviews, hopefuls are told things like: “We’re …
Keep a copy of your CV with you and query that it matches the one that your interviewer has. Agents are not above (it may even be required for some clients) rewriting them, either to emphasise certain attributes or to remove particular things, like salary requirements.
Generally in the UK, if it's not your first IT job pretty much every vacancy goes through an agency. That way companies can distance themselves from some of the most egregious biases that still exist in IT, whilst still making sure that they only get the "right sort of chap" sullying their reception areas.
This. THIS!
A THOUSAND TIMES, THIS!
I remember one interview (which turned out to be the best job I ever had), we were talking about university, and I mentioned in passing that I got a 2:1. The interviewer was very surprised, as the recruiter had removed the grade from my CV so he had assumed I'd got a 3rd!
Seconded!!! I had the same at an insurer 7 years ago. I talked about various things and the interviewers looked more and more puzzled. Then they asked "what about this 2 year gap in your CV?" to which I responded "what 2 year gap?"
Turns out the genius of a recruiter decided to erase one of my employments for some unknown reason... Needless to say I didn't get the job, and needless to say that recruitment agency was told in no uncertain terms to kindly take their practices and shove them.
I'd upvote this twice if I could.
I would also add considering not using your favorite email address when using an agency, and ideally use a single use email address. Agents will take your adress and CV with them when they move from job to job, and its almost impossible to get the scum to stop mailing you with irrelevant jobs. "My client is looking for a Visual Studio programmer..."
This is VERY good advice. Employment agents never, ever lose an email address and they never, ever give up spamming an email address once given, no matter how out-of-date it is, or how little the recipient wants to hear from them.
Twenty-odd years ago I uploaded CVs with skills like SAS and general lab chemistry and so on to assorted job-hunting sites. I still occasionally get plaintive requests from employment pimps that I might want to update the CV, and that they have some really great opportunities for me...
Use disposable email addresses when dealing with employment agents.
Secondly, never, ever expect anything even remotely resembling intelligence from employment agents. They don't read instructions, they don't learn from experience, and they never, ever try to make life simple. Many's the time I've spent talking to one, slowly and painfully determining that the jobs on offer were not in fact vaguely near to Manchester where I lived except in the cosmological sense.
".....Secondly, never, ever expect anything even remotely resembling intelligence from employment agents....." I think my fave experience was ten-odd years ago, when an overblown agent claiming to be a "headhunter" from Nokia called to discuss "a perfect opportunity". After thirty minutes of prattle, during which I was actually starting to believe I might have been wrong all these years when describing agencies as the homes for the terminally unemployable, the agent paused and dropped the bombshell - "Oh, it doesn't say so on your CV, but you do speak Finnish, right?" Resisting the impulse to ask if he really thought something as unusual as Finnish would be left off a CV, I reminded him I was looking for contract jobs in England not Scandinavia, to which the "headhunter" replied; "Well, Finland's not that far!"
Correction - take at least TWO copies of your CV to the interview. That way if the person interviewing you doesn't even have a copy you can politely hand one over whilst making a mental note to run like hell. In a whole series of interviews there was only one where I called the agent back immediately and said 'I don't want to hear from them again' - and to their credit, I didn't. A few other pointers from that interview to watch out for:
At the time of your interview, the interviewer is in a different building to the one you're waiting in. Though at least this gives you time to look around and notice...
Piles of boxes in the reception area.
A name etched on the glass in reception that isn't the name of the company on the job description.
Reason for hiring being that the market is 'consolidating'.
Good article though. Before I would have suggested that one tip for interviewing is to re-read a first-year undergrad textbook on the subject to get an idea of how the facile starter questions are going to be phrased. But then as suggested here, if the most in-depth thing they ask is about 'public / protected / private' then you don't want to be there anyway.
Good article.
I had that happen early in my career. The headhunter had changed my CV, and I noticed during my first interview I was getting some pretty strange questions about experience I didn't have.
Early this year I interviewed with a startup. Very wealthy CEO. At the end of the day, the CEO took us all out for dinner. He made everyone kick in to pay the check. Needless to say, I didn't take the job based on that dinner and, needless to say, they are no longer in business.
This post has been deleted by its author
Fresh out of university with my PC badge fully installed (1989), I decided not to accept a job where I was asked "You're not a woofter are you?" He went on to explain he couldn't have that type here as some of he contracts are with the department of defence.
The secretary didn't sound that surprised that I turned it down - I could hear a smile on her voice - she must have known what kind of chap he was.
All jobs are ultimately a waste of time. Don't try too hard to get any one job. Don't even read the descriptions (have you ever read one that was accurate?). Play the numbers game. This has several advantages; it's easier, and by attaching no significance to the outcome of the interview you are free to perform your best and to take a healthily cynical view of your prospective employer.
The painful fact is that it takes a recruiter about 2 seconds to determine whether they give a shit about your CV, so why should you spent (more than) 2 seconds reading a job description when the effort will not in any circumstance be reciprocated? It's not fair is it? And who's time is more important? Yours. The recruiters are paid to look at your CV, so send it in and let them worry about the sodding job description. Most of the time they haven't even read it themselves, so what is the fucking point?
I am in two minds about your post, I hope you never apply to work for me on the one hand, but on the other, I think that you may be confusing waste of space recruitment companies with the actual employers.
The last person I employed was told by his friendly recruitment agent not to discuss the salary that he wanted with us in the interview. When _we_ pay the agent a fee based on the salary of the new recruit, you can be pretty sure that we expect the recruiter to work on our behalf. Unfortunately a lot of recruiters seem to be young people struggling to get their next bit of commission who are ignorant and sometimes dishonest.
Just to clarify I do advocate reading the job description before the interview. But when dealing with the waste of space recruitment companies, any amount of effort you put into impressing them is wasted. They see exactly what they want to see in the candidates. I have spoken to these people are you are right, they are ignorant and dishonest. If they ask technical questions at all, it is immediately clear that they do not understand the nature of what they are asking, and are simply reading items off a list. A robot could do that.
"In my experience, you can tell a lot about a potential employer by checking the state of the loos. Make sure you check the ones that the staff use, not those reserved for "guests" or "visitors" (unless comparing the two). If there are such reserved loos, that is also a big signal."
I tried this.
They'd sealed one off for me to do the drug testing in.
The desktop infrastructure manager of a large public undertaking once made it very clear to me that they "did not support" screens larger than 21". Which made it kind of hard to develop their public-facing large-screen information displays. The issue wasn't meanness, it was institutional stupidity with no override.
If you're planning to work in development, check for signs of non-standard boxes with their lids off and wires trailing around - if there aren't any you'll probably find that you're expected to do your software development with codepad.org.
Some years back when working for a large insurance company we had a bit of a crisis - all hands to the pump, working all weekend, late into the night. The Operations manager called in on the Saturday to see how things were going - he wasn't a techie and knew it, and decided that the most effective thing he could do was keep running backwards and forwards to the kitchen with coffee and sarnies and phoning for the pizzas, without asking every ten minutes how things were going. A GOOD boss.
Yup. Also, team-building 101: Forget building rope bridges on a soggy Welsh mountainside, just take the team to the pub or restaurant at least once a month, and buy them all a beer or other drink of choice, whilst making it quite clear (both verbally and by your subsequent actions) that anything said is off the record, and will not ever be mentioned again. This last bit is quite important, and takes many months to put into action properly.
I may not know much about managing, but I've built teams that would follow me into any battle I decided to fight. The senior managers generally dislike me, for some reason, though.
GJC
"A GOOD boss."
Wasn't Aviva, was it? Because I might have been there that day if it was.
The old "get the lads a pizza" routine is a pretty cheap way of faking care, while gathering intel on who is in the office and which "slackers" left off after a mere 24 hours of straight work and so can be culled at the next round of redundancies. It allows the boss to swing by the office for a mere hour on a Saturday afternoon on their way home from squash (no real inconvenience at all) and get an update relatively painlessly and so they look clued up on a Monday morning in front of their own boss. They can then claim kudos from being there via "when I was here with them at the weekend" comments. They will also make matey comments about being in the trenches during the crash meeting in front of senior management, thus showing how great and hands-on they are. That's easily worth a tenner's worth of pizza and an hour to any bastard sociopathic boss, so don't mistaking it for caring.
A genuinely decent boss will sit there with you throughout the crisis, not asking dumb questions every five minutes, not crowding the screen*, hands hovering above the hot phone. He will intercept each and every bulls&^% call every ten minutes from the helldesk or users, which are hassling for updates and dragging people away from fixing the problem. He will field them -and this is crucial- WITHIN EARSHOT, both so that you can urgently wave your arms around if he starts saying something massively incorrect and so that you can hear and know that he's not secretly slagging you off or telling lies. He will buy you time and have a basic grasp of the issue, and let you do your job. Hell: He'll maybe even go run your kids to football or whatever important thing that you're having to cancel to be there if he hears you trying to organise it with the misses on the phone. He will supply coffee, and food which took him more than a phone-call worth of effort to purchase. He will be as knackered as you are at the end of it all, but will still get in early on a Monday to deal with the initial flak. He will go to the crash meeting and give you the OPTION of either coming along to make sure he doesn't tell lies/drop you in it/screw it up, or of getting some rest while he goes it alone.
And he will make sure you get paid the overtime in full.
*Management tip: Four sys admins hovering around a single screen is a sure-fire problem of fairly severe proportions and worth getting off your backside to investigate.
You do realise that they will expense the Pizza?
nb, 4 sysadmins around a screen may also be a sign of good porn - maybe a hot intern returned her mobile without remembering to wipe those intimate shots? Or uploaded all her very personal photos to her network drive?....
'The old "get the lads a pizza" routine is a pretty cheap way of faking care, while gathering intel on who is in the office ..'
Don't forget that the bosses secret sidekick reports every unguarded comment straight back. You can spot him as he never gossips, was transferred in from another division and never gets drunk. While you-all were reading The Art of Unix Programming, your boss was reading the Art of War and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, that's why he's boss and you're not. If you really want to advance your career, you'd be better off starting your own cult, people will believe any-old-nonsense if it's wrapped in plausible sounding language.
+1 on the coffee anecdotes. My last employer started with free coffee. They downgraded to a 20p-per-cup swill-machine, and six months later they were announcing redundancies. Conversely another company I worked at were on an upward trend, and the free coffee was soon supplanted by a dishwasher. It felt like luxury at the time.
I've just landed the second job in my working life that includes a complementary weekly half-hour massage in work hours for all the devs that want one. However, the last company that did it was clearly on a rocky footing and the massages stopped after the first six months. I think on balance I'd marginally rather have someone paid to bring me cups of tea and biscuits all day.
Not just being offered coffee but the quality of it. If it's instant out of a tin or machine, walk ;)
Or at least ensure there's a decent coffee shop nearby or they do proper coffee in the restaurant (if they have one).
What gets me though are freelance "interviews" where you have a bucket load of experience with loads of clients and perhaps even armed with a little portfolio, and despite the easy fire if it turns out you're not up to the job and far cheaper recruitment, they still insist on running you through a mini exam as if you're a 16 year old school leaver! And then some are all questions testing your ability to remember a reference manual, not actually solve problems.
And if anyone asks, "where do you see yourself in 5 years time"... walk. More so if it's a contract job!!! (and yes, I've had one ask that for a contract!).
Ditto any that spend most of their time seeing how you fit their company image rather than actually doing the job.
I remember once being given a coffee at an interview which was obviously Nescafe catering powder because most of it was floating on the top of a thin film of what looked liked oil. Also there was a lump of something that looked like post masticated sandwich on the rim of the mug.
It did allow me to practice my distraction skills via continually asking questions in a successful effort to avoid drinking it.
If it's good instant, I doubt you'll tell the difference.
Personally, unless I'm working for some multi-megabucks-huge corp, I wouldn't expect much more than a tin of Carte Noire or Nescafe. That and if it's a cafetiere, you don't know if it's been cleaned properly. Enjoy those stale grounds.
A salient question, particularly for positions attracting graduates or early-career individuals. It helps the interviewers to gauge important personality traits such as ambition and vision.
We ask this of all our interviewees. Do not walk. Answer honestly without sucking up.
I suggest you change your interview strategy then. I suspect many good candidates will find this question both demeaning and trite. Most employers don't offer five years worth of career development, so an honest answer from anyone with half a brain would be "probably not working here." Clearly that isn't going to land the job, so now you're putting your interviewee in the position of lying to make you happy. This isn't very comfortable for the person you're trying to attract, and you haven't learned anything valuable about the candidate as a potential team member.
Personnel Departments used to do useful stuff: the administration connected with employment, employment law, pensions, and all that stuff. Sometimes they'd let you cry on their shoulder without reporting it all to the person you were complaining about.
Personnel is a function, not a power base. HR is for people who want power without doing anything to deserve it.
However, turning down a bad job as a contractor is not a luxury, it is a survival trait. It has to be. Bad jobs can cost as much or more and can kill your business/reputation due to the stresses of simply dealing with people (management) that wants something for nothing. Better to pursue other opportunities and make better use of your limited time.
That they no longer provide coffee at all, in fact they contract out the running of coffee shops in their offices, so employees can buy coffee from them.
Not only did the bean counters realise they could save a few quid by cutting the coffee supply, they realised they could make a profit from selling it back.
Is there any upside to working at IBM? Err, yeah. Quite a few. Minor office perks like coffee are not in the list though.
There are a whole load of world-class software people there, and working with them you can learn a lot. Management in general may not be interested in their input to the business (rightly or wrongly), but as a developer there are far worse places to gain useful experience. It's not exciting like some startup might be, you won't get to jump on the latest tech bandwagons every week, but you will learn good practice. There's also the possibility of picking a country you like the look of and deciding to go and work there, as they are everywhere. Pay is competitive (though not exceptional), and if you're the sort of person who wants to find a quiet corner to sit out the rest of their career in you can probably do that too. It is riddled with the sort of problems only a company of that size can experience (e.g. drowning in 'process'), and it can be pretty boring.. but all in all it's a pretty good place to work.
My last company was borged by big blue. They threatened our complimentary tea and coffees, it was actually one of the stipulations on the takeover contract that they had to keep them. However they in turn stipulated that if we ever moved to a bigger office, this would no longer be available.
Otherwise, there were world-class software (and hardware) people, most of whom wont want anything to do with newbies to the company. I never heard from my "mentor". You will be stuck with the same people as before - good and bad.
The way up the ladder and getting a good PBC is by chasing emails CCing the right people, regardless of actual results.
Pay is at the lower end of market rates, topped up by retention bonuses to stop people escaping.
Pension is good mind, it would be a nice place to work out your last decade or two of work. And I do know people who took the option of transferring abroad.
I was a developer at a financial services co, several small software outfits running on VC money, and I was a system architect at an oil major. I am now a developer at IBM and I have to say that the salary/stress ratio at IBM is the lowest in the industry by some margin. I know several people who started in IBM then moved away, but nearly all see it now as "the grass being greener".
While IBM feels way to process-heavy when you're part of it, I reckon it protects you from the alternative seen at far too many shops, ie requiring staff to be in at weekends/hoildays to make up for bad/missing decisions that should have been fixed earlier.
As others have said, you get to work on key strategic products, sometimes all over the world, and with industry experts.
While the perks (esp compared to the oil major) are pretty pathetic, the salary is OK and (here in the EU) they leave staff "resource actions" as a last resort.
I can understand there are many who have experienced IBM and not enjoyed it. There is something very exciting about being part of a small start-up. But if it is a balance of stability and quality you want, I reckon IBM is top.
I'm only on my first proper employment here(before that it was student work) but it has been 5 years. But I can agree with the comments in there. I've had quite a few job interviews and I can agree with the article. And yes I have always considered a job to be a job... I'm not making a carrer. My managers face this year when for the third year in a row yearly reviews came up and me telling her that my job is that things keep running and that if they weren't it'd be noticed much much sooner then the yearly review was priceless. But she actually considered the idea and agreed to it. So now it's just a 5 minute talk instead of input stuff into review form and let me know when you're done.
I'm in a situation I shouldn't be in; I had some nagging doubts about the job when the hiring manager wasn't available for the interview and had a couple of his staff do it. However, after having checked a load of details it did seem that I was being unfair.
Boy, was that a wrong assumption.
Now I have to say that I am being paid and they are also covering my expenses. But the reality is that what I was told the job involved has proven to be complete bollocks.
I am sat twiddling my thumbs as I have no authority and I spend most of my week looking at server logs to make it look as if I am actually doing some work. I was told that I would have staff; no. I was told that I would be able to make significant changes; no. I was told that their IT was shit and needed to be dragged into the 21st century; that's true, but I'm not allowed to make any changes.
I'm seriously frustrated and now it appears that because they have had a bad year for sales, they will be laying people off. I haven't been told yet, but will probably get the info at the end of the month.
The moral of this tale; trust your gut feelings. If something doesn't seem right, then it probably isn't
".......the reality is that what I was told the job involved has proven to be complete bollocks....." In all my years, both as permie and contractor, I have only had one job description that was actually accurate to the role. The rest were often only 50% accurate at best, and one was so far off I actually asked if HR had attached the wrong job description to a different vacancy!
Same here..
I've started a new job, and my 'manager' is a complete fuckwit.
I find it impossible to have a technical discussion with her, to the point where a 2.4GHz WiFi spec she planned to 'roll out' - was inadequate, as it only consisted of b/g... no N, and no 5GHz.
I have control over lots of goodies, SAN's, racks of virtual machines, spanning multiple offices - Yet everything has to be channeled through my 'manager' before anything can be actioned. I'm unable to make decisions without first checking - I considered asking if it's okay to wipe my arse t'other day...
This is just one small example. I left my previous job from doing 65 hour weeks, week after week. My previous boss has just called me and offered my old post back, but with a 70% pay increase for a 37 hour week amongst other benefits. Rest assured I won't be continuing after my '3 month probationary period'.
"My previous boss has just called me and offered my old post back, but with a 70% pay increase for a 37 hour week amongst other benefits. Rest assured I won't be continuing after my '3 month probationary period'."
Which sound great.
*if* he keeps his word.
Better check the small print on the new contract *very* carefully.
Too bad this doesn't work that well in less civilized countries, such as Czech Republic. When someone turns a job offer down here, the chance of getting another one lowers significantly. As if actually getting a job without an inside help wasn't hard enough, heh. Also, out of the 25-ish interviews I've been to, they offered a coffee on two or three. Oh well.
"....Human resources is an audit function. They like proof by example, and are generally pretty easy going...." Maybe in good times, when the company beancounters aren't looking to trim the back-office count. HR can be very stressed in a downturn as they know they are not popular in the company and there will be no tears if they are given the boot. They know their jobs are continually under the threat of being outsourced to agencies and they know they will often and unfairly get the blame if some danger to the company slips through the interview process. Do not assume the HR drone will be a push-over, they may be looking to protect their job by "exposing" any white-lies on your CV. Do look for stress between any technical interviewer present and the HR drones as it's a good sign of an unhappy work environment.
Also do not assume an HR drone does not know your tech - after interviewing fifteen similar candidates, you'll be surprised at how quickly they latch onto the one question that makes all the interview candidates pause for thought. But the best advice here is DON'T LIE! If you do not know the answer, ask a few qualifying questions to show you are not clueless, but DO NOT LIE or BULLSH*T them, because if they pick up on it they will immediately assume all your other technical answers are cobblers.
The chair thing made me laugh.
A colleague and I once found a pair of old leather chairs languishing in a store cupboard. As they were considerably nicer and more comfortable than the ones we had, we dusted them off and put them to good use - supporting our tired arses.
That lasted about a week, until the HR lady came round and informed us in rather embarrassed tones that we weren't allowed to use them because they were "director's chairs".
As there weren't actually any directors that needed to sit on these lovely chairs, they were just stashed back in the cupboard again. There they quietly rotted away until they were eventually thrown out in an office refurbishment program.
".....A colleague and I once found a pair of old leather chairs languishing in a store cupboard...." BOFH 101 - as soon as you hear a rumour about company departments being consolidated, start looking for the excess kit being ordered in ADVANCE of the consolidation, and get your slice by whatever (blackmail) means you can! I can guarantee someone will be taking advantage of the consolidation to stash extra kit somewhere. Make sure you get the permission to take said kit home for your "home office" before anyone realises it's the director-spec laptop, desktop colour laser printer, 32-inch TV-cum-monitor, leather chair, etc., etc. You may need to bribe a manager with some kit of their own in such a "reassignment" deal. If need be, claim that you have backache and require the extra lumbar support only to be found in said director's chair. Do not keep the kit in your office as you can be sure someone of authority will want to take it from you (and take it home for their home office). If your company still does company cars then wander down to the Car Lease Desk and offer to "help them" with the excess executive cars which will typically have just enough left on their lease that the company would rather keep them for six more months than pay a penalty and return them. Remember, your pay and conditions should always be treated as the minimum.
/Posted from the comfort of my lumbar-supporting, Italian leather, ex-director's chair......
Pretty sure that would be my clue to get the hell out of such a dysfunctional place.
If someone has time to be the chair police, and actually believes that that is a useful function, then the company has become so ridiculously rules bound that it's not worth staying.
Obviously in an ideal world, where jobs are easy to come by. But they are in the tech sector aren't they? Only last month I turned down about a dozen interviews for perm jobs, and that wasn't even in London.
"Pretty sure that would be my clue to get the hell out of such a dysfunctional place."
Yes, I would have agreed with you at the time but I stuck it out and, believe it or not, things actually got better. Here I am some years later, sitting on a Herman Miller Aeron chair. Very lovely it is too.
As some other commentators have mentioned, all companies have their issues. Sometimes you have to just look at the big picture.
I remember a similar story from Norwich Union (now Aviva (not the woolly jumper shop) ).
Someone went on holiday to find their chair had been permanently "borrowed", but their replacement didn't have the clip-on plastic arm-rests. The reason? They are now for senior manager level and above...
Its like those magazines where you collect an piece of the model steam train each week, except here you're collecting bits of the chair you need to sit on each time you get a promotion.
The fact they were measuring peoples worth in management skills and nothing else speaks volumes on its own.
I worked for a foreign-owned company that had a regular rotation of of ex-pat seniors. Most of these were highly competent, and headed for the board room the home-country MNC, but there were exceptions. One of these did a chair audit. Luckily, I just qualified for the one I'd been sitting in for several years, but one of the senior managers (also an expat) was told that his chair was not senior enough for his job title.
Despite protestations of comfort, he was not permitted to remain in such a lowly chair!
After the usual "we are the greatest", "we take everything very seriously"," come work for us" drivel that the interviewee spouted at me, we went for a quick tour of the offices.
I asked if I could see the server room, wooooowwwwww.... There was carpet on the floor, no, not antistatic carpet or special office carpet, just the normal synthetic "static producing" carpet and the servers were held not in a rack, they just sat on the carpeted floor. I was afraid to move, I could just feel the static building up under my feet as we "shuffled" round the back of the machines.........
The interview didn't last long afterwards with this "Very Serious" company. Yes the walk round the office is definately important...
Now that sounds familiar!
Glad to say that the servers under my purview are now in racks. Although after consolidation and virtualisation they look a bit empty...
Unfortunately when you have been out of work for nearly a year the first offer, however much of a come down, is the one that keeps a roof over your head.
Damn right, I once had an interview arranged for 8am (neither of us could do a 9-6 slot) and after 30 minutes of waiting outside a locked building and numerous unanswered calls to the agent I left. Apparently the guy had slept through his alarm and turned up at 8:55 (the agent left me a message telling me to turn back as he was now "in the office"), needless to say I never went back.
"Apparently the guy had slept through his alarm and turned up at 8:55 "
It would be interesting to speculate wheather he'd be as forgiving if it was *you* who'd slept through your alarm.
But I'd suggest you do keep a note of his name just in case.
Just thought I'd make the point that I have been lucky enough, although it's probably more through poor attitude toward them and stand-on-their-own skills and experience, I have never successfully got a role through an agency. While I have come across a few individuals who seemed human the overriding feeling I got was that I was one of herd they cultivated to get to market in time for a big fat profit. I'm now old enough with hopefully enough direct contacts that if and when in the future I need a new role I don't even have to consider the option.
We may be wholly worthless pimps, but I take exception to being called a farmer...
At some point the Reg will let me write about the problems faced by recruiters, but I am not hopeful of getting much sympathy.
Direct contacts are of course good, but for most people they suffer from the fact that they correlate too much. By that I mean if your contacts are in one sector or just one technology, when the fan is hit they all are unable to help you at the same time.
"At some point the Reg will let me write about the problems faced by recruiters, but I am not hopeful of getting much sympathy."
I imagine it's a very hectic lifestyle. Surely that's why they never bother replying to emails/phone calls/death-threats, right?
"..... the problems faced by recruiters....." Yeah, Dom, that sound you hear is the World's smallest violin.
And I would also advise against accepting any requests from recruiters on LinkedIn, unlike a friend of mine that now gets spammed with dozens of jobs which are nothing to do with his field, from recruiters he has never even heard of!
There are two fundamental problems that agencies face:
The first is lack of respect, that's respect OF them (though some may argue they show little or no respect to prospects, but that's a different problem). Software is essentially a creative process. Like all creative industries, respect comes from the people around you being aware of your past work and giving you respect for those achievements. Recruiters come into the software world with no background, and no IT history. They don't have the vocabulary, although they speak fluent non-sequitur. Nor do they have the experience or knowledge to converse with softies as equals - yet they control our futures and our prospects. That is not a recipe for a successful relationship.
The second basic flaw is a lack of transparency. You send off your CV and wait .... and finally someone calls you, they dismiss your 5 years of SAP development in the City and ask if you want a second tier support job in Sheffield - debuggering Windows Server 2008 apps. There is no visible connection between what a prospect sends in and what opportunities pop out. Even worse is that this happens not just between the recruiter and the applicant but also between the recruiter and their client. The end result is frustration all round. Everyone has to deal with a world full of imperfect information. However, when it's clear that the person you are relying on as the gateway to ANY new position has a PhD in obsfucation there is no possibility to build trust - as past experience is that most interviews will be a fools errand.
As for being wholly worthless. I think you're selling yourself a bit short. Even a pimp has some scrap value.
"At some point the Reg will let me write about the problems faced by recruiters, but I am not hopeful of getting much sympathy."
I very much look forward to hear what problems recruiters face. I also doubt you will garner much sympathy. Probably due to the fact that the recruitment industry, in relation to IT roles, appears to be woefully inadequate and you are addressing a largely technical audience who suffer at the hands of these recruiters.
Could you also explain why all they ever seem to do is match keywords without context? I once wrote a game for a set top box - it ran in the web browser on the STB. I have also administered linux servers. Both are mentioned on my CV and every once in a while I get emails from recruiters looking for a firmware developer for linux based set top boxes half way across the country.
At some point the Reg will let me write about the problems faced by recruiters, <-- Now I would actually be interested in reading this. I suspect in some cases candidates are their own worst enemies, at least if I knew the problems an agent faced I could tailor my approach to help them satisfy their goals as well. Which means more chance of my CV ending up on the desk of someone. That and it would be amusing to hear how half the clients want the skills of to launch the space shuttle for the minimum wage in Kirkwall.
I got an interview for a good job through a bad agency, but this did mean we had to devote a section of the interview to correcting what the recruiter had said about each of us ("errrrm, that's not true", "I don't know why she said that", "I haven't done that, but I have...")
"I got an interview for a good job through a bad agency, but this did mean we had to devote a section of the interview to correcting what the recruiter had said about each of us ("errrrm, that's not true", "I don't know why she said that", "I haven't done that, but I have...")"
Isn't that fun? Many years ago I went for an interview where the agent got what the company did wrong, but they turned out to be really nice and the job was great from just about every perspective (even if it wasn't the one I'd been "briefed" about). It was a crying shame when they got taken over by a much bigger rival and everything went to shit. I was long gone by then, mind, 'cause I followed the people who'd made it such a great place to work out the door...
Some quickies:
Looking around the office is indeed invaluable. Within 30 seconds you can take the "temperature" of the environment, activity levels, are the phones ringing, how many people are updating their facebook, what is the general "energy level" of the place, what was the last thing on the whiteboard? Is the place reasonably clean/tidy, what is the carpet like, are the plants alive or dead? All this can be done in the time taken walking from front to back of a typical open plan office, from the reception to your interview room.
I dont wish to lower to tone, but a messy kitchen or loo speaks volumes too...
Basic (cheap) office space is just fine (especially if it is easy to get-to) but broken facilities speaks of a contempt for staff.
A couple of questions I always ask, both of which most interviewers find difficult to fabricate an answer to:
1) What is a typical day (or week) in the life of this job?
2) What hard problems are you facing right now?
Assuming you have done a modicum of research into the company and the role you are being interviewed for, you should be able to spot BS with those 2. If you are on a roll and have really done your research, you might even throw in something more specific:
3) How are you tacking the XYZ problem? Where XYZ is a known roadblock/elephant trap that many stumble into.
HZ
> 1) What is a typical day (or week) in the life of this job?
> 2) What hard problems are you facing right now?
The answer to question #2 is: trying to think of a convincing answer to question #1
I have been asked #1 when I've been recruiting people. The problem is that without a great deal of background information and often an intimate knowledge of the particulars of the work situation and project(s) in play, just saying "Well, I spent the morning writing a cost case for upgrading the ... and later I was configuring some mobile gizmos for our Android doo-hickey". It's a bit like the answer you give your spouse when he/she/it/them asks if you "had a good day at work, dear?" Nobody really wants to hear the detailed answer.
« Do not try picking up a girl with the line: “You’re not as fat as my current girlfriend; if you sleep with me I’ll drop her as soon as she’s finished painting our bedroom.” Trust me on this, it doesn’t work. »
Darn! I wish I had read this before. This opens a new page in my dating life.
Thank you Dominic.
We have the chairs issue at work... any chair labeled a "Manager's Chair" on the box is unacceptable for normal workers.
We also have a phones issue at work. Majority of employees are only allowed an analog handset with a LED voice mail light. Digital phones (with displays) are reserved for managers and above. Caller ID is not available at all (company does not subscribe to it from the telco).
Coffee is free, but I've heard rumors that may change in the future.
Desks with overhangs are reserved for higher-ups as well.
Assuming your company has money left...
You need to develop a class of employment that has special needs, but is the same low level; such as:
designers need big screens to touch up photos and large desks for the digitizing pad;
developers need big screens or multiple screens to debug while seeing the application output, and special chairs for long hours of screen work.
If you can double up on kit, then you will need more space, air-con to keep it cool, your own room, so you don't disturb the other workers or lock on door for data security.
Basically any white lie you can live and run with.
If you have a nice spot, get shelves and white-boards to make it more difficult to move you...
I'm not really this dishonest, the chairs, screens and air-con were a happy accident.
Intriguing, but this article does not match my experience of the industry.
Unless your name is Linus Torvalds, you can't be so choosy about taking a job in a recession, or despise prospective employers. Not offering you coffee is an annoyance but should not be a deciding "signal" for taking the job or not. And what's so wrong with waiting in reception for 5 mins ?
"But few skills have more than five years in the sun". Really ? Many people have been doing Solaris for 20+ years. Ditto C programming. Linux is 20 now and even some web skills are long-lived. Oracle DBA ? SAP ?
"I was the first person in the UK to write a VisualBasic program" - how do you know ?
So IBM cut the coffee budget and later reported a loss ? Would you rather they cut jobs and kept the coffee?
"... [not] grateful that I spent 20 minutes coming to their offices..." - poor you! Such a long journey!
"But never ever lie to the HR droid." - Don't lie to anyone at an interview unless you are really stupid!
"..... Don't lie to anyone at an interview unless you are really stupid!" Well, don't tell an outright, blatant lie you can obviously get caught out on. Having ben on interview panels I can suggest most interviewers expect your CV to have been given a bit of a "polish" - not lying, maybe just not being 100% honest. It's a bit like dating - on those first few dates you're on your best behaviour, you want to project the best image of yourself possible to your potential mate, but when you get to know each other you relax and be yourself.
If I'm interviewing you I will lop 20% off my expectations of you based on your CV and interview performance. I seriously do not expect employees to behave in the actual job as they did in their interview! Besides, with most jobs it's not how good you are when everything is going to plan, the real trick is how you perform when the brown stuff is meeting the fan, so don't be afraid to discuss how you dealt with a previous disaster.
".....that would leave your expectations....." Simple explanation - do you always turn up for work, every day, as bright and sparky as you pretend to be at interviews? Never turned up for work slightly under the weather, or just hungover, or maybe p*ssed-off because you've had a cr*p weekend with your partner? Unlike some HR drones, I do not expect employees to be perfect. If you were perfect you wouldn't need the reams and reams of processes we have in place, and you probably wouldn't need me to manage you in the first place. I do expect staff to occasionally grumble and swear and fart, and - hopefully rarely - drop the ball. Maybe I was just lucky, but one of my first bosses was a laid-back Texan with a love for sporting terminology, and he used to confuse the heck out of me with statements like; "Even Don Meredith never had a 100% completion record." Took me years to find out who the fudge Meredith was!
'Unless your name is Linus Torvalds, you can't be so choosy about taking a job in a recession, or despise prospective employers.'
I'm not Linus Torvalds. I am good at what I do. I've recently started contracting, outside of London, and I had three weeks of more or less daily offers for interview, all of which I turned down because they were for permanent positions. At the end of the three weeks I was able to walk into a contract.
I'm not a god, I don't have a huge portfolio of open source, I'm just a guy who's done a lot of C. There may well be a recession on but I don't believe that the tech sector is really affected by it. You can and should be choosy, the more choosy you are the more employers have to up their game, and their compensation packages.
The consequences of not being choosy are just as severe:
> no career path
> depression
> suicide etc
I remember being desperate for my first job and I would take any work. Now not so much. There are companies out there who simply don't deserve to have employees and in any good economy would be out of business, but because of the cheap labour and loans available to them now that our economy is shat through a bin bag, they are turning out a shit product and making everyone miserable in the process. Is this really what we need in this country? No. We should all agree to up our pay expectations by 6 or 7% overnight. So the bastards wake up and everyone they interview from now on is suddenly asking for more money. Maybe then they'll have to focus on making a quality product with high margins so they don't have to treat their staff like shit.
It's a romantic thought. Never happen tho.
Many years ago I had an interview at a university spinoff, with free coffee provided. The coffee machine was the sort that started with real beans and a filter. Unfortunately they were less particular about the other ingredients ... have you ever tasted coffee with a couple of teaspoons of salt?
This is interesting stuff. I'm in a situation now where I had been the all-rounder tech bloke in a small business for 8 years, then a couple of years freelancing on various small tech projects, web application development, intranet stuff, network admin, running a small virtualised web/e-mail hosting platform etc.
I'm at the stage now where my knowledge of IT requirements in small businesses feels saturated. I've always tried to apply deployment/management practices of larger firms... e.g. auto-provisioning of new VoIP extensions using vendor-specific DHCP encapsulated options probably wouldn't generally be implemented for a work-force of 8 people. But if it's good enough for a company of 100-200 people, I've generally tried to do it for companies with 5-20.
I know broadly how most stuff works, I can figure things out quickly. But it feels like I've been sat in the doldrums for a few years now and I'd quite like step it up from small biz level to something more challenging and learn some new stuff. Most job specs I see require a couple of years' experience in systems/software that probably cost more than my previous employers' annual turnovers! Do I need to look at internships and just work up from there?
I think I am pretty much where you are. I've scripted and automated pretty much everything it is reasonable to automate and have implemented enterprise level features in SMEs for little cost and am equally as stumped as to how to move on.
Right now spare cash for training is non existent so I have turned to the free courses by Stanford and the like. Currently doing the "Introduction to Computer Networks" at Stanford as a bit of a refresher. Something to put on the CV I guess...
Human Resources is a misnomer
A Resource in business language parlance is an another word for an "Asset".
Assets appear on the Balance sheet, things like Goodwill, buildings, etc.
However here comes the big but....
My salary as a wage slave::
My salary appears on the Profit and Loss account.
Its under the category of "Cost of Sales" which is not a resource or Asset!
Therefore I conculde that HR are in fact there to manage to keep my salary as low as possible while generating sales for the company whch increases their cash flow inwards.
Therefore the term "Human Resources" is a bare faced lie and why I have refused to engage once employed in any meaningful conversation with them once employed.
Human Resource people are the most scariest people you can meet outside of the workplace as they are about as personable and friendly as a neon sign outside a place where ladies of the night ply their trade to incoming punters.
Another troubling sign: If the management keep telling everyone that cash-flow makes direct deposit impossible but have no trouble funding an all-day secretaries day luncheon (for everyone, duration from noon until two the following morning for those with no real work to do) at a country club every year.
Seriously, there are mushrooms growing out of the floor in the downstairs loo. But I'm f*cked for how I move on from this. I hardly know what I'm doing or why I'm showing up to do it. I'm also one of those stereotypes with no life, sh*t at making friends and doubly sh*t at interviews.
" I hardly know what I'm doing or why I'm showing up to do it. I"
Which rather makes you sound like you're *exactly* where you deserve to be. If you don't have one already you just need a gimp suit to finish your wardrobe off.
Did that sound a little unkind?
The British seem to have something of a schizophrenic attitude to being good at things. If people are knocking 20% off the expectations on a CV and you're 100% truthful on your CV then you're running 20% behind for starters. Self deprecation can be highly amusing. Until you're due for a staff appraisal
I'll *presume* that in fact you do have some skills at doing something (because if you don't you're serious f**ked). You need to look *carefully* at what you do and how you do it. Have you improved things? Are you "responsible" if things go wrong (never mind you've got no *authority* to stop them)? Do they show up on your current CV (do you have a CV)? Have you checked your work contract (do you *have* a written contract?)
Can you get time off in lieu of overtime? It's odd how employers suddenly start to become more attentive when their employees start giving "signs" they are looking for other jobs. Taking surprise days off (Job interview?) the "accidentally" overheard phone call (for an interview out of hours).
And if you find a dream job but are worried you won't put it across well at the interview ask to give a *practical* demonstration. You may be monosyllabic but they're hiring you to configure routers/detect network intrusion/code scripts/whatever, not *talk* about how good you are at these things. One of my favorite "interviews" consisted of being put in a room with a terminal on a guest login, a program description and a language manual. 3 hours later they came back and ran the program I'd written. I got the job.
Like look at their patents. I noticed to late that my current company had a "perpetuum mobile" patent in there, signed by the management. Needless to say, it's one of those bad jobs. (and I have a contract still running for 60 weeks, 1 day and 42 minutes)
Then look at the products. Do they make sense? For example if they are network capable, do they support IPv6? If they have a filesystem and configuration files, how are they stored? My current company sells a device which has an ARM microcontroller and an SD-card, but the display is a simple 7-segment one, while the configuration can only in part be changed on the device itself, and is stored in a strange binary format.
Then there is often the cancer of VBA, meaning that instead of databases or simple text files, vital data will be stored in Excel-Sheets, making it impossible to do anything useful with it.
The `quants' these are the financial wizards that blew up the world economy through the use of such quasi-mathematical entities as the Black–Scholes model. And now rather than lock them up or send them working in the field we've given them an HFT machine to play with.
Mmm, what's that smell: Coffee or sweat? - well, in most places i've worked where people have been as anally retentive about coffee as they appear on this board, then the sweat itself smells of coffee. There are whole offices which smell like there must be a dead tramp lying under an unused desk.
I remember once standing next to an FD at a urinal in such an environment. The stench of sweaty filter coffee coming from his bladder was so vile my eyes watered and i was blinking like a newborn calf. He thought i had had bad news, as i was visible shaken, and proceeded to give me a manly pat on the back without first washing his hands.
IT sucks. Its a "profession" in name only. What professional is entirely under the control of agents and clueless managers? What if medicine were like IT? Then people would die every other time they visited the hospital. I consider myself a good programmer but in my last few jobs I had to sit next to a woman who talked nonstop about nothing, while I was trying to maintain programs of 10,000 lines of code each. And on top of everything, companies are offshoring development so the only work available involves interacting with people in crammed open-plan hellholes that are so loud your ears hurt. Get another profession before its too late!
If you're entirely under the control of agents and clueless managers then maybe there's your problem. Could be time to find another position or strike out on your own?
As for reliability of product, you know some folks have to program that medical equipment used by the med staff, right? And 10,000 lines is a tiny codebase.
If you're working for muppets and with muppets, it's time to move on or admit you're a muppet too.
I had been out of work for a few months, got an interview at a place supporting SME's - interview was fine, server admin job was pitched, I'd be on a contract for 3 months as a probabtionary period.
First day, I turn up and am led into what can only be described as a "boiler room" setup with half a dozen young lads in shiny suits and spiked hair juggling phone calls. I get stuck at a desk up the top of the room and handed this binder about 6 inches thick - oh documentation I naively thought, I was almost right. A set of rules for techs covering lunch breaks, tea breaks, when to use the photcopier, sending in timesheets, mileage allowances, how to reclaim parking tickets (so you could park close to client sites and not walk down the street with kit apprently)....all of which had a phrase "failure to follow this process will result in disciplinary action"
I asked about how this applied to me as a server admin, turned out I was expected to be on the road from 8am till 6pm as a field engineer, They had a box of kit for me to carry in my vehicle, timesheets every day had to be faxed by 5:45, but if the job ran on I was expected to complete it (asked about the rate when past 6pm, oh it's your day rate).
I sat down, told then this wasn't what I was recruited for, if I'm on contract they pay per hour. One look at their faces and I just said goodbye and good luck - the guys in the "boiler room" had heard the lot and they looked terrified when I came out.
tl;dr If your spider sense is tingling, walk away
Whatever side of the interview table you're sitting on, remember that an interview should be a two way process. The candidate is interviewing the employer as well as the employer interviewing the candidate.
I think that's a good rule... if an employer resents you "interviewing" them then walk away if you can... you're just trying to figure out if you and they will be a good fit, which is beneficial to you both, and if they resent that then it's never going to be a good place to work. If you're the interviewer and a candidate shows no interest in the job then either they didn't want to be there in the first place or you've already failed their interview... and either way it's probably not worth doing anything other than ending the interview as gracefully as possible for both parties.
"I think that's a good rule... if an employer resents you "interviewing" them then walk away if you can... you're just trying to figure out if you and they will be a good fit,"
A very good point. I often wonder how many have the strength of character to put it into effect?
I think a *lot* of people (employers as well) would be a lot happier if more people did. The interviews might not be as "smooth" for the interviewers of course but the people they hired (or perhaps who accepted their offer) would be more likely to want to be there.
In my very first interview after finishing my MsC I came to this big, world known bank. Apparently they had a bunch of devs in the town where I lived. The interview in it self went OK; I struck off a good note with the boss and everything was fine and dandy (he didn't offer me coffee, but had some himself). It wasn't until one of their head techs came in that I started to get worried. His face was like ashes, with red blotches, and creases belonging to someone twice his age.
It wasn't until about 10 minutes after he ended his questions I got to ask the whether there were any over time pay.
The look that tech gave me made me run, run as hard as I could, and never look back.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
