Category — career

But people are often successful not despite their dysfunctions but because of them. Obsessions are one of the greatest telltale signs of success. Understand a persons obsessions and you will understand her natural motivation. The thing for which she would walk to the end of the earth.

via The Interview Question You Should Always Ask - HarvardBusiness.org

From Peteris Krumins’ blog post My Job Interview at Google:

[...] I was contacted by a recruiter at Google. The email said:

“I recruit top notch Software Engineering talent at Google. I recently came across your name as a possible world class Engineer and am intrigued to know more about you. I promise to exchange some detailed info about us as well.”

“Interested to hear more? Want to be an impact player at Google? Then please respond with a current (English) copy of your resume and I’ll be happy to call you and discuss.”

Top notch I can live with. But “possible world class”, to be an “impact player”? Really?

Luckily I got a much more sensible and human e-mail from my sourcer when I was contacted by Google 3,5 years ago. If I would have received something like the above, I would have probably dismissed Google as a bunch of uninteresting, navel-gazing, full-of-hot-air brats. Here is hoping that not all our recruiters use this kind of language when approaching potential candidates.

Or so Ted Dziuba says:

Google uses C++, which is sure to attract a top-notch engineer whose only way to express his masculinity is the speed with which he can ace an academic recursive programming problem and the condescending modesty he has while explaining the solution.

Jerry Yang - Slugworth to Google’s Willy Wonka • The Register

You don’t, or do you?

Some bosses don't want to hire people who have a vision, a personality and a shtick. That's okay. You don't want to work for them anyway.

Seth’s Blog: The You Show

The criteria for success early in a person’s career are always going to be more operational than strategic – if only because lower-level employees don’t get the opportunity to make large strategic decisions. Nonetheless, even if they are not primarily getting rewarded for having a vision of the future of the company or the ability to inspire people to buy into the vision and help make it a reality, they had better develop those skills along the way, because they will need them if and when they reach senior positions in their organization.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Re-inventing Management and Management Education

I’ve been meaning for a while to write a little post about Seth Godin’s book The Dip, but procrastination had gotten the best of me. Now that Seth is asking in his blog for owners of a copy of the book to lend it to someone, I feel I have no excuse to put it off longer.

The Dip is, like most Godin’s posts, insightful, inspirational and brief (you could read the book in less than an hour). It also contains some great illustrations by Hugh McLeod.

The message of the book is deceptively simple: The Dip is the slog between starting and mastery. The Dip is the reason we are here.

Some quotes:

Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff a the right time.

Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success.

In a competitive world, adversity is your ally. The harder it gets, the better chance you have of insulating yourself from the competition.

And yet the real success goes to those who obsess.

It’s easier to be mediocre than it is to confront reality.

The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable.

If you are in Zurich, you can borrow my copy. Just ask.

In The Blissful Interview Candidate Gavin Terrill writes about an interview question he often asks[*], the various steps of the question, how people usually perform, etc.

One of the main points of his post is something that often I feel candidates don’t really understand: there is no Right Answer to the interview question and that is not what the interviewer is looking for, anyway. In Terrill’s words:

The point of this exercise is not for the candidate to get everything right, but to see how they operate when they don’t know an answer. My observation is that the more competent you are, the more intelligent a conversation you can have, and that is really what I’m looking for here. I like to see candidates who are on a voyage of discovery, buoyed by a passion for knowledge and personal improvement.

So the next time you have a technical interview, don’t try to guess what perfect answer is expected from you. Just be yourself, think about the problem and aim to have an intelligent discussion with the your interviewer. That tends to work out better.

[*] Yes, Singletons are the root of all evil. But that is not the point here, so let go of your anger and reflect on the nature of job interviews instead.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

When we talk about work and career, there is a lot of talk about resumes and how to get a job. But it is as important to select your employer carefully. After all, having a mind-numbing job at a company you don’t respect never helped anyone’s career.

So when you next search for a job, be sure to seek out those employers that seem to provide the sort of environment and challenges that you are interested in. For some companies, you can already tell from their job ads. For example:

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

Marc Andreessen has a recent article on How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with. If you are interested in maximizing the chances of getting that job interview, it is a good idea to read about what people like Marc look for in a candidate during a hiring process.

For Marc, it comes down to three main things: drive, curiosity and ethics. Drive and curiosity are closely related; they seem to be the direct consequence of passion.

Marc writes that you can see drive in a candidate’s background (read “resume”):

For the background part, I like to see what someone has done.

Not been involved in, or been part of, or watched happen, or was hanging around when it happened.

I look for something you’ve done, either in a job or (often better yet) outside of a job.

The business you started and ran in high school.

The nonprofit you started and ran in college.

If you’re a programmer: the open source project to which you’ve made major contributions.

Something.

If you can’t find anything — if a candidate has just followed the rules their whole lives, showed up for the right classes and the right tests and the right career opportunities without achieving something distinct and notable, relative to their starting point — then they probably aren’t driven.

And you’re not going to change them.

Motivating people who are fundamentally unmotivated is not easy.

Surprisingly enough, this drive part is missing from the vast majority of the new grad resumes that I review. I don’t know what is the reason for that. What I do know is that the few resumes that show evidence that the candidate has ‘done’ do stand out. And get at least a phone call.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

• Mashable.com: 70+ Tools For Job Hunting 2.0
• Paul Graham: How to Make Wealth:
  

  Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast.

• Free Exchange blog at The Economist: Sick man no more: the German economy and labour market is recovering:
  

  Germany is indeed waking from its sclerotic slumbers and might post a growth rate of 3% in 2007. That would more than double the 1995 to 2005 average growth rate of 1.4%, and could even exceed expected American and British 2007 growth numbers.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

Often people that are fresh out of college complain that they don’t have enough “work experience” for many of the job openings on the market. But what is this work experience thing, anyway? And why is it necessary in order to get some kinds of jobs?

In his essay A Student’s Guide to Startups, Paul Graham writes the following on the subject of work experience:

Now I know what it is, and part of the confusion is grammatical. Describing it as “work experience” implies it’s like experience operating a certain kind of machine, or using a certain programming language. But really what work experience refers to is not some specific expertise, but the elimination of certain habits left over from childhood.

One of the defining qualities of kids is that they flake. When you’re a kid and you face some hard test, you can cry and say “I can’t” and they won’t make you do it. Of course, no one can make you do anything in the grownup world either. What they do instead is fire you. And when motivated by that you find you can do a lot more than you realized. So one of the things employers expect from someone with “work experience” is the elimination of the flake reflex—the ability to get things done, with no excuses.

Now, if work experience is mostly “elimination of certain habits left over from childhood”, surely you can gain this experience in ways other than having a job at some company.

For example, you could participate in an open-source project and learn how to add value to the project and its users. Or you could commit to working with some sort of non-profit for a while. You could do these things while you are still studying.

You could (should?) list this kind of activity under “work experience” in your resume. After all, what a potential employer wants to know is that you are able to follow through on a project, no matter the difficulties you face. The number of years in industry is just a convenient proxy for this skill.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

Via a post on Zen Habits I find 10 Essential Steps To Get To The Top Of Your Field. The article recommends the obvious: learn, learn, learn, practice, practice, practice.

But the essential step to “getting to the top of your field” is none of the things that the article lists in boldface. The essential step to “getting to the top of your field” is a much more difficult one: choosing a line of work that you genuinely enjoy, something that you are truly passionate about.

If you really enjoy what you do, you will naturally tend to practice more (because you will enjoy the process of practicing), you will naturally tend to seek more learning opportunities (because you will enjoy understanding every day a bit more about the field) and you will naturally seek contact with like-minded people that you can exchange ideas with (and get feedback from).

If you feel like you have to talk yourself into practicing and improving in your field, then consider that maybe this is not the right field for you. Maybe you’ve lost interest and now you should redirect your career elsewhere. Maybe you are simply a happy person satisfied with their career.

Remember that, after all, what will make you happy at your job is not “being at the top of your field”, but truly enjoying what you do. Everything else will follow.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

A site for a book called “Career distinction” has something they call an online identity calculator. The ‘calculator’ is actually a rough guide to assessing how does your personal brand look on the internet.

I had never heard about the book or the site before, but the online identity calculator seems like an interesting tool for those that want to build out a reputation online.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

Interesting links on the topic of jobs, work and careers:

• Enrique Dans: ¿Alguien ha visto un programador? (Has somebody seen a programmer?):
  

  En España, a este lado del túnel, se necesitan programadores. Y los programadores necesitan una reivindicación urgente de su profesión, que recupere el legítimo orgullo de quien crea, de quien desarrolla, de quien se responsabiliza de un todo, de quien se enamora de un proyecto y no se limita a ser un obrero en el mismo, sino un verdadero arquitecto. Se buscan programadores con orgullo y capacidad para serlo. Pero por lo que se ve, habrá que mirar debajo de las piedras.

  Rough translation:

  In Spain, on this side of the tunnel, we need programmers. And programmers urgently need to claim back their profession, they need to recover the legitimate pride of someone who creates, develops and is responsible for a whole, of someone who falls in love with a project and doesn’t limit himself to being a mere labourer on it, but is a real architect. We need proud programmers and programmers with the skills to be one. It seems they will be hard to find.

• The Business of Software Wiki (from Joel on Software):
  

  Our goal is to gather and present unbiased, useful and up-to-date information about the business of software, whether it’s microISVs selling desktop software, Web 2.0 sites, or even the big enterprise kind of outfits.

• Brazen Careerist: How to be a star performer: 4 things to get good at (yes, this one’s a year old, but it’s still a good read):
  

  To become your best self – a star, a great leader, a fulfilled worker – you need to know yourself and your goals very well. Start now. It’s a lifelong process, and done honestly, it’s the process that makes almost any job intrinsically challenging and interesting.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

Everybody is reading today Turning Blogging From Hobby to Career. What seems most interesting to me is not so much the advice about updating your blog often and so on, but this bit:

So what does it take to turn blogging into a full-time living? Basically it takes a whole lot of hard work, knowledge and passion about the topic you’re blogging about, patience, and some ‘being in the right place at the right time’ luck.

If you are trying to build a career in any area, this is all you need: hard work, knowledge, passion, some patience and a bit of luck. This will get you there, eventually. And no, there are no shortcuts (see the patience bit).

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

Some interesting links to feed your Sunday surfing habit:

• Brazen Careerist: Book excerpt: How to turn a bad boss into a good one:
  

  Want to deal with a bad boss? First, stop complaining. Unless your boss breaks the law, you don’t have a bad boss, you have a boss you are managing poorly. Pick on your boss all you want, but if you were taking responsibility for your career, you wouldn’t let your boss’s problems bring you down.

• Seth Godin: Who should you hire?:
  

  There is a fundamental shift in rules from manual-based work (where you follow instructions and an increase in productivity means doing the steps faster) to project-based work (where the instructions are unknown, and visualizing outcomes and then getting things done is what counts.)

• Micro Persuasion: The Most Essential Career Skill You Need to Succeed:
  

  So as I thought about it, the most important “tool” you can have today in business is insatiable curiosity. The minute you lose it, you’re dead.

• Web Worker Daily: The Dangerous Myth of The Dream Job (by Timothy Ferris): I am not quite sure I fully agree with the main thesis of this article, but it is nevertheless a thought-provoking read.
  

  Converting passions into “work” is the fastest way to kill those passions. Surfing two hours on a Saturday to decompress from a hard week might be heaven, but waking up at 6 am every morning to do it 40 hours per week with difficult clients is a very different animal. Mixing business and pleasure can be a psychologically toxic cocktail.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

In the comments on the post about common resume mistakes, Paco was asking for a good example for a coherent skill list. For a good way to ’sell’ your skills, let’s look at the public resume of one of my colleagues, Sascha, available at http://www.brawer.ch/cv/.

Here is the skills section:

Programming Skills

Programming Languages — Extensive experience in Java, C, C++, Python, Perl, Prolog, Lisp, Object Pascal, Assembler (PowerPC, 680×0, 6301). Knowledge of Objective C, Forth, AppleScript, TCL, PostScript and Basic.

Operating Systems — System-level programming for MacOS, several Unices (GNU/Linux, Tru64 UNIX, HP-UX, Solaris), Win32. Some exposure to VMS and CP/M.

Libraries — Java J2SE (wrote several packages for GNU Classpath); Java MIDP; GTK+ (helped with the port to Tru64 UNIX); deeply familiar with MacOS InterfaceLib/CarbonLib; many GNU and X libraries; Windows API.

Nice things about this skill list:

• The header says “Programming Skills”, not just “Skills”. Clearly, this person is a programmer and wants to be hired as such.
• There are no irrelevant skills listed (e.g. there is no mention of ‘can use MS Office suite’ or anything like that).
• There is no mention of skills that are ‘taken for granted’, such as HTML.
• The list is not just an enumeration of terms, but also includes some details on the level of expertise. For example, ‘Operating Systems’ doesn’t just list OS names, but includes a note on ’system-level programming’.

Note, however, that this list talks about a specific type of skills. If you want to highlight other kinds of skills (e.g. organizational or leadership skills), you need to have a separate section for them. But all the points above still apply: avoid irrelevant information, include concise details to show the level of expertise.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

These days I am asked to review a few resumes per week, all of them for technical candidates. It is astounding how many people will write things on their resumes that make it hard to support a “let’s interview” recommendation.

Some of these things are mild irritants that prevent the reader from focusing on the important bits of the resume; some are serious ‘red flags’ that practically disqualify the candidate. Many of these annoyances keep coming up again and again. Here are six common ones:

• Distracting the reader with irrelevant personal information, such as a photography, marital status, nationality or age. This information can subtly bias the reader, so it is always wise to leave it out unless explicitly asked for (note that in many countries it is illegal for a potential employer to ask about things such as age and marital status, unless they can prove that this data is directly related to your ability to do your job).
• Lumping together heterogeneous terms in a skill list. For example: “Programming languages: C, C++, HTML, Java”.
• Focusing on irrelevant details in a description of a previous project. For example: “Developed e-commerce site. Technologies used: Eclipse, [...]“.
• Using all possible hype words that you can come up with. For example: “Developed e-commerce site making extensive use of Design Patterns and UML, leveraging modern AJAX technology for Web 2.0 community building while making extensive use of open-source agile bazaar-style software engineering methods.”
• Using all the wrong keywords in a role description. For example: “Cool Company Inc. Position: Senior Engineer. Accomplishments: Organized meetings, coordinated conferences, drafted documentation, did sales presentation for end customers.”
• Claiming “extensive experience” in some area, and not providing any evidence that this is indeed the case. For example: “Experienced Java programmer with detailed JVM knowledge. [And then resume lists 3 previous jobs where the work was done in C++.]“

Given that lately I seem to feel an urge to blog about work and career, I’ve gone ahead and created a separate blog to mace it easy for those interested in this particular topic to follow those posts.

The new blog is called On jobs, work and careers (very original title, isn’t it?), and is hosted right on this site, at http://anaulin.org/on_jobs_work_and_careers/. If you are interested in those topics, go subscribe!

Found | Read, one of the GigaNET blogs, is running an article titled Passion spotting, which echoes one of the main points in my recent Stop “fine-tuning” your resume post: in a job candidate, evidence of passion is much more important than any hyped keywords in a resume.

Passion will tell me most of what I need to know about a person’s dedication and drive. In developing a great startup team, these two elements are the most important. Talent and abilities can be developed. The former are what foil, or leverage, the latter.

Not exactly groundbreaking news, but always worth reminding yourself.

In his post on the The Awesome Power of Spare Cycles, Chris Anderson writes:

Web 2.0 is such a phenomena because we’re underused elsewhere. Bored at work, bored at home. We’ve got spare cycles and they’re finally finding an outlet. Tap that and you’ve tapped an energy source that rivals anything in human history.

[...]

Spare cycles are the most powerful fuel on the planet. It’s what Web 2.0 is made up of. User generated content? Spare cycles. Open source? Spare cycles. MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life? Spare cycles.

If Anderson is right, then we could measure how bored or not we are at our jobs (and/or at home, too) by measuring our online activity.

The thing is, Anderson is wrong.

Anderson is equating up activities for which the motivators are very different. Open source is not powered by “bored” programmers that don’t know what to do with their spare time, but by passionate contributors that very often make an effort to find time in their lives for open source. Same holds for the most devoted Flickr users, the most constant bloggers and the most popular YouTube creators.

Yes, the bored office worker that aimlessly browses YouTube or MySpace is indeed just burning spare cycles, but the pointless browsing/digging/etc is not the force that drives these communities.

Lately I’ve been reading the del.icio.us popular items RSS feed. A recurring theme in the feed are blog posts talking about ways to “improve” your resume.

The last such post, Let’s Fine Tune Your Resume, provides the ultimate example: a post pointing to other posts about “improving” your resume. Yes, a meta-resume-tuning post! The job-seeker’s dream! No wonder people complain they can’t get their “dream job”: they are spending all their time reading blogs packed with resume-tweaking wisdom!

If I wanted to hire somebody for a job (and this holds for any job), I would look for the following main qualities:

• Cares about the field/job/task. Is passionate about it.
• Has at least the minimum skill level needed for the job, and can prove it. And, by the way, being a Sun certified programmer or having an university degree only proves that you spent a fair amount of time (and money!) to get this piece of paper; it does not in any way prove that you learned anything in the process, let alone that you can actually Do Stuff.
• Is “culturally compatible” with the environment they would be working work in. “Culturally compatible”, in this context, means that the candidate shares the work style and values of the company/team.

Do you think you can convince me of your deep passion for this job by adding some clever keywords to your resume? Or that you’ll trick me into thinking you have outstanding skills by improving the look & feel of said resume? Maybe you are really convinced making your resume “accomplishments-driven, not responsibilities-driven” will really help me see what kind of work culture you are comfortable with?

Here is what I think: not only all this “fine tuning” won’t help, but it might actually irritate your potential employer. There is nothing I hate more in a resume than a whiff of not-quite-honest.

When I review a resume, I want to see indications of the qualities listed above. For example:

• Indication of passion: A candidate for an engineering position has through the years held individual contributor positions in different companies; maybe they rejected possible promotions to management roles, because they like being hands on. In their spare time, the candidate enjoys inventing and building things. Maybe they blog about their passion, too (and have consistently done so for a while).
• Indication of sufficient skill: The candidate has experience in the field; maybe some formal education in it, and can give concrete examples of jobs/tasks in which said skills were successfully applied. They’ve done work for fun/pro-bono/etc to either improve their skills or to prove them. (”For fun” or voluntary work can also be an indication of passion; see previous point.)
• Indication of value/work-style compatibility (this is probably the hardest one to identify in a resume): The candidate has consistently worked in environments with similar work culture. The resume uses a style that seems in line with the potential employer’s style. The resume does not contain keywords or phrases that indicate that the candidate belongs in a very different work environment. For example, the sentence “I am a firm believer in empowering your company by leveraging my Web 2.0 skills in order to, moving forward, maximize the ROI you bring to your customers” would automatically disqualify you for an engineering position (in my eyes, not necessarily in those of my employer, etc).

And no, I am not saying that you shouldn’t try to have a well-presented resume, or that you shouldn’t use the darned spell-checker before you mail it. And I am in no way saying it is better if you don’t bother converting the thing to PDF and just send them that nasty MS Word file, either. These are just the basic things that will prevent the reader from clawing their eyes out when they see it, no more, no less.

If you want your resume to really stand out, stop wasting time reading “fine tuning” blog posts, and get on with finding and cultivating your passion(s), improving your skills and learning what kind of worker you really are. It will show through in your resume. Really.

The need for a “proper frame” I talked about in this post is an important idea to have in mind when trying to get recognition for your work, be it artistic or not, professional or just a hobby.

In the case of artistic output, this might be quite obvious: a 9×15 photo print does not look as good as the same image when printed in a large format and professionally framed. Even a small black frame around a simple digital picture often makes a big difference. Look at all those Flickr pictures, if you don’t believe me.

But what is the “small black frame” for your professional, non-artistic output? You could try dressing to “look more professional” [1]. Of course, you should give as many good presentations of your work as possible, both in formal and informal settings. And send to colleagues/bosses/etc e-mails with bits of your output that you think can be useful to them is probably also a good idea.

If your main output is code, at the very least you should make it human-readable and well-tested (by unit tests, of course; stop bullshitting people with golden-file-based regression tests that you’ll never update again).

If your main output is in the form of a written report, choose a professional-looking font and layout (no more Comic Sans, no more than two or three fonts in the same document, etc). And, por dios, double-check your grammar and spelling!

Can you think of any more examples of how to better frame your work?

[1] Note that I use the concept of “dressing like a professional” in a broad sense. Where I work, “dressing like a professional” involves jeans and black t-shirts and/or looking generally nerdy. I bet those guys in the Ernst & Young building do not perceive our dress code as professional, though. So, when trying to look professional, study first the dress code for your chosen target audience.

Boing Boing talks about a company that automatically rejected all candidates that applied for an “internet expert” position and provided a Hotmail address. Why? Because you can’t pretend being an internet expert and use a Hotmail account at the same time.

A great idea, this one, that should be expanded to other position/technology pairs.

I, for one, find it disturbing to have to look at CVs of coders that insist in sending them in Microsoft Word format. WTF, people? If you want to come across as an IT professional, give me something that I can read on any platform, and make it non-proprietary, while you are at it.

(Disclaimer: these opinions are solely my own and in no way represent those of my employer or its hiring practices.)

Kathy Sierra shares some interesting thoughts about how “Success” should not mean “Management”:

Isn’t it about time we quit measuring professional success in one dimension, vertically, and start considering how much your actual work matches your desired work?

And isn’t it about time more companies started offering multiple career tracks, where management is no more valuable or important than the highly-skilled work of an individual contributor? (Sun is a good example of a company that offers two clear paths–one for management, and one for individual contributors who’d rather bathe cats than be a boss.)

What happens when a company gives an employee no option for growth other than management? Yes, lots of individual contributors (even programmers) want the challenge of a management role, but some of the best feel forced into trading the work they love best for more “advancement opportunities”. How senseless is it to take a star programmer and make her do Gantt charts? How lame it is to take your best designer and make him run budget meetings, review TPS reports, and consolidate time sheets?

I am lucky enough to work at one of those companies that, like Sun, offer two separate tracks for individual contributors and managers. Sadly, there are whole cultures (e.g. what seems to be the predominant Spanish corporate culture) that think that only losers stay for long as individual contributors.

Hopefully with more posts like Kathy’s folks will start to wake up and make career decisions that will actually make them happier (as opposed to making them own more stuff).