I like to work with recruiters. I’ve used them in the past. I refer people to them. But I am missing something here. I just got off the phone with a recruiter. He was using some kind of a phone, either VOIP or a cell phone, but it cut in and out. I had to […]
I’ve been talking with a colleague who is looking for a job. He’s comparing two senior engineering jobs. At one interview, it was clear that the manager makes all the technical decisions. No, the manager doesn’t code anymore; he makes all the technical decisions though, for a 12-person group. At the other job, it looked
Dave Larribee has a great post, The High Cost of Losing a Developer. (Discovered via an ericlandes tweet) Dave suggested it might take a couple of years investment in terms of salary to make a developer productive. My experience is that it takes about 6 months of that developer and some number of months of
I’ve been reviewing job descriptions from clients that are a laundry list of tools. Or, that ask for “significant experience” with a particular technology. No, no, no. People are not tools. They are human beings who have specific qualities, preferences, and technical and non-technical skills. When you think about those personal qualities, think about these
I recently spoke with a recruiter. “I don’t understand the QA market anymore. No one is hiring except for agile people. And they want people who are developers. What’s happening to QA?” Manual testing was never quality assurance; it was testing. And, manual testing is low-value, high cost work, especially when you compare it to
Hiring managers, recruiters, anyone on the phone or in the interview with a candidate: Don’t ask the “What Salary Do You Expect?” question. It puts people on the defensive before you’ve had a chance to build rapport. Instead, as part of the phone screen, say, “This job is in our ‘senior engineer’ level, which has
In yesterday’s Boston Globe there was an article, Start-ups stifled by noncompetes, which had a wonderful quote (go to the second page): Luckily, we have an academic here in Massachusetts who has dedicated the past few years to looking at the impact of noncompetes. Matt Marx, who recently joined the faculty of MIT’s Sloan School
I’ve been at the PMI Regina PDC this week. I did a general session talk Monday, and am leading a two-day estimation workshop through tomorrow. Andy Nulman had a great riff on normal vs. abnormal employees. You can see a clip of it here. Warning: racy, not completely clean. If you think of normal as
It’s now a hiring manager’s market. That means hiring managers can be picky and try to find just the right person for the open req. But, it also means that many applicants exist for each open req, and all of those people are applying for your job. How does a hiring manager find the right
I read a bunch of blogs, and Evolving Excellence is consistently good. I was struck by this post, Homozygosity – That’s The Problem!. I had never heard of homozygosity before, so I looked it up. According to Merriam-Webster, it’s having the two genes at corresponding loci on homologous chromosomes identical for one or more loci