The Cowgirl Coder

As promised, we’ll talk about the traits of successful recruiters.

Good recruiters look for people to fit a position, and pursue them individually. I’ve mentioned before that my name and resume pop on Google search results when a recruiter is looking for a senior web architect or development manager in the Seattle area. The best experiences I have ever had with recruiters come from these approaches, and they are instantly distinguishable from the usual.

One recruiter, Shannon Anderson from NuWest Group out of Bellevue, personifies this approach. She’s professional, spectacular at her job, and rarely presents more than a single candidate for a job. She matches people perfectly, and as a result, she gets a near perfect return on her investment and an ongoing relationship. It’s more like talking to a very friendly and competent matchmaker, and I’d encourage anyone to work with her or someone like her.

She makes personal connections, and takes her time getting to know her candidates.

Other great recruiters have a large database of positions, and instead of matching a candidate to a job, they match a job to a great candidate. Tara Gowland runs Startup Recroot, a Seattle-based firm, and her approach is to find spectacular and competent people, and try to pair them with positions that she’ll seek out. Her approach to me was diffident, even shy, which was a refreshing change from the normal TRUMPETS BLARING approach.

Now, while I can recommend each of these firms, and most specifically these two recruiters, I can’t tell you about the positions for which I was either hired or interviewed, since that breaks some confidentiality agreements. However, if you find recruiters like these ladies, I heartily recommend that you not only work with them, but that you give them all the social media and blogging help you can. Firms that are ethical, helpful, and who have recruiters with personal and competent approaches are few and far between.

Find these firms, and work with them. They’re full disclosure, honest, and they’re great at what they do. Please feel free to leave other firms that you’ve been happy to work with in the comments.

I want to take a moment away from my usual howtos and commentary to offer some encouragement and etiquette tips for my fellow web developers, especially the ladies starting out.

Doing freelance work with the occasional longer contract is difficult to break into, requires a thick skin, and demands careful reputation-gardening. Before I reached the point where I was getting contract requests and recruiter emails on a daily basis, work was thin on the ground. I did IC (individual contributor) work, and it’s taken a lot of time and effort to reach the systems architect and senior management positions for which I am now being recruited.

I maintained three principles which I use every day, especially when I have to deal with aggressive recruiters, tight-lipped company reps, and the inevitable professional relationship snafus.

(1) Say something nice about someone every day.

In late 2009, I had a tough personal situation to deal with, and after it was over, I knew I could react one of two ways. I could be angry and sour to anyone who asked, with the excuse that I was having a tough time, or I could find a way to turn the situation into personal development. I started looking over my friends list on Facebook, and made a point to say something nice about a friend every day. It got me back in contact with people I hadn’t talked to in quite a while, provided encouragement, and sparked memories. Likewise, when I’m dealing with professional issues, I write recommendations for my colleagues on LinkedIn. Many people I know work extremely hard without a great deal of positive reinforcement or top-down encouragement due to the nature of contracting and freelancing. No one ever tells them that they have serious skills, that they’re a pleasure to work with, and that you’re glad to have them on your IM contacts list for sticky coding questions. Nearly every company has a policy of never giving any feedback whatsoever on performance to anyone who’s not an FTE–this is to avoid legal issues. That’s good for the legal department, but doesn’t provide much in the way of constructive criticism for personal growth and improvement in skills. This is my way of helping others with this problem. Say nice things about your colleagues and professional contacts; it draws you together and provides opportunities to turn sometimes difficult situations into networking goldmines.

(2) Be courteous to recruiters, but do not let them run your life.

I am deluged with emails from recruiters on a daily basis. This is the very definition of a high-class problem; I am quite aware. Still, imagine getting a variant on this email about five times a day:

“Hi! My name is XXXX, and I am from XXXX Consulting, Inc. I came across your resume, and believe that you may be absolutely perfect for this (.NET, C#, Java, OSS, MS, frontend, backend, lead/IC/senior/junior, DBA, FTE/Contract) development position I have. Please send me an updated copy of your resume as well as current contact information, salary requirements, availability and geographical location, and a point-by-point answer to each of the ten questions below which will determine your suitability for this position.”

Now, these people are overworked, underpaid, and are dealing with a paradox whereby the people most likely to respond to them are not currently employed at high-paying and prestigious positions. However, almost all of my best contracts have come from recruiters. This means that I absolutely do want to talk to them, if they have something I need to know–but answering them all in detail would be more than 10% of my day.

I’ve come up with the perfect solution. I send a Gmail canned response to all recruiters thanking them for their interest in me, giving them a quick rundown on the positions I will accept, my base salary/equity/wage/benefit requirements, a link to my website where my resumes live in pdf and txt format (the pretty version and the text-searchable version), and my geographical location. I ask them to please send me the job description, geographical location down to the city block of the company for which they’re attempting to recruit (often they cannot give out the name of the company, but I need to know what transportation/commute will be like), and the salary.I let them know (as courteously as possible) that I will not respond to any reply that does not contain that information.

So far, it’s worked like a charm without sucking my time the way recruiting emails used to do.

(3) Maintain your relationships with the people with whom you have worked.

Facebook your friends, and LinkedIn your colleagues. Every nerd hates to hear it, but the people you know and with whom you collaborate are the best resource for gigs, recommendations, inside news, and a heads-up when you need it. THANK THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE HELPED YOU. When people point me to gigs, recommend me, help me out, and provide me with information, I thank them thoroughly and in written/gift form. Get a case of decent wine and send a bottle and a thank you card to the people who have helped you professionally. This isn’t because you want something from them; it is because you are grateful for their help without expecting that they’ll do so again. I mean it; sincere gratitude is important for its own sake.

Those three principles help me out when I am in contracts and looking for new ones, as well as closing down old contracts. Probably the biggest piece of advice I can give is this: take the time to be courteous to those who are helping you and supporting you, whether you know them or not.

Hello! This is my first post over here, so hopefully you all will be kind, and allow me to run my legal mouth off just a touch. ^.^

In honor of the Hallmark Holiday that is the fourteenth of February, I thought I’d revisit an oldie but goodie from the annals of “Seriously? It’s just a game!”

I used to play a number of MMORPGs, and the one that held my attention for the longest was a Korean-based free-to-play one called MapleStory. It was fun and cute and you could play through most of the quests without actually having to interact with too many people, at least in the States. Where things started getting a little sticky for players and the company, however, was when they introduced the ability to “marry” other players. You got special items and could go on special quests as a couple, and apparently you could have problems in real life as well.

After being dumped by her online husband in 2008, a Japanese woman hacked into his account, and deleted his character. After being interviewed by the police and admitting that she was responsible, she faced up to years  in prison or a $5000 fine. But wait a minute, I hear you saying, can you really “kill” an online character? Should that be punished the same way as “real” crimes?

It’s not clear from the various news stories who focused on the jilted lover aspect of the story, but it’s likely that the crime for which she was punished was the “hacking into his account” and not so much the “deleting his character.” In the States, we have the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) which makes it unlawful to use someone else’s login information to do illegal things, and Japan probably has similar provisions. Technically, even if she’d had his information for legitimate reasons, she still could have been prosecuted, because there is a provision about “exceeding the authority” to use that account or computer.

Even if she had been within the law in how she accessed his character, did she break the law by deleting his character? Is an avatar “human” such that it can be “killed” under the law? Well, probably not. The worst charge would probably be one of theft or conversion, or malicious mischief at the lowest end. And online games have an additional layer of complexity about who owns pixels, because with “free-to-play” and online games there isn’t a physical transfer of ownership which would constitute a “sale” in the legal sense.

Even if you pay money to use premium content (like if you want to get married in MapleStory…) the Terms of Service makes it clear that players lease the game from the developer, and don’t actually “own” any of it. So the spurned woman may have caused problems for her erstwhile lover, but the property she “destroyed” didn’t even belong to him. He was just using it under a license for as long as he followed the rules.

But “Woman Arrested for Hacking Lover’s Computer” doesn’t have the same sense of absurdity, does it?

When I came up with the idea for Fanvertise….

http://fanvertise.com/

…I worried about people stealing it until I had a chance (as I’ve done now) to trademark and patent protect the concept.

Maybe what I actually should have been worried about was no one understanding it, and hence ignoring it.

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/08/21/1729233/Google-Wave-and-the-Difficulty-of-Radical-Change

Slashdot’s article on this concept might have done me some good. In the last two years, I’ve seen some changes to traditional advertising models, but I’ve never seen anyone come up with my concept for using social media marketing to create a customized commissioned sales force.

Yay?

I’ve had a couple of interesting experiences on Facebook recently. More than anything else, the definition of “friend” is what has come to be controversial.

I tend to perceive my Facebook friends in one of four ways, and I’ll argue that most people will agree with me.

(1) Colleagues, old schoolmates, and business acquaintances that you feel obligated in some way to keep in touch with, who sometimes are overly familiar, but who can often provide useful connections or introductions around the country and in different industries and workplaces.
(2) Family that you SHOULD keep in touch with for the purposes of weddings, family reunions, and other personal obligations.
(3) Real friends—these are the people you actually talk to, invite to birthday parties, and care about their lives and relationships. If you separate out your friends into groups, then this is the one you actually read status updates from.
(4) Acquaintances, celebrities, local news sources, and people who are of use in some fashion. These are often the people who inform you of local events, gallery openings, concerts, big parties, artisans, and interesting news.

People in most social networks tend to have to utilize heuristics to deal with the constant flow of information. As for me, I am fine receiving 85-90% of relevant local news and events in order to not have to pay total attention to my Facebook/Twitter newsfeeds. Frankly, most of my friends are on Facebook, not on Twitter. As a result, I don’t tend to have conversations so much as I get soundbytes of information.

I only really track 50-60 of my friends, even though I have close to 300 people that I am connected to on social networks.

This conversation came up because sometimes there is asynchronicity in friend pairings. For instance, a Facebook friend of mine made it a habit to invite me to her dance club’s events each week. When she asked her substantial Facebook friend list why she never received any responses or RSVPs, I was the only person, I think, who was interested in the question and as a result gave her a genuine and well-thought-out response.

I told her that since she had 1000 Facebook friends, and I could see that she used her friends list as a sort of marketing tool, that I felt no real obligation to respond to invitations I perceived to be little more than a requirement of her job, and not part of her relationship with me. I think she was genuinely hurt by the fact that people had failed to respond to her invitations, but I believe that no one really thinks that someone who has invited 700 people to an event really cares whether or not one person shows up. No matter how much my friend protested that she personally selected the people she sent invitations to, I don’t really believe her, and I don’t think anyone else does either. It is impossible to maintain meaningful personal relationships with more than perhaps 100 people—and it’s stretching rather a lot for me to even try to do so with 30 or 40 people.

The truth is that the Internet is nothing more than a communication tool. Humans have never been capable of maintaining rational, close relationships with more than a clan-sized group of people; it’s how we evolved. It doesn’t matter if you’re webcamming or IMing or calling or coffee-klatsching—people make connections with only a limited amount of people. That connection list changes over time, but its existence, relevance to today’s social media, and importance, does not.