The Cowgirl Coder

I will be appearing on February 8th instead. Stay safe; do not drive!

I have a problem. Hundreds of people every week contact me to try to get me to work for them.

In an economic downturn, this may sound like what I call a ‘high-class problem.’ Noted examples of high-class problems include: paying taxes on your lottery winnings, being unable to make up your mind between your Harvard and Yale college acceptance letters, and getting a shopping cart dent in your Rolls Royce.

It may sound like I should have absolutely no problem finding my next contract or FTE position, but the truth is that I am bewildered by the sheer quantity of irrelevant job postings and shady headhunters by which I am besieged on a weekly basis. This is no joke: I have hired a remote assistant whose sole job for me is to go through all my emails related to job postings. I have no way to process them all and still get coding, blogging, eating, and living done. I have an obligation to follow up on each posting that fits my skill set, and I am trying my best to do so…but there’s no way to spend hours per response following up on thousands of postings–99.7% of which are irrelevant due to location, skill set, or compensation level.

Then, we come to the issue of rude and unethical recruiters. I’ve had some recent encounters that inspired this series; I’ll be describing that situation as I discuss the ethics of recruitment from the other side–the people being recruited. I’m bombarded by recruiters who have the incentive to email as many people as possible, since they have no reason to care about the skill sets or fit of the people they’re slotting into jobs. They’re paid by the number of people they place, not the quality of the placement or its duration. That doesn’t add up to a recruitment culture of individualized attention and courtesy. I’m also constantly hit by emails demanding my time and effort without so much as a ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’

Finally, there are rules that good recruiters follow which instantly get my attention and cause me to work with them. I’ll let you know what traits a recruiter possesses to make me work with them again and again.

So, over the next several days, I’ll be posting a multi-part series on how to recruit me. I want to be hired; people certainly want to hire me–so why is it so hard to be paired with a recruiter who has actually read my resume and thinks I’d be a great fit for their open position?

Welcome to the joy of being heavily recruited by thousands of clueless and careless headhunters who have your email address and phone number.

Here’s something I didn’t think I’d be saying today:

My resume isn’t perfect.

There are three companies I’ve been dealing with over the last five weeks who were all based in multiple countries. I never thought to add my multiple language proficiencies to my resume; I have a hard time keeping my resume under four pages as it is, and that’s with leaving off references and most of my educational qualifications.

However, I’m near-fluent in French, quite good in German, and have a serious background in Mandarin, Spanish, Greek, and a smattering of a half-dozen other languages. I was coaching a female developer three weeks ago who was applying to a company with multiple locations worldwide–including Latin America, and never thought to tell her that her proficiency in Spanish should certainly come up during her interview.

As companies start to expand and acquire, you may find that your four years of German (no matter how rusty) can pay off. If you’re proficient in an Asian language, make sure it shows up on your resume in the skills section. If you speak Klingon, email me. I need a translation of Jabberwocky for an ongoing joke I have with my father.

Oh, wait.

Ladies, before I go any further, be aware that I have an instructional DVD up at:

Tech Interview Help

So, this isn’t an entirely disinterested post, but I do want to add some information for you.

One of the best things you can do to prepare for interviews is to actually dev with the SDK and API that the company produces. I am in the Seattle area, and if I had an interview with Amazon S3, the first thing I’d be doing is setting up a bucket (not that I haven’t already done fifteen of these for various storage reasons) and transferring data to learn their system. I’d know the transfer protocols, the encryption levels, the likely physical network structure, and JFS if at all possible–at a BARE minimum.

If you have an interview with Microsoft’s IE10 team, you’d better be in front of IE6, 7, 8, and 9, knowing what major updates occurred between browser versions, which HTML versions were implemented where, security holes and how to plug them, and what cross-browser issues remain to be addressed, and that’s not even the bare minimum.


public tip
{
//Use the code of the team with which you're interviewing before you walk in the door.
}


What an amazing panel! Today, I, Liz Dahlstrom, and Qian Yi did a panel on “A Career As A Lady Coder.”

We had a great time; the young ladies who asked questions were thoughtful, imaginative, and genuinely interested in careers as programmers. We hope that we encouraged you, challenged you, and mentored you, as we ourselves were mentored by the ladies who inspired us.

Best of luck!

For those of you looking for more help with technical interviews, head to Tech Interview Help.

Part of the maze of legal knowledge programmers are expected to understand and integrate into their work involves intellectual property and the rights surrounding the creation of code and processes.

A friend of mine who created Girl Gamer, Esq. is an attorney who specializes in intellectual property and a fellow chick nerd. Anne-Marie is going to be guest-posting here at The Cowgirl Coder to you coder types, and I’ll be pontificating vociferously over on her soapbox to her law geek friends. Our occasionally overlapping subjects of attention make us ideal for cross-posting, and you should see some great comment threads come out of this collaboration. Next post by Anne-Marie Marra, an honorary Cowgirl Coder!

I’ve enabled Feed Facebook, Leave Facebook as a WordPress plugin; it’s a plugin designed to provide excerpts of blog posts to Facebook instead of the full content.

The idea of having a blog was to point people to the blog, and comments on my Facebook Notes do not centralize discussions. I liked the notion of multiple posts from the same blog entry, but the problem with that was that I have had the same discussion in two separate locations.

Let’s hope this works better. For those looking to do the same, scroll to the bottom of your Notes section in Facebook, click on the ‘Import a Blog’ help link, and use the URL from the FFLF plugin in the field.

How does one go about getting a logo made? I’ve gotten a couple of tentative offers, some concepts, and a few ridiculous quotes, but no one seems to do real logo work anymore. I’ve got two people promising drawings, but I haven’t actually seen anything yet.

Does anyone have recommendations for me? I’d really like to see some concept drawings of a nerdy superheroine. Comment on this post if you’re interested; you can use your Facebook login to do so.

#!/bin/bash

book=$1

[[ -z $book ]] && { echo “No argument supplied, exiting!”; exit 1; }

[[ ! -e $book ]] && { echo “Can’t find a file with the name $book, exiting”; exit 1; }

title=${book%.*}
bookcounter=0
linecounter=0
sed -i ‘s/\r$//’ “$book”
while read line
do
((linecounter+=1))
if [[ $linecounter -gt 300 && -z "$line" || -z "$output_file" ]]; then
linecounter=0
((bookcounter+=1))
formatted_bookcounter=$(printf “%03d” $bookcounter)
output_file=”${title}${formatted_bookcounter}.txt”
echo “…starting segment $output_file”
echo “$title – segment $formatted_bookcounter” > $output_file
echo “===================” >> $output_file
echo “” >> $output_file
fi
echo “$line” >> $output_file
done < “$book”