Geek on Two Wheels

“Unfulfilling, banal, and, worst of all, pointless”: this is how I described my more recent feelings towards software development in a previous post.  Displaying such public disdain towards a very key aspect of my profession, however, is quite clearly unproductive when seeking reemployment.  Nevertheless, my words were intentional and truthful; I don’t erase past confessions solely because they have become present liabilities.

So, lets try and pin point why.  It may be that the current software business culture is fundamentally incompatible with my personal goals and philosophies, or that a string of bad luck has seriously jaded my subconscious feelings about the profession.  You may sympathize with the following, or dismiss me as a huge pussy that needs to suck it up.  Whatever the case, it’s time for a rant.

But first, watch this: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us.  If you’ve already seen it, watch it again.

Financially, being a software developer has netted, essentially, zero.  Despite emerging from university a dozen moons ago with almost a year and a half of professional experience and free of debt, I have been unable to provide for my own living expenses since sometime in 2008.  Being laid off twice in less than as many years has certainly not helped matters.  Forget trying to make an impact on a team: being accepted in to team in the first place has never been anything short of near-impossible.  Even before the market collapse, my first co-op position did not involve working with software development at all, and my second attempt yielded only a couple interviews, despite having extensive programming experience outside of school.  Worse still, I’m paralyzed by a—perhaps irrational—fear that if I spend significant time in a field away from development I may never gain entrance again, especially having not yet made it past the “junior” phase of my career.  Does it not, after all,  signal that one is uninterested in pursuing programming as a career, and worse, that they might not be good enough?  Of course, it’s also time spent not getting more experience; with professional experience apparently favoured above most else, people with luck like mine appear to be perpetually “inexperienced” enough to gain more of it.

That, however, is not the cause of my shift in attitude.  Hang on to your tower of hats, because here come more words.

I became a programmer because I was intrigued with the idea of making computers do neat things.  Not computing, as through toolkits, libraries, and frameworks, but computers in the literal, physical sense.  I don’t mind having to know things like strides, fences, and word alignment; I enjoyed assembly programming on an 8-bit, single-accumulator microprocessor; I even once applied to be a firmware developer in Saskatoon.  Saskatoon, for crying out loud.  Alas, the modern software market has very little room for people with my kind of disposition, but that’s OK, because I kept myself occupied with mastering novel, shiny new things.

But, to what purpose?  Am I a better person for knowing how to work six different web frameworks instead of just two?  Can I derive happiness from knowing one more obscure, undocumented bug in PHP?  Is that mouldy block of cheese still in the fridge, or did I already toss that out?  I’ll just come right out and say it: I don’t care about the web development.  I find no joy in mastering more JavaScript, CSS, RoR, Twisted, or whatever database that’s currently the rage.  No, I won’t build you a website.

Furthermore, it frustrates me when job postings list “self-motivated” as a requirement, as if to deny any notion that programmers can—and do—derive motivation from the work itself.  On the whole, the divide between what developers need to thrive and what management are willing to provide is still as wide as ever.  For every story I hear about awesome work places and interesting work, I hear two more about micromanaging bosses, design-by-marketing, unreasonable workloads, or leadership by incompetence.

Finally, I have passions outside of hacking, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that none of them involve computing.  There are things I can do to improve my chances of employment (spend all my time at a computer working on open source projects, move to Ontario, give up computing and go back to school, etc) but most of them, I feel, must come not as mere compromises, but by giving up some fundamental part of my identity.  It’s a cost I’m not yet willing to pay.

I haven’t given up, though.  Not yet.

Despite the unbearable tools and brain-dead designs, all the terrible stories, and all the depressing weeks not knowing how much longer I may have to make my savings last, I’m still trying my chances in the hopes that, this time, it’s going to be great; that this time, there’ll be interesting projects for years to come; that this time, I can find purpose in what I do that aligns with my own.

Will I succeed?  Who knows.  What I do know, though, is that I am no longer afraid to complain out loud.

I have been job hunting for the better part of six months now.  Taking the overall health of the job market into account, this doesn’t seem like a big deal.  However, as a new graduate who qualified for but managed to miss the opportunity to receive employment insurance benefits, the whole thing is an ongoing ordeal that has been crippling, exhausting, demoralizing, and confusing.

It’s this last point that I would like to elaborate on: why is there such an asymmetry of expectations for job seekers when compared to those in positions to hire?

(Of course, there is a clear difference in the volume of applications an employer may receive and how many simultaneous application processes an employee-hopeful is going through at the moment.  Let’s assume that the in-person interview has happened, and there is no expectation of a follow-up interview.)

Through the various career preparation courses and workshops I have had to endure, there was a consistent message that I, as a job seeker, should do my best to research and learn more about the potential employer and the position in question before sitting down at the interview.  However, in most cases, the true nature of a position is not revealed until the interview is happening, and, all things considered, this is reasonable.  What isn’t reasonable is the fact that employers are not held up to the same expectations.

Truth be told, half the time, I am unconvinced my interviewer has even read my relatively short, 1.2 page resumé beyond scanning the headers.  I am, however, fairly convinced that none have taken the time actually investigate my open source work.  Some don’t even seem to understand that I had just finished school, and unlikely to have years of professional experience.

However, this is a minor annoyance compared to the lack of communication following an interview.  Despite the promises of “get back to you next week” and “staying in touch”, only some ever do.   I am not expecting feedback on my interview performance or tips on how to do better next time; a courtesy one-liner will suffice. Paradoxically, but not surprisingly, the probability of being notified of a rejection seem to be inversely proportional to the size of the company in question.  Empirically, I have had exactly zero rejection messages from companies big enough to have dedicated HR staff.  Most of the smaller programming shops have been good in this respect, but the score is not quite perfect.

Granted, I have not requested for a response when none were received in the assured time frame.  And, frankly, why should I?  If I were responsible for making the final decision on a business transaction of such a scale, I will have the common courtesy to notify the other parties affected regardless of outcome.  However, as a job seeker, the expectation of such a reciprocation is apparently foolish.

The mind boggles.

I will end with this list of wishes and advice for employers:

• If you are collecting resumes over a month or more, and plan to have phone screenings, don’t leave it all until after the deadline.  We might not remember having applied with you at all.
• If you have brought in candidates in for face-to-face interviews with the expectation that the outcome is Hire or No Hire, do let them know regardless of the outcome.  You wouldn’t leave a business partner hanging like that, would you?
• Don’t take weeks making the final decision after the interviews are held.  In the odd chance there is a good reason, let people know.
• Research us.  If we have impressive stuff to show, we would, and it’s not always the case that it should belong on a resumé.
• Treat this with the same professionalism as you would any other business relationship.

I do not like online social networking.

When it comes to interpersonal interaction, I have always preferred mine to be in meat-space, conducted over a few cold beers, some hearty food, and generally with more vocalization and eye contact than TCP and text rendering.

That said, in this day and age, especially for one with my occupational slant, having a positive online presence is generally recommended, if not expected.  And, whether I like it or not, these new-fangled social networks are a good way to keep in touch with old friends and new acquaintances alike, not to mention being fairly effective for organizing relatively larger scale gatherings.

So, for my own sake, I’ve gotta put some effort into  this whole shebang. That means blogging on this here blog, photoing on flickr, linking-in on LinkedIn, denting on identi.ca, and at least being aware of what “Facebooking” even means for the month.  That’s a lot of nouns to verb, and I’m a very lazy man.

Luckily, integration tools exist. After some futzing, my Facebook status is now updated via identi.ca (without the annoying “dented: ” prefix) via XMPP via Pidgin and the blog is being aggregated to both LinkedIn and Facebook.  With the latest redesign of the latter, I would rather have my blog entries show up in News Feeds as links instead of Notes posts, but that’s something I will have to investigate for later.  As for Flickr, Facebook does a decent job scraping thumbnails when posting Flickr links, so doing it manually will have to do for now; in fact, I think I prefer the extra control over having it happen automagically.

And, finally, updating my main page to contain all the appropriate links.  The only things left to do is to create a good profile photo of myself, and put up a resume.

Now if only they would all become OpenID consumers, I wouldn’t have to log in to them separately…

My good friend Allen over at antipode has recently decided to say a few words about the new Firefox 3 address bar.

I, for one, agree with him. I love it, and have gone to relatively great lengths to keep it.

An obvious rebuttal to the nay-sayers is that URLs don’t always share the same prefix as what is actually available at the address. And, although I’ve become trained to memorize the former instead of the latter, it always annoyed me that I had to.

gianttip? cad-c? apfo? No, what I want are “Order of the Stick“, “Ctrl-Alt-Del Comic“, and “One Piece Manga“.

In this day and age, I don’t want to care that the URL is moofs.com instead of moof.com, or .net, or actually baz.co.tv/content/random/moof—what I want is “Clarus the Dogcow“, and it’s about time computers started doing what we mean instead of what we say.

Old habits are hard to break, but there are some habits worth breaking. Should we all go back to driving flywheel-less manual transmission cars with no power steering, too? (Me, I prefer paddle shifters)

If you’ve been following any of the major user-contributed blogs/news sites in the last few days, you’ll most likely be aware of a certain “16-digit hexadecimal number” that has been the center of some pretty interesting happenings.

Now, here’s the problem: for anyone that’s passed counting-without-your-fingers, there are clearly 32 alphanumerical characters in the sequence. Folks, that’s a 16-byte hexadecimal number, not 16-digits.

Getting the units correct, as always, is important.

Just read it.

Children of Men—go watch it.

Now.

So, wearing my flector band to reduce the chance of being ran over by a car while crossing the Hastings/Kensington intersection didn’t exactly work.

First, a white van cut me off. Okay, I was still a good ten feet away, so it wasn’t exactly cutting me off. However, seconds after, the grey Matrix next in line proceeded to make the same turn, without stopping, driving by, literally, three feet in front of me. On the plus side, he did actually see me after he had sped up and slowed down to apologize. On the down side, well, I almost got ran over, again.

At this point, I’m confused more than anything.

The intersection is well lit. And, although I had originally theorized that my silhouette is not clear due to a dark background, that didn’t seem too plausible when I looked back at the intersection from the other side. Despite my noticing that the reflector does not work too well under lightning with a yellow hue, I was spotted perfectly fine by another car making a left some blocks later, in an area that is clearly less lit than Hastings.

Next time, I’m bringing my red blinker as well, and, if that doesn’t work, I’m going to bring a flash light and shine it directly at the driver’s face. Failing that, well, I’m crafty with electronics…

Here’s a interesting statistics for you: for every time that I’ve walked home, alone, at night from the Hastings/Kensington bus stop, I have almost been hit by a car at the above intersection.

Seriously, what the fuck?

The two times that I’ve walked home at night from that bus stop, I was almost hit by a left-turning car both times. Yes, it is true that my jacket is black, and I wear dark-coloured pants. I will also accept that I may be hard to see despite the intersection being fully lit and the fact that I was, at one point, in the path of the headlight of the vehicles that almost hit me. So, at least the first time around, I’m not going to claim that I am free of all faults.

However, in tonight’s incident, there were two other people walking directly behind me, both of whom were carrying umbrellas. Not see the guy in the black jacket? Fine. But how the bloody fuck do you miss a group of three people crossing a lit intersection, while heading in their direction?!

Had I not been cautious due to the previous incident, I would surely be, at best, interviewed for a police report, and, at worst, spending the night in a hospital. Juding from the fact that one of the other two walkers bumped into me when I stopped, I’m fairly certain that they would have at least walked into the side of the car.

From now on, I’m wearing my reflective band when walking home at night. I’d also like to carry a bazooka around so I can teach the fucker a lesson if it ever happens again, but I’m sure the law frowns upon things like that.

1. Send artworks in binary-embedded EPS, defeating the entire purpose of being requested a vector image to begin with.
2. Not send in a one-colour image for t-shirt printing use, despite clearly being indicated to do so.
3. Not only neglect to send a real vector image, but send one that is semi-broken and cannot not even be loaded into the the respective vector image editors of both myself as well as the person doing the actual printing.