Day 21 – where I get offered a job

3 weeks in and I get a job offer, pretty good going I think. I have the weekend to think about it. And given that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush (even if the birds in the bush have really nice plumage) I will probably accept it.

For any other IT job hunters in the current climate, here’s my advice.

• Throw your CV onto every job website out there.
• Make sure everyone you know is aware you are looking for work, have no shame!
• If you have a website or blog, make it obvious you are looking for work. Play the percentages game, every person who sees you are looking for work may be a potential employer.
• Don’t demand to get paid as much as you were paid before. Assuming you’re out of work like me, your current income is zero or thereabouts, so your previous salary is pretty much irrelevant.
• Accept all interviews. Even if the job isn’t a perfect fit, it’s good to get back into the interviewing groove, which will help when a better role turns up. And who knows, a job that doesn’t appear perfect on paper may turn out to be better than expected.
• When you have an interview and you get asked about something you have no knowledge of, go off and investigate it. OK, it’s too late for that particular interview but it might come up again.
• Learn about other technologies which may have passed you by in the past. Today the guy I spoke to said he was impressed with my use of the JavaScriptSerializer class, which I’d only started playing with the day before my technical test.

Day 19 – More calls

Quite a few calls from agents today, including some jobs that sound very interesting. What I’ve noticed is that I never hear anything back about the roles that sounds particularly interesting, just the run of the mill stuff. I guess the interesting jobs get absolutely deluged with CVs so can pick and choose people who look to be perfect. My first call about Metastorm work as well, so there is some work out there on that side of my skills. And I will return to Croydon for yet another interview on Friday.

Day 18 – Bell, Doogal Bell

So little happened today that I actually answered the door to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and tried to convert them to Atheism. I did have a call from an agent wondering if I’d be interested in a contract position in Sweden and an email asking if I spoke French and would be interested in a job in Paris. Being an international man of hacking does appeal I guess, flying from nation to nation with only a laptop loaded up with Visual Studio.

Day 17 – A sweaty interview

Croydon is “Manhattan as imagined by Le Corbusier” apparently, or so my mate Jethro says. I’d agree to an extent, except I’d have to say it’s Manhattan without the glamour. And today it was a particularly sweaty unglamorous place.

I was faced with a technical test, which I quite liked since I could do it. But as is always the case with these kind of tests, there are a hundred ways to implement a solution, so it all depends whether what I’ve done resonates with the person looking at the code.

And then onto an interview, where the interviewers basically said they are looking for someone who can be a team leader, top quality developer, project manager, software architect and product manager. Oh and they don’t want to pay very much. Of course I said I could do all of these things, although I wanted to shout “you will never find anybody who meets all those requirements with the money you’ve got to offer!”. 

Day 14 – my first real interview

To be frank I thought this would be a complete train crash of an interview. I’d been asked to do a presentation on some of the work I’d done during my last job and I generally don’t feel overly confident doing presentations. So I guess it was a success because my presentation wasn’t awful. It was helped by the fact that the interviewer seemed to be checking his email most of the time I was talking.

The rest of the interview seemed to go OK, although my interview assessing antennae seem to be a little off at the moment. I met the agent afterwards and he said because there are so many candidates going after jobs, employers are getting much choosier about who they take on. Whereas in the past being a 75% match may have been enough, now they only accept a 100% match. Which may explain my incorrect assumptions about how well interviews have gone so far.

Day 13 – where my hopes are dashed

So today I had a telephone interview with a potential employer and things seemed to be going pretty well. I think you can generally tell how well an interview is going. Some times it’s clear the two of you are not really on the same wavelength, but other times it’s like you’re talking to someone who you could imagine as a friend, or at least a work mate. Then he mentioned a company I’ve done some work for recently and I thought things were going even better. In the past, quite a few of my jobs have come not necessarily from my knowledge or experience but from having some kind of connection with the company I’m interviewing with. At Metastorm, one of my former colleagues worked there. At APT, I knew the person who would become my boss. At Process Mapping, the boss was a former work mate. Of course, I’m sure that’s not the only the reason I got those jobs, but it certainly didn’t reduce my chances.

So the thing was having that connection made me think I’d at least get a face to face interview. But then the agency tells me they’ve decided not to go any further and I was somewhat disappointed. If it had been one of those awkward interviews where there is no common ground I’d have been cool with it, but now I’m sitting here wondering what did I miss, what did I say that came across badly and how do I rectify it? But then of course the next interview will be with someone completely different who has completely different requirements and a completely different perspective on who they are looking for. So it’s a different game, one where you find out the rules after the game has finished.

Day 11 – where I wonder how List<T> is implemented

Just over 5 years ago I had an interview at APT and after a mammoth interview (the longest I’ve ever experienced) the interviewer told me he thought I’d done well but he was a little disappointed that I didn’t know how the TList class in Delphi was implemented (an internal array as it happens, as opposed to a linked list). Fast forward to now and I was having a telephone interview today where the discussion turned to data structures and the difference between an array and a linked list. We discussed how a list like this could be improved to provide faster random access. I probably didn’t do too well on this, since the internals of collection classes are generally not something I’ve needed to worry about too much but I probably should think about them some more since they do seem to turn up in interviews a lot.

But after all this talk of linked lists, how is the List<T> class (or the ArrayList class for that matter) actually implemented? Well, after firing up Reflector I discovered that, just like in Delphi, these classes actually use an array internally. I can only presume the overhead of having to resize the array when more items are added is outweighed by the memory fragmentation and slow random access of a linked list. Of course if you really want a linked list, there is a LinkedList<T> class available.

Looking for work - Day 10

When I started this series of blog posts I was thinking it might be interesting because we are meant to be in the middle of a big recession. But as far as I can tell there seem to be plenty of jobs out there for people like myself. It could just be down to my impressive CV (ahem) or my tactic of throwing enough crap at the wall that some of it is bound to stick or it could just be there are still a good number of jobs available. I’ve had another two telephone interviews confirmed today so I’ve now got three telephone interviews and a face-to-face interview lined up. I’m guessing that employers will probably interview the same number of people as in the past, even if there are more CVs available to look at, they will still not want to spending all day interviewing people, so I’m guessing my chances of actually being offered a job from one these interviews are the same as they were in the past. This is just conjecture on my part of course, but it certainly makes me feel better.

Talking of my blanket bombing technique, here are the sites I have submitted my CV to. It seems that different recruiters use different websites to find candidates, so it is probably worthwhile submitting a CV to as many as possible

jobserve.co.uk

totaljobs.com

jobsite.co.uk

monster.co.uk

planetrecruit.com, jobsearch.co.uk, gisajob.com (I think these three share the same back end)

cwjobs.co.uk

technojobs.co.uk

jobs.ac.uk

Day 7 – where nothing happens

A few phone calls from agents, but nothing of note.

Day 6 – where I take a test

I spent the morning taking a programming test, sent it off to the agent (the second in a chain of agents I’ve had to pass through to get my CV to the actual employer) and he told me they’d probably get back to me in a week. It seems like no-one is in too much of a hurry to actually employ people. My one interview is over a week away, although I’ve now got a telephone interview lined up for next week which will be followed by a real interview the next day if the phone interview goes well.

I did like the agent’s story of how one person who took this test (for a C# position) actually implemented his solution in Perl… It was quicker apparently. I’m sure he probably solved the problem in 3 incomprehensible lines of code, but he didn’t get the job. 

Looking for work – day 5

Perhaps the job market isn’t as bad as people are saying, I’ve managed to get myself an interview. Admittedly not the best paying job in the world, but it’s enough to cover the bills. And I’ve still got a few other potentials looking positive.

And going off at a tangent, I’ve got an idea for an application somebody could write. I’d do it myself, but I don’t have time right now. Logging into all these job websites to update my CV is a right pain. Keeping track of all the jobs I’ve applied for and all the conversations I’ve had with agents is also hard work. So an application that helps manage all these things would be most useful. It should be able to store all your login details for job websites, then I should be able to do a search across all the sites and also update my CV on all the sites in one action. It should also be able to keep track of job applications, link them to emails in Outlook and so on.

Looking for work – day 4

It occurs to me that having Metastorm BPM plastered all over my CV isn’t really helping in my job search. If a Metastorm job does come up then I’d hope I’d be in a good position to get it, but the fact is there aren’t any Metastorm jobs around at the moment. And most agencies (and potential employers for that matter) don’t have a clue what it is so they probably drop my CV in the bin, since they’ve almost certainly got a big pile of CVs that match their requirements more closely. To be fair, I’d do the same thing myself. So more CV tweaking is required I think. It seems like uploading a new CV to the job websites might trigger an email to agents anyway, so it may make sense to keep updating it, to keep myself at the front of the queue.

Agency quote of the day - “Winsocks are also important as well”

Looking for work – day 3

Things I learned today

• There are still some jobs available for hackers like myself
• Some of them are potentially quite interesting. In fact one actually seemed pretty exciting, not necessarily for the work itself but for the company who do something I think could change the face of one of our industries, in a good way.
• Apparently having an A in Maths A-Level is considered a good thing, even though I took the exam 19 years ago and have forgotten everything about it. Take heed young uns!

Some stats

• Number of agents I’ve talked to – lots
• Number of jobs I’ve put myself forward for – several
• Number of interviews lined up – none…

Looking for work – day 2

I dunnow, but this may be interesting to people, so I’ve decided to blog about my attempts to find a new job. Given the current economic situation, I suspect it may take a while and as my life may start to mirror ‘Fun with Dick and Jane’, it could get entertaining (a film I ironically saw just a couple of months ago at the ‘Baltimore or bust’ conference…)

It will be interesting for me, for at least one reason. I’ve never had to look for a job during a recession. I was having a wild time at university during the last recession, it all passed me by in a drunken haze.

So what have my first moves been? I’ve uploaded my latest CV to Jobserve, Jobsite and TotalJobs and applied for a few jobs. I’ve also asked a few people on LinkedIn to recommend me. Being a Sunday, I obviously haven’t heard back from any of the agencies, but hopefully tomorrow things will really start to kick off for real.

Looking for work

I am in the market for a job. Ideally I’m after a .NET development role in London, but I’ve also got a lot of Metastorm BPM experience so anything in that area would suit me. You can find my CV here.

The search for some page rank

I played around with bing today to see if it’s any good. I was pleased to see that a search for Metastorm brought up our forum and the FreeFlow web page on the first page, so clearly bing is a complete success. Or perhaps not, the image search brought up a photo of their former CEO, who hasn’t been there for many years.

But it did make me go off and check the same search against some other search engines (if you try this yourself, you may well get different results, I’d be interested to know if they are wildly different). Yahoo brings up the Process Mapping website on the first page, Cuil has Jerome’s book on the first page and puts the Process Mapping website on the second page and Ask has the forum on the second page (although for some reason they think I’m Dutch).

Finally I checked the other search engine that you may have heard of. OK, it’s the only search engine that matters. And we are way down the search rankings (page 5 for the forums, page 4 for FreeFlow). But the weird thing is if I search on Google’s UK site, FreeFlow and the forums are on the first two pages. That may make some sense for the FreeFlow site since it’s hosted in the UK, but the forums are hosted in Australia. Next I changed my search term to ‘Meta storm’ and was asked ‘Did you mean: Metastorm’, and although all the results were related to Metastorm, both the FreeFlow website and the forums now appeared on the first two pages. We also rank highly on searches for ‘Metastorm development’ and ‘Metastorm consultancy’ so it seems odd that we are so low down on that one search.

So is it a cock-up, conspiracy, some weirdness in the ranking algorithm or have we been marked down for doing something bad? I don’t think we’ve employed any bad practices in our attempts to improve our ranking and if we had, I would imagine that would impact all our rankings, not just on one search, so I think we can eliminate the last option. But I have no idea about the other three.

New look JobStats site

Not sure when it happened, but JobStats has got a new look. This is the best site to find out about the health of the IT job market in the UK. From looking at the site, it’s clear they now have some issues with their data (or calculations) since some of the average rates are clearly ridiculous. And if they’re not, I really should be getting into doing SAP consultancy. That said, the graph showing the number of advertised jobs is truly terrifying, since there are now fewer jobs advertised than at any time in the last ten years. If you consider that probably many more of the total jobs available are now advertised online than ten years ago makes that graph even more depressing viewing. Lets hope I don’t need to to look for a new job any time soon… (and that is really tempting fate)

Baltimore skyline

There’s an advert for Microsoft on currently that shows a kid taking some photos and with a few clicks stitching them together into a panorama. All thanks to the ease of use of Vista. So when I was in Baltimore this week I took some photographs to attempt to do the same thing. After all, if some kid can do it, I’m sure I should be able to. But when I fired up Windows Photo Gallery I was unable to find any options to make a panorama. So I fired up Windows Live Photo Gallery instead and that did have the option. In fact it was pretty damn simple to create a panorama, as you can see above.

But two things bother me. Why are Microsoft advertising Windows by showing the capabilities of an application that doesn’t ship with the operating system? And why are there two different photo gallery applications which seemingly do the same thing but are subtly different?

Documenting Metastorm procedures

You may be aware of the procedure documenter produced by Process Mapping, the company I work for. If not, have a look. It’s a Designer add-in, which means a menu item is added to the Designer’s Tools menu that kicks off the documenter and generates the HTML documentation. I spent a little time today extracting the HTML generation code from the add-in assembly into a separate assembly. This means that the code can be called from anywhere you like, which leads to the possibility of automating your documentation generation. Combine this with FreeFlow and you can automate the documentation of all your published procedures. The following console application demonstrates how this could be achieved.

using System;
using FreeFlow.Administration;
using ProcessMapping.ProcedureDocumentationGenerator;

namespace DocumentProcedures
{
  class Program
  {
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
      Server server = new Server();
      server.Connect("sa", "a", "Metastorm");
      foreach (Procedure proc in server.Procedures)
      {
        Console.WriteLine("Processing " + proc.Name);

        string filename = "c:\\temp\\" + proc.Name + ".xep";
        proc.Versions.LatestVersion.SaveToFile(filename);

        string htmlFilename = "c:\\temp\\html\\" + proc.Name + ".html";
        DocumentationGenerator generator = new DocumentationGenerator();
        generator.IncludeMapImages = true;
        generator.Generate(filename, htmlFilename);
      }
    }
  }
}

I believe later versions of SQL Server allow the execution of .NET code from within the database, so I would imagine it is possible to add a trigger to the eProcedure table that kicks off this code whenever a new record is added, so documentation will always be up to date.

Of course the procedure documenter isn’t a silver bullet. To generate useful documentation, some work will be required to ensure the notes in you procedures contain useful information.

One of the problems with working from home

However much it snows this evening, I can’t call the office in the morning claiming the weather is too bad for me to get to work.