thirdbIT

Today I happened to see a job description that didn’t suck, so I thought I’d give the company posting it a bit of free publicity in thanks. (Publicity, hah! That would imply that people are reading this blog…;-) Ontela is looking for a “demo hacker”. Though a bit verbose (*I should talk*, blabbermouth that I am), their job description gives actual examples of what the job may entail, and actual useful details about what kind of working conditions to expect:

Moderate travel (15%) may be required to get the job done – flying out to install something for a customer, for example, or coming along on to a tradeshow to make sure everything works. Also, as a young startup, we do work long hours-not just nine-to-five. In some cases, you may even need to be available during weird hours, for example if the team is off demoing in a strange time zone.

In other news, commenter Audrey points to a job description she sawthat was not bloated with business-speak, just with bias. (And Audrey: yay, thanks! Our first comment!, and sorry I am not at railsconf to keep you company with all the boys, but I didn’t want to schlep the baby. )

Here we are, in Internet Boom 2.0. As they are fond of saying on Battlestar Galactica, “all of this has happened before; all of this will happen again.” Join a fabulous startup, get rich quick. Take your dogs to work. We have a work hard, play hard atmosphere, and all the free $junk_food you can eat. Just completed our second round of funding.

And so goes the business cycle.

Meanwhile, how do we figure out what we want to do? We can do many things. We could advertise ourselves as general all-around techie problem-solvers, but isn’t that a bit vague? A friend with an interactive agency keeps trying to convince us to learn ActionScript 3. We keep trying to get it up for the idea, but we just can’t. If one of us could, the other could go along, but neither of us can.

We wouldn’t call ourselves expert at anything. We’re generalists by temperament, and by circumstance. It’s harder and harder to be a specialist these days: you start specializing, and your specialty goes overseas, or out-of-style. Or someone discovers that you are great at requirements analysis and there you are, talking to users, when what you wanted to learn to do better was write code.

On the other hand, our non-specialist skills are a lot better than many people’s specialties. I keep thinking my skills must be a bit rusty, given that I’ve been working mostly as a hausfrau for a couple of years now. Then a friend will tell me some story about how he discovered that the reason someone’s code was running so slow is that it was making a ton of completely unnecessary database calls. And I think, “well, duh.” Which reminds me that actually, I may not be up-to-date on my technologies, but I’m not, fundamentally, a dumbass. Which a disturbing number of software developers are. I like solving problems with code. I like solving problems with other peoples’ code even better. I like working with other people to solve problems with code. And I like working with people to solve their problems without code. And finding out exactly what problem they’re trying to solve when they come to me with some ill-conceived notion about some code they want me to write.

In general, I’m remembering how much I truly enjoyed writing software.

Which, getting back to figuring out what I’m passionate about, should tell me that even though I write great documents, I don’t want work that’s just about writing documents. I want work where I get to write code.

When I was a kid, I thought I’d be a novelist when I grew up. I was very sure of that. In college I instead became very sure that I would be a university professor, an anthropologist. My friend Nitzan and I would start a new school of thought, neo-structuralism. It would be all the rage. We would be incomprehensible and profound.

I ended up writing code because Max thought I’d like it. I don’t think he thought I’d end up a software developer. Who knows what it means to end up anything, anyway, these days, when everyone tells us to be flexible and expect to have a dozen different careers in our lives. What does ‘career’ even mean in those circumstances? Actually, what did career ever mean? Max’s father says that the whole concept of a career, as we think of it, was invented in the 70s to get more unpaid work out of white-collar employees. It’s not enough to put in our hours at the office – we also have to advance our careers. We do this not just by putting in extra hours, but by having an advertorial online presence. We have to brand ourselves and then sell sell sell. I resent this. Working on a SafeForWork blog, building my online brand, networking… there are so many things I’d really rather do with my time. And yet.

One must have money.

So I consider my brand. I consider Max’s brand. I think about what **our** brand would be, the secret that would make hiring us, as more than two minds (a *bit* more, you see), attractive.

When I figure it out, I’ll be sure to let you know.

I look at a lot of job descriptions. If the perfect employee jobs came up, Max and/or I would take them. We are also always on the lookout for interesting contracts, cool companies, and weird projects. For clients who want the work done, and don’t care if I bring a nursing infant to a meeting…For work opportunities with the potential for exponential and renumerative growth. For a fast-paced, take-no-prisoners, work hard-play hard up-and-coming, learning organization. Wait, no, scratch those last two sentences.

__What we’re looking for is job descriptions that are not full of crap.__

Most job descriptions are as tedious to read as most resumes. Do they say *anything*? Can even the people who write them stand to read them? I’ll be honest - I cannot bear to read my own resume, or Max’s. Or anyone else’s really. Even the best-written resumes I’ve seen are so bland my four-year-old would eat them without complaint. That’s *bland*, baby. Same for job descriptions. Occasionally I send my resume to a company because they had a puzzle in their job description — Athena Health had a fun one) or because they have an opening for “General Rock Star” (ZoomInfo’s clever recruiter Martin Burns attracted me with that one). The rest of the time I think, “eh, I’d rather be wiping up baby poop.”

I would like a world in which no one was counseled to pepper their resume with impactful verbs, and companies did not seek “ideal candidates” who “posess excellent communication skills” and are “self-motivated.” Resumes and job descriptions would be formatted in a kind of work-yaml:

job-title: senior software developer
    skills: RoR, mod_perl, MySQL
    experience: 4-6 years
    hours:  40 hours for salary negotiations, 55 if you ever want a raise or bonus
    location: Burlington, in a hideous office complex where the only food is a Panera
    commute: 30 minutes, door to door (i.e., at least an hour each way)
    boss: hates confrontation, won’t tell you if you’re screwing up. Otherwise nice.
    benefits: good for now, but next year we’ll cut out prescription drug coverage
    coworkers: pretty smart, will expect you to know how the Sox are doing this year.

resume: Amy Newell
    keywords: Java, Oracle, RoR, JSP, HTML, workflow, FDA compliance, project management
    previous_employers: Newell Household,
                        Millennium Pharmaceuticals,
                        Abuzz Technologies,
                        Harvard Extension School,
                        Harvard Medical School
    education:  humanities degree, summa, Harvard College.
                Software classes at Harvard Extension,
                vague thought of getting Masters there till life got in the way.
                O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online.
    good_at:    talking, writing, coding, training, requirements
    experience: mom brought home apple 2+ when I was 7.
                Husband brought home heapsort 7 years ago, been software developer ever since.
    quirks: nursing infant, hate crowds, startle easily, don’t like gadgets
    projects: Teaching Fellow for Data Structures class.
              Experiment Management Software for Molecular Pathology Department.
              Clinical Exam for Fourth Year Medical Students.

That’s it. I couldn’t resist putting in some jokey parts, but if you take those out I think we’ve really got a solution to the heartbreak of job and contract-hunting. Let’s stop bombarding one another with “Implemented Tracking System that increased revenue by 17% in 6 months” and “Must be a team player.” Let’s quit with “Detail-oriented”, “compensation package”, “in search of talented individuals” and “demonstrates expertise”. Please, no more “performs a variety of tasks” or “helped to grow the business”. Let’s ban “methodologies”, “proactive”, “interpersonal skills”, and “highly motivated”. I’ve been reading Jakob Nielsen’s website, and he has a nice quote from Winston Churchill: “Short words are best, and the old words when short are best of all.”

The thing about resumes and job descriptions is that there’s really no hope that most of what we say in them is going to be particularly useful in matching people to work. All the interesting, useful things to know about jobs, and about people doing jobs, come out later, after everyone’s already committed. So can’t we all just cut the crap?

The Boston Globe reports that not only should I have been making about 140K for each year I’ve been a stay-at-home-mom, but that everyone wants to hire me as soon as I decide I no longer want to stay at home:

“Mothers are not only talented; they’re experienced managers, motivators, decision makers and client specialists after spending time in both the work force and as a mother,” Salary.com senior vice president Bill Coleman said in a statement.

That’s why I list hausfrau on my LinkedIn profile. Unfortunately, like most hausfraus, i am grossly underpaid.

We are in the market for one of those scanner/copier/fax machine/printer/microwave thingies. Today we were looking at some at Best Buy.

“Oh,” I said, “We can’t buy one here, though. Best Buy just did a hideous thing.”

“What was that?” asked Max. “Fired a bunch of their sales associates because they had too much seniority and made 50 cents an hour too much money.”

“Ick,” said Max. “You’re right, let’s not buy from Best Buy.”

“And I’ll post a blog entry explaining why.”

Except that when I got home and started writing this blog entry and tried to find a link to the news item about how Best Buy laid off its workers, I couldn’t find one. How come? Because it wasn’t Best Buy, it was Circuit City.

Which is good, because Best Buy is conveniently close to us, and Circuit City isn’t.

One reason Max is not so sure that we should ever go into business ourselves is that it obviously requires sales (”You had your own corporation back in the day, sweetie,” I say to him. “Yeah, but I didn’t have to sell myself much.” says Max. Or, as another friend of ours says, you can just barnacle yourself to some other business that takes care of the sales and farms work out to you.)

People who are good at sales seem to be from some alternate universe, and the idea of having to spend a lot of time selling ourselves is just ick. We resent the idea that not only are we forced to work for a living (and do all the stuff that actually accomplishing stuff at work entails, not to mention sitting through ugly slideshows with fancy and useless ‘effects’, eating Trader Joe’s cookies that someone left by the water cooler just because they’re there, and waiting for three days for the helpdesk to finish setting up a login that you know takes exactly two minutes of effort to accomplish) — not only are we forced to work for a living, but in our free time we must work on working. See my thoughts on the meaning of “career” (is it cheating if I add a link to something later, when I’ve actually written it?) We have a bunch of other stuff we’d like to do besides sell ourselves. For example, here I am, writing this blog entry for our “professional presence” blog, which, as noted previously, everyone says we have to have these days. But we have an unprofessional blog too (no, I’m not telling you where it is, go find it yourself if you’re so damn nosy. Or just click here to read all the deep dark secrets about us that you’d discover on it. ) And maybe I’d rather be spending this time working on the other blog, or studying my French verbs, or weeding my garden, or playing with my kids. But noooo, we have to have a brand.

How will we come up with a brand when we resent and distrust the whole notion of brands?

Why should I even be writing about this? Because I’m sure we’re not the only shy marketing-averse techie people who are hung up on the whole “creating a brand” thing everyone’s always telling us to do, and are thus holding ourselves back from being able to make money in the simplest, most pleasant, most efficient way possible.

First we have to get past all these marketing types telling us we need to have a brand. Brands are fine for those people, obviously, from some other universe, but why should we have to have one? We don’t want to do marketing. We just want to interview our users to see what their ridiculous desires (uh, I mean requirements) are, draw some screen mockups and non-UML-compliant app diagrams, write some code, configure some stuff, make some useful docs, and be done. (See how sneaky I am: Reqs. Code. Docs. Done.)

Once again, Amy Hoy comes to the rescue. (She gave me my first Ruby pep-talk, on the first day I started learning Ruby, oh, a month ago. Not that she knows me or anything.) Amy Hoy tells me all about pimpin’:

Oh blech, I can hear you thinking, an article on marketing. But wait a moment. Among geeky types, the word “marketing” has an evil reputation, I know. But pimpin’ ain’t marketing.

Pimpin’ goes oh-so-much further.

The act of marketing products is often taken to mean creating desire where there isn’t any, creating dissatisfaction in the viewer/reader/whatever, manufacturing needs and generally trying to create a false image of a product that will convince a viewer he just haaaas to have that thing. Archetypes: misleading beauty ads, “lifestyle” soda ads, and Ronco.

Now, I disagree with the above definition, but that’s the reputation the word has and I’m going to just let that one lie.

The act of pimpin’ products, on the other hand, never involves any kind of questionable tactics. Pimpin’ means putting your product’s best foot forward. Accen-tuate the pos-it-ive. It means not shirking from self-promotion, and shouting your product’s position, features and benefits loud and clear. It means making the acquisition (download, purchase, whatever) process as simple as possible. It also means having a very non-murky message. Archetype: any time when you can get in, download the product/information you want, and get out in under 60 seconds.

And, unlike marketing, pimpin’ has no “g” in it. You have to know that’s a point in its favor.

Of course, we don’t have an actual product to sell. Just us. But we need to sell Us, or at least one or the other of Us. So the advice applies. We need to have a brand, and we need to pimp it. There’s no use complaining about how we don’t wanna, cuz we have to. Even if we never go into business for ourselves full-time, people don’t stay in jobs anymore like they used to (so we hear). We’re gonna have to keep finding other jobs, and keep coming up with new ways to get people to pay us.

So there it is. We must have a brand. Ideally, of course, we end up with too much business to keep up with, and we don’t spend much of our time selling ourselves. People just email us to ask if they can hire us. But if we want that to happen, they have to find us, they have to read us, they have to know us, and they have to know what’s great about us. And they won’t find us, read us, know us, and know what’s great about us unless we tell them.

As long as we’ve got bills to pay, and as long as we don’t want simply to be cogs in a corporate machine, over-working ourselves in our cubicles, we’ve got a brand to build. Or rather, some pimpin’ to do. Sorry Max, but that’s just the way it is, and it doesn’t have to be as painful as all that. We know we’re awesome, and we just have to be able to tell a good story to everyone else about why that is.

Why are we learning Ruby on Rails? Let’s ask _why.

_why: his very existence, his poignant guide, his utter bizzare-itude. His hackety-hack project. Having come across _why, how could we turn down his invitation to learn ruby?

Now, apparently, some people have a very different reaction to _why. Some people think _why is what’s wrong with Ruby. _why thinks that is funny:

The problem here is: the author of the article is trying to do academics, to gain knowledge, to build a career. And my cartoons and stories have patronized him, belittled him, by treating him as if he wasn’t a real professional. This is a terrible breach of conduct. He has accolades innumerable. He has done no small deed. His peers are all gathered around him, wishing him the best and swelling with nothing but respect and esteem for him. NOW WHAT IS THIS CARTOON BOOK DOING HERE??Programming is for world commerce. It is like agriculture or fossil fuels. It is lot a like baling hay. I’ll give you an example: You wouldn’t write a cartoon book with a plot and running narrative just to show a guy how to bale hay! That would frustrate the guy! He would throw that book in the pig’s pen! He just wants to get straight to the nitty-gritty and, for once in his life, just bale hay, straightway!

It’s not just _why, of course. We’d be pretty pathetic if we decided to devote lots of time and effort to a new programming language just because of a cartoon book. I mean, we have to have serious, professional, career-oriented reasons for learning ruby. And Rails, of course. Not that ruby doesn’t exist without rails. Ruby doesn’t need rails to justify its existence. Matz is not DHH, after all. Matz came first. And then, presumably, came _why. 37signals was later.

Learning a new language takes a lot of effort. I’m trying, lackadaisically, to learn french, since Max speaks French and Ari is learning it, primarily by having Barbapapa books read to him over and over again. And we have a bunch of french friends, and it’s really depressing at dinner parties how I’m never quite sure what people are saying. It’s hard, though, and what would make it even harder is if I didn’t like french culture.

Learning a new programming language is a lot like learning a new human language. It comes with a culture. You have to like the culture to want to put in the effort.

So, you know, we have a friend who’s making fistfuls of money because he’s a crack ActionScript 3 developer. Every time we turn around he gets another promotion, and another raise, and he says the world is desperate for ActionScript 3 programmers. We hear this from other people we know, people with jobs. We don’t have jobs right now. Well, Max consults. And I consult to Max on his consulting. But not a 401(k) plan between us. So I keep thinking “fine, let’s learn actionscript”. Except that it’s like trying to have sex with someone you’re just not attracted to. close your eyes and think of Ruby. Oh wait, I swore I wasn’t going to mention sex on this blog. Note to self: blog is for professional presence. Sex: not professional. Well, except for sex workers, for whom sex is professional. But I’m not a sex worker. Am I calling my actionscript friend a sex worker? Not sure. We love you, actionscript friend! And I will be quiet now.

What I’m trying to say here is that we like the Ruby culture. No doubt we’ve come to it too late, and in about two weeks it won’t be cool anymore and people will be all ‘ewww, you’re a ruby person? Rails is soooo 2006. Didn’t you know that Twitter proved it wasn’t scalable? And it’s s…l….o….w.” But that’s okay. When I first started programming, it was because I fell in love with a heapsort. Heapsort had been around for a pretty long time then, but I felt like I was the first person who’d discovered how cool it was. (Kind of like teenagers and sex. Oh wait, there I go again. Shut. Up. Amy.)

Anyway, here we are, immersing ourselves in Ruby culture. We’re gonna go to a Boston Ruby Meeting, where Hackety Hack will be demo-d. I’m subscribed to all these Ruby blogs. We’re studying the idioms and learning about the people and the projects in the Ruby world. And, of course, learning the language. We’d like to contribute to the conversation at the Ruby table.

As for Rails, we’re learning it because we need to write our own web-based to-do list. I’m joking, I promise. Rails comes along with Ruby because most of our experience in IT has been web-related. So we’re leveraging our experience with web technologies and increasing our skillset with Rails, an agile Ruby-based framework that dramatically increases the speed and ease of web app development. See: serious and professional. Ignore the cartoon foxes and sex workers.

thirdbIT is the “professional internet presence” of Max and Amy Newell. Or, if you will, Max and Amy’s Interweb job-pimping self-marketing, social-web 2.0 thingy. Eventually we’ll put up code, to show we know how to code. We’ll have posts showing that we read all the important technology news and have interesting things to say about it. We’ll talk about our contributions to cool open-source projects, and provide cheatsheets and other useful stuff. We’ll talk about why people would want to hire a husband-wife software development team, as opposed to just one person, or some other kind of team. We’ll have our resumes and a “contact us” form. We’ll be doing all the stuff the careers people say to do, even if we’re pretty conflicted about the whole notion of “careers” (look for a future post on this subject).

Right now, we’ve just got a blog that only I, Amy, am likely to post to with any regularity (being as I’m the loquacious one), and a name, which I’ve been nursing for a few years now, along with my dream of starting a consulting business with Max, and a tagline, which I came up with a couple weeks ago while driving back from Target. We’ve got some pictures I drew for a logo/template, which Max then took some photos of, and some alterna-cards we made from the photos, which are somewhere in the mail between the UK and here. We’ve got some ideas. We have some goals. But we don’t have much else. If we’re going to actually hand out the alterna-cards, we should put something up here.

Still, the customer (being us) is pretty happy with this iteration. We don’t know where things are going. We’re not sure this is the time to start consulting as a team; it wasn’t really our plan; there’s so much we want to learn, still; we’d like to say we’re experts at something, but our career paths have been too unconventional, too general, to say that. In a lot of ways, we like being what we are, jacks-of-all-trades, IT-wise. But we’d like to be master of one too. So it’s time for us to settle down and get great at something.

What we’ve chosen, right now, to settle down and get great with, is Ruby on Rails (future post to do on why RoR).

So that’s what the focus of this blog will be right now: our journey to getting great with RoR.

Yesterday afternoon I drew and painted some thirdbIT logo ideas. This afternoon Max took some photos of the pictures:

Really we should use a flatbed scanner for these, says Max.
We don’t have a flatbed scanner, says Amy.

Right. We should use a tripod for the camera, though.

Take the pictures.

Later…

The lighting was bad.

I don’t care, upload them to picasa.

The idea is, we are going to be agile, and not wait until things are perfect. In an alternate universe where we get an actual designer to come up with a logo for us, and make us business cards, and have a flatbed scanner and, I don’t know, any time at all, we would make logos and cards and blog designs all match-y and carefully branded and present a perfectly poised business front to the world.

But I’m going to my old company’s ex-employee party next week, and since it’s part ex-employee party and part job-fair (the party invitation mentioned that companies were welcome to buy tables at the party to display their wares or try to hire people…), I need business cards. Or something cards, anyway. I’m working on moo cards, with a bunch of different photos of the logo pictures. I read about them on Web Worker Daily, and they seem less intimidating than business cards. For 20 bucks we can get a hundred of these very cool-looking things to hand out to people we know whenever it happens to come up that we happen to be software geeks.

Anyway, the whole idea is that we’re not making a big commitment to a particular logo. We’re just… fooling around. We’re trying things out, seeing what fits.

Now I’m gonna see if I can convince Max to do the dirty work of munging some of the logo pictures into the blog’s design. Max?

…a domain name, a site, a blog, and a Ruby on Rails books Amazon order…

all this since our Friday stratergery session. In some ways, it’s not much, but it required decision-making and leadership to not dawdle over the details for four years. What should the domain name be? Where should we host it? Is the original blog entry too un-professional? What should the blog look like? All things we could easily have spent months haggling over. Yet, done, done, and done.

How are we able to be so marvelously decisive? We just pretend that everything we’re doing is fake, and therefore of no consequence. Hence, we pick the option that makes the most sense at the time. Cross that bridge when we come to it, “do the simplest thing that works”, etcetera.

Can agile development build a consulting business? We aim to find out.