“Hi Marc, this is Mike from the sleazy consulting group in Boston. I saw your resume online and would like you speak to you about a .NET position for a client that I think would be a perfect fit for your background. I am in today and my direct number is 617-123-4567. (If it turns out this position isn’t the right fit for you, I wonder if you know anyone who would be looking for such a position?)”

I probably got around two hundred messages like this. Always the emphasis on some insignificant words that make the message sounds businesslike, without actually talking about the job. Always the line about the job being a great fit, which I learned from experience usually means that they don’t have a client, yet, but they’re cold-calling managers and want candidates ready to go when they schedule an interview. Often making me depressed that I haven’t been invited to the parties of unemployed software developers.

This is my second “mid-career” job search—what at one time I would have called a “real grown-up job.” All the idiomatic advice that was drilled into my subconscious work ethic in college and earlier no longer applies:

I worked hard to break the rules, and, for the first time in my career, got two job offers the same week. (Surprisingly, it was a far more stressful week than any one in which I’ve been unemployed!) My strategy was to focus on contacts directly from employers and after about two months looking for a job, ironically, I accepted a job with the first company to contact me directly, in the first week of the job search.

I decided to accept an offer from Partners Healthcare and this broke the job-search rules a little, too. I didn’t choose strictly on salary, and I turned down a software company (generally considered a better choice for a developer) to work in IT. There were a few reasons, not the least of which is that at this point in my life it helps to choose the job closer to home. Even though the other job would have paid a little more it wasn’t going to materially make a difference in whether I could pay the bills, so that wasn’t the main factor. A big reason I took the job is that I’ve never worked in a large IT department; I’ve always worked in small companies reporting directly to a CIO or VP. I’ve never been able to move up or across the organization while saying in IT and I’ve never had to coordinate projects with other internal teams, and I want to see how that’s done. I value my software industry experience but there’s a lot of my training (particular my graduate degree in information systems, not computer science) I haven’t been able to use at smaller shops. I’m also not exactly going to work for a corporate IT department: good science, technology and research are a reason for Partners’ existence and a way that it’s judged. Someone compared working for Google to being in grad school and in that sense Partners reminds me a little of being in college. (Keep in mind I went to Washington University, where the medical school was a big part of the institution.) I liked being in college; the work was challenging, the institution as a whole was supportive, and I learned a lot. So we’ll see how it goes!

A post on Coding Horror, “There Are No Design Leaders in the PC World,” got me thinking.

The most aesthetically pleasing piece of computer technology I know is Craigslist. Form follows function. The basics of computer display are melded into something much more elegant than glossy graphics.

If only Microsoft had such restraint. I just discovered that the replacement for the NT “kill” command is “taskkill” in XP. It is so much less satisfying to “taskkill” a process than to “kill” it. And the double “k” - ugh.

On the other hand, most building aren’t works of great architecture; and most cars, product packages, advertisements, consumer products, etc. are designed to sell, not to go into a museum. So it’s a broader social phenomenon.

One thing I’d wonder if if this plays out an different in Europe than North America.

Anyhow, back to the regular business of being a misunderstood artiste/developer…:)

Interesting article about unit testing:

http://martinfowler.com/articles/mocksArentStubs.html

This clarified two things for me:

1. What exactly are these “mock objects” I keep hearing so much about.

2. Why I like writing unit tests in certain ways, other than just intuition. (It turns out I’m a state/classical unit tester; and I now have a mental framework for deciding when to stick with that vs. when to try behavior/mockist testing instead.)

Via Ned Batchelder’s blog.

If you read eWeek or listen to some other people enough you are bound to start believing that the world is on the verge of some major computer security meltdown. But when a former UBS network administrator damaged computer systems in a plan to affect the company’s stock price, the expected financial gain didn’t happen. Are the computer security systems that vendors would sell us to prevent this type of thing not responding to the right threat? In a world where we have more information and copies of that information than we can handle, does losing some of it really matter if you can recover the important parts?

Interesting article (via EFF) that Cuyahogo County, Ohio may replace their new e-voting machines. Interesting personally because it’s where my wife’s family is from, and I’ve been to the county courthouse myself to get my marriage license. Interesting politically for two reasons:

1. This is the greater Cleveland area which, on its own, is much closer to being a “blue state” than the rest of Ohio, so it does affect Ohio’s electoral college vote and the national election.

2. The article says they may be using more optical-scanner machines. I’ve voted with these in Newton and Brookline and, as I found in the last primary, they can actually be pretty high tech - it took less than a second for the machine to read and reject my ballot because I’d accidentally voted twice in the same race. The optical systems could be best of both worlds - an inherently paper system that also has the benefits of an electronic system.

Note that in Brookline and Newton you use a marker to fill in a circle on a card; this is not the punch type of system with “hanging chads.” What makes this system ideal is that the electronic ballot box gives the voter immediate feedback as to whether their ballot is valid (and there is a procedure to destroy and replace the ballot in the voter’s presence) so there is no gathering up the ballots and guessing at what a partially-punched circle means later, as there was in Florida in the 2000 election.

When I started this blog I thought I would have clearly delineated categories, with professional posts about software development and personal posts about other things. But I always end up writing about themes that crosscut the personal and professional.

For example, a post on another blog with the same complaint about certain technical communities that my Mom makes about her Reform Jewish synagogue; i.e., that by always keeping things simple for newcomers you make things less engaging for those who literally do know the lingo.

“the stober tool is really cool…awesome!! dont know why i didnt use it till now… we should do a little marketing of this product here in the engineering team …so that others can make use of such efficient and time saving tool .. as it saves many clicks to restore, backup and connect to the database…”

(Alas none of this will make sense or be useful to you unless your desk is within about 50 feet of mine.)

I passed Microsoft certification test 70-536 this morning! It was hard. This test is not about C#, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, or Windows Forms. It’s about the .NET Framework, and such diverse topics as threading, graphics, and sending e-mail. There isn’t any one book or training program that covers it all (except the test prep material). I reviewed with a great practice test from Transcender, which helped - their practice tests are even harder than the real tests.

Are companies rejecting open-source software because it’s free? I don’t think so.

Companies (and non-profits) like to cut costs. They do not pass over free (as in dollars) anything if it will meet their needs. Getting companies—particularly small companies—to pay for support on something that’s not broken is a hard sell.

I just read in the Register about SpikeSource, whose business is to charge a subscription for “certified” versions of software you can download for free. The article says this will be valuable to “SME end users,” but I wouldn’t bet on it. Small businesses will find more valuable uses for their cash.

There’s a myth that companies don’t use open source software because it’s free. In my experience, the commercial competitor actually needs to offer some additional feature or service. If there’s a company that will pay for something they can get for free, I’d like to know about it.

Knows they are musicians and software developers, that is. The new features for the 2007 Outback are interfaces for music devices and a driving feature called S#. (Background: Microsoft first used the “sharp” symbol outside of a musical notation, naming their flagship programming language “C#”.)