Inspiring stories from Texas Linux Fest

At the Texas Linux Fest I was particularly intrigued by Amber Graner, who went from a complete Linux newbie, to becoming a Ubuntu User Magazine contributor in one year. She spread a message that everyone, no matter how non-technical they are, can become proficient in Ubuntu. As they progress, they can participate in user forums, educating less advanced users. If I'm not mistaken, she said she recently accepted a position as Ubuntu User Magazine editor, though I haven't been able to find a confirmation of that on the net. Whatever her position is, the magazine is now her day job.

My old acquaintance Janet S., who I first met at the Atheist Community of Austin, was at the Texas Linux Fest too. She is now involved in writing FLOSS manuals -- technical documentation for open source software. And what do you know -- a couple of weeks since TXLF she started a job doing developer documentation for Mozilla.

Amber Graner gives a presentation "A Year NTEU* (pronounced In-to) Ubuntu and the Open Source Community". More pictures from Texas Linux Fest are in my photo gallery.

Those stories are inspiring. While I am not by all means closed off to a possibility of writing proprietary software (if you are a prospective employer Googling me, please be assured of that :-)), I've been thinking there are serious advantages to working in open source. It opens prospects in self-marketing you won't get in closed-source. Quite simply, if you're writing proprietary software, it's very hard to prove to prospective employers that you've done worthwhile, creative things. They have only your word to take for it. And even if you were permitted to show pieces of your code to outsiders (extremely unlikely), they still won't understand the context your applications worked in, the needs they addressed, or technical challenges they conquered.

But if you are writing open source software, depending on how widely used it is, chances are that someone on your prospective employer's team may be familiar with it. Also, its open nature allows you to blog about your work, and answer questions about it in user forums, building your online visibility and reputation.

At the nonprofit I'm currently working for we use Drupal and the LAMP stack -- Linux, PHP, MySQL and Apache -- to build our web application. At the very least this will give me opportunity to openly blog about the problems we are facing, and the ways we are solving them. I'm too busy actually building the application to blog about it yet, especially we as we are trying several approaches and it's not clear which of them will "stick". But I'll have to start blogging about it soon. Drupal is open-sourced, with a huge community seeking answers to their own problems -- thus, lots of social capital to be gained. I'm hoping it may become useful for me one day if, as I suspect, this nonprofit does not secure funding, and I'll have to continue to search for jobs.

Pictures from Texas Linux Fest are in my photo gallery.

Old advice comes true, with complications

One of the truths we are told at job search clubs and interviewing workshops is: find out what problem a company is facing at the moment, and suggest ways to solve it. Getting them to see you as a solution to their problem may be the key to hiring you.

For a long time it sounded presumptuous to me. First of all, how would you know what problems the company is facing? Do they shout about their problems from the rooftops? Do they post them on the front page of their website? (That would do wonders to their stock price! :-)) Or am I supposed to have a high-level buddy in every company I interview with? Someone who would grumble about his work problems at our weekly golf game? Is there any hope for someone who is not in the ole' boys network?

When you are applying to be a junior level, rank-and-file coder at some corporation, as I did 11 years ago, wouldn't it be awfully arrogant of you to suggest that you are a solution to the company's problems? At best you can hope to be considered a peg of the right shape to fit a hole in a corporate board game.

But later I see this advice coming true more and more often, and you don't have to be in the ole' boys network to make use of it. Companies WILL tell you their problems. They might tell you this at a job interview, where they bring a list of features they want to be implemented in their application. Or they may tell you their pain as you stop by their booth at a career fair -- even if you don't necessarily have the skills this company has said it needs. This has been my recent experience. This one company originally said it needed Java developers, but when I started talking with their CEO (who is also a developer -- it's a small startup) -- he said they were considering switching to a different platform, because Java was too much pain. They have not even been able to set up a development environment in Java that would work consistently. (According to the guy, this is because Java is an open-source language, and you have too many different open-source components for it to work; and they are often incompatible, or require different versions of the same library, or some such.)

So yes, there are companies out there who are open about seeking someone to ease their pain. However, the kind of problems I personally heard about seemed big enough that I didn't feel confident to take them on. Working at a job for 10 years, like I did, can shoehorn you into a limited role where you do pretty much the same things over and over -- unless you are very strategic about diversifying the tasks you do. So I don't know. Maybe if I worked a few contract jobs, writing different kinds of software, maybe then I could become the kind of person those companies seek. As it is now, some of those jobs companies are desperately seeking to fill sound like a devil's bargain.

Job search and religion, or lack thereof

As I said on Facebook, the reason I go to job search clubs at churches is because Texas Workforce Commision requires you to make 5 "job search activities" to receive unemployment benefits, and going to a job search club counts as one activity. (Somebody has informed me that it's easier to meet those requirements than I thought. Thanks, you-know-who-you-are, I'll keep your advice in mind and will revise my job search strategy in the upcoming weeks.)

All three clubs meet in churches, but two of them don't require any religious involvement. The third one, though... time will only show if I can stomach all their god-talk.

However, the third one also has some good stuff going on, such as resume critique sessions or personal statement help sessions. A personal statement is an answer you would give when an interviewer asks you, "tell me about yourself". The most vague and trecherous of all interview questions, it's so ubiquitous it has its own acronym: TMAY. It's also known as elevator pitch. If this club prepares you for interview pitfalls, it may be worth going to. I just don't know how much religious involvement it demands of its members. Some evidence suggests that they ask way more than I could comfortably ignore. For example, it encourages everyone to find their accountability partner -- a person to who you would be accountable for things you've done in your job search on any given week; that would be good except you are supposed to pray for your partner.

I didn't expect that when I went to my first meeting. The club's profile on LinkedIn says they welcome people "without faith background". Yet it was pretty clear at the meeting they assume everyone is a religious person. The Friday of the same week the president of the club called me -- he probably does that for all new members -- and asked about my experience with the club. So I asked him bluntly if have to be religious to be a member. He took my question calmly, and said I didn't have to pray. I was surprised by how he was completely unfazed when I said I was a nonbeliever. Maybe it's the whole "love the sinner, hate the sin" thing. :-) Many Christians may be intolerant of liberal point of view, but some of them show a surprising amount of tolerance when dealing with individual heathens, such as me.

Revenge of flowcharts

My other gripe regarding automated job search application goes towards Texas Workforce Commission. It makes you fill out an enormously long profile that lists various aspects of a programmer's work, and asks you how much experience, if any, you have in each of them. Then it matches you with jobs based on how much overlap there is between tasks you are experienced in, and ones required by the job.

One minor imperfection of the Texas Workforce Commission job match system is that sometimes it sends you email notifications of job matches, but when you login into the system, it says you have no new matches. It's a bit annoying. Occasionally, though, it's possible to find the missing job posting by searching the TWC site. One time I was able to find a .NET developer job it notified me about, but didn't show in my job matches. When I viewed the posting, it said I wasn't qualified for this job. I was surprised, because on the surface there were no requirements I didn't meet (such as programming languages or business areas I haven't worked in). But there is a button that lets you compare your qualifications to the ones required by the job. Clicking the button revealed that I am not qualified because I checked "none" in the profile box asking for years of experience in... creating flowcharts.

I thought creating flowcharts was something my mom's generation of programmers (hi, mom!) did before they punched holes in the cards to feed to a machine. :-) I haven't had to create a flowchart in my entire 13 years in the industry. Well, this job is at a government agency, but still... If they use .NET there, they can't be complete dinosaurs.

And then flowcharts had their revenge on me. I am volunteering for a nonprofit that want developers to do some coding -- for free, of course, but the developers benefit by having something to put on their resumes, learn new skills, make networking contacts, etc. So far I haven't done any coding yet, because project managers (who seem to be overrepresented among the volunteers) are still setting up the infrastructure for the group communication, collaboration, sharing documents, etc. We have not yet written specifications for the piece of software we will be writing, but one of the project managers has created -- you guessed it -- a flowchart of users' expected actions when they login to the website. So... I don't know. The person who wrote it was half a generation older than me, but maybe flowcharts still have their uses?

Quirks of automated job search

In my job search I've run across not just one, but two big companies that use the same resume-parsing application. The existence of such applications is new to me -- they weren't there when I was looking for a job 9 years ago. This piece of software parses your resume after you upload it to the company's website, extracts relevant information from it, and converts it into its own format. For example, it will recognize your address, phone number, and email address, and put them in appropriate fields. It will also recognize Summary Of Qualifications, Objective, and perhaps some other sections, and put those paragaphs in appropriate boxes.

Further than that, things get tricky. It tries to recognize names of companies you've worked for, and does it with only a varying degree of success. The name of my pre-previous company, i2 Technologies, has the power to throw the parser off. It may be the lowercase i that trips it, but both times it parsed it as "Technologies". Fortunately, the system lets you correct this stuff manually.

And boy, is there lots of tedious manual correcting to be done. The parser doesn't handle bullet points very well -- it lumps them all in a big single-paragraph mess. Cleaning it up once is tedious enough; doing it twice, even more so. Doing it on a netbook, which has little vertical screen space, is even worse. Doing it on a netbook on a web page where the editing window, embedded between an immovable header and footer, is about an inch high... that's just UGH.

If I had known that these parsers were used by more than one company, I would have copy/pasted and saved the formatted text in a file. But, as Murphy's law would have it, I might not come across another company that uses it. :-)