Dearest Recruiter

Update:I expanded on this a bit over here: http://blog.jdconley.com/2011/07/how-to-recruit-great-engineering-talent.html

I'm taking some time out of my lunch break today, when I'd much rather be indulging in some geek porn over at Hacker News, to submit a plea on behalf of all the in-demand geeks out there.

You probably found my resume, my consulting company, my blog, my Linked In, my Facebook profile, the MySpace profile I haven't taken the time to delete, my Stack Exchange profile, and some personal blogs about my kids via Google. Did you actually read any of it? No? I am an entrepreneurial generalist that prefers to balance business, product, and technology. I do not want a heads-down, order-following, engineering role.

Yes, I joke about golden handcuffs, but I am happy in my current position. I work from home for the most part. I am working on autonomous startup-like projects that provide great satisfaction. I have some cool benefits and awesome perks. Oh yeah, and I'm paid well.

But, I digress. I do enjoy money. I am human, and a good American consumer. I like to buy stuff. My wife likes to buy stuff. We like vacationing. It's fun. So I'll make you an offer. I will consider your position if you can provide compensation like Sergey Aleynikov. Let's round it up to $500k/yr total compensation, and the work better be self rewarding as well. Yes, I'm serious.

Do I feel bad for asking for such a huge sum? No, I don't. Am I entitled to it? Probably not. But I'm happy in my position and a few thousand dollars extra will not change my mind. I am not interested in a market-competitive salary. I am not interested in being the 25th employee at the next great Groupon clone. I understand how company capitalization and ESOP's work.

Now, I might be interested in being the first employee at a startup or a technical cofounder, but it had better be really darn interesting. I've got my own ideas and stack of half finished prototypes to productize. :) On that note, consulting arrangements at > $200/hr will also be considered.

Stop contacting me with inappropriate jobs that have nothing to do with my experience. Stop attempting to relocate me to Indiana. Stop asking what it would take for me to move to a new position. Stop wasting my time. Please. Stop.

Best Regards,

The In-Demand Geek

A new basket for my eggs

Hopefully after reading that title you're thinking of the old adage "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" and not something crude. Ok, I admit, either way it works for me. You're still reading.

Let me preface by saying I love what's going on at Hive7, but a guy's gotta have a side project. In fact I wrote about this phenomenon a while back. And, in my mind, that side project might as well make me some lunch money.

For the last two years or so I've been really interested in digital photos and the untapped markets that lie within. In fact, I got introduced to Hive7 while trying to sell myself to an investor to get some angel funding in the space. I'm not a pro photographer wannabe or anything like that. I just think digital photos are a great medium for sharing life with friends and family. I have built Friend Photosaver for Facebook (a screen saver using Facebook photos), Photo Feeds for Facebook (automatic photo RSS creator for Facebook), and Photozap (a tool to download Facebook photos as a zip file).

Those applications are all pretty cool, but didn't really strike me (or anyone else) as especially compelling. But, they did lead me down the path of building something that I think is pretty interesting.

Everyone has a digital camera or cell phone camera. When you go to a social gathering of any sort there are usually tens to hundreds of photos taken. Think of weddings, birthdays, graduations, family bbq's, night clubs. . . . What happens to these photos? Someone copies them to their computer, or uploads them to a photo sharing web site. They send out links or maybe share the photos through a social network's tagging or posting features or some such. That's all fine and good, but I think there's more to be had.

Enter pixur.me. Quoting the about page:

Pixur.me is a different kind of online photo sharing service. Our mission is to focus on the person receiving photos, rather than the one taking them. There are a lot of great services where you can organize your own photos and share them with people, but we think that's only half of the equation.

Can you find all the cute pictures of your kids from your last family vacation? Or how about all the photos from your wedding that your guests took? Could your mother find those same photos?

You could if your family was using pixur.me! What if all the photos that everyone took at that last vacation or your wedding were in one spot? Even though Aunt Sue uses Flickr, and you use Facebook, and your mother uses Picasa. That's pixur.me. Create a Stream and see for yourself! Once your stream is created anyone can add photos to it, regardless of where they are stored online.

That's it. Another basket awaiting some eggs. Give it a spin and let me know what you think. Of course, it's not very interesting if you just use it by yourself. Create a stream and give out the link at your next gathering. Or maybe start a stream that your extended family can add photos to so grandma can see them all in one spot.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot this is a technical blog. This project started out as a technology experiment so it's built on Windows Azure and ASP.NET MVC. Very cool stuff. I'll have to write more about them later...

Put down the abstract factory and get something done

It seems as a group, us programmers have our priorities screwed up. Programmers value clean, concise code. Code that requires no documentation. Code that perfectly uses design patterns and best practices. Code that other programmers will look at and think "wow, I wish I was as l33t as this guy."

But, let's get real. That stuff doesn't matter.

Why do you write code? Well, chances are someone pays you to do it. Of course the best programmers also love what they do and do it for fun. But at the end of the day it's your profession. Maybe you're (un)lucky enough to be doing it for yourself in your own startup.

In the early years of a startup only one thing should matter to a programmer: shipping your product to meet your customers' needs. Everything else we do is simply a result of this, the humblest of goals. Without the product people want you have no revenue. Without the revenue you have no company. Without the company, well, you get the idea.

Startups are widely considered the purest form of a company. You exist to meet a perceived need with a pretty small scope. There aren't layers of management or TPS reports to get in the way of getting things done. The only barrier to getting something done is yourself. No excuses. It is in this environment where an engineer's need for perfection must be replaced with a hacker's passion to get things done, and get them done fast. Nothing else matters.

Maintainability isn't a factor. Best practices don't matter. Design patterns don't matter. All that matters is getting things done. Don't worry about scalability until you have to. Instantiate that object. Who cares about the factory. Skip the interface, and create a static class. Some day if you need the interface come back and re-factor your code. With the power of the IDE these days re-factoring is a lot less scary than it used to be.

This may sound short sighted, and it is. In fact, that's the point. Who knows if the company will even exist in a year to have anything to maintain. Projects change. You have to adapt. You will never know how your code will be used 5 years from now. Stop thinking about it. 5 years ago did you think you'd be integrating your [random business application] with this Facebook thing? I bet you've thought about it now. Not to mention, 5 years from now it's likely the entire programming paradigm will have changed. Were they thinking about AJAX when they designed ASP.NET? How about 3D graphics in desktop applications when the window message pump was developed? Such is life in our fast paced world. No amount of overly designed or perfectly formatted code will change it.

If you find yourself maintaining this horribly designed, hacked together legacy code from the early days of a company be thankful and bask in its glory. Without that spaghetti nightmare you wouldn't have that job. It was that short sighted thinking that was able to get something done and create a profitable product/company.

Of course, I'm not advocating you just toss all your code in a button's click event or anything that silly. Be smart, organize things well, but don't waste time overly designing code to be flexible. If you have to spend more than a couple hours sketching out your design, it's probably too complicated. Write some code. Re-factor it if you need to. You don't need a proper RESTful architecture, or a perfect DDD. Your application isn't going to change from Microsoft SQL to MySQL some day.

Alright, I'll admit it. If you're building enterprise server products, or work on a large team, or are building framework products for developers to use, then ignore everything I've said. Of course, then I'd question why you're a startup in that position in the first place....

So I urge you, especially if you're in a startup, to put down put down the abstract factory and get something done.

Don't hire a programmer if they don't code for fun

I'm not the first person to talk about this paradigm and I won't be the last. Every single programmer I've seen that is exceptionally good at their job also does it for fun. They have an itch. It must be scratched. No matter how fun and lenient the work place, they always have their own project to work on. Their own passion. But, I think there is more to it, or I'd just site some previous articles and be done with it.

But first, what do I mean by exceptionally good at their job? Well, Steve McConnell has made quite a name for himself in recent history bringing forth the research on 10x Software Development. This is the level of exceptional I'm talking about. The guy that takes a 10 minute set of verbal requirements, extrapolates, and builds a Web 4.0 Whooziwhatsit in a day, before you even know what Web 4.0 is. Paul Graham calls these guys great hackers, Joel Spolsky says they're smart and get things done. We just call them rock stars.

But, to possibly be a rock star, it's not enough for the programmer to just have a side project. The side project has to be fun (for them). Maybe they get a kick out of programming Lego Mindstorms to walk their chinchilla or creating an app for their mobile phone that synthesizes unique farting noises for ring tones based on the names in their address book. Whatever it is, they should be doing it for the pure joy they get by flexing their creative muscle.

Next time you're doing a phone interview ask the candidate about side projects early in the call. Dig in a little bit. Expect the rock star to change her mood and instantly become a lot more talkative. The passion will be self evident. If it isn't, this person isn't your rock star.

Obviously fun coding projects aren't the only indicator of a rock star, but they're a good way to filter out programmers that just do it for a paycheck.

An Entrepreneurial Story

I don't remember how exactly I got there, but while clicking through my morning feeds I ended up at the very interesting story of an Australian .NET micro ISV startup called Shuffle Text. They outline pretty much everything we learned when we started Coversant nearly seven years ago.

Some Gems

"And while we believed that technical differentiation would be enough to sell our product, we ended up being dead wrong."

"Change, it turned out, ended up being one of our worst development enemies."

"Of all those Google Ads signups, we got 0 feedback. All feedback on the product beta came from friends or friends of friends."

"There’s a bajillion ISV’s out there all competing to sell their crappy untested memory leaking piece of junk software. No matter how much time you spend perfecting your algorithm, improving the performance, and making sure you’ve got zero tolerance for leaks, NOBODY CARES. At the end of the day, it’s getting noticed that matters, convincing people that they should take a bet on you to solve their problems."

Don't give up guys. The product's been out less than a month and people are blogging about you! Your marketing seems pretty solid to me. While I don't have a use for your software at this very second. I'll certainly keep it on my radar. Oh yeah, consider putting out a completely free version, as in beer, not a trial.

Dvorak's Gone Mad

Maybe I'm just young, arrogant, and naive, but I think John's getting a little senile. In his latest rant for his PC Mag column he bashes Google's plans for the Open Handset Alliance with the title "The Google Phone is Doomed". Go read that if you haven't already and work your way back here. Don't get me wrong, I'm not convinced the project will work either – more on that later, but his reasoning confuses me.

Why Dvorak Thinks it Won't Work

1. Google isn't charismatic
2. Smartphones suck
3. Nobody wants the internet on their phone

Google isn't charismatic? People don't love Google? Really? Google has more mindshare than pretty much any internet company out there. Ok, so they put out a crappy social networking tool called Orkut that nobody has heard of. I'm not sure how that relates to the potential success of an open phone product.

Smartphones currently suck. I definitely won't be arguing with that. The operating system user interfaces are crap and the software packages suck. However, I don't get how that has anything to do with a vaporware smarthpone due out some time in the future. If anything, an open platform should lead to a bunch of startups trying to build the next great phone interface. If they can pull it off, this should jumpstart an entire industry of reform. Apple did some good things with the iPhone. I see no reason why the same can't happen with OHA.

I'm not sure what year he's living in, but pondering why anyone would want internet on the phone when they could use the phone is just plain dumb. How do you know the phone number of the restaurant without the internet (or finding a phone book somewhere)? And why would I want to talk to someone when I can get more information myself on Google or [insert name of search startup here]? Maybe it's just me, but this seems like someone arguing to keep their fax machine instead of getting email, or keep their email instead of getting instant messaging.

Why I think it might not work

Alright, so maybe I don't agree with everything John brings up, but I do agree with one. Google wants to roll up the entire mobile market. The carriers, the operating systems, the software, and the hardware manufacturers. I don't see one of the biggest industries in the world taking that lying down.

In addition to the huge hurdles on the business side of things the technical challenges are staggering. Phones are not simple platforms to build on. And from what I've seen Google has yet to produce a large, complex, consumer facing product. They have a great back end platform and a boatload of itty bitty – dare I say widget – sized front end applications. An operating system and SDK that runs on a phone will prove to be a huge task, indeed.

In any case, "doomed" is pretty uncalled for. Of course, I did read his article, look at his ads, and now all of you are going to head over there too. So, I guess that's a success... And hey, I'm just a punk kid anyway! :)

from the trenches of my first software startup

I was born and raised an entrepreneur (I'm pretty sure that's how you speel that). During my lifetime my dad never had a single "real job". He has always been a small business owner. From a carpet cleaning business, to a trucking company, to a coffee shop, he was always working on something he could call his own. Every time we get together we end up talking about businesses we'd like to start. If only I had the time. . . Somehow, after seeing him (and my mom) constantly working at least 80 hour weeks, stressed out, and exhausted, I still decided I wanted to start a company.

At the end of high school, and for a while after, I had a computer repair business with a really cute name and no business plan whatsoever. This lasted about six months. It turns out to be real work, and it's quite difficult to find people that are good enough to do that sort of work for very little pay. I'm really very interested in how Best Buy pulls that one off, though I assume they just have a good process and the people don't need to be all that great (no offense geeks -- I owe you guys many hours of my time that has been saved because I didn't have to help out my mother in law with her digital camera).

Ok, back on topic, sort of. A few years prior to my repair business I had fallen in love with computer programming. I wrote little programs to do all sorts of interesting things. Of course, I didn't work on anything that took more than a few weeks of my time and only built things that were interesting to me. Ah, the good old days! I went into the professional world when I turned 18 and started writing code for a living. Wow, what a change. Who knew coding could be so much fun?! "Wow, I get to program against another database and improve business processes! Woohoo!"

Needless to say, the life of a professional internal software developer was not in my cards. Even though I was making way too much money for my age as a "consultant" (that's what the recruiters like to call you, even though you're really just staff augmentation and under a different category on someone's budget), at about age 20 I started getting very restless. Luckily I met some like minded individuals (Jason and Chris) and Winfessor (Coversant's old company name) was born.

For the last few years, in between consulting engagements (we're boot strapped), we've been building the SoapBox products. Of course, we haven't only been building software, we've been building a business. Lucky for me, my role is still primarily building the technology. It continues to be a wonderful, trying, stressful, exciting, sleepless, humbling experience.

Here are some tidbits, in no particular order, that I've picked up along the way, from learning both the easy way and the hard way. It's free (and probably bad) advice from my limited experience aimed at any programmers out there that want to start a company around a software product. I'll probably write some more specifics at some point.

• Have at least one flagship customer to start with, mainly for promotional purposes, but ideally one that will help fund the project.
• Work full time on it. Hire others to do your consulting or other revenue generating work so you can focus, or get funding.
• Don't work so hard. There is always more work to do, even if you work 140 hours/week.
• Start small (ideally around 6mo development) and iterate from there.
• Build it like you would an enterprise project - component based, easily maintainable and easily expandable.
• Hire people to do things you aren't good at or learn to do them. Web site, graphics, brochures, accounting, sales, etc. Writing code is an itty bitty teeny weeny piece of your business.
• Figure out how to start getting revenues, quickly, and set reasonable goals.
• Don't look too far out into the future. Have a plan, but don't be scared to change it.
• Any software you build needs to be extremely easy to use and install. This alone will win many sales in a head to head battle with your competitors (yes, you will have competitors).
• FOCUS! Do one small thing better than anyone else, and then move on to the next.
• Don't pretend to be a big company. You have a lot of advantages being the small guy and people willing to work with small companies know it.
• Do something unique that your market needs.

That's all I've got for now. We're constantly growing and learning. I imagine my advice will evolve as the Coversant experience continues. In the end, the freedom, excitement, and financial possibilities of a startup outweigh the pains, at least for me. I also just realized I use way too many parenthesis when I write (maybe I'll work on that).