Geodog: Annals of Job Hunting

Is the economic drought over?

I've spent a bit of time over the last two years searching through my cobweb shrouded memories of the lectures of one of the best teachers I ever had and trying read the entrails of the economy and predict when the hi-tech rebound would start, all without success. We finally shut down our company last year, and I have been parenting, travelling, writing and doing a bit of consulting since. Until recently, the Bay Area economy and the high-tech economy seemed mired in the doldrums.

However, recently my personal economic barometer has suddenly moved from calm to hurricane. Last week I got two phone calls from old colleagues about jobs, as well as a couple of calls from recruiters, something that used to be an almost daily nuisance, then didn't happen at all for two years. This week I have 3 meetings to discuss employment opportunities, one that I sought out, the two others that sought me out. I certainly hope that this is a sign of things to come for the Bay Area economy and hi-tech.

As Glenn Fleishman once said, "Whenever I get busy, my blog dwindles. You can practically draw a revenue/work graph line against frequency of posts. ... If you don't hear much from me, congratulate me. I must be doing well. "

To complete the parade of cliches, I'm not counting my chickens before they hatch, but I expect that postings will be light in the immediate future, and I hope they will continue to be light for a while.

Geodog is back from Costa Rica

We are back from our month in Costa Rica. We had a fabulous vacation. We learned a little Spanish, met some really nice people, and we had a great time living outdoors, hiking or swimming almost every day. In fact, we had so much fun that we didn't get around to doing all the research we had planned on housing costs, schools, employment opportunities, health care, and all the other details that would be involved in living there in the future. We just played. We also concluded that while we are definitely interested in going to Costa Rica to live for a year to two at some point in the near future, for now we are staying here in Berkeley.

I highly recommend Costa Rica in the summer to anyone looking for a moderately priced vacation with great hiking, great wildlife viewing, great adventures and really friendly people. If anyone is interested, I put a few of the 300+ photos I took up on the web at http://www.thebishop.net/gallery/CRHigh/. Email me for the password if you want to see photos with people in them. If you are interested in my impressions of Costa Rica and travel recommendations, I'll be posting a travel report of sorts here and at Geodog: Costa Rica over the next few days.

I plan to start writing here again, although I am going to try to avoid losing myself in politics again -- it takes up too much time, doesn't feel productive, and there seem to be plenty of people doing a good job exposing the lies of the Bush administration. Now it is time for me to restart the job/entrepreneurial opportunities hunt that I put on hold last spring. I am looking for anything that involves using my analytical, organizational, and people skills (see resume) to work with smart people on an interesting product or project, but I suspect that the easiest way to market myself is going to be as a Software Product/Project/Program manager. I'm hoping to find something in the East Bay or San Francisco, but I'm looking farther afield as well. If you know of any openings or of any interesting companies in the Bay Area that are hiring, feel free to leave me a comment or send me an email.

Interesting event calendar

Mostly a note to myself to check back on the WorkIt Event Listings on a regular basis. May also be useful as a model for the Berkeley Blog.

Scary

The New York Times says U.S. Economy in Worst Hiring Slump in 20 Years. Lots and lots of depressing statistics. Not what this entrepreneur/job hunter wants to see. I must say, my faith that if you are good enough and flexible enough, there is always a job for you, is being tested. Add the (politically inspired?) Orange Alert , and it makes me wonder if maybe this would be the right time to move to Costa Rica for a year or two.

Geoworks, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

From PR Wire: "Geoworks Cancels Special Stockholders Meeting Due to Lack of a Quorum. Company Will Explore Alternatives Including Bankruptcy."

A pathetic ending for a once great little company. There are enough stories behind that little press release to fill a book. Geoworks was founded 20 years ago, and went through more lives (and management reshuffles) than a cat. It had a lot of great firsts, but it was also a company that had a real gift for giving up on a market after shipping its first product, just before that market took off, e.g. one of the first commercial GUI OS's, GEOS; one of the first PDA's, the Casio Zoomer; and the first dedicated smartphone OS, GEOS-SC.

I put five years of my life into the company, spending many late nights in the office and many weeks in Japan. And I was part of some great things -- building a great embedded GUI OS, GEOS-SC, code name "Liberty," from scratch, shipping some of the world's first real smartphones, the Toshiba Genio and Dialo. I got to work with some really smart and good people. But I also got learn how greed and stupidity at the top of the corporate organization will doom the efforts of those below them, no matter how smart or hard the people below them work. Geoworks built up a world class engineering organization, but could never decide what it wanted to do with it (Geoworks eventually sold one part of it in Seattle to Amazon for a pretty penny). The founder was replaced with a series of executives who were smoother and would be more likely to please the market. Some of them were quite good at talking up the stock, but none of them were any good at leading a company. I worked with a lot of other people building up an OS business then watched it get thrown away, because it wasn't sexy enough for "the market," and because it supposedly wouldn't be as profitable as the wireless services business, which itself proved in the end to be a mirage.

I quit when I became convinced of the utter lack of integrity of my then boss, David Thatcher, the latest CEO at the time. He has now pled guilty to conspiring to commit securities fraud at a subsequent company, Critical Path, and is facing 1 to 5 in the federal pen, so I at least have the satisfaction of having my judgement confirmed.

Bitter? I sound bitter, but I'm really not. I had a great time, I worked with some great people, made some lifelong friends, and I learned a lot. I just rue the waste of all that energy, talent and drive. A lot of it was just thrown away.

The Dream Job that Got Away

I was reading Dan Gillmor's Weblog a couple of weeks ago and saw his piece on Mitch Kapor's new Open Source Application Foundation and their project to make an open source PIM, code named Chandler. I followed up and checked out the website, and got really exited. I have been frustrated by the lack of a decent PIM on Windows, and as a result use a combination of programs (Eudora for email, Outlook/Palm for calendaring and contacts, MyBase, AskSam, and Ticklist for information capture and retrieval, and NoteStack and TickList for to dos. I would love to have a decent Windows PIM that did all those things. I looked at the team, and was very impressed - a lot of smart people who have built good stuff. Then, as I am wont to do these days, I looked at the job listings. I saw that they were looking for a product manager.

My first thought was: "That would be a dream job -- Work with really smart people, building a really great product that lots of people will want -- I want that job."

My second thought was "Everybody and their brother is going to apply for this job."

So I wrote up a cover letter and sent it and my resume to the mail link that OSAF had posted, but I also decided to campaign for the job. I racked my brains trying to think of who knew me and my work well, and also knew someone at OSAF. I sent mail to people who I had worked with in the past, asking them if they knew anyone on the OSAF people page. I hate doing this kind of thing, and haven't done it for any of the other jobs that I have applied for, but I figured that I needed to make some connection, otherwise my resume would just get buried in the pile of hundreds. It turned out that my first boss in high tech, at GO Corporation, knew one of the people at OSAF and was willing to put in a good word for me, which he did. Then I signed up for all the OSAF mailing lists, lurked on them, checked the OSAF website and Mitch Kapor's Weblog daily, and waited. And waited.

A week later I came down with the flu, and was lying in bed when I heard the home office phone ring, and someone leave a message. I stumbled upstairs and heard that it was soneone from OSAF, wanting to talk to me. I jumped up, grabbed a few tylenol and drank a few cups of coffee, then called back. I had a very pleasant phone interview with John Anderson that went on for a about an hour, at the conclusion of which John told me to hold myself in readiness for a call inviting me to an in-person interview in a couple of days. I was so eager I couldn't stand it. I spend the next two days doing everything I could think of. I did my own competitive analysis, downloading and reviewing existing PIMS, email clients, and P2P groupware (Groove). I read up on Python and wxPython and ZOPE. I googled all the current members of the OSAF team. I thought about what problems I would attack first, and how I would attack them (requirements, competitive analysis and user scenarios -> specs). I skimmed though some of my project management books just to remind myself of some of the issues. I even read up on the other person Kaitlin Duck Sherwood who I knew had applied for the job.

I got the call to come in, and went down to OSAF for an afternoon of interviews. The interviews lasted 4 1/2 hours, and I met with nine people. I actually had a great time, although I was pretty wiped by the end of the day. As always happens in our industry, I found that I had at least remote connections with half the people on the team, and in one case discovered that the wife of the engineer interviewing me was best friends with the wife of one of my best friends - so goes Silicon Valley. I would only give myself a B+ for my interview performance -- I was still recovering from the flu, and it has been so long since I have sat at that side of the table that I didn't have answers ready for all the standard questions (what was your worse mistake, what was your greatest accomplishment...), but it was a lot of fun and energizing to talk to these really intelligent people about the exiting product they were building, and how I could help them with the challenges involved. I wanted that job so bad I could taste it. But it was not to be.

I was told that I would hear in 4-5 days whether or not I had gotten the job. Five days went by without hearing anything. Even though I knew it was foolish, and that odds were strongly against my getting the job, I put my job hunt in suspended animation. Who could apply for a job as a PM managing the company wide upgrade of Peoplesoft version x when it was possible that I could get this job? 6 days went by, then 7. I was nerving up to call and check on the process, when I got the phone call. I was very nicely told that someone else was going to get the job. I was told that while I was well qualified for the job, this other candidate was even more qualified, having founded a company during the dot com boom which he later sold for $74 million. Plus, salary wasn't an issue for him. How can you compete with that?

I am getting over it slowly. I am trying not to hate the person who got the job, which as far as I can tell he is well qualified for, and I am actually planning on sending him an email offering to help him out, since I still hope that Chandler is going to be a great product, and they clearly need some help in defining it. I'm not checking the OSAF site daily. And only once a day do I fantasize about how I would be doing the job now. Most days.

An evening with Regis McKenna

Tonight I went to an event put on by The Entrepreneurs Resource Network, where Regis McKenna was the featured speaker, promoting his new book, Total Access. He is a good speaker, funny, and and a good storyteller. He also comes across as being very smart. I don't think that I can do justice to his ideas in a late night blog post, but suffice it to say that I had a new perspective on marketing after the night was over. Part of that is the history of marketing that he carries around in his head -- he spent a long time talking about what marketing was all about in the early 1900's -- distribution and enabling the consumer to buy. He also talked about how many more choices consumers have today than they had even 15 years ago. The statistic that stuck in my head was that WalMart now has 300,000 SKU's that they carry, and that WalMart updates the database of what people have purchased nationwide every 90 minutes. Holey Moley!

Regis McKenna closed with a funny story to illustrate how different the buying experience is today from the past, and what assumptions our kids are growing up with. He was  driving somewhere with his two granddaughters, 7 and 9, and his father-in-law. His granddaughters were lobbying to have him buy them an iMac. McKenna said to his grandchildren, "but does the iMac come with enough software? - Maybe we should look into computers that have more software bundled in with them." The 7 year old replied, "But if I need more software, I can always get it over the internet", and the father-in-law chimed in with "Yeah, Dummy".

I don't know enough to recommend buying the book Total Access, at this point, although I plan to, but I can highly recommend going to see him talk while he is on the book tour circuit. Hearing him speak reminded me of what I miss most about not having a full-time job -- not getting to spend the day interacting in person with really smart people. Also, I was reminded how everybody is connected, especially towards the top of social and financial networks. While chatting with him after the talk, I discovered that he is having dinner tomorrow night with my old boss at GO Corporation, Bill Campbell aka "Coach", currently chairman of Intuit. They worked together at Apple almost 20 years ago. Small World.

Just mean

Business 20 reports that somebody lured 50 out-of-work high tech job hunters to a supposed job interview at a Palo Alto Starbucks, where they all found out it was a hoax. Whoever played this prank should be sentenced to a week sharing an cube with John Ashcroft. It is rough enough out there without people intentionally making it harder.

What does the future hold for software developers?

Some people seem to love bad news. And I must confess, reading the news and blogging every night probably hasn't made me a cheerier person. If it isn't terrorism, it's the war on civil liberties. If it isn't war, it's the economy. At least the job market is going great guns <g>.

A couple days ago I ran into this gem, a depressing riff on the future of software developers by Phil Wolff, which he wrote after reading an InfoWorld column by Bob Lewis. Lewis talked about how programming jobs are being exported to India and other countries where there are high quality programmers who will work for substantially lower wages than American developers. Lewis' advice to software engineers: Find a different field of endeavor. Unless you're in the top rank, there's little future for you in IT. [of course that doesn't explain how to deal with engineers' seemingly congenital belief that they are all in the top rank.]

Phil Wolff's riff has a lot of good reasoning as to why it is easier than it has ever been to export programming jobs overseas, which can be summarized in one word - Internet. Plus there are an increasing number of good software engineers overseas. While he makes the point that technical people with so-called soft skills (like project management) or jobs that require a lot of face time don't face as much competition, he basically concludes that Lewis is right, and that American software engineers are going to face rapidly increasing competition and downward wage pressure from overseas engineers.

I've been noodling on this for a little while and decided to try to get some unformed thoughts on this out there into the blogosphere to see what others think (one of the advantages of writing for free is that you can do stuff like this, instead of waiting until you have all the loose ends tightened up.)

It seems crazy to be predicting a long-term surplus of software engineers when three years ago I was offering newly minted college grads what seemed to me to be obscene amounts of money plus bonuses to come work for my company (and they thought they had somehow earned the right to that much money). And we have heard this warning before -- I have a book in my bookshelf (unread, I confess) called The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer, published in 1992, that warned of exactly this future. It certainly didn't come true in the late 1990's. I have learned to be very wary of trying to predict the future using reasoning - there are always factors that you don't account for which end up having huge effects. People thought the internet would be big in 1996, but who would have predicted the excesses of the internet boom before Netscape went public? Finally, my career in high-tech has all been with startups working on new products and new technologies, where the spec and the dates get revised frequently, and the ability to communicate and to change rapidly when new data comes in (or the boss gets some bright idea :-) is critical to success. Attempts to outsource that kind of work seem doomed for failure. I can't imagine having outsourced the development of a new embedded OS for instance, although I did successfully outsource things like the IrDA stack, and had an outside company do a great job. In my experience, one of the keys to success in outsourcing is tightly defining the deliverable, and understanding the costs, direct and indirect of making changes to the deliverable. In running a consulting business, one of the most lucrative though frustrating situations is having a client who constantly changes his or her mind. But when you develop something that really is new, you have to change a lot on the way.

It seems to me that there will be downward wage pressure from the availability of qualified software engineers overseas, as well as from the availability of high quality Open Source software, which none of these authors mention. But the likelihood that the American Programmer will "decline" is dependent on how fast the rate of change in the software business is, and if it remains led by the US. I have worked through two booms, the rise of PC software in the mid-1980's and the rise of the net in the latter half of the 1990's, and in both cases the rate of change in everything that a developer needed to know was extremely high. New tools, new languages, and new platforms rose and fell by the wayside rapidly. Large numbers of new products for users were imagined, developed, marketed, copied and sometimes sold. Companies grew rapidly and failed rapidly. These were not conditions under which managers could outsource work, and it is hard to imagine that changing. I also worked through the doldrums of the early to mid 1990's, where it seemed like most development was incremental or me-too, and the lawyers were the one who got to be creative (remember the Lotus-Borland and Apple-Microsoft look and feel lawsuits?). A lot of that development could easily be outsourced. So which is the future going to look like? I don't know, although I fear that given the economy and the excesses of the internet boom, for the immediate future it will look a lot more like the doldrums. However, I'm betting that the roller coaster will come back around again in a while, and I'm ready for another ride.

Sorry about the length. I'm gonna learn how to do that >>>more<<< thing.

The state of the Bay Area economy

Articles like Silicon Valley mood worsens seem designed to depress job hunters, especially with quotes like"For the grizzled, experienced CEOs in Silicon Valley who have seen every downturn, this is by far the deepest. Time will tell if this is the longest" and "the job market resembles one with 12 or even 15 percent unemployment. He's seen laid-off engineers applying for jobs that pay $8 an hour, and people in their 40s competing with teen-agers for entry-level positions".

The Economist has a more balanced article, Still Fizzy, with different conclusions. The bust is real, as are the Bay Area's three biggest problems: astronomical housing prices, mediocre to terrible public schools, and traffic. However, the Bay Area still "has an unusual number of America's most productive industries; it also has many of the better companies within those industries; and it boasts the best-educated workforce in the country...it would be hard to describe the Bay Area's mood as disconsolate. Most people seem to realise that the dotcom extravaganza was not going to last."

I find the Economist's article truer to my own experieince. It can be pretty depressing if you are looking for work now. Anecdotal stories abound of hundreds or even thousands of resumes sent in reponse to job ads. One person told me "I heard that nobody will post jobs on Craig's List any more because when people post jobs, their servers go down from the load of email that they get in response." (Not true, although there certainly are a lot less jobs posted on Craig's List than there used to be.) I always thought that the dotcom boom was too good to be true, I just didn't realize how far the economy had to fall.

I find that I need to remind myself that some companies are still hiring, startups are still forming, and that there is always a demand for people who are good at what they do, and I'm very good.  The company that needs my services is out there, I just have to find it or create it.

In the meantime, I am having a blast being a father, learning by teaching myself Perl and PHP, and amusing myself acting as an amateur journalist here at www.geodog.us. I am putting some of the energy I would normally put into working into weblogging. It's fun and blows off steam. I always wanted to write -- now I don't have to worry that it doesn't pay much :-) And the Bay Area is still a great place to live, except for the fog.

Thanks (I think) to Scott Loftesness for the links.

Jobs I am qualified for, but have no intention of applying for.

One of the job boards I'm signed up for sent me these two listings:

Lead Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation, US-CA-Mountain View 
Development Manager, Microsoft Corporation, US-CA-Mountain View

As my friend Tony said "Commuting [2 hours] to Mountain View to work for Microsoft on a TV product.  A trifecta." He knows how I feel about TV, Microsoft, and wasting time commuting.

The sad thing is, I am extremely well qualified for those jobs -- I have exactly the experience they are looking for. Now if I can just find someone else in the East Bay who is working on something socially worthwhile who wants a Program or Development Manager...

Largest Oracle shared database project

Today I was looking at jobs at Kaiser Permanente, the giant HMO. I saw this listing:

Director of Network Services
With the name, National Operations, you can assume that our focus is huge - not to mention, 24/7 - and you'd be right. In a nutshell, NOPS is a group of 850-plus people who provide the day-to-day automation services necessary to support Kaiser Permanente's many medical groups, business partners and millions of members. With 6,000 servers, NOPS is one of the largest Oracle shared database projects in the world.

Wow. Well, I have to say - I'm not qualified for that job, and I don't think that I would like it even if I was. Can you imagine the phone call if 6,000 servers went down?