My Professional Blog

People have asked me quite a lot lately what I’m going to do now that I’m free and clear of Click Here and my pat answer has been one of two or three things:

1. Find a product-oriented company with a high-performance team building something amazing, or
2. Bootstrap my own tiny consultancy, and / or
3. Build an amazing product.

As luck would have it, I’ve already landed an interview at a company that offers the first option. I’m excited about the interview, but realistic about the possibilities. Because they appear to be a high-performance team, they are guarding the entrance quite closely. My level of intrigue is all that much higher because the interview process is anything but easy and normal. Suffice it to say that you can’t get hired by being a good guy and liberally dropping high-impact buzzwords. You may laugh, but I’ve been hired through such good-guy interviews.

This is a position which features the use of Java as their primary implementation language, so my challenge is to get back into the Java mindset after several months of Ruby development. My friend Mike once supposed that I would never return to Java. Its possible he’s wrong as I could be circling back. Working with Ruby is fun, but my talents and experience position we well for a Java shop and there is more of a job market there too.

But even as I say that, I must admit that looking at Java for the first time in a few months has surprised me. Java hasn’t changed, but it seems that my mind has started to think in Ruby. I am actually alarmed that a language I’ve worked in for years could be subject to this kind of transition. I found myself asking fundamental syntax questions. So I wondered if this had happened to anyone else. Or is this just a by-product of my being 43?

Well, I’m not worried about picking Java up again, but I am picking a problem to code to get my head back into it. I still have a series of Java projects from an interview process I went through in June (yes, I was offered the job), so I’m going to work through one of those. To make it more fun, I may try to integrate it into a JRuby on Rails project and do a local deploy. This will enable me to prepare for the interview and explore the integration possibilities for JRuby and Java.

What happens if I don’t get the job? Well, that’s a real possibility, so I’m planning my bootstrapping activities for my consultancy. Having done recent work for a medium-sized consultancy, I know there is work out there and I know that I can provide high-quality work for a portion of the price that bigger companies are charging. But as every entrepreneur knows, you cannot be successful without customers, so my biggest challenge will be to construct a marketing machine capable of producing a sustainable pipeline of work. For technicians, this is not an intrinsic skill, so I’ve been thinking more about marketing than my technical skills — the latter is the easy part.

In some ways this takes me back a great many years ago when I created a small software company, SportSoft Systems, which created and marketed Fantasy Football software and a few other things. This was back 20 years ago and my product was just about the best out there. Had I only known that the fantasy sports craze was to explode, I would have stuck with it. I did actually make decent money, but the pressures of supporting the product and building in new features every year while being an ethical employee at my primary job caused me to discontinue my efforts.

So for now, I’m circling back — either to the Java world or to a world where I build my own company. Should be fun wherever things lead.

As many of you know, I’m looking for employment now while my Nokia days come to an end. I thought I would post some thoughts on how you find a job in the current job market. Nevermind that I don’t have a job, I just started looking in earnest a couple of days ago. So here goes:

The first thing to get straight is that YOU are the product. Prospective employers are your customers. And as a result, you need a marketing plan. Your marketing plan must begin with the usual self-assessments which eventually lead to your main marketing vehicle — the resume. In some ways, you could almost consider your resume as the product.

Next comes the distribution problem. How do you get your resume in front of those who you wish to become your buyers? In today’s world, you get your resume and profile up on all the job boards that are relevant to your profession. However, reentering the same data over and over is such a pain. To ease your pain, use SimplyHired which is a site that will enable you to enter your resume data once and then blast it out to sites of your choosing — a real time saver. Just be sure that you get the information right because after SimplyHired does its thing, you will have to manage individual accounts at all the sites.

As an added touch, I created my own website to promote my efforts. The website serves as a visual reinforcement of my technical skills. Its well-designed, uses semantic standards-based markup, is CSS-based, and uses progressive enhancement in a couple areas to improve the user experience (printing, tag cloud AJAX). Its not an over-the-top tour de force in technology, but is just enough to impress the target audience — prospective employers and recruiters. Because some of you will go there, I readily disclaim that its been soft-launched. Expect to find minor cross-browser issue and some content yet to be provided. You techies are a tougher audience than my target audience!

So when you flip the switch on this machine, you will get assaulted with emails and opportunities. These are your customers banging on the door. To organize yourself, get a Highrise account from 37Signals. Highrise is a mini-CRM application and let’s face it, you will be talking to people, exchanging email with people, and more or less manage the sales process. Highrise is perfect for this and is free for limited use.

Once you actually start interacting with people you’ll have to get pretty savvy at determining who to spend your time with. I have received very generic requests to call recruiters and I don’t get involved further unless I am able to get a compelling story up front. Be prepared, you will also hear from people who will disregard your skills, experience, and relocation preferences entirely. I am deleting most emails on that basis alone.

So far, things are going well. I think that treating this situation like a product campaign has been beneficial. I already have some solid leads and opportunities that I’m following up on. And this is Day 3.