This is my friend, Darin Ninness.  I knew him mostly in the 1990’s, when he was working on Military Cadet Programs (in Michigan) and I was working on them in Maryland.  We both ended up in technology, and we see each other every few years at social events for mutual friends, so I connected with him on Linkedin.

You probably noticed that tempting box at the top, asking if I could recommend Darin for technical skills.  I have no idea if Darin knows anything about SQL Server, but there is that annoying box, asking me to recommend him anyway.

This is a problem.

Another Friend

No, I did not end up recommending Darin for anything, but last week I did receive a recommendation for my web development skills.  It was another friend from my cadet days, Leonard,  who I have not seen since 1997.  At the time we had a conversation about region tabs.  Before that, I remember a breakfast in 1995.  In the time since we probably exchanged a half-dozen emails, all about military science. Yet here he is, endorsing me for my web development expertise.

This is no surprise … but it might just be an opportunity.

How We Got Here

If you’ve been using Linkedin for a few years, it is likely that you completed your profile for the same reason I  did:  The positive reinforcement around having a better profile.

As I used the site, I would invariably get a firm warning that my profile was missing something — a picture, some job history, education, take your pick, combined with a notice that people that had that feature were some percentage more likely to be clicked on or have a job offer.  Eventually I would fill out that part of my profile, just to get the annoying box to go away.

Now that we are all trained to click boxes to make them go away, Linkedin suddenly created a new kind of box — the endorsement.  If I am looking at a friend who is down on his luck and that box appears, I might be tempted check it, especially if it would just make that annoying notice go away.

It would help if we had some way of clarifying our endorsement, with one being “he seemed interested in it at a user’s group” and ten being “I saw the guy personally perform complex tasks over a long period of time.” Still, when you combine that with the mutual admiration society I’ve been writing about (“You recommend me and I’ll recommend you!”), suddenly, the endorsements mean almost nothing.

The good news is that single word: “Almost”.

The Right Place For Endorsements

Say I am looking for hire a subcontractor in my field of software testing, and I end up on Linkedin.  When I am looking to work with someone, yes I can look at their endorsements, but I have no way to tell the quality endorsements from the bad.  So first I am going to look at the people we have in common, and what those people have recommended Joe for.  Then I want to reach out to them personally, and ask how strong the recommend is.

It is an extra ten minutes of work, per search, sometimes more.  It fails when I am working with people outside my network.  Still, if the relationship is “We see each other at Social functions and chat and he seems competent”, I suspect the answer that come back would be honest.  What does the person gain by lying?

That simple work process makes the process personal, realistic, and honest. It will take more time, but that is how a effective search works.  You can also use this when interviewing or considering a hiring offer, to find out what the person interviewing you is really like.

Skipping that step gets you the kind of results in this video (which does have a bit of strong language):

The choice is yours.

As for me, I’ll leave that kind of thing to someone else.

So I just got an email from Linkedin, telling me that my account is in the top 1% most viewed.

I should be happy right?

But I can’t say I am.  Instead, I suspect that something is very wrong.   Allow me to explain.

The Problem

Last week I was on linkedin, looking up a former colleague, and to the right, the little “People who viewed this also viewed …” box showed names of other former coworkers.  You know the types:  The project manager who never had a project come in on time (they rarely came in at all), the architect whose participation in a project was the kiss of death, the executive who didn’t even seem to follow through, but always had q great ‘story’ (right up until he was fired), and so on.

Out of a morbid sense of curiosity I clicked on a few of these, and read the bios, which were certainly putting their best foot forward.

Then there were the recommendations.

Oh my goodness, the recommendations.  Each of these people was “exceptional”, they all had keen, accurate, clear, and deep insights into the problems at hand, could think “outside the box”, they were strategic thinkers and high-level change initiators, coming from all levels of the organization, including from the person that decided to let them go.

Every single one of these folks had a pristine set of “this person walks on water” recommendations.

Just.  Like.  Me.

I truely am pleased and honored that people are either seeking me out or stumbling on to my profile.  Still, I have to wonder, when it gets time to choosing who to work with, if we all look perfect, doesn’t that create a sort of “Lemon Market” where the sellers can’t tell the good products from the bad?

A More Excellent Way

Looking at those recommendations a second time, I noticed something. Without a successful project to point to, the recommendations were limited to a list of virtues, like sharp, decisive, open-door, and so on. In writing, we call this “telling” – the author makes the decision for the reader that the hero is brave, or strong, or noble.

The classic way to express this in writing is not to tell but instead “show” – have the hero fight the dragon when everyone else runs, win the arm-wrestling match with the giant troll, or sacrifice himself to save the defenseless.

My favorite stories show, they don’t tell.

So my first takeaway to avoid the lemon market is to work on myself.  I’m going to review the folks who have recommended me, to see if those recommendations “tell” or “show”, and ask for revisions.

I want to have my recommendations talk about the challenging conditions, the conditions of uncertainty, the hard deadlines and out-of-control scope — and what I did to help the team move toward an outcome we could look back on and be proud of.  And if my friends can’t write that, if they struggle to find examples, I want to find out why, and change my behavior to make things better.

A Final Thought

When I left my last long-term consulting assignment, the staff got together and made me a goodbye card.  I kept it in my desk and re-found it the other day, and just took the effort to scan it in (click for the hi-res version):

Somehow, I suspect the folks I mentioned before, with the perfect set of “walks on water” recommendations, don’t have a card like that in their drawer.  I wonder how I could get that on linkedin?

Executing the Reboot

John Bruce, an active blogger in the early 2000′s, once pointed out that when companies need help, real help, not just empire building, they want grown ups, people that actually get things done.  Making it clear that you are a sound craftsperson may just be the new linkedin differatiator — or at least one of them.

For now, I’ll settle for checking my recommendations, asking people to focus on show, not tell.

More to come.

The last time I wrote about this I was taking about Call Centers. American Companies had outsourced phone support to other countries, often India, and the results were so bad due to cultural and communications issues that the USA companies insisted on a call center across the street so the Indian Companies rented office space across the street and hired US Workers.

A month after I wrote that article, Tata consulting opened an office for three hundred technology workers in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Re-shoring isn’t coming to IT, it’s here, and the same offshore companies that started round one are taking the lead in round two.

The odd thing is, at least according to the Chicago School of Business, this shouldn’t be happening – at least on first blush.

Let me tell you why.

How did this happen?

If the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago were to come up with a slogan, it would probably involve the idea that efficient markets win.

By efficient markets, I mean markets with lower cost structures.  If you pay 2% per transaction in the stock market, and I pay 1%, over ten years, I’m going to end up with more money, right?  Put another way, if we have to pay a five cent fee on every transaction, and work to lower that amount to four cents, in a way, we made money.

If that were true, then the round-tripping of contracts to India/China/Pakistan and back agan, with its associated communications costs (have you ever tried to set up a conference call to a developing nation?), combined with the sheer overhead of managing a multi-national company, should mean that the best deal would be a local deal.

Simply put: This should not be happening.  It makes no sense.

We did this to ourselves

Thanks to the build/boom/bust cycle of American real estate, office space is available cheap.  Thanks to the layoff/outsource cycle, labor is available cheap too.  Those two efficiencies combine to create just enough cost savings to allow for management overhead and awkwardness.  (Shrinking the distance between doer and client adds efficiency as well.) Yet there is opportunity here.

A local company, with less overhead, could be more efficient. That efficiency could lead to a better contract, with more cost savings for the outsourcer and more profit for the local company.  When I think about local contracts, a few companies come to mind; Menlo Innovations, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, competes for that kind of work. Pillar Technology is a 200-odd person delivery company which had no physical offices for over a decade; the executives and staff all work from home. I once took a call from a Pillar Recruiter, working out of her home in Georgia, to do a software project in West Michigan. In 2012, Pillar opened a software studio near Detroit, but its executives continue to operate with no building, which means no gas bill, no lease, and no maintenance, reception, or jantorial expenses.

One more time: Efficient companies win.

There is an opportunity here for local companies that are efficient.

Where are the small local companies?

David Gewirtz is the author of “How To Save Jobs: Reinventing Business, Reinvigorating Work, and Reawakening the American Dream.”  In that book, he claims that we schooled the entrepreneurship out of our society – that by focusing our culture on getting a good education in order to get a “stable, secure, good” job, we actively turned ourselves away from the idea of creating a business.  When the companies merged and laid off redundant departments (or sent work offshore), those now-laid-off went to the market to look for another “stable, secure, good” job.  Multiply that by a thousand mergers and offshore initiatives, and you have a lot of unemployment and a job market ripe for hiring, but no entrepreneurs to do that hiring.

This idea of entrepreneurship is not entirely gone; companies like Pillar and Menlo are still doing impressive things, and we cover the individual perspective right here on this blog.

What’s next?  I’m not sure.  Mr. Gewirtz has recommendations in his book, both for society (more small business) and for any individual stuck in the “good job”/lay-off trap.  My favorite idea from Gewirtz is to look for other people who have good products, then either partner with them (you take over marketing, logistics, and production, to make the product “real”) or outright purchase the product idea and develop it yourself.

There are many people with ideas; Gewirtz suggests becoming a ‘finisher.’

Lessons

Writing this article has helped me realize two things.

First, that we (myself included) in the US are overly focused on ourselves.  This blog has readers from all over the world; it would interesting to hear from the current IT workers in India, Pakistan, and Vietnam on their perspectives on re-shoring.

Second,  I would like to get Mr. Gewirtz to interview on this blog.

What questions should I ask him?

I my previous post I suggested that the workforce is split into three general roles – ‘Labor’, ‘Crew’ and ‘Talent’ — and that it was better to be talent.

In order to be talent, you need to be differentiated somehow from everyone else.  Unique; different.  The classic definition is either a ‘known good quantity’, willing and able to do things others are unwilling, or unable to do — and you’ve got to work gigs, not that day job stuff.

Let’s talk about how to get there.

A Branded Quantity

The straightforward way to do this in IT is to pick one (preferably several) of the following:  Get a PhD in computer science, become a professor at a referencable school, write a book establishing your expertise, then work at a big company with an impressive title.

My model for this is a man named James Whittaker, who yes, earned his PhD from the University of Tennessee, taught at Florida Tech, gave a talk with one of his students that he later turned into a book, How To Break Software.  After Florida Tech, Whittaker left for Microsoft, then did a couple of years at Google, and, as of last February, is now back at Microsoft.

That’s Whit over at right, when he was a director of Test Engineering at Google.

So yes, real people are really able to plan their career in such a way as to do things others have not done, to make their expertise sought-after and desired.  If you are under 25 with no mortgage or serious life commitments, this is an approach.  Right now, my advice is the University of California at Berkeley, MIT, or Carnegie-Mellon University, then on to Google, possibly Microsoft, or Groupon.

But that’s not the only way to do it.

Willing To Do What Others Can Not – Or Will Not – Do

When I click on the “Talent” list for Craigslist, the same listings come up again and again – actors, actresses, and *cough* models doing, well … things on cameras that anyone could do, but that violate the average person’s sense of proprietary.

The easy way to be talent is to simply do things others are unwilling to do.

It doesn’t have to be … adult.  Garbage and Sanitation workers get to work reasonably short hours and command premium pay and benefits relative to their experience.   Mike Rowe, on the discovery channel, has an entire show about this called “dirty jobs.”

In IT, this means carrying a pager or offering support services at midnight.

Consider this business model

There are one hundred and sixty-eight billable hours in a typical 40-hours-per-week month.  If you know your customers well, you might know that they only need, on average, thee to five hours of support – but want time reserved if they need it up to ten hours a month.  So you sell thirty customers up to ten hours of reserved time and get paid for 300 hours a month.  Most of the time it will work – occasionally you will need to call in some help (or just go crazy.)

This is how my brother in law got a very large house.

Or This One

The other end of what people aren’t willing to do is what they aren’t able to do.   So you go out and write your own webserver, or some other component, that is terribly needed to make an open source project really work.  You don’t have to write the whole thing. Zed Shaw, for example, wrote Mongrel, the webserver that made Rails efficient – and gave it away.

Or take David Heinemeier Hansson (“DHH”), the creator of rails. He once had a recruiter ask how many years of Rails Development experience he had.  David replied “ALL OF THEM.”

Neither of those guys is going to have a problem finding a gig anytime soon

The Last Piece

But there’s another element, the toughest element, in becoming talent – moving toward pay-per-event – that most of us avoid out of culture.  We want the “safe” day jobs, which, ironically, means that freelance work becomes  work that few people will do, further increasing the value of that work.

More on that next time.

In my Informations Systems Policy Class in Graduate School (yes, they have classes for that), outsourcing was one of the hot topics of the day.  Specifically, outsourcing of business process. The basic idea was to clearly identify services, then cut cost by moving them to low-wage areas.  We even had impressive, triangle-shaped strategy graphs that talked about what to outsource and how to outsource it.   I ended up doing my master’s capstone work on the subject of outsourcing; it still stands up to scrutiny today.

But I have to admit, when the Washington Post ran an article on Indian Companies setting up call centers in the United States, I was as surprised as the next guy.

There is a lot of confusion going on here; a lot of doubt and mis-understanding.

I’m going to try to clear it up … and let the opportunity show through.

 How Did This Happen?

If you’ve ever called an 800-number for technical support, only to be transferred a dozen times, you probably realize how hard it can be for outsourcers to clearly identify lines of service.  Add a half-dozen time zones, eight layers of management, and a great-annual-review, transfer/promotion/forget_about_yesterday culture to the mix, and you’ve got a prescription for some real trouble.

There are plenty of lessons to be learned from that, but one of them is that keeping the outsourcer close — physically close — to the client company adds incredible value.

So that is exactly what the outsourcers have done.

After complaints about poor service, they looked at the United States (and other developed nations) with our bad economy, large numbers of unemployed workers, large amounts of cheap office space with power everywhere (that works!  All the time!) and said “hey, why don’t we set up shop across the street?”

According to the article, Aegis ignores credentials, uses a competency test, and pays workers who can do the job of repeatable business process outsourcing (mostly phone calls) from $12 to $14 per hour, along with a monthly bonus that might be worth an additional dollar per month.

To a competent high school graduate, it isn’t much, but it beats Taco Bell.

Truth and Consequences

One thing that always struck me about offshore technical work – from low-skill to high – was the sheer number of inefficienies in the process.

First you need a sales person on-site in the developed nation; you need an office to support that sales force.

Then you need the recruiters, trainers, and management overhead in the developing nation, plus, likely, an army of translators and liason-people.  You need to pay taxes, fees, and lots and lots of airfare and hotel expenses.

All this translates to inefficiencies in the system – it makes costs go up.

The Opportunity

A few years ago, an offshore company was offering programmers at $30/hour.  The work wasn’t that complex; it couldn’t be, in order to be offshored.  At the time I thought “A good college intern would accept that rate.  Why, I could get student to drop out of college for a few years, pay them $25/hr, and collect the float.”

I did have a bit of a chicken and an egg problem – I could not get the employees until I had the sales, and vice versa, but the idea was right.  I thought local people of ability could compete directly with offshore work by eliminating complexities in the supply chain. (In English: Cut overhead and work from home.)

I didn’t have the investment cash to pursue this, but it turns out, someone else did.

Today, the outsourcers are setting up shop locally and hiring the talent themselves.

The thing this – they are still saddled by those layers of management, the sales force, the physical office.

With IP telephony and rerouting, someone is going to build a virtual office, enable people to work from home, and lower costs to providers.

The only question is if it will be the developed nations … or the entrepreneurial, scrappy, outsourcers they have come to rely on.

If anyone wants to talk about this — you know where to find me.

Ian Rutherford is a technie; someone just comfortable enough in IIS, SQL Server, HTML and ASP to make a ‘real’ e-commerce site – or at least comfortable enough to learn.

Last time we talked about Ian’s back story, and left him with a tech support position at Pizza Hut Corporate Headquarters in Texas, learning the skills he would later use to start his own business.

Iwanted to ask Ian how he decided to move to colorado, start his own business and how it went.

It’s time for part II of our story.

Matt Heusser: How did you find yourself becoming CTO of the Catholic Store in Denver? How large was the IT department, and what was it like?

Ian Rutherford: Back in 1999 while I was working at Sprint Paranet doing website development I decided that I liked doing web and database integration but I really wanted to do something faith-based. I had already been working on websites since 1994 and  after watching Amazon take off, I figured that there wasn’t any reason that a Catholic store couldn’t have the same success on  a slightly smaller scale.I, with the eyebrow-raised agreement of my wife, decided to leave Sprint and start my own Catholic store since the technological world didn’t end in 2000. I decided to work on a fulfillment warehouse model to keep my costs low so I approached the largest Catholic bookstore in Denver about doing fulfillment for this  website I was going to build. The owner instead offered me a job building his website which I made into the largest on-line Catholic store in two years. When I arrived I increased the size of the IT department from zero to one and that is how it stayed until I left in 2002. We actually brought in a T1 and hosted the website on servers in an office closet.

Matt Heusser: Somewhere along the way, you and family decided to start your own Catholic store. What was that like? Would you consider it a vocation or a calling? How do you know that you made the right choice?

AquinasAndMore.com today

Ian Rutherford: When I decided to start Aquinas and More I was excited. I really thought that this was my calling. I wouldn’t call it a vocation, that’s what my family is. There was very little competition and I had the technical know-how (if not the business savvy). My family was supportive and my Mom, who I will never be able to repay, worked as a volunteer for countless hours while we did mind-numbing data entry. At the time, hardly any of our vendors were on-line so getting digital pictures, descriptions or any other promotional assets was almost impossible. We opened in October of 2002 with an initial investment of $12,000 and a 144 square foot office twenty miles from town. I’ll get back to you on the right choice when I’m more sure of the answer.

Matt Heusser: 2002 to 2012 is a long time. Can you tell us about the process of starting the business, especially the early years? Did you have any doubts?

Ian Rutherford: In early 2002, the owner of The Catholic Store told me that my contract was up and that I could reapply for my job but that he was looking for someone else who wouldn’t cost as much. I decided that wasn’t a good situation to be in so I decided it was time to part ways and start up my own business like I had planned to in the first place. I had about three months to build the customer-facing component of the site from scratch before we opened in October. Those were some very long days and nights of code writing and I am sure that a code reviewer would have nightmares about some of the legacy code still in the system. When we first started in our tiny office my team consisted of my Mom, a family friend and me. We had a web server, a database server, three workstations, a flatbed scanner and some utility shelves for product. We had also purchased an old jewelry case from a local church. We spent weeks just writing descriptions for items and learning the rudiments of using a digital scanner. During that first year we would wait for orders to print as they were placed and had our first “big break” when a publisher reprinted Bishop Fulton Sheen’s Wartime Prayerbook. We sold several hundred in a matter of weeks.

We finished part two of the interview with Ian taking the risk of his life; an on-line-only web store. Next week we close our adventure, with Ian taking the store to profitability, and even opening a a physical bookstore – with a lot of help from family and friends, and a few adventures along the way. We’ll also cover the advice he has for folks who see the path but have concerns about making the leap.

Regular readers will remember last month’s Las Vegas Trip to Interop (including the Booth Babes). A few of you may also know that, while in Vegas, I found time for an onsite with Zappos,

Long-time readers know that when I make these trips, I ask a lot of questions.  Some aren’t relevant for the C-level audience; others need to be interpreted by an audience with a bit of … finesse, or, perhaps, would be great, but the answers I get just don’t fit into the piece.

That’s what we have unchartered waters for.

Zappos is a subsidiary of Amazon.com; the company was purchased in 2010, when it had just broke the $1 Billion in annual revenue threshold.

For a website primary known for selling shoes, that is, well, a lot of sales.

Not only did the folks at Zappos invite me for an onsite; they also extended the offer to include attending the all-hands meeting the day before.

Why yes, now that you mention it, I did take my video camera.

The company is actually based in Henderson, Nevada, about fifteen minutes from Las Vegas, and is in the middle of a huge, ambitious project to move to downtown Las Vegas.  Once of the references that Tony Hsief, the CEO, made was that as companies get larger, the per-employee productivity goes down — yet as cities grow, the per-human productivity got up (for most reasonable measures of it.)

Why is this?  Well, lots of things, but I suspect choice and competition are two of them.  When you get more rug-sellers in the market, the customers win.  When people have autonomy over where to live, and realize that, if they put work into the house and community, it’s value will go up, they put effort into property and community.  More people means more specialized clubs and social events.

After describing the advantages to downtown, the company leaders showed a video that was a Walk-through of the Zappos Campus, really a world-class comceptualization.  My camera was on, and yes, I can show you the recording.  The all-hands was enlightening; I got to see the fun culture, the focus on customer service, and a couple presentations from outsiders.  (I have a little more film, I can upload it if there is request.)

Then Things Got Interesting

The second day was where the real action is — the heart of my CIO piece.  One thing I captured on camera that I haven’t had a chance to publish yet is my interview with Chris Weiss, then architecture lead (now director of it) at Zappos, about how the site’s hardware and systems interoperate.  When you consider the volume of traffics they get (the site is rank #216 for traffic in the United States by Alexa), having a 200ms response rate from inbound to outbound is incredible.

How do they do it?

Here’s Chris Weiss in his own words:

Just one more thing:  There’s plenty more to come.

Last time I introduced Andy Lester and his book Land The Tech Job You Love.  Today we return to ask about the specifics of the book; what Andy recommends to job seekers, and where can go to learn more about it.

Matt: Tell me about the book; how is it structured?

Andy: It’s in two halves: Finding the job and then applying and interviewing.

The first half is about the part of the process that’s entirely about you, that you do by yourself.  The second is the parts where you are actually interviewing with the company.

I made a point of splitting the chapter on resumes into two chapters.  The first discusses the words that you’re going to put on your resume, and the second talks about presentation and format.  One of the things that I’ve seen from years of reading Slashdot and Reddit is that people think primarily about formatting on the resume, and pay very little attention to what they’re actually saying.  I hope to help people get past that.

I’m also emphatic that you don’t have a resume, just one resume you send out for every job.  You have a base resume that you then modify for every job for which you apply.  No two jobs should get the same resume, because no two companies and positions are the same.  For one company, you may want to emphasize your database skills, and for another, your educational background is the most interesting.  Yes, it takes time to tailor every resume you send out, but hey, you want the job or not?  Besides, if you don’t have a job, what else can you be doing that’s more important than everything you can to get a job?

Matt: How do you find the company you’d like to work for?  It sounds like you are not suggesting the “numbers game” resume approach …

Andy: There aren’t 200 jobs out there that will make you happy, so why are you sending out 200 resumes?

Instead of going scattershot looking for any position possible, start looking for the types of companies that you’d like to work for, or doing the kind of work you’d want to be doing as well.  Talk to whoever you can.  Ask for pointers on what kinds of companies might be a good fit.  For instance, if I was looking for a job, I might drop you an email saying “Hey, Matt, you know I’m big into automated testing like you are.  Can you point me at any companies that are strong in that area, or could use help getting ramped up with testing?”  Note that I’m not asking for a job, but just help along the way.  When the requests you make of your contacts are small and non-imposing, it’s much easier to ask for help.

Matt: You mentioned the second half was about interview tips. I expect that all of our readers know to show up ten minutes early, to get a good nights sleep, and to dress a level higher than the job would generally require.  Could you share a few tips that have a bit more, well … depth?

Andy: Actually, you might be surprised by how many people don’t know those interview tips.  I”m finding more and more that the people raised on the Internet have apparently never picked up a book on job hunting of any kind.  I often tell job hunters who are completely new to the job hunt to go to their local public library and start there.  You’ll find dozens of books that will have a solid overview of the process.

My #1 tip for interviews is to have stories to tell.  The interviewer is going to be asking about your skills, and a story is the best way to do it.  Don’t just say “Yes, I know Oracle’s PL/SQL” when you can say “I’ve been using PL/SQL for three years, and I had to implement a Foo system in it, and convert a Frobnitz application from Postgresql to PL/SQL.”

The first answer says “yes”, the second answer says “Yes, and here are details to support it.”

The #2 tip is to put yourself in the shoes of the hiring manager.  What is it that she wants to know about you?  What problems does she have to solve?  The hiring manager wants to hire you.  She wants you to be the ideal candidate, so she can hire you and then get back to the rest of her day-to-day job.  She is on your side.  What you have to do is tell her the things she wants to know so it’s a slam-dunk decision.

Matt: Let’s say someone is living in a medium-sized area, and there are tech jobs, but he lacks some specific buzzwords and doesn’t want to move.  How can a person in that situation land a great job?  Do you have any advice?

Andy: If they’re buzzwords that he wants to learn, then start by learning them.  Spend an hour less a night watching TV, and read a book on the topic, and create a homemade project that uses that technology.

Want to learn Ruby?  Or a new variant of SQL?  Or HTML5?  The technical knowledge is out there, and you can spent the time to learn it.  You’ll just have to do it on your own.

Matt: I can see that working for open-source tools (I just did a tutorial post on how to get started with EC2), but can that work for large, expensive databases, or, say, administering MS Exchange?  For that matter, have you seen a lot of people have genuine success with that approach?

Andy: A fantastic solution, if you can find it, is to join an open source project focused on the object of your learning.  There’s a huge difference between putting on your resume that you’re teaching yourself Ruby, and that you’ve been contributing to the RubyWhatever project.

As you point out, this isn’t always possible.  An alternative might be to take a class at your local community college that is at least in the same general area as the topic.  You could also find a user group, say, the Des Moines Exchange Admin User Group, and attend meetings.  Mailing lists are fantastic for this, too.  Just join a mailing list and read the archives and learn from the problems and experiences of others.  It’s not as good a learning experience as having your own Exchange server to play with, but it’s far better than nothing.

Matt: thank you for you time today Andy; where can our readers go for more?

Andy: You’re very welcome, Matt.  If your readers want more, they can visit my blog about jobs and programming at petdance.com.  I’m glad to answer questions from readers when possible, too.

It’s a tough world out there.  Unemployment runs at 9%, but if you count the under-employed, part-time, or those out of work more than two years, the percentage could be twice that.

Then you have employers, a fickle lot, that like to require a very specific skill set, down to the level of sifting out people who have experience administering the wrong point-release of specific operating systems.

Then along comes Andy Lester, author of “Land The Tech Job You Love.”

Let’s be frank: The first part, “land the tech job” is hard enough, and here Andy comes promising the second.

I thought it was time to talk to the gentleman, man-to-man. (Plus I’d let you watch, because I’m that kind of guy.)

More seriously, Andy wrote a book about developing habits to get, and keep, a job suited to your skills and temperament — and offered to talk to us about it.

In Part I of this interview, we’ll talk about the experiences and motivations that Andy drew on to write the book.

Matt: You’ve been a programmer, manager, and technology evangelist.  What inspired you to write a book such a human-resources-y topic?

Andy: Years of hiring programmers.  I’ve had so many people interview for programmer positions with two big failures.  First, tech people tend to not like to talk about themselves, and you have to sell yourself to get a job, because if you don’t, someone else is going to beat you to it.  That’s not the entire problem, but it’s the tip of the iceberg.  Second, I talked to many people who didn’t seem to especially care what job they got.  They just wanted to come in and write some code and go home.  This seemed like such a shame, because I figure that life is too short to spend working in a job that you don’t love.  You spend as much time at the office as you spend waking hours with your spouse, so why not love what you’re doing?

Matt: You’ve been a hiring manager since about the time we first met, in 2003.  Of all the candidates you’ve seen, what would you say is the #1 mistake you’ve seen?

Andy: I always ask for printed code samples before an interview.  I want them printed so that the candidate and I can look at them in the interview together, and I can get a feel for the candidate’s design and coding decisions.

So this guy comes in at 9:10 for a 9:00 interview, which is Strikes #1 and 2 against him right there.

He doesn’t apologize for being late, and hands me an orange 3.5″ floppy disk and says “Here’s my code samples, my printer ran out of ink this morning.”

Never mind that I didn’t have a drive capable of reading a floppy, even years back when this happened, but he told me quite a lot about himself.

First, he was unable to complete his first assignment as directed.  I said to do X, and he didn’t.

Matt: Let me guess — second — it told you that he was comfortable transferring his problems to you?

Andy: Exactly.  Third, he waited until the morning of this important meeting to do the assignment.  Fourth, he didn’t have the presence of mind to go to a Kinko’s and print off copies.

Matt: Can I ask, what were the top two or three things you’ve seen as a hiring manager that impressed you?  What were the good things?

Andy: I’m always impressed when a candidate has clearly done his or her homework and researched the company or me.  I always give my name when I’m going to interview someone, giving them ample opportunity to find out about me on the web. If you can find blog posts or mailing list messages from your interviewer, it can give you insight into what he and the company need. This isn’t creepy. I’ve already Googled the candidate before calling them in for an interview, and they should have the foresight to do the same in return.

At the very least, everyone should find out as much about the company with which they’re interviewing before going in for the meeting.  I wish it weren’t so uncommon that it impresses me when people do it.

Candidates who are well-prepared for the interview and work to tell about their value to their companies in past positions always make a solid impression.  It shows that they know I’m hiring them for a job, not just for the heck of it.