Job offered in job/seeker mismatch scenario.

SixPapaCharlie

SixPapaCharlie

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Interview 1 went great for them. Iffy for me but no deal breaker.

1/2 way through the guy says: "Your are aware this is a hybrid dev / manager role?"

I had no idea. It was never mentioned but I am an expert at faking it so I just said "I was actually going to ask you more about the technology you are using because I didn't see it listed"

He says. "You can talk to so-in-so at the next interview about that"

Interview continues and it went really well but I was iffy.

2nd interview this AM with CIO.
I'm a 100% MS guy. I was a vb6 and .NET / SQL developer and that is who I manage today. Been that way for 15 years for me. Very clear on my resume.

Talk to the CIO, we discuss the products, the team, and then... the tech.

He says you will be doing development in Delphi, Sybase, and Unix using Emacs and Vi

Without skipping a beat I ask "then why are sitting at a table right now with a .NET guy?"

He says because your history tells me you know how to learn.


Any IT people think these things are non trivial enough to be making an offer to a MS guy? This is by no means entry level either. I think if I took it, I would be gone in a couple weeks. I haven't done development in 5 years and he is explaining that he expects that we can do better optimization than the SQL optimizer. I can't. I don't want to be that good at SQL anymore.

What are they thinking? I can't figure it out.

From the management / client relationship standpoint I am totally interested but that is 50% of the gig. I find it odd they are willing to make me an offer knowing I would be probably the weakest link technically and at the same time trying to mentor a team of stronger links so to speak.

If I were in their position I would think having someone ramp up on the job and completely new to them technology would put that person in the way of progress for a long time.

weird.
 
Plus there is an on call rotation. I am so damn sick of being on call.
 
I think it's weird too.

I'd be suspicious as to why they can't hire someone who's a better fit. Or the CIO has no understanding of the issue you're raising and the dynamics of a (small-ish?) development team.
 
Would you be leading some kind of team? (Sounds like it, I just reread your post)

You wouldn't necessarily have to be so familiar with the details.
 
Thinking big picture, I can see no career-enhancement potential to learning Delphi or Sybase. I didn't even think Sybase was still in the wild -- wasn't MSSQL 4.3 basically a fork of Sybase?

As a tech, management is definitely a dead-end. I haven't made less than my managers in over a decade.

If a company can't come up with a reasonable tech description for a technical job, then you've got a dilbert-grade company on your hands. That may be a good or bad thing, depending on your tolerance of corporate BS. Frankly, I don't mind corporate gigs as long as I can fool them into letting me work from home -- then I get a "real" job or three on the side. But there is NO corporate hole that I can last on-site at for more than a month.
 
tiger said:
I think it's weird too.

I'd be suspicious as to why they can't hire someone who's a better fit. Or the CIO has no understanding of the issue you're raising and the dynamics of a (small-ish?) development team.
Click to expand...

Yes small. Company is ~20 people.
CIO built the software years ago.

Now lives on an island somewhere and flies in once a month to check on things. He seemed like a real no kidding genius. They guy was super smart technically. But curious about converting someone for the job. It would be like making a career change almost.
 
Matthew said:
Would you be leading some kind of team? (Sounds like it, I just reread your post)

You wouldn't necessarily have to be so familiar with the details.
Click to expand...

Title is software development manager.
The verbal description is managing the develpment team while at the same time having hands on development projects of my own.
 
In a previous life when I was running network and security infrastructure, I looked for folks with automotive experience. Why? I can teach someone everything he needs to know about networking. But I can't teach someone how to troubleshoot and think about systems interactions. For higher level positions, I'd have happily taken someone who was a Juniper whiz even though we were a Cisco shop.

Maybe they figure if you're a hot-**** developer, you'll be able to learn a new language/platform and be equally good with it. I'm assuming you understand computer science, development management and life cycles, systems, and theory, and you're capable of learning new tools. So that part makes sense to me. But if 50% of the job is just what you don't want to do, I'd walk.
 
schmookeeg said:
Thinking big picture, I can see no career-enhancement potential to learning Delphi or Sybase. I didn't even think Sybase was still in the wild -- wasn't MSSQL 4.3 basically a fork of Sybase?

As a tech, management is definitely a dead-end. I haven't made less than my managers in over a decade.

If a company can't come up with a reasonable tech description for a technical job, then you've got a dilbert-grade company on your hands. That may be a good or bad thing, depending on your tolerance of corporate BS. Frankly, I don't mind corporate gigs as long as I can fool them into letting me work from home -- then I get a "real" job or three on the side. But there is NO corporate hole that I can last on-site at for more than a month.
Click to expand...

I am done with the hands on dev stuff. I quit liking it around the time I had kids and didn't want to spend my free time studying new crap all the time.
People never change and are super easy to manage in a tech environment if they enjoy what they do. Money is not a concern as far as who makes what relative to me. I make more than I deserve. Most of my value to my current company comes form the fact that when there is a jam, I can get them out of it. I have a pretty good track record for that. And my team is kick ass so that helps. :)
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
I am done with the hands on dev stuff. I quit liking it around the time I had kids and didn't want to spend my free time studying new crap all the time.
Click to expand...
Oh, you will just love getting up to speed with vi then... :)
 
tiger said:
Oh, you will just love getting up to speed with vi then... :)
Click to expand...

I used it in college and I recall then (1997) thinking
"Who the hell would want to use this?"

I hated it so I got PC based compilers for all of my programming projects.
I know That stuff is all free but it is highly non-intuitive to use IMO
 
I'd run. Those skills won't be useful in the future. If they wanted you to work with some non-relational databases and a new modern language then it'd probably be worth doing. Some sort of new technology that'll be useful in the future.

If you're going to learn, learn what will be used tomorrow.

As to hiring different technology stacks - we've hired many Microsoft stack people who have turned out to be great employees and picked up things quickly. We don't do *any* development on the Microsoft stack. That said they have to WANT to work with what we use else they'll just hinder us.
 
tiger said:
Oh, you will just love getting up to speed with vi then... :)
Click to expand...


As soon as Sybase, emacs and vi were mentioned, it was obvious the company is stuck in the Dark Ages.

Run. Runaway fast.
 
I know what some of the buttons on the ribbon in Word and Excel do so if you pass on this job let me know. I'll require 10K per week and work from home on days I choose. I'll also need an expense account.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
Yes small. Company is ~20 people.
CIO built the software years ago.

Now lives on an island somewhere and flies in once a month to check on things. He seemed like a real no kidding genius. They guy was super smart technically. But curious about converting someone for the job. It would be like making a career change almost.
Click to expand...

"I'll change him after we're married". Recipe for divorce.

That said, many organizations (including two very large internet companies) really focus on hiring smart people. As one regional manager told me "they can learn specific skills & we can teach them - but you can never teach someone to be smart". Don't discount learning something new.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
What are they thinking? I can't figure it out.

From the management / client relationship standpoint I am totally interested but that is 50% of the gig. I find it odd they are willing to make me an offer knowing I would be probably the weakest link technically and at the same time trying to mentor a team of stronger links so to speak.
Click to expand...

No need to be direct with us, be direct with them. You gave them one chance with the "why are you here talking to me" question. Obviously you have to hit them between the eyes to get their attention on the question you are asking. If they don't respond adequately the second time, run away screaming.

or, get a guaranteed year/year contract and enjoy it while it lasts...
 
Listen to your gut - run away. Along with the old, outdated technology, these guys aren't willing to listen to you...think they will if you accept the position?

Run fast...
 
I am turning it down.

I had felt some pressure to accept something with my current company going away but we had some meetings today and found out the sale wont be approved till July and they anticipate a year to complete the close process. I still time to be picky.

As soon as I made that decision, my day became pretty stress free.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
I am turning it down.

I had felt some pressure to accept something with my current company going away but we had some meetings today and found out the sale wont be approved till July and they anticipate a year to complete the close process. I still time to be picky.

As soon as I made that decision, my day became pretty stress free.
Click to expand...

Good for you
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
I am turning it down.

I had felt some pressure to accept something with my current company going away but we had some meetings today and found out the sale wont be approved till July and they anticipate a year to complete the close process. I still time to be picky.

As soon as I made that decision, my day became pretty stress free.
Click to expand...

Good call.

The tech they were talking about isn't difficult, but it's not what you want to do. They're looking for someone to own the whole thing, soup to nuts. If you're not into every aspect of it, walking away is the right call.

Plus it sound a bit like a backwards step.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
I am turning it down.

I had felt some pressure to accept something with my current company going away but we had some meetings today and found out the sale wont be approved till July and they anticipate a year to complete the close process. I still time to be picky.

As soon as I made that decision, my day became pretty stress free.
Click to expand...

If the prospect of accepting a job offer is stressful, your decision is made for you.
 
paflyer said:
If the prospect of accepting a job offer is stressful, your decision is made for you.
Click to expand...
It is. I have had a lot of jobs in my career but this the first time I was aware of impending closure of my company and that adds pressure plus being pretty honest, they were waiving a lot of money around.

Those are 2 things that make a guy go "ummm maybe I could do this for a few years" If it were 100% management, I would take it. Every couple years on my resume, I have gone back to dev positions and they are the shortest positions on it. I like writing code for myself and I probably always will. I don't have any interest in doing it for other people. I need to just make that a hard and fast rule in my life.

Plus, I may enjoy living off Mrs 6PC for a few years ;)
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
Plus there is an on call rotation. I am so damn sick of being on call.
Click to expand...

Screw that sh*t! Been there, done that. Never again.

I got a new manager a couple months ago, and in his first 1 on 1 with me, I told him in very loud-and-clear language that if our team ever instituted on-call rotation, I would either not do it or resign.

I've done it previously in my career, and also for about 18 months when I joined my current company and was on the Support team. Having a cell phone by the bed that could go off at any moment with a live customer having problems on the other end is not for me.

They could triple my salary and I still wouldn't do it (no joke). Never again.
 
I'll tell you what he's thinking: he's tired of Indian nationals that don't know $h!t about technology but are semi good at faking it.

Don't take me wrong, this is not a racist comment but the reality of the IT industry in this country today.

I'm also an IT guy (Java and Oracle in my case). Real tech guy that has evolved throughout his career into architect level/middle management in the enterprise. Also some of my best friends are Indians (from the country India, not Native Americans...so confusing)

But the reality is that the "natives" (not necessarily the Native Americans) stopped studying IT technology two decades ago.

This guy is so tired of it that he's willing to give you on the job training. You'll probably last a lifetime there if you wanted to.
 
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By the way, do you guys mention in your resumes that you're pilots? I was wondering that.
 
Wow Delphi and Sybase, must be a very old codebase.

Back when it was VB6 or Delphi I went the Delphi route. Served me and clients well for along time, but moved on to .NET some time back. Still have a coupe of old programs at customer sites built on D7. I keep a VM around with my old development environment on it.

Toss in being on-call and it sounds like a mill.
 
Rotating on call for developers is becoming more and more common as companies start to involve development teams in the operations process. A downside to the whole Devops movement for sure if you're a developer that doesn't want to be on call.

Personally as an it operations guy that writes a lot of code I don't mind it. About time the developers have to fix their own code at 2am instead of me :)
 
LuisO said:
By the way, do you guys mention in your resumes that you're pilots? I was wondering that.
Click to expand...

I have before. I was looking at a job where I knew the hiring director was a pilot. We spent the whole time talking about flying. I tend to customize my resume a bit based on information I have about the company. Sometimes I have a hobbies / interests section, sometimes I omit it.
 
Old Unix greybeard here: Never bothered to learn Emacs but if you're fluent in vi, you can claim to have "The Right Stuff". There's nothing like grokking regular expressions to be tantamount to having magic powers in data manipulation. Knowing AWK and SED are also powerful tools to have in your arsenal.

Yeah, Sybase is a yesterday's has-been database much like Informix but those skills do translate well to other sql databases very well. MS SQL Server was derived from Sybase. My first sql database was Sybase and learning it prepared me for a lifelong career in database administration. I'm currently in the process of migrating data from our last Informix on AIX system today, our new municipal court system is MS SQL based and we're going live with it and doing the live conversion this weekend. The new people we've hired to run these SQL Server based systems simply lack the ability to grasp the underlying concepts of how the systems work but I don't care anymore. In a few more years I'm retired and it all becomes somebody else's problems. We still have several Oracle systems too but those will likely be replaced with new apps that use MS SQL someday too.

If somebody wants to hire me after I retire my current job for contract work I may consider it but I'm going to be damn expensive.
 
LuisO said:
By the way, do you guys mention in your resumes that you're pilots? I was wondering that.
Click to expand...

Used to. Just like it's fashionable for idiot managers to say "I used to be a programmer too, you know" -- it also brings out the "I once took flight training" stories.. which always end up with a tale of personal woe, where the person ran out of cash, got married instead and now he's divorced, or ended up having crotchfruits and is still in debt up to his eyeballs, but he wouldn't give them up for anything else in the world.. I have no idea what to answer them when they do that, but I'm sure I don't hide my pity well.

Now it's my little secret. I filed it under the other sage career advice of "never let a man know you have a nickel more than he does". Seems to fit there nicely.

$0.05 ;)

- Mike
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
I am turning it down.

I had felt some pressure to accept something with my current company going away but we had some meetings today and found out the sale wont be approved till July and they anticipate a year to complete the close process. I still time to be picky.

As soon as I made that decision, my day became pretty stress free.
Click to expand...


Glad you said no. I read that and my next question about the place would have been, "Ok, if I'm the manager can I choose the next technologies to rebuild this thing in, because this stuff is so close to dead we may not be able to hire people to work on it for long, if we even can right now."

jesse said:
Rotating on call for developers is becoming more and more common as companies start to involve development teams in the operations process. A downside to the whole Devops movement for sure if you're a developer that doesn't want to be on call.



Personally as an it operations guy that writes a lot of code I don't mind it. About time the developers have to fix their own code at 2am instead of me :)
Click to expand...


I've always thought that tying mistakes that make it all the way to Production to their wallets, is the ultimate fix for that. But I've never seen a place with the cojones to do it. On call costs come right straight out of the paycheck.

No more on call being overhead...

No way anyone will ever do it. But it'd be damned effective. Problem is they'd all leave to go somewhere there's no direct accountability.

I guess the next best thing is to eat their time. It's the same thing kinda. Hourly rate goes way way down when you're up all night.
 
denverpilot said:
I've always thought that tying mistakes that make it all the way to Production to their wallets, is the ultimate fix for that. But I've never seen a place with the cojones to do it. On call costs come right straight out of the paycheck.

No more on call being overhead...

No way anyone will ever do it. But it'd be damned effective. Problem is they'd all leave to go somewhere there's no direct accountability.

I guess the next best thing is to eat their time. It's the same thing kinda. Hourly rate goes way way down when you're up all night.
Click to expand...

I write more software than I build or maintain infrastructure these days and it certainly brings perspective. Mistakes happen.

It took a lot of culture change in our company to get to where development is not blaming IT for problems and IT is not blaming development for problems. A problem is found or reported, we work together, and we get it fixed.

We live in a world of rapidly changing businesses and rapidly changing requirements for the software. You do your best to create workflows that do that efficiently and control quality. Many times the risk of a small software bug is worth it compared to slowing things down.
 
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SixPapaCharlie said:
Interview 1 went great for them. Iffy for me but no deal breaker.

1/2 way through the guy says: "Your are aware this is a hybrid dev / manager role?"

I had no idea. It was never mentioned but I am an expert at faking it so I just said "I was actually going to ask you more about the technology you are using because I didn't see it listed"

He says. "You can talk to so-in-so at the next interview about that"

Interview continues and it went really well but I was iffy.

2nd interview this AM with CIO.
I'm a 100% MS guy. I was a vb6 and .NET / SQL developer and that is who I manage today. Been that way for 15 years for me. Very clear on my resume.

Talk to the CIO, we discuss the products, the team, and then... the tech.

He says you will be doing development in Delphi, Sybase, and Unix using Emacs and Vi

Without skipping a beat I ask "then why are sitting at a table right now with a .NET guy?"

He says because your history tells me you know how to learn.


Any IT people think these things are non trivial enough to be making an offer to a MS guy? This is by no means entry level either. I think if I took it, I would be gone in a couple weeks. I haven't done development in 5 years and he is explaining that he expects that we can do better optimization than the SQL optimizer. I can't. I don't want to be that good at SQL anymore.

What are they thinking? I can't figure it out.

From the management / client relationship standpoint I am totally interested but that is 50% of the gig. I find it odd they are willing to make me an offer knowing I would be probably the weakest link technically and at the same time trying to mentor a team of stronger links so to speak.

If I were in their position I would think having someone ramp up on the job and completely new to them technology would put that person in the way of progress for a long time.

weird.
Click to expand...


Quite possibly they have a good technical team that lacks good leadership. Sometimes it's good to have a member of the team who looks at problems from the different perspective of a different background.

I never hire someone for what they know, I hire them for attitude and ability to think and learn.
 
denverpilot said:
Glad you said no. I read that and my next question about the place would have been, "Ok, if I'm the manager can I choose the next technologies to rebuild this thing in, because this stuff is so close to dead we may not be able to hire people to work on it for long, if we even can right now."




I've always thought that tying mistakes that make it all the way to Production to their wallets, is the ultimate fix for that. But I've never seen a place with the cojones to do it. On call costs come right straight out of the paycheck.

No more on call being overhead...

No way anyone will ever do it. But it'd be damned effective. Problem is they'd all leave to go somewhere there's no direct accountability.

I guess the next best thing is to eat their time. It's the same thing kinda. Hourly rate goes way way down when you're up all night.
Click to expand...

Disagree. That would build a department so risk averse that nothing would ever get done. Success comes from failure. That's not just a fancy buzzphrase, it is the truth. Never fail, never innovate.
 
Nothing wrong with vi :) I use it everyday! Emacs? Go to hell! I hate that POS. Doesn't matter if you are a .Net guy or not. A good developer can use whatever language/platform that is needed. A matter of syntax if you understand the underlying algorithms. Sybase, MSSQL, MySQL, Postgres, if you understand the concepts, translating them to a different platform is easy.

Although the big thing these days is NoSQL, so Couchbase, Mongo, Cassandra, Aerospike, Redis, is the cool hipster tech to know :)

Devs being on call is more common than not these days. Nothing worse than a code push go wrong in the middle of the night, and an IT guy that knows nothing of that code push trying to figure **** out. It is what it is.

-Brian
 
SkyHog said:
Disagree. That would build a department so risk averse that nothing would ever get done. Success comes from failure. That's not just a fancy buzzphrase, it is the truth. Never fail, never innovate.
Click to expand...


True. It would seem on the surface that the better method is instead incentivizing success.

Problem is, that doesn't work either. It leads to lack of innovation because if you can do something small and easy and call it a success, instead of something big... You will... if that's how you get paid more.

Frankly I wouldn't want to wake up some of the junior devs at 2AM anyway. They aren't paid for that crap. I am. Perhaps senior devs if needed.

It's a conundrum. Can't penalize immediately and fiscally for bad work, can't do immediate small fiscal incentives for good work... Both can backfire.

Luckily motivation and pay of devs is not my responsibility at this place... Yay. Haha. I'm Infrastructure. ;)
 
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