Matthew Botos

I was recently invited to join Naymz, a professional social networking site like LinkedIn, but with more emphasis on reputation. Going through the initial setup and looking around, several features caught my eye:

(more…)

The Wall Street Journal has some interesting things to say about The Next American Frontier:

The most compelling statistic of all? Half of all new college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job. Today, 80% of the colleges and universities in the U.S. now offer courses on entrepreneurship; 60% of Gen Y business owners consider themselves to be serial entrepreneurs, according to Inc. magazine. Tellingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are starting companies at a faster rate than 35 to 44-year-olds. And 70% of todays high schoolers intend to start their own companies, according to a Gallup poll.

(more…)

This is so true, I should put it at the top of my resume:

Work Isn’t Their Whole World: Sure, they’re going to go to work, but it had better be fun. For Gen Y, work isn’t their identity. It’s just a place. Gen Y sees no reason why a company can’t be more accommodating, offering benefits like the ability to work from anywhere, flex-time, a culture that supports team communication, and a “fun” work environment. They’re also not going to blindly follow orders just because you’re the boss. Sometimes dubbed “Generation Why?” they need to “buy in” as to why something is being done. Old school bosses may find their questioning insubordinate behavior, but they would be best to just change their management techniques and adapt. Gen Y hasn’t known much unemployment and they’re not going to put up with being treated poorly just for sake of a paycheck.

From Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web - ReadWriteWeb.

I happened to click on a LinkedIn Company Profile today, and realized it provides metrics that most companies themselves don’t. These range from things that are hard to track (where do people go on to work afterwards), to ones human resources more closely guards (age and gender). Of course, these are just from the LinkedIn crowd; some companies aren’t as young or diverse as that subset appears. In any case, it’s one more source of information about employers, and potentially a gauge of how Web 2.0 and social network savvy a company is as a whole.

I critiqued a resume for a friend of a friend today and it made me realize how we as technical people always slant our resumes. We write them as exhaustive specifications, with perfect chronology and humble detail of our roles, occasionally indulging our egos by describing a really cool project or solution. The managers and recruiters who read them, though, are looking for something a little different.

Sure, they want to see that your experience and qualification that fits the position, but more so they want an overall sense that you’ve got the right personality and technical mindset to join their group. And since most of them write job descriptions as a bit of a wish list, they want to see some skills in tangential areas and in a pay grade above the one they’re actually offering.

The solution? Succinctly emphasize your general technical strengths, cover your bases with a keyword-loaded technology list, and round it out with some management-friendly language that shows you have the “extra” skills to make you the perfect candidate.

Code reviews are another software practice it’s tough to buy into until you see the value - which has recently become apparent to me after finding a very effective way of doing them with a number of added benefits.

I discovered this through an unintentional experiment: after having a single person review a new piece of code, we sat the whole team down and a walk through of the same code. Together we exposed many more opportunities for improvement, and started a lot of good discussions on standards, reuse, and code quality. That continued this week, where we found that even that “peer-tested” and  “done” code still needed some fixes.

Another benefit was that it gave everyone a chance to see other parts of the system; that kind of cross-training makes a team much more flexible and resilient to turnover and absences. It’s also a nice chance for people to show off work that would otherwise stay in the dark. Overall, though, I think what really impressed me was how much a review by the entire team encouraged conversation and put quality in the spotlight.

The problem with a lot of new ideas, particularly software development methodologies and management trends, is separating the wheat from the chaff. Until recently, test driven development was another bit of hype I didn’t buy, but I few recent experiences have changed my mind to the point where I’m actually using it at home on personal projects.

What really made a difference was seeing it in action: writing a test, writing some code, and seeing that it really worked. Repeat that for a number of scenarios and you start to feel pretty good that what you have is solid and you’ll know if you break it in the future.

The second feature is that someone sold me on what it could do for me as a developer - free me from the tedious, ad-hoc, labor-intensive testing process that tends to go along with my rapid style of development. At work, it’s allowed me to bypass all the clicks of a web application to test the underlying logic, and at home I can test my photo management scripts without manually shuffling around files to be modified.

The real test of my commitment and realization of its value will probably come the next time I modify Gallery, a very large PHP photo gallery with an equally large testing suite.

One of the very different things at my new job is how prevalent the use of contractors is, though it provides some interesting moments. My team currently includes a software architect in London, 3 on-site contractors, and an entire test team in India.

Those of us on-site go out for lunch every Friday, and this week we hit up a Mexican restaurant with one of the new contractors, who’s in the US from India for the first time. He was adventurous enough to try some Mexican food, which led to the interesting scene of one (Italian) Amerian, one Russian, and one more acclimated Indian trying to explain the nuances of various meat, cheese, and tortilla combinations. It worked out OK in the end; he got a couple of beef tacos and cleaned his plate

It’s funny - when I was actively looking for a job, LinkedIn didn’t offer me much, but now that I have one, I get all kinds of calls and emails. Most are from recruiters and hiring managers with positions of wildly varying quality, but one this week really threw me. A contracting agency saw my title of “Innovative Technical Lead for Agile Scrum Software Development” and called not to hire me, but to see if he could get me to hire his company’s contractors! This was amusing for a few reasons:

• Someone didn’t doubt for a second that I actually had authority
• I’ve never been a position to hire anyone, temporary or permanent
• My current employer actually does use a lot of contractors, from a firm that has both onshore and offshore workforces

Maybe I should change my title to Director and see if I start getting calls for Vice President jobs!

Almost as soon as I mused on What I Want to Be When I Grow Up, one of those paths found me. After a week of scrum training, my manager did a quick, quiet poll of the team, and ratified their vote for me as scrum master.

The fact that this was largely peer-driven makes it a bit more meaningful; certain skills are often only truly appreciated by other techies, and it’s nice that they trust me to keep management from meddling too much with their day to day development activities. It also plays to my desire to have a broader view and influence in the projects I work, and the provides the enjoyment that comes from mentoring in various forms.

My concern of losing hands-on technology time has only partially been realized; I’m still being tapped for some development work, though administrative matters seem to be consuming most of my time. It’s exciting to see the project really start rolling with scrum, and I’m much more engaged now that I have some skin in the game.