Job search notes and search database

I constructed a Filemaker database to track my job search, mostly out of boredom, and just to see if I could do something interesting with Filemaker. I posted a template copy on my iDisk public folder here:

http://public.me.com/nrussell


The job search drags on. It appears that I have little chance at a development job now. I am convinced that rampant age discrimination is my biggest obstacle. At virtually every interview I am told that I did very well on the technical assessment, and that everyone liked me and thinks I am a good fit for the job and the company. But later I am told that other candidates had better skills, or that my expected salary is too high for the position. Why are they telling me what my expectations are before we even talk about salary?? And why do they think I will leave for another higher paying job, when of course, there are no other jobs, let alone higher paying jobs?? All of it boils down to age discrimination as far as I can determine.

All my recent interviews have been for support positions like escalation, where you get on the phone with angry customers at 3am and tell them the team in India/China/Timbuktu is working really hard on their problem with the best people assigned to it. The main goal is get the customer to stop screaming at the executive vice presidents about the poor quality of the product and the support, neither of which you have any control over, and neither of which the execs want to hear about. It distracts from their strategic planning.

Your only required skill is to keep saying nice things to the irate customer and avoid screaming four letter words back at the customer out of your own frustration about the poor product quality and support. Oh, and you get to install and run the product and verify to the rest of the company that the product is in fact poorly built and full of bugs, just like the angry customer says it is. Somehow the product team never believes what the customer tells them, so someone has to spend a week or two to duplicate the issue before anyone will be assigned to work on it. Usually the customer wants you on a continuous phone link 24x7 while you are trying to duplicate their problems, in case something else goes wrong.

So once you have isolated the problem and proved to your local development team that something is in fact wrong, you get to try to persuade the mostly non-English speaking remote support team that they need to write the fix for this problem as soon as possible, because the problem isn't important enough for the local development team to assign anyone to it. If you do manage to get the remote team to understand what you are saying, and they do manage to get some code written, then you get to install the supposed fix and re-test the customer issue. Usually this last phase drags on for several weeks and a couple of dozen attempts at fixing, while the customer demands that you stay on the phone and give progress reports every five minutes.

One thing I have learned from some of my remote colleagues is that there is an art to constructing a progress report. There are an infinite number of ways to say "I am still trying to understand what the heck I am doing" and "I really don't understand anything you are telling me" and "I am busy looking for another job that pays better" that make it sound like something is actually happening. I never realized how many process steps there are between the time you tell the remote team what needs fixing and the time that any code at all is actually written, let alone tested. There are at least 30 process steps that I never heard of prior to last year.

Finally, if you do actually succeed in improving anything for the customer, you are now the world expert in this area of the product functionality. Everyone in the company will now direct every customer question or complaint about this area of the product directly to your cellphone. Your number will be programmed into the favorites list of every operations manager at every customer.

Oh, and it is bad form to scream at the development team too, be they local or remote. They don't normally listen to you anyway, any more than they listen to the customers, and screaming obscenities at them does not improve the relationship.

The executive vice presidents don't reward you for any of this of course, since this has nothing to do with the strategy or direction of the company or the customer satisfaction. The only important thing is that you are the firewall between the executives and the angry customers. This is not a highly paid or respected position despite what they tell you when they are trying to hire you or keep you from leaving.

Hmm, and one other skill that gets no recognition on the job is the fact that you do not scream obscenities at your loved ones after being awake for 60 hours continuously with nothing to show for it other than cauliflower ears from being on the phone.

The good part is that there is a salary and benefits.

In case you can't tell, my frustration with this whole thing is that if you build the product right in the first place, you generally don't need very many escalation or support people. Building it right doesn't mean that you don't have bugs, or unforeseen customer problems when they insist on using the product for ten things that you never thought of originally. It just means that the product is built to be extended quickly and easily, and that you have built in mechanisms to assist with troubleshooting field issues on the actual customer installation, because they have the 1,000 server machines deployed and you have only a single CPU 10 year old PC cobbled together from spare parts due to cost cutting measures.

One of my former colleagues just landed a support job. Per usual, he knows the hiring manager from about 15 years ago. And another colleague has suddenly gotten 4 or 5 interviews this past week, and it seems highly likely he will get multiple offers within the next week. There are definitely more job listings the past month. And of course, both these guys are about 20 years younger than me.

So anyway I have another round of interviews at a small startup tomorrow, for one of these escalation positions, since they don't think my technical skills are up to the high level they require for a development position. I guess I talked too much about how I want to keep the customer happy during my technical interview. Their idea of keeping the customer happy appears to involve establishing an escalation organization to keep the angry customers away from the development team. They do not appear to have any plans to improve the way the development is done, other than to rewrite the application using the latest Java technology. There seems to be a pervasive belief that if only they were using the latest tools, they wouldn't have angry customers.

Another large company where I already interviewed twice just contacted me for sustaining position on their 30 year old code base, so perhaps that will turn into an interview within the next few days. The variation on the above theme here is that you get to look for horrible mistakes in 30 year old code with no documentation or any clue what you are looking for, other than the fact that there is - wait for it - an angry customer who is paying millions of dollars in annual support fees on the phone screaming at you. In this variation, you are expected to actually fix the code yourself, while on the phone. The good part may be that the pay is actually decent, since you are expected to actually write the code fix as opposed to simply isolate the non-English-speaking support team from the North American-based customer.


I'm sure I can find more things to rant about, but I need another cup of tea and I have to get ready to talk to someone in China about that escalation job tomorrow morning.