Hard to fathom that January is nearly over. What a ride it’s been already.
Earlier this month I had to take my laptop in to the Apple store because it started making vacuum cleaner noises. When I called them to get some additional information, this song above was the hold music. I thought it was sooooo clever. But then I called again a week later and the hold music had nothing to do with waiting, so maybe just a coincidence?
Nevertheless, I have a few irons in the fire at the moment and the waiting is exciting and terrifying, while simultaneously I am trying to continue to forge ahead in case nothing comes of it.
Being unable to talk about my own job search I will tell you instead about a conversation with a colleague last night, a fellow TA who graduated around the same time I did from the JavaScript Accelerator. She’s slated to start working in February for a company here in Seattle who empowers female entrepreneurs, in a contract-to-hire position. When I asked, “How’d you find out about that gig?” she told me that she invited someone out to coffee for a networking conversation, a women she got connected to on Twitter, and that conversation turned into “hey can you come in to interview?” which then turned into “actually nevermind, can you start in February?”
“Hang on, so you went to coffee… and then… you didn’t have to do a phone tech screen…”
“Nope, they just offered me the job. It’s contract so if it doesn’t work out, no harm done to them or me.”
“…You didn’t have to code on a whiteboard…”
” 🙂 ”
I’m really happy for her, and the more I thought about it, the more I land on: WHY AREN’T MORE ORGANIZATIONS DOING THIS??
I interviewed back in November for job that seemed like a *great fit*, working as a Rails developer (“engineer”) at the local office of an org that allows users to track which books they’ve read and want to read. The job description said “be less than a year out of school” so I applied despite my green-ness, had a great “cultural fit” convo, and then got whomped in the technical phone screen. Guess what: that job is still unfilled, or still hiring, it showed up again today in my job postings notification. In the three months since they talked with me, at least two things have happened: 1. I got better; 2. The technology changed. If they had just hired me in November for a three-month run, I could have gotten better *on their technology stack* and we would both know by now whether it was a good fit for a longer commitment or permanent hire.
Josh helped put this in perspective for me yesterday, talking about another potentially stressful interview process coming up. “It’s not whether your technical skills are good enough to fit on their team, it’s whether they have the training capacity to take you on.” He continued: “[Company X] has enough resources, they could potentially take any of the five of us in this room [including the cats] and train us to work with their software. Whether they choose to do so is reflective of their own priorities and not your abilities or capacity to learn.”
#perspective
This article is making the rounds, and I think it’s an essential, and relevant, read: Why Doesn’t Silicon Valley Hire Black Coders?
I’m not advocating for throwing your “Ace the Technical Interview” book out the window, but there’s something here worth considering, both for technical job seekers and those to seek to hire them. At a minimum, maybe it’s time to schedule those informational interviews you’ve been putting off!
Say, can I take you out for a cup of coffee?
