General

Stop Motion Movie

Since my intent with this blog is to publish my thoughts and opinions on various things of interest, I don’t normally like to post entries that consist solely of links to other sites. But this mini movie, titled ’Tony vs. Paul’ is probably the best stop motion movie I’ve seen to date. Very clever.
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Interviews: How Not To Hire Good People

Back in August 2006 I went to a job interview. I haven’t been to all that many interviews in my ten years of working but I can say without a doubt that this was the worst interview ever; both from my perspective and from the employers perspective. Simply put, this was a classic case of ‘how not to conduct an interview’ in the technology sphere. To protect the innocent, I won’t name names (other than myself) and I’ll simply refer to the potential employer as ‘The Corporation’.

In hind sight, I should have never applied for the job. The Corporation’s website used to apply for jobs is terrible. The careers section is one of those out of the box solutions that everyone inside the corporation thinks is cool, mostly because after paying for the product they didn’t really have to customize it. But, those same people already have a job, so they never had to use the careers section, so they wouldn’t know any differently. And job prospects certainly aren’t going to criticize the careers section because the person doing the interview might have been the one who implemented it. And should the interviewee get hired, well then they no longer care how crappy the careers section is because, well, they have a job. Back to the site though. Remember when the first web content started coming out back in the mid-1990s and most sites wouldn’t let you cache anything that you submitted through a form? You know, you’d get that crap message about the cache had expired, even though you had ‘just’ hit the page? Well, I haven’t seen many instances of that anymore, and in fact the only instance I can think of off hand is when signing in to my online banking. So that I can accept. But in the case of The Corporation, any time you did a search for a job posting, checked out a job and then tried to click the back button, you’d receive the ‘expired cache’ error. If they were posting jobs every few minutes I could maybe understand, but in this case it is highly unlikely that a new job would be posted during my 5 minute job searching session. That expired cache problem drove me nuts. And when combined with the fact that some of the links to log into the career section didn’t work or redirected to the wrong spot should have been enough to push me away. But I thought that given my experience and smarts, I would be a good fit and moreover, I was excited about the position as it sounded like just what I was looking for.

My next clues about the job should have been picked up during the interaction while scheduling an interview. If, at anytime, the person scheduling the interview jokes around or is anything but professional, you should probably figure out and excuse and call it even. In my case, all emails to me from the Corporation contained not one but several smilies (emoticons), for no real reason whatsoever. At this point, even Ali was skeptical and suggested calling it off. But, I still felt that this job would be a good match for my skill set and offer some new experiences; so I scheduled a time.

On the day of the interview, I wore a suit without a tie. The emails I received from the Corporation specifically about the interview (how to get there, parking , etc) mentioned that they would be in business casual clothes but that I could wear a suit to impress them (followed by several smilies). Again, I looked past the smilies and the lame reference to making an impression by wearing a suit, and decided that this was still the job for me. In my defence, I almost always wear a suit for interviews so that part had no effect on me. I arrived at the Corporation’s offices, several floors up and phoned the contact person from a phone in the lobby. The person came to the door, introduced themselves and led me to the location of the interview - their office; their small office I might add. At this point, everything was starting to add up I was getting a bad vibe. From this point on down, I couldn’t wait to get out. But, still I persevered.

At this point another person also joined us in the small office and the three of us sat at a small table to conduct the interview. Or more accurately, the three of us carried out the Corporation’s interview ‘script’. Interviewer number one directed act one, which most people would call the HR question section and interviewer number two directed act two, which would be likely referred to as the technical part of the interview. Bot of these acts were read verbatim from pre-printed ‘scripts’ and at no time did we sway from the script. Seriously. So imagine yourself sitting in front of two people whom will likely be your boss(es) and having them with their heads down reading questions from a piece of letter-sized paper, then scribing down as you respond. Nice. Oh, and if you don’t follow the script and answer in a way that they are expecting then you are specifically told that you need to follow the script. Seriously. Even though their script is in front of them and your script? Oh, the director didn’t print one out so you have to improvise. But your script better match the director’s script or you won’t do well.

After act one, it’s on to act two. You’d think you’d have a little more leeway here in terms of the script but no, this is simply a knowledge act. You either know the answer or you don’t. Because smart people know acronyms and project code names. Ya, smart people don’t ever need to explain how they built a scalable, server farm that provided load balancing and redundancy or how they designed some enterprise system to tackle some problem more efficiently. Nope. Never mind that this job entails enterprise technologies and design. No need for that information, because the smart people just need to know what EJB and JSP and WKRP stand for. And they should also know that Oak was the codename for first version of the Java programming language. Seriously. Oh and they should also have in depth knowledge of the specific technologies being used by the Corporation today, because that what’s in use today and the Corporation doesn’t think about tomorrow thus there is no need to choose people that will be smart enough to adapt to the next great technology chosen by the Corporation.

After answering ‘no’, ‘not sure’, ‘no idea’, for most of technical questions, I asked a few questions about life at the Corporation and left. And my interviewers told me that sometimes they forget to let people know one way or the other whether or not they got the job so if I hadn’t heard form them by a certain day, to email or call them. To date, I have yet to hear anything. Not that I mind, since right after that I accepted a great job at Critical Mass.

I was initially going to summarize how to conduct a good interview, but I think Joel has covered that subject more than enough. Instead, I provide this example of how not to recruit good people. Of course, to accept that premise, you will have to accept that I am a good person - I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. And for the record, I do in fact know what EJB, JSP and WKRP stand for; those were not questions asked by the Corporation.
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Good Customer Service Makes All The Difference

It looks like I’m finally going to be able to do my IFR pre-flight test. Jason, my instructor is moving onto a dream job with Ken Borek Air so I’m booked this Sunday with CFC’s chief flight instructor, Pierre. But my IFR maps and CAPs are now two cycles behind since I had needed to update them, so this morning I ordered new maps from Map Town, located in downtown Calgary.

I ordered my usual six items: CAPs GEN, 2 and 3, LO 1/2, Terminal Area Charts 1/2 and the CFS. I paid by Visa and had it delivered by local courier as it’s far more efficient for me to do that than drive around looking for parking, plug a parking meter, get the stuff and leave. It sounds silly but the $5 courier charge is money well spent. My stuff was delivered to my office only a couple hours later and everything that I asked for was there. There was however a small problem; instead of keying in LE12 for the Low Enroute Chart 1/2, the Map Town employee had keyed in L12 which is an Indonesia ONC aviation map, which happens to be $7.00 more expensive.

I called up Map Town and the first person I talked to listened to my problem, apologized and then asked me to hold on while he put me through to someone who could help. Not more than 30 seconds later another person answered, listened to my problem, apologized and then refunded the difference to my credit card. What an amazing customer service experience. Mistakes get made and I accept that; and when they are made and you handle the problem with swiftness and professionalism, especially when dealing with customers, well that makes me want to continue doing business with Map Town for as long as I’m living in Calgary.
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Still Alive

It’s been two weeks since my last entry. And the entries have been sparse for the past couple months. I think that’s a testament to how busy my life has been. To sum up things in brief: I’ve left one job, started another, learned the in an outs of ATG, rediscovered VMWare, and last, but certainly not least, there is a new addition to our family. More details about everything this weekend when I will try to get caught up.

And if the weather holds out, I will be doing a night flying convoy to Edmonton City Centre (CYXD) on Saturday night with two of Ali’s cousins who recently moved to Calgary from Manitoba. So I’ll have that to blog about also.
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Parting Ways

Last week Zymeta and I parted ways. Actually we parted back in early August when the company was bought by the Edmonton-based manufacturer. But then the new owner decided after all that he needed Mike and I to help with transition training so the two of us spent the better part of three weeks in Edmonton on contract showing the ‘new guys’ everything we know.

And last Friday, I showed them the co-locate facility where the servers are hosted, gave them remote access via ssh and handed over the keys. And with that my tenure at Zymeta was done.
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Blog Moving

I’ve decided to move my blog over to my own personal server. A server that I maintain and control completely. So if you’re reading this then that means you’ve either arrived here directly (ie. via Google) or the Zymeta blog server redirected you over here. That’s a good start. And I’ve changed the RSS feed so it also redirects over to my new blog server; hopefully that works also (and feel free to let me know if it doesn’t).

Thanks to the beauty of Postgresql’s import/export dump features, I’ve also pulled all my old entries and comments over as well. So, for the most part, it’s like I was always right here.

Anyway, the nice thing about being on my own server is that no one can mistake my entries as representing my employer (which certain losers have done). The other great thing about being separated is that I can be more openly critical about whatever I want without the potential ramifications of affecting future clients of my employer. So, for example, I can talk about certain airlines executives as being out of touch with their customers without worrying about said airline not wanting to advertise on our network because of my comments. You get where I’m going with this.

So welcome to the new, old blog site. And please let me know if you encounter issues.
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Chauvinists Live

I was walking home from work this afternoon and saw something I have yet to see in the 21st Century; a real, live chauvinist. At the corner of 17th Avenue (the famed ’Red Mile’) and 14th Street SW while waiting for the light to change, a woman in her late twenties, out for a jog, ran up from behind me. She was reasonably pretty, with a rather skimpy running outfit given that it’s April… in Calgary, which could easily still mean snow. In any case, she was certainly the nicest thing at this particular intersection.

After the light changed, she carried on with her run along 17th Avenue and I carried on with my walk home. As I finished crossing the intersection, I heard a series of “woo’s”. I looked up to see a white crew cab truck, typical of one you would see in construction or the oil patch, with a 40-something guy sticking his head out of the passenger window. And what was he wooing? Yup, the young woman jogger.

I never understand that mentality. Did the man honestly expect the woman to stop jogging and run after the truck? Or was the guy just trying to impress his friends? Although we’ve likely all done the ‘impress your friends’ thing, for most people that stops once you graduate from university. In any case, the chauvinists live. And it made me laugh. And to the woman’s credit, she just kept on jogging.
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Rrroll Up The Rim To Win 2006

There’s a fairly new Tim Hortons’ just a block from the Zymeta office and so Ali and I have been stopping there on our way to work to pick up coffee. The ‘Rrroll Up the Rim’ contest for 2006 has started and I began on a high note: my first three cups were winners. I won a coffee, followed by two donuts. Three for three isn’t bad. But I’m now at three for ten and I saw this morning in the store that the odds of winning are 1 in 9. So that means I will likely have to drink another seventeen coffees before seeing another winning cup. And it’s more than likely that the contest will be over by then. Sigh.
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More Content

I hooked up with a buddy of mine last week who had recently moved back from a multi-year stint (including a marriage) in Australia. He’s an avid music collector and, like me, owns an ecclectic mix of CDs. So in exchange for lunch and a handful of beers, he loaned me his CD collection, which for the past 5 days I’ve been ripping to digital format so as to add to Zymeta’s collection. So far I’ve ripped 1073 tracks. Good times.
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