Don't hire me

There are many reasons not to hire me

I will say no, a lot. I am pragmatic and may find a better solution by asking what it is you actually want to achieve. Or just No

I will say its crap if it is, immediately

I will have an opinion, always. Even when based on very little facts. Sorry

I will change my opinion 180 degrees quickly if a good team convinces me I am totally wrong. This happens a lot, thankfully

If obedience is important to you don't hire me

I am in no way politically correct (not an excuse to be an asshole either) and I make terrible jokes and often “too soon”

I do not have a filter for whom to sugar coat a situation to. I will say the same whether you are a team member, manager, CEO, client or shop keeper. And always blunt and honest

I will be honest with estimates. As in they are total guesswork and only worth it to gage magnitude

If you prefer polite sales type people that tell white lies or total tales then I am not your man

I don’t clock in, I’m definitely not a morning person. If you value timeliness above value then I am not your man

I don’t clock out on the dot either but I rarely work overtime and never weekends. Too risky, if the TPS reports can't wait, don't hire me

I like collaborating, pairing, even tripling for important decisions that needs swarming

I like the team taking ownership together, I detest micro managed task delegation

If you need bums on seat and each task accountable to a person then don’t hire me

I will not jump up like a lap dog when people panic, I barely got a pulse at the best of times. If you prefer knee jerk reactions don't hire me

If you want me to be an ivory tower architect, don't. I like to work with the team to find out their best suggestion is and then work with them to implement it

Or if you have another architect of an ivory tower inclination telling me how to implement something - not going to happen

If you want to keep status quo don’t hire me, I will insist on continual evolutionary improvements. Otherwise the systems will rot, become a big ball of risk and your best developers will leave

However if you want a ninja/rockstar, I am not

If you want me to work with a ninja/rockstar I rather not. Some are okay, but most are a PITA and imperceptibly costly for the company

Insist on Windows? Don’t be ridiculous. No serious developer would accept that handicap unless desperate

Shirt & tie? No, not happening. You can’t take techies dressed as used car salesmen seriously

If you prefer drones in suites, that is not me

Many of these are valid reasons not to hire me

Some I hope are reasons to hire me

Your call

@flurdy | linkedin.com/in/flurdy | www.eray.co.uk

Dream employer past and present

With the demise of Sun following the Oracle's acquisition of it (or resurection depending on your view), I remembered that Sun Microsystem was once a "dream" employer of mine.

With Sun always seemingly on the forefront of technology, inventing(or acquiring) and leading the development of tools I liked; mainly Java but also within Unix, OpenOffice, VirtualBox, MySQL, etc.. And being fond of Open Source they were my "dream" company in the 90ies and early years of 2000.

But that faded over the last decade, so I began pondering what my current dream employers would be.

Current employer

And is it wise to speak/blog about other companies than my current? Would my current employer be offended or even future employers if not mentioned?

As Ive never been known to care too much about political correctness nor company politics I plow on regardless... Anyway would I still be at a company if I did not appreciate it? Maybe when I was a developer padawan I may have had less options, but today I can pick and choose so I don't think my current employer nor future ones will be that offended. :)

Dark past

Actually when I think about it, even Microsoft was a highly thought of employer in my early years. But grew out of that! Even IBM seemed attractive to the naïve student.

Today's dream companies

1. SpringSource
   
   Avid user of their framework(s).
   Met a few of their employers whom seem great advocates for the company.
   But wary of VMWare influence, too corporate?
   (Offices in Southampton and now Frimley are close to family and potential future home in Alton, Hampshire.)
   


2. Atlassian
   
   Great tools (Jira,Confluence,etc).
   Great supporters of Open Source projects.
   Influenced by their sponsering of JavaPosse.
   


3. Canonical
   
   The company behind Ubuntu.
   Nice ethos, even the Ubuntu name.
   But perhaps not a Java company?
   And Im defintely not a C man.
   


4. Twitter
   
   Great tool.
   Still a small company.
   But any relevant Java?
   


5. Spotify
   
   Great tool.
   Great solution for future music.
   Interesting future.
   


6. Amazon AWS
   
   Amazon web service, mostly ec2.
   Use it myself for my private servers,
   written documentation on how to use ec2 for others.
   Would be interesting to work with their cloud.
   


7. Remember the milk
   
   Maybe too small?
   But supports distributed work force.
   


8. Google
   
   Now too large. Nice ethos.
   Great innovators.
   Too algorithmic/academic culture.
   Bad reputation for coder burn.
   

Dream role/position out of scope

Dream/fantasy company/employer does not make working for them an ideal job. The actual position I would work as is obviously the crucial part. Perhaps you can have a dream position in an awfull company and the other way round. I am sure there always some disgruntled workers working for even in general fantastic companies.

Other factors such as job stability, salary and other compensations, location, coworkers, potential personal growth etc are all important but all out of scope for this list.

Analysis

If I review my list they tend to be smaller companies that have one or more great applications that I use myself. Perhaps they are not great companies, they just make great tools? Quite a few are also Open Source supporters.

And they may be cool companies, but are they working with what I do? Any Java? As I move away from a fulltime developer role and more and more into a system architect role, technology should be not so relevant, but I still mostly prefer Java based solutions (Or similar, Scala, Groovy etc). Due to less need to reinvent the wheel, more mature libraries, easier employment/training of developers, and personal indepth knowledge. And I do not know if these companies use Java, or even if they do if it is a marginalised technology choice.

Summary

What is important in the end is job satisfaction and that it supports my life outside work: Family etc. A great Norwegian motto is that "you work to have spare time". Ie the reason you work is to afford having quality spare time. In addition I think it is important that you enjoy what you work with. I do, basically I get paid to do my hobby.

If I am happy in a role the company should not matter. So this list will probably stay as a "dream" list". If I ever did work for one of them, I might actually see sides of the company that might tarnish the "dream" label!

In a perfect world, my dream company would be a charity. But I would feel guilty about demanding a significant salary from such a company. So my requirement of quality of life for me and my family may lower my ethical requirement of a company. But Microsoft is no longer on my list so I have some standards.

Actually anything based in a nice spot (Caribean, Barcelona, Meditereanian, New York) would have a great chance of making my list!