Geodog: “So I walked into the cafe tonight and looked around for the Joel group — like any other geek, I was too shy to ask anyone, but when I spotted a big table lined entirely with males, mostly in their mid-twenties to early forties, not too well dressed, predominantly European-American, I knew that I had found the geek gathering.”
Month / January 2004
30
Ted reviews my speech.
Scoble: “I hate to play the ‘it’ll be fixed in Longhorn’ card, but I’m going to.” OK, you tell me when my customers have Longhorn and I’ll think about using .NET then, mm-kay? My money is on 2008.
The Salamander .NET Linker and Mini-Deployment Tool might be a solution. Has anyone evaluated it in depth?
28
For some reason, Microsoft’s brilliant and cutting-edge .NET development environment left out one crucial tool… a tool that has been common in software development environments since, oh, about 1950, and taken so much for granted that it’s incredibly strange that nobody noticed that .NET doesn’t really have one.
Please Sir May I Have a Linker?
** Heute verwende ich die deutsche Version von CityDesk um mein Weblog zu erstellen. No, I don’t speak German, but I know CityDesk well enough to find my way around!
27
Reminders:
- Thursday morning I’ll be giving a free lecture at UC Davis
- Friday evening, 7:30 PM, I’ll be meeting up with a huge group of Joel on Software folks at Au Coquelet Cafe, 2000 University Ave. at Milvia, in Berkeley, California. Tell them you’re with the “Joel” group.
- Not in California? I’m working on a Fog Creek open house in New York Real Soon Now.
- Anywhere else? Join our Meetup group and hang out with other Joel on Software readers in your city on Wednesday, February 18th. So far 28 cities in the world have hit critical mass (5). The London group is already up to 29 members!
In the meantime entertain yourself with some of Rory Blyth’s inspired comix.
This one’s a riot: “Ooooooh! I know! We could print out the data, scan it in, and then paste the image into Excel!”.
And some disclaimers:
- The remark yesterday in tiny print could not possibly be homophobic, because I’m gay and thus granted automatic diplomatic immunity from all charges of homophobia.
- Putting spaces in front of commas is really not that bad, but I stand by my claim that it’s not very professional looking, and, merely as a point of information, at least on the resumes I get, this particular error occurs on 37% of cover letters from people with Indian names and 0% of the cover letters of people without Indian names.
- Anyway talking about punctuation is really, really boring, so please let’s stop.
- There’s nothing like 100,000 incoming links from Slashdot to uncover those rare people without a sense of humor… but you can’t tell people, “no, it’s a joke, you just didn’t get it” because the one thing common among all people without a sense of humor is that they inevitably think they have a very good sense of humor; your joke just wasn’t funny.
In the spirit of the escalator
The number one best way to get someone to look at your resume closely: come across as a human being, not a list of jobs and programming languages. Tell me a little story. “I’ve spent the last three weeks looking for a job at a real software company, but all I can find are cheezy web design shops looking for slave labor.” Or, “We yanked our son out of high school and brought him to Virginia. I am not going to move again until he is out of high school, even if I have to go work at Radio Shack or become a Wal*Mart greeter.” (These are slightly modified quotes from two real people.)
These are both great. You know why? Because I can’t read them without thinking of these people as human beings. And now the dynamic has changed. I like you. I care about you. I like the fact that you want to work in a real software company. I wanted to work in a real software company so much I started one. I like the fact that you care more about your teenage son than your career.
I just can’t care about “C/C++/Perl/ASP” in the same way.
So, maybe you won’t be qualified for the job, but it’s just a lot harder for me to dismiss you out of hand.
Getting Your Résumé Read
I’ve been going through a big pile of applications for the summer internship positions at Fog Creek Software, and, I don’t know how to say this, some of them are really, really bad. This is not to say that the applicants are stupid or unqualified, although they might be. I’m never going to find out, because when I have lots of excellent applications for only two open positions, there’s really no need to waste time interviewing people that can’t be bothered to spell the name of my company right.
So here are a few hints to review, if you’re sending out résumés.
- A résumé is a way to get to the next stage: the interview. Companies often get dozens of résumés for every opening … we get between 100 and 200 per opening. There is no possible way we can interview that many people. The only hope is if we can screen people out using résumés. Don’t think of a résumé as a way to get a job: think of it as a way to give some hiring manager an excuse to hit DELETE. At least technically, your résumé has to be perfect to survive.
- If you don’t have the right qualifications, don’t apply for the job. When the job listing says “summer intern,” don’t ask for a full time job. You’re not going to get it and you’re just going to waste your time. (It won’t count against you in the future, of course, because your original application was deleted so quickly I’ll have no memory of you when we do get a full time opening and you apply for it.)
- OK, this one really bugs me. Learn where spaces go in relation to other punctuation. Whenever you have a comma, there is always exactly one space and it’s always after the comma and never before it. Thank you.
- In the olden days résumés were sent out in the mail and included a cover sheet on top which explained why the résumé was being sent. Now that we use email, there is no reason whatsoever to send the cover letter as an attachment and then write a “cover cover” letter in the body of the email. It’s just senseless.
- Even stupider is submitting two big Word documents with no body text in the email. This just gets you spam filtered. I don’t even SEE these.
- Please do not use cover letters that you copied out of a book. If you write “I understand the position also requires a candidate who is team- and detail-oriented, works well under pressure, and is able to deal with people in departments throughout the firm” then at best people will think you’re a bullshit artist and at worst they will think that you were not born with the part of the brain that allows you to form your own thoughts and ideas.
- The personal pronoun “I” is always capitalized. All sentences must end in a period. If your cover letter looks like this I will not even look at your résumé:
i m interested in your summer job.
here is my resume
——————————————————————————–
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder – Free web site building tool. Try it!
- And while I’m on it, anonymous email accounts and AOL accounts just don’t send a good message. They won’t exactly disqualify you since so many people use them, but crazydood2004 at hotmail.com does not really impress me as much as name at alumni.something.edu. Do you really need to know if I Yahoo!? Do you really want to advertise Yahoo! SiteBuilder, a competitor to one of Fog Creek’s products, when you’re actually applying for a job at Fog Creek?
- In most of the English speaking world it is not considered polite to open letters to a Mr. Joel Spolsky by writing “Dear Spolsky.” One might write “Dear Mr. Spolsky,” or “Dear sir,” or perhaps, “Hi Joel!” But “Dear Spolsky” is usually followed by some story about embezzled funds and needing to borrow my bank account.
- Don’t tell me about one of the requirements of the position and then tell me that you don’t want to follow it. “One of the requirements for Summer Internship says that you need to interview in person in New York City. I am interested in the position but I stay in East Nowhere, TN.” OK, that’s nice, hon, you stay there. Another PS, I thought we said in the requirements “Excellent command of written and spoken English.” Oh, yes, indeed, that was our first requirement. So at least do yourself a favor and get someone to check your cover letter for obvious mistakes. Like I said, don’t give me an excuse to throw your résumé in the trash.
I don’t know why I need to spell these out because they’re probably listed in every single “how to send out résumés” book on the planet, right there in chapter 1, but I still get more résumés that show an appalling lack of concern for what it takes to get an interview.
Let me try not to be so negative and provide some constructive advice.
- Proofread everything a hundred times and have one other person proofread it. Someone who got really good grades in English.
- Write a personal cover letter that is customized for the job you are applying for. Try to sound like a human in the cover letter. You want people to think of you as a human being.
- Study the directions that are given for how to apply. They are there for a reason. For example our website instructs you to send a résumé to jobs@fogcreek.com. This goes into an email folder which we go through to find good candidates. If you think for some reason that your résumé will get more attention if you print it out and send it through the mail, that you’ll “stand out” somehow, disabuse yourself of that notion. Paper résumés can’t get into the email folder we’re using to keep track of applicants unless we scan them in, and, you know what? The scanner is right next to the shredder in my office and the shredder is easier to use.
- Don’t apply for too many jobs. I don’t think there’s ever a reason to apply for more than three or four jobs at a time. Résuméspam, or any sign that you’re applying for 100 jobs, just makes you look desperate which makes you look unqualified. You want to look like you are good enough to be in heavy demand. You’re going to decide where you want to work, because you’re smart enough to have a choice in the matter, so you only need to apply for one or two jobs. A personalized cover letter that shows that you understand what the company does goes a long way to proving that you care enough to deserve a chance.
Some of this stuff may sound pretty superficial. Indeed, what we’re really looking for when we look at résumés is someone who is passionate and successful at whatever they try to do. We like people who are passionate about software. Writing a shareware app when you’re a teenager is just as good a qualification to us as getting into MIT. This is your life story, and by the time you’re applying for a job it’s probably too late to change that.
Would I reject someone just because they don’t quite understand the relationship between the comma and the space? Well, not necessarily. But when I have to find two summer interns out of 300 applicants, here’s what I do with the résumés: I make three piles: Good, OK, and Bad. I give the same résumés to Michael and he does the same thing. There are always enough people that we both put in the Good pile that those are really the only people that stand a chance. In principle if we can’t find enough people we like that we both rated as “good” we would consider some people who got Good/OK, but in practice this has never happened. Much as I’d love to be able to consider everyone on their merits instead of on superficial résumé stuff, it’s just not realistic, and there’s just no reason a college graduate can’t get this right.
(Added 1/27/2004)
The number one best way to get someone to look at your resume closely: come across as a human being, not a list of jobs and programming languages. Tell me a little story. “I’ve spent the last three weeks looking for a job at a real software company, but all I can find are cheezy web design shops looking for slave labor.” Or, “We yanked our son out of high school and brought him to Virginia. I am not going to move again until he is out of high school, even if I have to go work at Radio Shack or become a Wal*Mart greeter.” (These are slightly modified quotes from two real people.)
These are both great. You know why? Because I can’t read them without thinking of these people as human beings. And now the dynamic has changed. I like you. I care about you. I like the fact that you want to work in a real software company. I wanted to work in a real software company so much I started one. I like the fact that you care more about your teenage son than your career.
I just can’t care about “C/C++/Perl/ASP” in the same way.
So, maybe you won’t be qualified for the job, but it’s just a lot harder for me to dismiss you out of hand.
26
“Please do not use cover letters that you copied out of a book. If you write ‘I understand the position also requires a candidate who is team- and detail-oriented, works well under pressure, and is able to deal with people in departments throughout the firm’ then at best people will think you’re a bullshit artist and at worst they will think that you were not born with the part of the brain that allows you to form your own thoughts and ideas.”
PS. This article got two kinds of feedback:
Ok Joel, I’ve been getting you newsletter for a while now. Mostly I was glad to. I’m a twenty year vet myself and I agreed with most of what you had to say. You were always a little pompous, but the resume “thing” takes the cake. PLease take me off you maliing list.
And:
It’s absolutely perfect. Please make sure that this article stays on your site for a very long time. I want to maintain a link to it and recommend it to everybody who is looking for a job. Thank you!
Why the disparity?
Attention, All Gay Men on the Planet: OK, I can understand you don’t want to dress up for the interview, but at least pick out a handbag that matches your outfit!
20
I will be speaking on the subject of Designing Applications with the User in Mind at UC Davis on January 29th. The speech is free and open to the public so if you’re in the Davis/Sacramento area please come.
UC Davis
Thursday, January 29, 2004
10 – 11:30am
at the University Club (map)
19
SysAdmin Week
After a bit of a scare discovering that a few of our critical files were not getting backed up, and with various system administration things starting to cross from annoying into the category of downright emergencies, I am going to spend a few days focused on improving our network infrastructure.
All of our backups are done to hard drives, not tapes. It’s not that much more expensive than tape, and it’s a lot more convenient. For example all our workstations and laptops are backed up using Veritas NetBackup Pro which creates hard-drive based backups on a server. Anyone can browse the last 5 versions of any file on their hard drive and instantly restore it; if a complete system is lost NetBackup does “bare metal restore”, and, the part I like best — if two people have the same file it is only stored once. This saves gigs and gigs of space because almost every machine here has the same OS files, the same development environment, the same full text of MSDN, etc. Servers are backed up over the Internet using Dantz Retrospect, also to a hard drive at a different location. Retrospect has the advantage of supporting “open file backup” on SQL Server databases, backing them up while they’re running. As far as I can tell, this relies on an underlying feature of Windows 2000 which allows you to make virtually instantaneous, atomic copies of any open file (Windows does this using “Copy on Write,” where the file is simply marked as being “copied,” the copy itself doesn’t take place until one copy is written to, and then only on a sector-by-sector basis). Dantz has the disadvantage of some architectural decisions that reflect its Macintosh heritage which do not really make sense… for example, rather than the traditional Windows server model of having two apps — an invisible service and a management console which controls that service — there’s just one app. This means you can only run one management console and if you lose it (e.g. someone else is running it in a different session) you can’t get in, requiring drastic process killing or rebooting. And the number of new concepts you need to learn to set up simple server backups is astonishing… it took me way too long to get things set up and then it took several weeks of occasional tinkering to get it to work, and even then it seems to get flaky and decide it doesn’t want to backup and doesn’t want to tell anyone that it doesn’t want to backup, so I have a weekly scheduled task to kick the sucker. Somewhat frustrating but I have no experience with other server backup products and suspect the others are just as bad.
I just woke up to the fact that we were paying about $6/GB for disk storage on Dell SCSI RAID arrays, and for backup media I don’t need SCSI and I don’t need RAID, so I’m going to try a LaCie Big Disk Drive connected to the backup server over USB 2.0 which is about $1.20/GB.
Meetup
So far there are 136 people registered at Meetup.com. London, Toronto, and Dublin have passed the threshold of 5 members for meetings to actually be held. I was thinking it might be fun to pick the city with the most people on this list for my next vacation.
17
Meetup.com organizes regularly scheduled Joel on Software reader meetings in 640 cities around the world on the third Wednesday of every month. The next one is coming up on January 21st.
I’m not sure exactly how it works… I think that as soon as they get 5 members confirmed in a particular city, the meetup is officially on, otherwise it’s automatically cancelled.
Meetup.com was created by my fellow New Yorker, Scott “Fries With That?” Heiferman, who also founded i-traffic.com (now a part of agency.com).
13
Whoo hoo! There’s nothing better than shipping a new product.
Fog Creek Software is proud to announce: FogBUGZ for Unix and FogBUGZ for Macintosh.
All About FogBUGZ
System Requirements: Unix | Macintosh | Windows
Today is Monday, right?
