Half way through the interview loop I realized that things had changed. Sometime in my 20 years of web development, I’d become the seasoned hand. The voice of experience. The old guy.
The startup whose conference room I was sitting in was young. Established, but still maturing. Three of their junior developers sat across the table from me. We’d run out of questions early. What do you ask someone who’s been developing for the web since before Netscape 1.0, and who’s about to leave a great gig at a top technology company? The only question that seemed relevant was the obvious one, asked after the formalities had run their course: “So, why do you want to come here?”
Time for a Change
Let’s wind the clock back to April, when I was a Tech Lead on the Big Data team at HP Helion, their enterprise cloud product. Before I joined HP I’d never considered myself a big company person. I figured that there were people who went to school and got CS degrees and did corporate development, and there were the rest of us who scraped up knowledge where we could and built the web. But at the end of 2010, thanks to some friends I’d made building said web, I found myself at HP, doing DevOps work on their Cloud offering. Over the next four and a half years I had the opportunity to learn Python, build a PaaS from scratch, file patents, speak at conferences, and finally, build and lead a team shipping a major tentpole feature on a major product. I even got to create a weekly engineering newsletter. It was a great run, and I was very lucky to have it.
Four and a half years is a long time, though, and the industry landscape has changed significantly. The Nest thermostat, Raspberry Pi, Minecraft, AR/VR resurgence, mobile as a serious platform, IoT, AI. All of them have exploded since I joined HP. While working on the cloud was interesting, you can only build ‘give me some servers with some software on them’ so many times. So this spring, after shipping Helion Development Platform 1.0 and handing off my team, I started looking for the next thing.
My criteria for the next gig were:
- Somewhere I could learn something totally new (not a cloud hosting service or product).
- An exciting industry or a space experiencing a big transformation.
- A smart team and smart founders.
- An office in south/central Austin so I could see people face to face.
- A flexible work-from-home policy since the kids are small.
- A progressive company with a social conscience.
- Make enough to pay the mortgage and keep the kids in school, but not so much that I’d feel obligated to work every waking moment.
Unfortunately, aside from sending feelers out to my network, I didn’t have a good idea of where to find this gig. Most of the folks I’d worked with at HP had moved on to similar cloud projects, or were working on service mechanics. After four and a half years of working primarily for people outside of Austin (and having kids, which makes meetups hard), I’d lost touch with what was going on here in town. So how would I find the companies looking for talent in Austin who’d be interested in me? I didn’t know, and to make things more complicated, I had a really short time window. The project I was leading was about to start a serious development cycle, and I felt like my departure wouldn’t have as big a negative impact if I could give them notice before the planning really started. HP had been good to me, and I wanted to do the classy thing. In the end, my job hunt window was about three weeks.
Finding HIRED
One of my buddies is a Director of Engineering at a growing bay area software firm, which means he’s always on the lookout for talent. Whenever I started talking about the next thing, he would say, “You should check out HIRED.” HIRED is a curated tech placement matchmaking service, and I hadn’t payed them too much attention until this year, because they hadn’t been in Austin. But now they were, and by funny coincidence, they’d just sponsored the PyLadies Austin meetup that my wife helps organize. So at the beginning of April, I signed up.
The first step at HIRED is filling out a profile. They can import from LinkedIn, which is what I did. After a little text tweaking, you’re set for their staff to review you. The next day I had a phone chat with Amanda, their talent advocate here in Austin. You can think of Amanda as a tech yenta. She knows what companies in town are looking for, and she talks to candidates to figure out what they’re looking for, and she tries to make good matches.
After my chat with Amanda (which was short, because I’d lost my voice the day before), my profile was set to go into the weekly batch. HIRED releases their resumes on Monday mornings to the companies using them. Those companies get to look through the candidates, and pick who they want to send an interview request to.
By Monday afternoon I had three interview requests, two from Austin startups, and one from a distributed company headquartered in the bay area. None of them were companies I’d heard of before, and one of them was doing really interesting product development for humanitarian purposes. So far, exactly what I was hoping for.
Monday afternoon, after the most pro-active companies had checked the new candidates and sent their interview requests, Amanda looked through the system and sent me a half dozen ‘Would you be interested in…?’ emails. Of these companies, I’d heard of three before and had either had initial conversations with them or knew it wasn’t the right fit. The other two seemed promising, so I had Amanda contact them on my behalf.
I had initial phone conversations with the companies, some of which went really well, a few of which weren’t a great fit. After an interview you can rate it, and if it didn’t go well, HIRED can let them know you aren’t interested. It makes saying, ‘Thanks, but we’re not right for each other,’ really painless. Some front-runners were emerging. I started making pro and con lists. The most promising companies in town wanted to do face to face interviews, so we started figuring out times. I was speaking at ApacheCon, which ended up pushing them all to Friday.
Friday came and I ended up with two face to face interviews, both for Senior Rails Developer positions, both for companies doing an interesting blend of software platform and physical product. Which is how I found myself sitting across a conference room table from a trio of junior developers, amazed at how the time had flown since I was the junior kid sitting across the table.
A Wild Media Company Appears!
So where did I end up? I had three HIRED companies on my short list, but eventually, it came back to some advice I’d gotten from the friend who referred me to HIRED. “Figure out what you really want to do.” It’s easy to take that with a grain of salt, but if you’re serious about it, and figure out that one thing that you would drop everything for, suddenly everything can become clear. I want to work on the intersection of machines and stories. I think interacting with a software bot or agent is going to be a super-prevalent paradigm in the next few years. I did a whole presentation about it at SXSW 2013, and another one this year.
One of the feelers I’d sent out before I joined HIRED was to Trei Brundrett and Skip Baney of Vox Media. I’d worked with Skip at Polycot in the mid 2000’s, and Trei had referred some of our best clients to us. We had lunch during ApacheCon, started talking about narrative software, and Trei said, “Hey, you should come join us and make cool stories.” So now I’m at Vox Media, making VR experiences and hacking on a bunch of stuff I wouldn’t have been able to at a company that’s more diverse in people and expertise than anywhere else I was looking.
The experience of using HIRED was great, though, and I’d recommend it to anyone (and have). Amanda was awesome. If you’re in a position where you’ve either gotten out of touch with your local tech community, or you’ve moved to a new city and you don’t have a feel for the local market, I’d definitely give them a shot. All total I talked to 7 companies, had 3 on my short list, and did one serious interview loop. Everyone I talked to was great, and while they were all doing cool work, the opportunity at Vox was just too good to pass up.
In Conclusion
Your profile stays up on HIRED for 2 weeks, but you get the bulk of your requests in the first week. I had a mix of contacts, some from hiring managers, some from CTOs, and some from CEOs. Some of the conversations with CTOs and CEOs were so good, and the companies were doing such interesting work, I’ve referred other people to them. For the hiring companies that use the service to it’s full potential it’s a great way to get past the recruiter/hiring manager firewall. If you’re thinking about making a move, I heartily recommend them.