Andrew Wegner | Ponderings of an Andy - Jobs

Talking about rejection in job searches

2022-10-24T12:45:00-05:00

The problem¶

Searching for a new role, especially when you don't have one at the time, is stressful. In my industry, it's common for a candidate to attend multiple interview rounds and participate in a technical evaluation. Depending on the company and role, you may have to defend your technical work as well. This is stressful and takes at least 4 hours of time, not counting the technical evaluation. That can range anywhere from an hour to a full week of time, again depending on the company.

This is for a single role. When a candidate is applying to multiple roles, it literally becomes a full time job to find a full time job.

The rejection¶

Rejection during a job search is part of the process. Companies only have so many openings to fill. As a candidate, you put hours of time into your goal of getting a role and then, unfortunately, the dreaded rejection shows up. It happens, but it'd be nice if it was useful so that you can move on to the next role and make improvements.

The reality of rejection¶

Unfortunately, recent experience has shown me that very few companies want to provide useful feedback. There are a few key things that tell me immediately that the rejection isn't going to be useful:

no-reply - This means that the company hasn't set up their applicant tracking system to use a real person's name for the email template you are about to read. Why? Because they don't want to answer your questions. Thus, it's not an offer to continue with the process. This is a "here's the door" email. This one especially hurts after you've talked with a portion of the interview team already.
Internal Promotions - During my search this summer, I received a surprising number of rejections that told me I was rejected due to an internal promotion. Every single one of these came as a surprise, because the interviewer never mentioned this as a potential outcome. This one hurts because you've spent the time and effort to get through multiple rounds of interviews to find out you have been rejected due to someone having the inside track. Congratulations to those individuals receiving a promotion, but letting your external candidates know this is a possibility would go a long way to improving candidate experience. In fact, the companies that did mention this was a possibility, were the ones that provided meaningful feedback when a rejection was received.
"We are fortunate to receive many qualified candidates..." - This phrase or the countless variations tell me I'm about to read a templated rejection with no substance. I don't think any company is going to say that their candidates are horrible, or that they receive only one or two candidates. I read this as a "participation award" sentence, but it doesn't tell me why I've been rejected.
Ghosting - This isn't to be confused with never hearing from a company in the first place. That happens plenty too, but it's less annoying if you've never talked to anyone at the company. Technically, you never get an email with this reason, because ghosting is when you've taken the time to talk with someone at the company or participated in the technical evaluation, and then hear nothing back. The further into the interview process you get, when ghosting occurs, the more annoying it is. During my hunt, I had three companies ghost me after the fourth interview. I had two companies ghost me after sitting down and talking with the CEO of the company. Despite follow ups on my part, it is simply radio silence.

The good rejection¶

In this world of horrible candidate experience, there are a few shining stars. One of the biggest ways to improve candidate experience, is to provide meaningful feedback on why they were rejected. A candidate is a professional and should be able to accept that feedback and use it to improve themselves for other applications.

One of the key things, in my opinion, about these companies is that despite receiving a rejection I still would love to work for the company in the future. They are on my short list of companies to watch out for when looking for a role either for myself or as a referral.

So what does this type of rejection look like?

The rejection comes in the form of an email you can respond to or a person you can speak with directly. The communication isn't copied for a template, but a real attempt to communicate the reasons you weren't the right person for the role. These reasons aren't a vague reference to skills or feelings, but are a real attempt to point out an area where you are missing a skill that the company needs for the person in this role to be successful.

If a candidate puts in the time and effort to speak with your team multiple times, I believe the company should be able to compose an email offering a brief reasoning why they were not hired. This is especially true the further a candidate gets into the hiring process and the companies that understand this, will have a list of high quality candidates waiting in the wings next time they have roles to fill.

Join me over on LinkedIn to discuss this some more

Upload your resume, then re-enter it to apply for this job

2022-09-13T08:45:00-05:00

Upload your resume and then re-enter everything¶

How accurate is that?

The joke is that applying to a job is an exercise in copy and pasting your resume into the application over and over and over. I've submitted a ton of applications in the past month on my journey for an engineering leadership role (reach out if you are looking for someone). Let's take a look at what I've seen.

I broke this down into 4 major categories:

No duplication: This type of application either took my resume or LinkedIn profile and didn't require me to fix any fields, re-enter anything, and generally "just worked". From a candidate's perspective, this is the ideal. A little over 10% of my applications fall into this category. A majority of these are using LinkedIn's Easy Apply. The downside I'm seeing, and will report on in a future post, is that the response rate for these types of applications has been very low.
Minor Re-entry: I classified this is cleaning up or filling in up to three missing fields (but NOT job overviews). The most common thing I had to clean up was dates related to either a job or my degree. Some applicant systems want down to the day granularity, others are month granularity. My resume is to the month. The second most common fields to clean up are my degree and my address. For my degree, I see this on systems that have a predefined set of degrees to choose from. My Masters of Engineering is in Information Assurance from Iowa State University. This isn't a common degree title. My address is listed as city and state on my resume. Several ATSes want a full street address.
Single Section Duplication: This is a category that either requires me to reenter an entire job or entire educational history. This includes dates of employment, title, and description. There isn't a pattern on what goes missing when the resume is imported. I've had to re-enter jobs and degrees. It's not a single job that goes missing or a single degree. If I start seeing a clear pattern here, I'll dig a little deeper and see how I can clean up my resume.
Complete re-entry: Here is the trope. One out of five of my applications have required re-entry of more than a single section to the point where I am just reentering everything.

Summary¶

Which ATS is responsible for most of those re-entries? MyWorkDay. Every single application I've put in that utilized this ATS required a full reentry. I've tried multiple resume formats.

Greenhouse seems to be the easiest to use, especially when a company has taken time to embed it into their site with their branding, style sheets, etc.

If a company hasn't embedded the application into their site though, Lever has been better. When LinkedIn integration is set up, applying via LinkedIn and providing a resume has resulted in a very minor edits. The application updates after both steps - approving the Linkedin application and uploading the resume. Between those two, it's been only dates that I've had to change on those applications.

While completely re-entering your resume may not be the majority, fixing things up happens on 9 out of 10 of my applications.

What has your experience been as a candidate? Are you re-entering your resume details this frequently?

I cross posted this over on LinkedIn. Join me over there for the discussion

What Job Source is using which ATS?

2022-09-06T08:00:00-05:00

What Job Source is using which ATS?¶

That's a question that no one has asked me in my current search for a role, but it is information I have! It's been a few weeks since I started my hunt for a new engineering leadership role. It's time to start sharing some statistics that I'm seeing in this hunt. Today's information was originally to see if a specific job board favored a specific ATS.

Spoiler: Greenhouse and Lever are the most popular. I'm sure no one is surprised with that. I was surprised that so few roles posted on LinkedIn that are appearing in my job alerts are using the Easy Apply feature though.

Maybe my next question should be: How many jobs have you applied to where you uploaded your resume and then had to type it in manually? Without looking at my data, I theorize it's over 50%.

I'm still looking for an engineering leadership role, but in the meantime, I'll share some occasional numbers from my search. Reach out to me if you are looking for a leader to join your engineering team!

I cross posted this over on LinkedIn. Join me over there

I am looking for an engineering leadership role

2022-08-18T08:00:00-05:00

It's been a busy couple of days. On August 16, I was part of the 15% workforce reduction efforts that Woven implemented. This was not entirely unexpected, as our customers started scaling back their hiring efforts it was imperative that Woven didn't outgrow what it was able to sell.

I took the last few days to orient myself, and prepare for another job hunt. I'm looking for an Engineering Leadership role and would love an introduction if you could make one. I'm over on LinkedIn, where I think it's going to be easiest to interact with my professional network.

In the meantime, this one is going to be a short post. Depending on how this goes and what twists and turns I go through to get to my next role, this may turn into a series of posts in the future. Time will tell.

Hop over to LinkedIn to join the conversation and provide those introductions! I'd really appreciate it.

Time and Gas saved by switching to remote work

2022-06-12T01:00:00-05:00

A brief history¶

In August of 2017, I left a decade long career that consisted of driving at least 90 minutes every day. During construction, poor weather or winter weather it was closer to two hours daily. I discussed this as one of the factors in my initial search for a new role at the time. I also briefly covered it in my reflection on how I found that role. An hour and a half to two hours daily adds up quickly.

I'm quickly approaching half a decade of full time remote work. I spent a majority of that at PacketFabric and recently started at Woven (still need to post about the new role). I wanted to see what I've saved in terms of time commuting, gallons of gasoline and maybe a few other interesting stats.

Starting Numbers¶

Before I can do some of these calculations, I needed to get some starting numbers. I'm not trying to calculate to the penny or to the minute, so these are rough averages. However, over the course of 5 years, a couple extra minutes every day add up quickly. These numbers assume I would have stayed at that same office, same house, and accumulated vacation time the same way I was while still employed there.

Miles per day: 90 (45 miles one way)
Commute time per day (minutes): 106 minutes (53 minutes one way, this is roughly in the middle of my 1.5 to 2 hour commute depending on traffic)
First day remote: 2017-08-01
Calculate until: 2022-06-10
Total number of days: 1774
Total number of week days (remove the weekends): 1269
Total vacation days: 180
Total number of work days: 1089
Average MPG: 22.5

I also needed to find an average gas price. While starting to write this post I thought I'd pull official numbers from the US Energy Information Administration. They have numbers going back to 1993 broken down by week. This would be amazing, but I was spending too much time trying to figure out when I was on vacation and how to handle weeks with a holiday in it. I don't need exact numbers. I'm looking for ball park, so instead I went with the yearly gas price average for 2017 through 2021 then I used the inflation calculator from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to adjust for inflation using May of that year to May of 2022.

2017: $2.52 -> $3.01
2018: $2.81 -> $3.26
2019: $2.69 -> $3.07
2020: $2.25 -> $2.57
2021: $3.10 -> $3.37
2022: $4.00   (based on average price of January through May 2022)

This gets an average gas price of $3.21.

It's probably important to note that if I run this again in August at the full 5 year mark that gas cost is going to be much higher. Inflation was 8.6% in May 2022, with average gas prices hitting $5.00 nationwide. In my area, it's been above $5 for over a month. This is also part of the reason I wanted to run these numbers.

Lastly, I wanted to see if I could figure out how much CO2 I had not produced based on how much gasoline I hadn't used. I was expecting a complicated formula. Turns out that 1 Gallon of Gas = 19.59 pounds of CO2 (8,887 grams of CO2 per gallon).

The calculations¶

With my initial numbers determined, the calculations are pretty easy.

Total Miles Not Driven = Miles per day * Total number of work days
                       = 90 * 1089
                       = 98,010 miles

Total Time Not Commuting = Commute time per day (minutes) * Total number of days
                         = 106 * 1089
                         = 115,434 minutes
                         = 1923.9 hours
                         = 80.1 days

Gallons of Gas Not used = Total Miles Not Driven / Average MPG
                        = 98,010 / 22.5
                        = 4,356 gallons of gasoline

Dollars not spent on gas = Gallons of Gas Not used * Average gas price
                         = 4,356 * 3.21
                         = $13,997.28

CO2 Not produced = Gallons of Gas Not Used * 19.59
                 = 4,356 * 19.59
                 = 85,334.04 pounds of CO2

Analysis¶

Those are some impressive numbers. I saved almost 100,000 miles of commute time just going to and from work over five years. Put another way - I was NOT in my car for 80 full days over the course of five years. Literally a full time job's worth of travel time at nearly 2,000 hours saved over 5 years.

I didn't put over 4,300 gallons of gas in the vehicle and I didn't spend almost $14,000 on gasoline. That also prevented the production of 85,000 pounds of CO2. Sounds like a big number, but it's a passenger vehicle. It doesn't compare to the output of a large truck, an airplane, a tanker, or a factory. But, it's something.

Conclusion¶

These are just the easily calculable numbers on what shifting to remote work has saved me. Things that I can't put a number on: time with family, flexible scheduling, ability to take the dogs for a walk when the sun is out, and more. I'm not spending hours in a car. I'm at home when the family gets home from school and work.

I hadn't tried to put hard numbers on this before, but now that I have, I am even more satisfied with my decision five years ago to start looking for a company that was 100% remote.

The Other Side of the Mirror: How I Went from Woven Client to Woven Employee

2022-06-04T08:00:00-05:00

Before we begin...¶

This post is republished from Woven's blog.

Back in April 2022, I left my position at PacketFabric, which I've talked about a handful of times, previously. At some point I'll do a post-mortem on the job and why it was time to move on, but that's not for today. This post is about how I went from a customer of Woven to Woven's Director of Engineering.

As I spin up in this role, I'm looking forward to growing with the team and helping other engineering leaders find amazing new members for their team.

Read on!

The conversation¶

Background¶

Interviewer: Thanks for sitting down with me, Andy. Could you tell me a little bit about your background?

Sure. I started at Cat Logistics doing inbound transportation, which went from a single division to five or six divisions by the time I was done. In 2017 I transitioned into building the QA team at PacketFabric, and that expanded into building the software engineering team itself.

I joined when there were six or seven engineers, and I was the first one on the QA side. When the company went through their next round of funding I was the one that led the software engineering growth. So we worked with Woven to hire roughly 20 engineers in about 10 months.

Tooling before Woven¶

Interviewer: Had you used a technical assessment tool before Woven?

Before Woven we were using just a standard take-home test. We built a rubric, we built the scenario, and we handed it out to the people we wanted to move forward in the interview process.

The problem with that is it’s very, very time-consuming. It means that me or another engineer is constantly following up. “Hey, are you going to take this today? Are you going to get this done? We sent this a week ago.” And we had to spend time writing it, too. I also had to make sure they were all evaluated uniformly because if not, you’re not getting any value out of it.

This is not something that a small team can do when they need to grow quickly, which is where Woven came in. Woven was very helpful in getting us a set of scenarios that matched what we needed. One of them matched exactly what we were hiring for; the calculating and billing invoices was exactly what we needed a couple of engineers to build. So it was very, very fortuitous in that case. Woven made evaluating those candidates very easy.

Other things like debugging and systems architecture were very helpful in identifying the senior engineers we were looking for at the time, because we were growing quickly. And Woven was able to identify a senior engineer versus somebody that had some experience but hadn’t done the full gamut of work that a senior engineer would have done in the past.

So Woven really grew to cover most of engineering because it was so successful in bringing in high-quality engineers with very low turnover.

Candidate experience¶

Interviewer: Did you hear any feedback from candidates about their experience using the platform?

Oh, constantly. Especially from engineers in the calculating and billing invoices area. You know, they thought this was just a scenario that was built up, but it was actually focused on what they would be doing. There was a lot of feedback like, “This is not just a code challenge. This feels like real work.” Those types of things were said constantly throughout the interview process, and we didn’t solicit them.

The most I usually said was, “You should have received feedback, was there anything you wanted to discuss?” And their response was kinda like, “No, it was very good and very thorough.” They were appreciative of feedback because most candidates have gone through more than one interview at this point, especially the senior engineers, and often they’re just ghosted.

Puzzles¶

Interviewer: I’m sure as the candidate it doesn’t feel good to get ghosted or to spend time doing something that doesn’t matter. Especially when you’re really experienced.

Yes. As a hiring manager, I have zero interest in puzzle questions. They’re not helpful to me. It feels like I’m wasting their time and my time. When candidates are able to see and do projects that feel real, it’s important.

If they’re just doing a puzzle, they don’t get a sense of what we want to do. And with Woven, they’re getting well-defined scenarios that are picked by a hiring committee and focus on what the role is supposed to cover. You know a senior engineer is going to be doing debugging and is going to be looking at architecture. It may not be our exact system, but it’s pretty close and you’re going to be doing this type of work.

I’ve done puzzles when I’ve interviewed, and I hate giving puzzles.

Interviewer: I imagine a lot of people in your position would say that. Why would you give a candidate something that you wouldn’t want to take?

Exactly. If I was interviewing for this role, I would not want to do a puzzle. I had to go through the Woven test as I was applying here. And I was like “Okay, I’ve seen the other side. I’ve gone through this. This is exactly what other candidates have said.”

Moving to Woven¶

Interviewer: Tell me about that — transitioning from using Woven as a service to going through the interview process and becoming an employee.

The big thing that I learned is that Woven’s engineering team is a lot smaller than I thought. Because when I would have a question or an issue, it would get solved really quickly. So I thought there was a much larger team. But it points to how good the engineering team is here.

And going through the interview process was fun. Obviously I knew very high-level what it looks like, how it operates. I knew what was going on behind the scenes. But I was nervous because even though I knew what the test was going to look like, I don’t know exactly how I did.

Then I got the feedback and it was really good. There were a few areas that I definitely could have done better and Woven caught all of it. So I was very happy with that.

Moving over here is really like looking through the other side of the mirror. It’s interesting to see how things actually work.

Other side of the mirror¶

Interviewer: As someone who’s been on both sides of the mirror, what would you say to other VPs is the main benefit of using Woven?

From a hiring manager perspective, I’d talk about how much time is saved from when my team was doing their own evaluations to when Woven was involved.

It was very easy to see the teams that were hiring using Woven versus the teams that were building their own scenario take-home tests. The efficiency was so much higher with the Woven teams. They could get through more candidates and they could get higher-quality candidates to the later stages versus the teams that would be doing their own take-homes.

I also like to tell people I hired non-engineers that were among the top performing engineers on the team. People that I would have missed just looking at the resume. Somebody that you wouldn’t think could do a good job as a senior engineer, but they received some of the best scores on the Woven assessments and turned around and produced some of the highest-quality work. Just looking at a resume though, they would have been passed over pretty quickly.

Oftentimes this kind of candidate has done and learned just a little bit more than somebody with a traditional CS degree that probably hasn’t used data structures in their day to day job. Instead they’ve focused on building a product that works and functions. And this candidate that’s from another career had to jump in and solve the problem, and that problem was very complex. They taught themselves and found that it was something they really enjoyed.

So the hidden gems aspect of Woven is very surprising.

That's a wrap¶

With that, the conversation is over. I'm enjoying my role at Woven. There are a lot of ways to make the hiring process better in the tech industry and I'm going to be right there helping.

How I found an awesome remote only job

2017-11-28T09:01:00-06:00

Introduction¶

It's been over three months since I left my position at Caterpillar, but leaving that job wasn't as simple as finding a position and changing jobs. Since my initial post that I was changing positions, I've gotten questions from several professional contacts that were also looking to move, but weren't entirely sure of the process I used to find my new job. I hope to answer some of those questions with this post.

New Job Criteria¶

One of the advantages I had during this search was that I had a job already. This allowed me to hunt for a job at my own pace. I didn't need a new position immediately. The slower pace also let me set my own criteria for what I wanted in a new job.

Full time work from home¶

At Caterpillar, I worked from home one to two days a week. I did this for several years and enjoyed it. I found that I was much more productive. I was able to focus on the work that needed to be done that day because the distractions of working in a cube farm weren't present. I didn't hear the side conversations that I wasn't involved in. I didn't get the "hey can you help me" questions that could be solved with a few seconds of trying some new code. I was able to concentrate on the task and not context switch frequently.

Additionally, the drive to and from the office was consuming almost two hours a day. In the winter, this was brutal. I was leaving as the sun rose and getting home well after it had set. I wasn't seeing the family.

My most important criteria was born from these two. I wanted to be able to work from home, full time. I was not opposed to the occasional yearly get together, but I didn't want to go into an office on a regular basis.

Pay and benefits must improve¶

Caterpillar had great benefits. I don't remember ever worrying about health coverage, or prescription drug coverage. Pay was "industry average", which always seemed a bit lower than what sites like glassdoor.com said I should make. Part of this was due to the yearly bonus I was eligible for. This was dependent on the business performance and not guaranteed. It also fluctuated a lot. The fact that Caterpillar went through nearly five years of poor market performance didn't help with those bonuses either.

A new position would need to meet or exceed the health benefits I had. The pay would need to improve too. Working from home would have the advantage of not paying for gas for the car as frequently. It'd also reduce the maintenance costs of putting so many miles on the car.

Something challenging¶

A new position is going to bring new challenges. It's new. You don't know the job. But, I wanted it to be challenging after I made it over that initial period of adjustment. I started looking for a job that would utilize my programming skills, leadership skills from the projects I've led, and maybe some of the community management skills I had from Team Vipers and various StackExchange communities I participate in.

The search¶

I had my initial, if broad, criteria defined. The next step was to start the hunt. I utilized several sites to help with the initial search and to help narrow down the list of companies I'd really like to talk with.

remote|ok - A job board that updates throughout the day, yet doesn't have thousands of postings. It is specific to the "IT-ish" world. This was helpful in finding companies that are open to remote jobs, because I'd see those companies listings repeatedly over the course of my hunt.
We Work Remotely - Another "IT-ish" job board that updates one or two times a day. It has multiple categories of jobs and usually is pulling in positions from other job boards. I preferred using this over the source sites because this had a much smaller set of jobs and was restricted to my area of interest.
Stack Overflow Jobs - I have a love/hate relationship with Stack Overflow Jobs. On the one hand, it had so many UI/UX issues. On the other hand, it makes it really easy to find remote jobs and narrow it down to only jobs I'm interested in. This is where I eventually found the posting for the job I took.

UPDATE: Stack Overflow Jobs shut down in March 2021.

If I'm being honest, my search for a job took over eighteen months. I found several jobs that were interesting and that I applied for, but the process was slow. There were several false starts, several job applications were ignored, and several interviews that didn't move forward at either my choice or the company's choice.

Keeping it all straight¶

I put out a lot of job applications. This meant that I needed to adjust my resume and cover letter to each company. I needed to keep track of when I applied, who I interacted with, when interviews were scheduled, and when to give up on a job.

Enter: Trello

Prep: This is a reminder to update resume and cover letter for each position, and a list of the labels I utilize. The colored labels made it easy to identify the current status, and whether this was a local or remote position. After searching for about nine months, I started to consider office positions in a few specific cities.
Interesting Positions: All new jobs I was considering would go here. It'd consist of a link to the job posting. This was made really easy by utilizing a bookmarklet provided by Trello that would send any link to this list on this board.
Companies to watch: As my hunt continued, I found several companies that seemed interesting or that had expressed interest in my skill set. I set up links to the job pages for each of these companies so that I could see if anything new and interesting was posted.
Submitted applications: After updating my resume and cover letter, filling out the application forms, and pressing submit, a job posting would be moved from "Interesting Positions" to "Submitted Applications".
Interviews: When a company liked an application and scheduled an interview, I'd move the card to this step. Additionally, I'd add a comment with the name of the people I'd be talking with - Human Resources representative, technical leads, managers - so that I knew who I'd be talking with.
Recheck opening availability: If a card sat in "Interesting Positions" for a period of time, I needed to check if the position was still available before finally submitting an application. There were many times that I'd mark a job as interesting and then never apply. This list helped keep the viable list of positions down to what was still available.
Cold Opportunities / Rejections: Just as I ignored positions, my applications were ignored many times. Other times, an interview process would just fizzle out. These seemed like the company didn't want to send a rejection notice and hoped that ignoring me would provide a hint. It was unprofessional, and I wouldn't look at those companies again. Other times, official rejection responses would be sent back. I appreciated these, even though they were rejections.

Butler for Trello¶

The last list on the board was Butler for Trello. This is the system that automated a lot of the moving of jobs through the process and applying proper labels. When a new job was added to the "Interesting Positions" list, a due date was added for one month from now. Triggering off this due date, the butler would move cards to "Recheck" if the due date was exceeded.

When a card was moved to "Submitted Applications" the due date was changed to be three weeks from now. The thought here was that if I hadn't heard from the company in three weeks, I was probably being ignored and thus rejected.

This automation helped keep the board clean and usable. I was always presented with a list of openings I was interested in that were current. Moving through the interview process, the cards would be moved if a period of time was exceeded. I didn't need to remember to move stuff based on when I submitted an application, or when the last interview was. It just happened.

It was amazing.

Getting the job¶

As I said above, this was a long process. That list of cold opportunities and rejections is pretty long. I talked to a lot of different companies and went through a lot of different interviews. Eventually, though, I found a job advertising a Senior Integration Tester at a new start up.

The interview process consisted of 4 interviews - one with the Senior Vice President of Development, and three individual interviews with team leads (my peers). I also needed to submit a project demonstrating how I'd test the API.

The interviews felt like conversations. We discussed my project. I had to defend a few decisions, but there were no wrong answers. Everyone was professional, yet personable.

After all of this, an offer was presented and after some last minute "do I really want to make a big change in my life" doubts were squashed, I accepted. I love the job.

A reflection on my decade at Caterpillar

2017-07-31T12:00:00-05:00

Right out of college¶

Ten and a half years ago, I was the manager at the university help desk and less than six months from graduation. I hadn't heard back from the company I interned with. I was getting concerned. I went to the university's yearly career fair. I had companies I wanted to talk with, a few that looked interesting and a handful that I knew handed out decent freebies, so I'd stop by those too. After all, what college student is going to turn down a freebie?

I don't remember what company I was speaking with. I remember it wasn't going well. The interviewer was making unfunny jokes about the location of my home town and how far it was from their place of operations. I was slowly trying to extract myself from the conversation and really wanted to take my resume back too. Finally, I was free and turned to walk away and almost knocked over a recruiter from the next booth over. I apologized and she beamed at me. She also apologized but said it was because she'd been listening to the conversation I'd just had. I had sounded like someone she was looking to hire.

I stepped over to the booth and was introduced to the Logistics arm of Caterpillar. The interview on campus and follow up all day interviews about two weeks later went very well. I was offered a job at a salary I was happy with. It turned out that the company I'd had my internship with would eventually offer me a job and not even come close to the starting salary Caterpillar offered, which made me even more satisfied. I was to start in June following graduation.

The first day¶

My degree is not in Logistics or transportation management, yet that would be the team I was joining. I was given my boss's name. I showed up, bright eyed and ready to begin my career at a company known the world over, and was told by the receptionist that my boss no longer worked at this facility. She'd moved to a new area of the company less than two weeks ago.

Eventually, I was introduced to my new boss and the team. I was handed off to my team lead and we promptly started going over a gigantic system. I remember being overwhelmed and confused. My college degree didn't use terms like "bill of lading" or "route optimization". I tried to keep up. Eventually, lunch rolled around. I was handed a set of instructions on how to get myself added to the system and told to follow those after lunch. I was young and eager. I followed the directions. In doing so, I learned how to add myself to the system. The company also learned a lesson that day: their instructions were wrong. I followed exactly what I was given. In doing so, I locked out the system administrator account for the transportation management system. This was a 'mistake' that is still brought up a decade later. On day one, it's a horrifying experience. A bit later, it's a harmless first day mistake that took a few minutes for an experienced technician to resolve.

Fortunately, day two went much better.

A revolving door of bosses¶

The first four years at Caterpillar, I met many great transportation consultants. They were very smart, had worked with many other companies and had been all over the world. I was a bit jealous of their ability to travel. These consultants taught me about managing transportation, about setting up a system for a new company, and helped me design and build tools to improve Caterpillar's ability to do the same. They also taught me something else about Caterpillar: if you aren't a Caterpillar employee, your opinion matters less. They are paid a ton more than me and my more senior coworkers, but if an idea doesn't come from an employee, it's not given fair consideration by management.

The problem with this should be obvious. Those with the most experience setting up and managing systems to get parts and supplies on time to our facilities weren't able to provide suggestions for how to improve the system even more. System growth stagnated and my first boss was replaced. The second boss came from overseas and had experience we were trying to move to the US. Their assignment in the US lasted a year or so, and I was given a new boss again. A fourth boss was assigned about nine months before I eventually moved to another division. Four bosses in four years.

Through all of this, though, I built and managed some amazing applications. These included a brand new order processing system, a container management system, and a dashboard to unify all of the different systems into one quick at a glance system. During one of the boss transitions, I was moved to sit with my users and learn their pain points. This was one of the best decisions that came out of these first four years. By sitting with the users and talking with them daily, I learned exactly what they had problems with. I designed simple work-arounds, automated external tools and ways to improve their pain points. My yearly review reflected how much the customers appreciated my help and me sitting with them.

Eventually, I was moved back with the rest of the IT team. At that point, I felt a bit like an outsider. I'd been sitting with my users for over a year. None of my coworkers had been given the opportunity to do so. I was moving from the trenches back to the ivory tower. I lost the interaction with my users and I think my team suffered because of this. We were slower to respond to issues, because now the users had to go through the official channels of calling the helpdesk and waiting until a member of my team was assigned the problem to work with. Simple questions couldn't be answered with a two minute conversation.

During this move, a third party logistics service was brought in to 'improve' our processes. It turns out that a start up company without a large customer doesn't know how to manage transportation for a company that spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to move stuff around. The relationship didn't improve over time. Instead, each side attempted to blame the other for the smallest of issues. After being assigned the task of ensuring our data was transferred every day by an early time, I started looking for another position in the company. I was tired of getting up early and missing time with the family.

The long drive¶

I found a new position fairly quickly. It was recommended to me by a friend I knew outside of work. It was a Python development position for a tool used by the entire division. I interviewed, was offered the job, and then told by my boss I couldn't move yet. Despite asking ahead of time, the answer had changed once I was actually offered the job. I spent months waiting to be allowed to move. Eventually, I was allowed to move.

The one down side of this new job was its distance from my house. My first job was about 15-20 minutes away. This new one was 45 minutes away, on a good traffic day. It was worth it though. I liked the job better. I worked much more closely with my users and over the next six years the job evolved from supporting a desktop application to building an entire analytic environment. We built a system to track failure reasons and determine who was responsible for paying a warranty (saved millions of dollars every year since implementation), a predictive failure dashboard allowing service engineers to reach out to customers before something happened, expand from desktop to web development and deploy a large expensive environment for hosting tons of sensor data from machines around the world.

The down turn¶

Unfortunately, the economic situation for Caterpillar, especially after the down turn, was always "it's going to get worse before it gets better". For years, I watched rounds of layoffs. I watched employees with decades of experience be escorted out while under-performing employees remained in place. Decades and decades of knowledge walked out the door, never to return and were replaced, most often, with nothing.

My team avoided the brunt of these layoffs, but they were never far from our doorstep. The looming threat of "maybe next time", was always there. With a large number of layoffs, it's not surprising that someone would walk out with confidential information. It happened. IT and HR cracked down on the rest of us. First came the removal of little things - USB access - then came the increased security on the laptops. Security software that took 4GB of memory on a fresh install. On day one of a new machine, half of your system resources went to "security". Restarting your computer was a 15 minute process due to this software.

Then HR stated that you must be in the building 8 hours a day. Working from home in the evenings didn't count. This was the straw that started my job search. With a 45-60 minute drive each way, I'd come to an agreement with my boss that I'd spend a majority of the day in the office but do releases in the evenings from home. This allowed me to be with my family at nights and finish the day after they'd gone to bed. HR's new rules eliminated this. So, I worked out the ability to work from home two days a week. This still wasn't ideal for those three nights that I was home later, but it improved home life a bit, for a while.

The kids were growing and starting to be involved in more after school activities. Activities that I had to pick and choose whether or not I could attend due to this decree to keep my chair warm in the office. I hated missing these things. The kids hated me missing them. Then HR "reminded" us that it was still required that we are in the office for 8 hours a day. This didn't feel like a professional work environment any more. It felt like we were being treated like little kids by HR.

The new job¶

Eventually I found a new job. My first day is, officially, tomorrow. Today is my last day at Caterpillar. It is unfortunate that I have to leave. I really enjoyed the work and the people. My managers have worked with me (and the rest of my team) to help us be as flexible as possible. But, I can't ignore that I'm missing out on family things more and more. Caterpillar says things like "work-life balance", but I'm not sure they actually believe that any more.

If they do, it's not a "work life balance" for families where both parents are employed - especially if they aren't both employed at Caterpillar. A week before I found the new job, a new flexible work schedule was announced where employees could work 80 hours over the course of 9 days instead of the usual 10, giving you every other Friday off. At first glance, that sounds appealing. But, after a minute or so of figuring out how it works there is a fatal flaw: I'd be home even later over the course of 9 days and then be home on a Friday - when the rest of the family is at work or school. That doesn't solve anything for me.

The new job is a full time remote position. I'll be home every day. I can step out for an hour to go to a class room party or take a morning off to go on a field trip. The flexibility I've been told about is amazing. The official vacation policy is:

Employees have the authority to use their judgment and discretion and take temporary periods of time away from work as vacation, without loss of pay, as their work permits.

Sold!

Goodbye Yellow!¶

Caterpillar has been my home for a decade. Despite my complaints about work life balance, above, I'm not leaving the company with malice or ill-intent. Caterpillar is a large company and will continue long after I've left. The people that are there, especially my coworkers, are intelligent people who build amazing things. Unfortunately, in my case, Caterpillar seems to have forgotten that those intelligent people like to spend time doing things other than keeping their chairs warm.

I am thankful for the decade of experiences, the professional relationships, and chances to work on interesting projects. Caterpillar, I wish you well in the future. If you are going to listen to one piece of advice from a former employee, I recommend you take a look at those employees in your work force where the household is a dual career house. Your work life balance initiatives do not appear to account for those employees and it is for that reason that you lost me.

Goodbye Yellow. I'll always remember my time with you.

How not to recruit me

2015-10-10T14:20:00-05:00

Introduction¶

A few days ago, on Meta.StackOverflow, a product manager asked for feedback on how they could make first contact between employers and potential employees more valuable to the potential employee. I provided my feedback. I've reposted it below, with some minor changes to further explain my ideals.

The summary of this entire post is: If I have to spend time to make my resume jump out and catch your attention, I expect you to spend just a little bit of time telling me about your company and the position you are recruiting for. I don't think a few sentences with these details is that much to ask.

What I want to see¶

I want to know what the company does and I want to know who you are. I also want to know what positions you are looking to fill and a few details about the position are also important.

Messages I've received¶

Message 1¶

This is the start of a good message:

It has the following good elements:

Who the recruiter is
Position they are recruiting for
A company name

It does not offer the following:

What the company does (other than "build great software").
Explanation which of my skills or experiences they are interested in. Are you interested in my Python answers on Stack Overflow? My projects on Github? My PHP experience from years ago? This is important to know. If the company is looking to recruit me for knowledge I shared years ago (ie. PHP in my case), I'd probably be less useful right now because I haven't used PHP in years. I have not kept up with recent changes to the language or various frameworks.
Explanation of what the position will do, projects I'll be involved in, or challenges they are facing now that I'll help solve.

I did not respond to this position.

Message 2¶

This has the following useful elements:

I know your name, position and company.
Due to who the company was in this particular message, I am even vaguely aware of what the company does. Name recognition helps, but is not very high on my list of "important things"

What this does not have:

A description of the position. "Looking for top talent...to make a significant impact on our systems". Ok. How? What will I be doing?
How did you find me?

I actually talked to this recruiter and I have to say that I'm both disappointed in the company and myself for not noticing some red flags in this message. This wasn't an interview for a specific position. This was a general recruiting email and I suspect it was sent to multiple users. Flags that I missed in the message:

Lack of any details at all and use of buzzwords ("top technical talent", "fast paced", "start-up like", "eCommerce industry").
Discussion about personal career goals and technical background. Some of my background should be obvious from my Careers profile, SO profile and links on both. More importantly, I missed the "personal career goals" flag. The details they wanted were to see if my goals aligned with any open positions they had at the time.
When the discussion took place, the recruiter knew little more than my name. There were no questions about my careers profile (at the very least) or other projects I mentioned on my profile.

Shame on me.

Message 3¶

This message isn't useful to me at all.

Who is this company and what do they do?
I have no experience in mobile apps. How did they find me?
What is Chad's relationship to the company?

I suspect this message showed up because I work for one of their largest clients, live 10 miles from their office and work, literally, right across the street from them. I didn't know that at the time though. I had to ask a co-worker if they'd ever heard of the company. They pointed out their office at lunch.

I did not respond to this message.

Message 4¶

This message is worthless.

You are seeking employees who are willing to relocate. Great. Good for you. Are you interested in my skills or just a warm body to keep your chairs warm?
No details about the company, other than a link to a web site
No name at all. Who am I talking to?
No details about the job. I hope they found someone to hold their seats to the floor 8 hours a day. If not, I recommend large rocks.

Summary of the messages¶

I need details and I need details more than what the salary is going to be. Obviously, I need to do some research about your company, if I've never heard of you. But, throw me a bone. Tell me a bit about yourself. I had to make a fancy resume to get you to reach out to me. I did something that caught your eye. Now, do something that will catch mine.

I don't need to work at a company that is the next Google or Apple or start up flush with cash. But, I do want to know about the company before I talk to you. If you can't spend a few seconds explaining a bit about the company, I don't want to talk with you. I don't think a few sentences is that much to ask:

"Here at COMPANY NAME, we are looking for a POSITION with skills in LANGUAGE or experience in INDUSTRY. I see you have both and think you'd be able to help TEAM NAME with their on going project of MAKING THE WORLD BETTER. Your PROJECT ON GITHUB looks like you've dealt with aspects of this problem before. We've gotten some press recently about our innovations in this area (check them out HERE)."

How to get my attention¶

I think the post above makes it clear what doesn't work. The companies that I've responded to (other than message 2, above) have all done the following:

Indicate they've at least looked at my resume by commenting on some aspect of it. I've had recruiters mention projects I've done, jobs I've held, or individual bullet points that caught their attention. This is great. It means you aren't reaching out to me because I happened to hit all of your keywords when the resume passed through your Human Resources department.
Provide a short description of the job they want to fill. I don't need a full job posting. A link to such a posting is sufficient. However, if you could summarize it in a sentence or two, that'd make both of our lives easier. Reading full job descriptions isn't the most fun thing in the world and often have industry (or even company) specific acronyms. That isn't helpful to either of us, because I may not know them. Just tell me what your team does within the company. That's good enough to get my attention.
Talk to me like a person, not some number that a database search returned. As a hint, if you can figure out that I like to go by "Andy", instead of "Andrew", you've already done a far better job than most recruiters I've spoken with.