Work

I am often asked the question at networking events, “What do you do at Unbounce?” and I never have an engaging answer. I am working on why that is (future article?) but since I am much better at writing, this is what I will try to say. Q: “What do you do at Unbounce?” My position is Head of Security, but that’s when most people’s eyes glaze over or envision me as a security guard. So let me explain it with an example. Have you ever visited a website that was selling a cool new toy, book or idea? Let’s say they ask for your name and email address so you can be put on a notification list when the product is available for purchase. There is a good chance that website is hosted on our system, and your personal data you just submitted is now flowing through our servers and being stored there too. ...

Recently, I was speaking with a company about opportunities they have. It’s a regular, casual affair that I do every so often. It keeps me grounded about what the job market is like, and allows me to see if there are other opportunities out there (because if you never look, opportunities never exist). At the end of the day, I like to help people solve problems because it makes me feel valued. ...

I’m currently reading the book, Drive, by Daniel Pink. In the Introduction the author sets out the 4 main psychological needs, much like the physical needs set out by Maslow. Here are the psychological needs: We need to feel we belong. We need to feel valued. We need to feel we’re good at something. We need to feel we have a secure future. That’s a lot of feeling, but this is profound. It corresponds directly to what I’ve said before (and possibly written here) that I look for in an employer: money, people, and work. Money helps to pay for things, and it helps to show value in someone (granted, it’s an extrinsic value). People helps define the belonging. And work defines that we are good at something. But the last psychological need, I missed that. ...

I have worked for many companies in my career and noticed some basic trends regardless of size, industry, or composition. I’m labeling these trends the Four Horsemen of Companies, and each one is named after a specific type of inflammation (-itis). My advice to budding job seekers is to work for a variety of places so that experience and understanding can be gained. If you only work for one particular type of company, you and the company end up being more prone to these horsemen than you think. If you are already employed, consider whether any of these horsemen are already present in your organization. ...

Recently at Unbounce we have been talking about what it takes to move between the ranks of junior, intermediate, and senior developer 1. Some very good discussion came out of it, but one key piece was left out for my personal interest 2: where do developers go after becoming senior? At a certain point in the career of a software developer they are told to make a choice: keep programming and developing a deeper understanding of software (The Guru), or go into management and lead software developers to the possible detriment of deep programming skills (The Manager). Over the past decade I have found myself revisiting this dilemma but have never spoken about my dislike for it. I view it now as a false dilemma but, that being said, it is a common practice to take one of two paths. ...

Don’t hate. Create. It is easy to feed the part of you that hates the broken and inefficient things you see every day. Instead of feeding that negative emotion, you can in turn convert the feeling into an opportunity to create something better. If everything worked perfectly and was the most efficient solution, there would be little work to do and life would get quite boring. It is easier to write in red than black. ...

I’ll state my bias up front: I do not like interview take-home projects. I do not like them, Sam I am. They are exploitative, they lack any ability to show realistic software development, and they shift the cost from the employer to the candidate. Recently I interviewed at a friend’s startup. I went through 2 phone screens and everything was going well. It was the kind of interviewing that I like, where the process is treated as a discussion. Then I was asked if I would mind doing a small project for them. Instead of giving a resounding “yes”, I said “maybe, what kind of project” as a terrible way of weaseling out of me saying no 1. It’s hard being put on the spot during an interview. Honestly, I should have had the guts to say no, but we don’t all act ourselves when in these situations (interviews are already an unnatural setting). I was told the project was intended to take “1 day” to implement and the assignment details were emailed to me a few hours after the phone screen. ...

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me. - Aretha Franklin I’m feeling a bit crabby this morning, perhaps because I had to deal with a take-home exercise that passed for an interview. But that’s another story. Today I want to focus on respect and how the software industry is mishandling it. To service the above quote, I also want to provide some insight into how I, just your average humble software developer, choose to define the term. ...

I finished speaking on the phone with a recruiter and, yet again, I had to spell out exactly what I look for in a job. It’s difficult to explain the same thing and have people understand what I mean, so I decided to be even more opaque and put it in a radar chart. That, and I love radar charts. To read the chart, higher numbers mean things I like doing more. And things I like to do more of, mean jobs that make me happy. And a happy Scott is a very productive Scott. ...

I just completed a set of interviews with a company for a technical lead position 1. At the last interview I got a bit quiet at the end which I explained to the interviewer was because my brain has now spun up and I’m starting to think about ways to fix some inefficiencies I heard about in the previous interviews. In each interview I made notes along the way about how I’d fix the issues, and I feel it is a tragedy to not allow part or all of this information to be used by someone 2. ...