Maybe five days after my last day at Lombardi in April, my boss there sent me a note. He had received a message on the Trilogy alumni mailing list. There are a lot of people I have run into in Austin who at one time worked for Trilogy; they had a legendary training program for new programmers called Trilogy University, and if you went through it, you had a leg up getting a job in Austin over those who did not.

The letter was from somebody who is now an exec at Indeed:

I joined Indeed at the beginning of the year and I’m expecting to double our engineering headcount here in Austin by the end of the calendar year. Indeed.com is one of the fastest growing web sites <http://www.indeed.com&gt; in the country; according to complete.com, we’re currently #201 in terms of unique visitors (> 6mm by out count) and our growth continues to be about 100%/year. In addition to ongoing opportunities for engineers for our search engine, site and applications, I’m currently looking for a test automation architect. If you or anyone you know might be interested, feel free to contact me.

He signed it, and then listed the job description. I was not really qualified at that point; I was missing web technologies, Selenium, and building automation frameworks, but I had a lot of the other qualifications. I was still just looking for management jobs at that point (for whatever stupid reasons..)

Later, my good friend in Austin who had been trying to help me get jobs here before sent me this:

Not sure if you’ve seen this:

http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=software+manager+&l=austin%2Ctx

Using a posting I found, I sent this email on 5/12/2008:

Dear Hiring Manager,

I saw the posting for Software QA Manager on indeed.com, and I think that I would be a fit for the position. I have 10 years of experience in software management, including 7 years of managing QA. I also 10 years of development experience. I feel that my interpersonal, technical and planning skills are a good match for the job requirements.

Please consider my resume for your position; I look forward to talking to you in person.

And, that was that, I thought.

On June 11, a week after I had accepted the position at Coverity and had made my travel arrangements to go to San Francisco for orientation and training, I received this:

I was cleaning up email and ran across yours from 5/14. If you are still interested in Indeed, please let me know. Your email was no read until now.

I responded with an apology, explaining that I had accepted another position, and the Indeed person thanked me for explaining.

4 weeks is a long time to take to respond to an applicant, but at least they did respond and follow-up once they read it!