I should have listened to the people recruiting me. I was not happy as a QA Manager at Lombardi, and I didn’t think I was particularly good at it. I got this email from a recruiter who had been pinging me for years. (As a matter of fact, he was the first actual recruiter I had ever talked to):

We are conducting a search for a very exciting company located in Silicon Valley. This company is building exciting, next generation system software.

The company’s founders and CEO are seasoned executives and have served at other successful companies.

The company currently has openings for Technical Leadership and Software Engineers at all levels. As a member you will play an important role building major components of a world-class highly scalable distributed system. You will make critical contributions in both team and individual capacities.

You will thrive in an organization with a strong culture of shared ownership, high-quality, innovation, and rapid development. Critical thinking skills and the ability to learn quickly are more important than specific technical skills or experience in our application domain; this position will not be filled by matching bullet-point technical skills to a rigid set of requirements. However, you will have mastered multiple software technologies and applied them appropriately.

Here is a list of our clients current resource needs:

There are 4 organizations that need people.

The UI group, Applications group, Quality Assurance and The Platform group.

We have listed the needs from the Platform group below allthough (sic) there are many postions in all four groups.

This was followed with a list of positions:

• 2 kernel/drive engineers
• 1 usb engineer
• 1 power management engineer
• 2 User-space software engineers
• 1 Java engineer
• 2 whitebox engineers
• 1 tools engineer
• 1 media/audio engineer
• 1 tools engineer
• 1 browser engineer

There are no management positions in this list. Looking at my development skills, which were now 8 years out of date, I was probably only qualified for 1 or 2 of these positions. But this is a prime example that the vast majority of tech jobs are for software development positions, and if you can do software development, and you can stay up-to-date on your skills, you can stay employed.

I missed this point in 2007; I told him that I was only interested in management positions.

Sigh.

So, almost a year into Lombardi, I got this email:

Hello.

My name is _______ _____. I’m recruiting for Vmware’s R & D Engineering team, Monitor-Guest Components, and ran across your website.

A few things first: 1) your children are gorgeous – I especially like the one of your (two-year old daughter) going for a ride in Daddy’s sportcar. :). (and further comments about the various notes about music on my old website)

But the real reason for writing to you is that we’re looking for a strong Windows developer to work on a new project, Windows Debugger Integration, giving the debugger the ability to debug in an enhanced way in virtual machines. This person needs an understanding of processor architecture and low-level Windows kernel internals, including memory management, debugger support, network stack & interrupt architecture. Also they need to be an experienced implementer of Windows-hosted debuggers.

I saw on your resume that you might know people who could be interested. If so, please feel free to share my information with them (and/or your referral of them would also greatly be appreciated!)

She then attached a full, detailed job description, with a list of requirements a mile long. I cannot imagine that there were more than a few dozen people in the world with the necessary experience for the requirements. I knew quite a few debugger people, but I don’t think that they were Windows experts.

But I am really surprised that she is just pumping me for names. It was clear from my resume on my now-defunct personal website that I was not qualified for the position as written. So, she was just getting in touch with me after looking at all of my baby pictures to see if I knew anybody and if I would give her any names out of the kindness of my heart.

In my reply, I made social noises about her comments about my website, and then wrote:

Ooh, I don’t know many people who fit that bill. (A former Apple coworker) works there, right? (Say “Hi” for me). He would not be able to recommend his former debugger engineers because of affiliation with Apple. I would, except that I know that they would not ever want to work on Windows anything ever again. They like the Mac, and they like Linux, and there is not much you could pay them to do anything else.

I then gave her the name of a debugger engineer I knew who was still at Red Hat (who was not likely to want to do the position either), telling her to get his email from the gdb mailing list at the Free Software Foundation site.

If I think of anybody, I’ll let you know.

Looking back on it, I am so glad we have sites like LinkedIn and Indeed to circulate resumes with having to build a website. I am somewhat horrified that this person look at my baby pictures while downloading my resume. Times have changed; those kinds of things are all on Facebook now! (which is creepy on a different level I guess…)

Email arrived late one evening:

Found your info on your website. Interested to speak with you re: Lombardi. Not sure if you’re looking for a new opportunity or not, but would like to speak with you anyway. Fwd me a resume in .doc format and let me know of a convenient time to talk.

Signed as a recruiter. Fishing for somebody to shop around. The telephone number they gave was a Concoard/Walnut Creek number, so most likely, the companies he was working for were back in California. I had only been at Lombardi a few months, so I wrote back this short quip:

I am not interested in changing jobs at this time.

 

I really had not had that much experience yet with recruiters, but I had worked with better ones than this. .doc format? Oh, that’s right, in 2007, it was easy to generate a PDF on a Mac but not on Windows. And most people were on Windows. Giving me some idea of what kind of work it is, where it is located, and oh, I don’t know, THE COMPANY NAME, might make me more amenable to talking.

Of course, often recruiters for startups are not allowed to divulge the company name. I hate that game.

So, no.

About 3 weeks before I was to leave to start my new job in Austin, I got this:

I am a working with a Silicon Valley profitable start-up company that is looking for full-time Software Manager

Our client’s customers are worldwide leaders in wireless, cellular, avionics, military, video entertainment, broadcasting, automotive.  Their breakthrough patented coding technologies are now being implemented as worldwide standards for upcoming communications designs in international standards bodies. Their technology allows for reliable transmission of data on unreliable wireless or wired networks.

Primary Responsibilities
Drives the delivery of embedded software products for IP-based streaming and file delivery applications. Ensures customer success through the delivery of well-designed, flexible, extensible, robust and richly supported software products.

Leveraging past product successes, provides domain expertise in the area of IP-based networking architectures and protocols. Provides technical guidance on multimedia session/transport protocol implementations, limitations, and applications including IP/UDP, RTP/RTCP, firewalls, and performance enhancing proxies.

Works closely with development team to ensure that core technology implementations are highly portable and scalable to a broad range of client and server environments.

Required Skills & Experience
An innovative and technical professional with a proven track record as a technical software manager in the area of IP-based networking protocols. Minimum of 12 years relevant experience, including at least five years experience in a management capacity.

Depth of knowledge in many of the following protocols and technologies: IP/UDP/TCP, NAT/ALG, firewall, VPN, RTP/RTCP, FTP, DHCP, FTP, DiffServ, including a comprehensive knowledge of the architecture, design, development, limitations and use as applied to streaming and file broadcast applications.

Proven technical manager; must have practical, hands-on experience in leading teams in the development of complex multimedia networking solutions. Demonstrated success in the early stages of product development through participation in product and roadmap definitions with product management. Strong project execution skills covering task definition, team mentoring, and recruiting. Demonstrated success in delivering best of breed solutions and ensuring customer success.

Bachelor’s Degree in CS or EE

If you want to apply, reply to this email with your resume.

Well, it’s an engineering manager position, which would have been better than QA, in my experience. However:

• I was committed to moving to Texas already. House was on the market. New job already lined up.
• Lots of embedded networking software. Not my strongest muscles as a developer.
• 12 years of networking software dev as a matter of fact. I had basically zero? 10 years as a general developer, but not networking.
• 5 years as a manager. I had 3-4 not continuous years as a manager, but only 2 as a dev manager.

I was not qualified for the requirements listed, and I was leaving California anyway.

Some other little things: There is inconsistent punctuation. There are changes in tense and mood in the text. Whoever it was was still trained to type two spaces after a period. And I hate it when they don’t tell you who the company is.

The recruiter left their LinkedIn profile in the email. Ironically, they work at Apple now! Still, I often wonder how recruiters could think that I would be qualified for a position like this when they look at my resume? There is very little overlap in specific skills…

Some time in late 2005 or early 2006, as we were trying to figure out what to do with ourselves as a family, I applied to a position at Hewlett Packard. The position was in Houston. I am fairly sure I applied through careerbuilder.com, and it brought up an HP job portal to apply with. It was pretty awful, if I recall correctly.

Some time later, I got this gem:

From: HP Human Resources ercwww2@hp.com
Date: March 3, 2006 12:52:42 PM PST
To: <color=”black”>REDACTED
Subject: Thank You from HP

March 03, 2006

Dear Candidate,

Thank you for your internal application for the position of Handheld Engineering Manager, requisition #896972.  HP is committed to providing internal opportunities to its current workforce and we are pleased with your interest to expand and grow your career opportunities.

We had many inquiries regarding this opening.  After careful consideration of your application, we regret to inform you that we will be pursuing other candidates for this opening.  We appreciate you taking the time to post internally for this position and encourage you to continue to pursue your career goals with HP.

We encourage you to explore the myriad of career opportunities available at HP utilizing Job Searcher (accessible via the @hp portal or directly at http://staffing.corp.hp.com/recruitsoft/js_main_panel.asp

HP is committed to providing our employees opportunities for career growth.  Please keep in mind the positions in Job Searcher are updated on a daily basis.  We also strongly recommend that you continue to discuss your career goals and aspirations with your manager.  Thank you again for your internal application.

Wishing you continued success in your career with HP!

Sincerely,

Hewlett-Packard Company

Please note the following:

• Your application and any additional information you provide to us will be added to our international resume database located in the United States and Canada and will be used only for the purpose of reviewing your skills and interests against job openings at HP.
• This resume database will be shared with third parties acting on behalf of HP who may be located in other geographies.  These third parties are under contract to HP and bound by terms of confidentiality and the same data privacy rules in usage at HP.
• If there has been no activity on your candidate information in six months, it will be removed from our database.
• You may use Job Searcher to update or make changes to your profile.  Use of this site indicates your acceptance of the Terms of Use.
• If you would like to delete your profile from our database, please send an email to resume@hp.com.  Within the subject line of your email message, please reference “Delete from database”.  Please include your full name and mailing address within the body of your email message.
• Replies to this message are undeliverable and will not reach HP’s Human Resource Department.

Wow. I am still dumbfounded. Some points:

• I have never worked at HP, so why would this be considered an internal hire?
• I wonder if they shared my resume with third parties acting on behalf of HP?
• I am glad that they will remove my entry after six months of inactivity.
• I guess I had to count on them deleting my profile automatically after six months, since I could not access their internal site. I did not try that email address.
• Replies don’t work.

This is a seriously messed up email on so many levels. I’m glad I never went to work at this company.