Don't have the talent...?

Don't want to use the talent already present in your company?

Do you enjoy purchasing new and non-applicable software if the sales pitch is convincing enough?

Want to burn this year's budget to ensure financing doesn't cut back your funds for next year?

Like having "all your eggs in one basket"?

There's only one solution!

Outsource!

You still won't have the talent and will be screwed when it comes time for maintenance after the outsourced resource is gone. But your immediate needs will be satisfied! Or they may not, but your financial balances will be close to zero. Thus justifying the cost savings from the 150 people you just laid off!

...

...

Yes, I'm bitter.

Hope my boss(es) don't read this

I didn't realize my slow decline at work until last Monday. Monday we had a meeting and two hours later I was emailed a ton of materials that one person just whipped up. That used to be me. I used to get back from a meeting and crank out deliverables and prototypes. What happened?

My current excuse: I'm working on six different projects simultaneously, 3 have a hard 12/1 deadline (really 11/26 with the holiday), and I change between them 20 times a day.

Resume woes

So my team wants a "Flex and AIR rawkstar". Someone to fly in, throw down an app or two, revolutionize our development mythologies*, but looking through these resumes, I wonder if such a person exists. This is my first chance to be a part of the hiring process from the other side. And if nothing else, I've learned some great tips for building my own resume. I skipped the list of "technologies and stuff I know". People are listing Flex 3, then in their experience they don't mention ever writing a line of code. Writing CFCs and business logic for a site with a Flex front end doesn't mean you can put Flex on your resume. So I skip right to the experience sections.

One resume says "Worked with CFQUERY, CFUPDATE, and CFSTORED PROC for database manipulation". What about CFSET and CFBEER? Yeah, we skipped that one. And yes, there's a space in cfstored proc, apparently. "Used CFTry CFCatch to trap errors..." more tags in the resume. Say that you wrote in explicit error handling, don't say how you did it.

"Wrote modules for header and footer templates and called them all over the site using CFInclude". Okay, for real, stop capitalizing tags like that. Including a header/footer is sooooo trivial. Reading this in the resume makes me think "they think that's impressive? buh bye"

How many years of experience do you say you have for each bit of technology? I worked on Oracle for 9 months, but haven't touched it in 3 years. I've been using CF primarily just to talk between Flex and SQL Server for two years, but have been using it in some fashion for almost 7 years.

The CONSTANT misspellings are killer. It's "ColdFusion", it hasn't been "Cold Fusion" since version 2 and was never "Coldfusion" nor "Cold fusion". 4 years ago I went through a contract house and my agent went through my resume highlighting things and messed up a lot of my technical terms like this. I'll blame those agent-types, but they need to stop, they're making their client look like they don't know what they're working with.

Another resume lists off a half dozen sites s/he** worked on, that's good. But they're all extranets that require login to do or see anything. Don't include links to those.

References to internal systems...? If I said on my resume "Streamlined interfaces to VIDS", would you hire me? Now if I say "Streamlined interfaces to company's internal chargeback and budgeting system", maybe.

DO NOT MENTION FRONT PAGE!!! If you're a real web developer, you don't use Front Page. You never used Front Page. You hate Front Page and are glad it's dead. You can't say "Front Page" without spitting on the ground. Do you design web applications in Word, too? Saying "Designed and developed user interfaces with Front Page" is like "Preformed brain surgery with Playskool's Little Doctor tools". Maybe you can remove the tumor, but imagine the gory mess you'll make.

Include a web site link to your example work. And if it's a locked down site, take screen shots of what you can. I was really impressed with one resume that included a link to the guy's site. But then I go to the site and it's basically a slide show of index pages of, I would guess, site's he's touched. I don't know, it's just the slide show. No other links or text.

*That was a typo, but it works, I'll keep it

**Only one of the 10 resumes here have Anglo-Saxon names. I can't pronounce them, much less know if it's male or female. Nothing at all against Indian developers, but I'm already imagining a strong language barrier.

The Plague of the Old Program

I'm currently debugging a Flex program I wrote 18 months ago. My very first "big" Flex app. All the variables and functions are public. Data is passed around by tightly coupled components. The database is requeried CONSTANTLY. I went into this thing to make a text change a few weeks ago. While in there, I wanted to make some little efficiency upgrades and ended up rewriting half the thing. Going back to your own old code is actually more frustrating than picking up someone else's. It's fun to see how I've progressed as a Flex programmer in the last year and a half. But also very frustrating to weed through all the junky code I put in because I just didn't know better then.

Coining terms: Decision Radius

Term coining!

Decision radius: The scope of individuals capable of making a decision. Example: I'm outside the decision radius about where we'll be raiding tonight.

Adobeverse: A group of high-image individuals known for their knowledge in Adobe-related technologies. Such as Ben Forta, Ray Camden, and Ben Nadel are in the ColdFusion wing of the Adobeverse. Unfortunely, this term was used at least a year ago, so while I thought of it on my own, someone else thought of it on their own first.

iTard: One who has displayed inability to navigate Apple's simple interfaces.

I work for {directorFName} in {deptName} at {compName}

My company's going through "performance transformation" which is a fancy, summed up way to say "move people around, fire a few, and centralize all the decentralization (and vice versa) we did seven months ago". I'm not worried for the future of my position here but it's so annoying, having a new management cast every few months. Just as I start learning the names of all the people so far above me that they don't even matter, they all change. I was just asked (by a smoking hot babe) "Who is your director? What department are you in now?" and I honestly blanked and couldn't answer either question. From now on, I'll write down this sort of worthless information. No sense in devoting brain tissue to remembering what my group is calling themselves this week.

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