chorn

BarCamp Rochester 2010

In Rochester, BarCamp day is one of my favorite days out of the whole year.  If you don’t know what BarCamp is, let me summarize:

• O’Reilly hosts an invite only event called FooCamp.
• Geeks love the format and make their own, called BarCamp.
• Foo and Bar as IT jargon are explained here.
• The next BarCamp Rochester is April 3rd.
• The basic format is that everyone who attends either helps or presents.

I have my own perspective on BarCamp:

• Originally for IT, you can give a talk about anything you are interested in, and hopefully passionate about.
• You don’t have to be an expert presenter, this is not TED.  We like BarCamp because we’re all in the same boat exploring and learning new things.  No judgement and no scathing criticism.
• BarCamp is not focused on IT or even expertise, it’s a chance to express why you’re passionate about something.

Not only is BarCamp fun, it is also important.

• As a professional, you should be able to give a good presentation.  This is a fantastic low pressure forum to give a brief talk and get feedback.  If you want, you can give multiple talks.
• As a life-long learner, it is important to maintain your interest and passion for topics that challenge you.  Share that!
• As an employer, you need to be able to find and attract exceptional people.  The nature of BarCamp is that only people with the courage and the passion to present something contribute to the event.  That is a huge differentiator.  Don’t send managers or HR, go yourself and take notes.  A lot of the presenters are thought leaders, and might be looking for a co-op or a full time job.
• As a business owner, it’s time to take a critical look at your team.  Where is the passion in your company?  Is there any?  If your knowledge workers don’t seem to belong at this BarCamp thing or worse, don’t even want to attend, then I’d say this is a good time for a panic attack.
• As an educator, RIT basically owns the event; other schools are represented very poorly.  If I still taught, I think I’d be drumming up support for this at my school and arranging some buses.  This is a “street cred” crisis for all the other schools in our area, which they don’t know they need to address.
• As a smart person, this is a place where fun, interaction, and education meet.  As an adult that is rare, embrace it.

BarCamp needs your money and I’ve had a great reason why:

• Western New York & Rochester have “brain drain” groups focused on keeping talented people in our area.  This is the forum you’ve been looking for. The majority of presenters are under 25.  Do you want to keep them here?  Show them their professional life can be fun.  Money does not motivate most people. Show them there’s a part of the job which is just about being awesome.  Show them you don’t need to be Google to value the passion they have.

Go to BarCamp Rochester to:

• Attend.  We need your t-shirt size and what your presentation is about.
• Give money.  Details on the website.  This might be the year we become a non-profit.  To date no one finds accounting and legal paperwork very exciting.  Any amount is welcome.
• Give your old and current conference swag.  At the end of the day we have a big drawing for all of the donated stuff.

More questions?  E-Mail hosts@barcamproc.org.

-chorn

Get ready to get hired

You need a new job.  Maybe you’ve got one and are looking to switch, maybe you don’t.  Either way, you might not be aware that the job hunting world has changed.

Your career probably revolves around IT, even if you’re not an IT person.  If you struggle with your personal IT, then put the time in now and learn it.  It is always a differentiator, and it’s probably a big one.

LinkedIn is probably the most important task to set for yourself, if you do nothing else, follow this part.

1. Sign up, create a complete profile.  It’s very much like a terse version of your resume or CV.
2. Connect with everyone you know, especially people from past positions you’ve held.
3. If you’ve made some connections via social networking, ask to connect with them as well.
4. Keep working with your profile until LinkedIn says you’re at 100%.  That include recommending people you have connected with.
5. Recommendations in LinkedIn are kind of a scam.  I would never use them as a trust metric.  The problem is that in a lot of organizations you can see the “recommend me” peer pressure sweep through a whole organization.  If you were to watch LinkedIn every day, you can see it roll right through departments, it’s creepy.
6. That’s why I suggest only recommending people you no longer work with.  Start with ancient history and work your way forward.  When it comes right down to it, you probably only want recommendations from the people you most respect because that is the real intent, to build a web of trust.
7. Jobless or not, it is important here (as on your resume) to show that your skills are current and you are actively doing something. You don’t have to be incorporated or anything that requires a big investment, but you should clearly look like you are not sitting on your hands and that you are available to work.

Next, be ready for the job search once you’ve pulled the trigger and started applying. You can expect the following things from everyone your resume reaches:

1. You are going to get googled.  If someone out there with your name is making your search results look scary, put it in your resume and in your cover letter.  “I am not the Chris Horn who made headlines in 2008.”
2. You are going to get stalked on Myspace.  Delete your myspace account, it is lame and not the sort of thing highly skilled professionals have.  If you are tempted to argue with me on this one I understand, it’s just too damn bad.
3. You are going to get stalked on Facebook.  Make 120% certain you have all of your Privacy settings locked down so that only people in your best friends forever list can see what you have posted.  Facebook privacy Facebook friends list
4. If you have been social networking on twitter, digg, reddit, etc… make sure it doesn’t make you look like a jerk, like me.  @chorn
5. If you are not currently social/professional networking at all, it is time to start.  You don’t have to look like you are the foremost authority in your field, but you should at least look like you are paying attention.  If people can see that you are involved in your field, it is a big differentiator.
6. If there is any other ugly content from you or about you on the Internet, you’d better have your talking points ready now because it’s probably there for good.

Build a presence on the Internet.  You don’t have to be social networking whiz, but you really can’t afford to avoid it.  Your goal in social networking is to find a balance between fame and reputation.  You can work your way to having thosands of followers in all of the major networks, but if they don’t know what you are good at, and that you are looking to get paid to do it, you aren’t really helping yourself.

Here is how I would get myself on the Internet:

1. Get a domain name.  For me, chorn.com is great, scrapbooking-for-life.com would probably not be a good choice.  That’s probably because scrapbooking in general sounds like kryptonite to me, some other cool sounding hobby might be ok.
2. Use GoDaddy as your registrar and for DNS, not for hosting your e-mail or website.
3. Use Google Apps for your domain for e-mail.  They have good directions on how to set it up with GoDaddy.  If you can afford the $50/year for the premium level, it’s worth it for the added support and features.  E-mail addresses like resume@{my_domain_name_goes_here}.com look professional.
4. Use Tumblr to host your main webpage.  They’ll host the A record for your domain for free.  That piece is important!
5. Tumbr is also a great place for you to start blogging, vlogging and aggregating the rest of your social networking related activity that makes you look like an Internet professional.
6. In addition to Tumblr, Google Apps for your domain includes some free web page hosting with the Sites feature.  Not only should you have your resume here as a PDF, but you should put it up as HTML too.  If you don’t know what a PDF or HTML is, learn now.  Then you can share your resume as something like http://resume.{my_domain_name_goes_here}.com, which is a really nice touch.

Don’t forget the standards you probably already know:

1. Have a polished resume.  Experienced and skilled people do not have a 2 page resume.
2. Tell everyone that you are looking for a job and what you are looking for.  If you are just pushing your resume around you are just a list of buzz words and a price.
3. Hopefully your area has a professional networking group or two you can attend and meet potential employeers at.
4. You can work with placement agencies, but your success there is primarily driven by the number of openings and which buzz words they match up on your resume.

The job market is pretty grim right now.  Depending on your skill set it might always be grim if you’re choosey, I don’t know.  I do know some top notch people who are without a paycheck right now, and looking for some ways to outshine the rest of the pack.  Hopefully this helps, but then again maybe it’s just worth $.02.

-chorn

How to ask your vendor to do something.

I’ve worked directly with more than my share of commercial vendors, and the majority of the time things did not go well.  I’ve made foolish assumptions such as:

1. They care.
2. They know what they are doing.
3. They tell the truth.
4. What they’ve said they’re going to do is really what they’ve done.
5. They realize that I’m the paying customer.

It’s not too difficult to imagine any or all of your ISP/Telephony/Hosting providers in that list.  Residential vendors probably fall into this list, more or less every time.  I’ve tried to define a process, and follow it.  It’s my goal to minimize the time I spend doing other people’s jobs, and increase success overall.

How to make the request:

1. First and foremost, talk to your rep, your tech contact and make sure they can actually deliver on your request.  Hopefully they have request forms and/or a process of their own.
2. Document the complete detail of the request as if you had to do it yourself.
   • Don’t assume that any standards or jargon you use is defined the same way by the vendor. Culture trumps facts.
3. Include all technical details.
   • Assume that the work will be done by someone who could care less whether or not it is done correctly, and is not qualified to to the work.
4. Include any necessary timing.
   • Unfortunately you really can’t make anyone work faster than they want to, but setting timing sets expectations.
5. Include the tests required to verify correctness.
   • If you don’t define success, the vendor will define it for you, to their advantage.
6. E-Mail the request to the account rep, CC: liberally.
   • Include any and every previous e-mail thread even distantly related to the request.
   • Assume that the person doing the work is not privy to any conversations you’ve had with the rep.
7. Ask for an update every 2-5 days as appropriate.
8. Once you are notified the request is complete:

When you are notified the request is complete:

1. Run the tests yourself and verify that it is correct.
2. If any tests fail:
   • Let the account rep know immediately.
   • Ask for a new, appropriate time line.
   • Ask for an escalation path, including names, phone #s if you don’t already have a list.
   • Escalate early and nicely.
   • Failed tests put you back to the beginning of the process.
   • Escalate higher and a little less nicely each time you iterate because of failure.