Tag Archives: recruitment consultants

Developer Day Number Six

Today was the sixth of the Developer Developer Developer events at the Microsoft Campus in Reading, and as with the previous events, I spent the day enjoying the sessions. As in previous events what I actually attended didn’t quite match up with what I thought I would attend, but the beauty of these days is you can quite easily switch dependant on what takes your fancy on the day, or indeed which sessions have seats!

First off I sampled the first part of Oliver Sturm’s double presentation on producing business applications with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Like most people, what I remember about WPF is the flashy eye candy filled demo applications – what Oliver aimed to do was show that alongside the eye candy was a strong platform that could produce the kind of ‘boring’ business applications that most people end up writing, something in which he very much succeeded.

I commented after DDD4 that the kind of material that Oliver covered needed an early slot, rather than the graveyard slot where everybody was tired, and it is great to see that the comment had been taken on board, as a result I thought I gained a lot from attending both the first and second parts of the presentation (although it would have been better in successive slots I have to say), and certainly have a better idea of what I can do with the new framework.

Another session that gave me a better idea of what I can do was the slightly mis-titled Cruise Control .Net session presented by Paul Lockwood. I say mis-titled as the titular piece of software only appeared at the end of the session, much of the earlier part was looking at all the other bits of software that Cruise Control .Net actually uses, and which provide much of the power of the continuous integration process. No matter as it was an interesting session, and certainly gave me some pointers towards what is needed in setting up a continuous build process. Having said that, at work we’ve been saying we’re going to set up a continuous build process for a long while, whether we’ll actually get round to doing it is another matter!

After that it was back to see Oliver for part two of his session, and then from there on to lunch.

The main lunchtime activity was the Grok talks, of which more in a moment, but first the one thing that really annoyed me about the day (well aside from the car service indicator, but that’s another story) which was the way lunch was handled. Now they’ve tried various ways around this from full scale hot food, through to the bagged lunches they have now. The bagged lunches seemed to have worked fairly well, but it is always slightly slow because they randomly pack the bags so whether you’re just like me and fussy, or more importantly have food allergies you sometimes need to look through to find a reasonable combination. Now obviously there have been comments about this, as this time they had taped all the bags shut and the only option was vegetarian or meat – but still with the same random selection. There were also Microsoft Events staff posted at each table handing the bags out and being downright rude if you tried to have a look at what was in the bags. Heaven help you if you actually had a legitimate reason to be careful what you got. Luckily my random selection was pretty good and I didn’t get a sandwich ruined by tomato and cucumber, and even struck lucky with the flavour of crisps. But seriously taping the bags shut may remove a symptom of the problem, but it’s not actually solving the problem, it’s just annoying!

Anyway, onto the lunchtime talks. In an improvement from last time they were actually held in Memphis rather than in the foyer. There was still a bit of a problem with noise as the doors were open and people were chatting outside – not helped by the lack of a microphone for the speakers in that room, but it was a definite improvement. Whilst on the subject of microphones, in answer to the organiser, who shall remain nameless, who introduced and closed the day in Chicago by saying both times “you can hear me, I don’t need a microphoneâ€?, “we can’t, and you doâ€?! I know it’s a pain to use a microphone, (and I know other people who don’t like it and think they can get away without) and it’s probably not comfortable, but you can’t be heard at the back if you don’t.

Anyway, back to the Grok Talks – there was a good mix of topics including tips on packaging up your custom controls, a demo of Windows Power Shell and some tips on how to speed up Reflection. Probably the two most memorable were firstly a senior programmer, whose name unfortunately I don’t remember, who did a primarily non-technical presentation about a recent project he led implementing a patient record system in the UAE. Basically by reviewing the project from a business perspective it highlighted all sorts of gotcha’s for other people developing software in foreign countries. In terms of software design, things like other countries having names that don’t fit neatly into the forename/surname structure used here are important, also the d’oh moment when they realised that having a picture of the patient was pretty useless when large numbers of the women wore a burqa was good to share. He also highlighted that the scheduling aspect of the system was complicated by Ramadan as the scheduling algorithm would be different in that period. He also highlighted issues of staff morale, and just getting things done – all useful stuff that some might consider common sense, but are easy to miss on a complex project.

The second most memorable was for totally different reasons. This one was Guy Smith-Ferrier talking about Extension Methods. It was memorable not because of the topic, but because Guy chose to do it as a Pecha Kucha where the presentation is limited to twenty slides, each shown for exactly twenty seconds. After those twenty seconds the slides automatically move on, whether the speaker is finished speaking to the slide or not! Even if you’re not really massively enthusiastic about the subject, the format itself does bring in a strong element of interest as you watch to see if the speaker succeeds or doesn’t manage to keep up. Although there were a few points were Guy fell behind, and even one occasion where he was waiting for the slide to move on, he largely succeeded in coping – maybe an idea to try for more speakers next time?

After lunch I stayed put in Memphis for a Question Time style session on recruitment, not because I was massively interested in the subject, but because the panel included Barry Dorrans on the panel alongside a recruitment consultant. To understand why, have a read of some of the posts on his blog… Anyway, it was a worthwhile session, as there was a good discussion of the pros and cons of going freelance – something I’ve considered before, but rejected – which was an eye opener, particularly the comments from the recruitment consultant about the issues with trying to swap back again. I also felt somewhat better about the lousy pass rate we got on the programming test we gave to potential developers on our most recent recruitment round – the manager on the panel said only one in twenty programmers pass his simple test which sounds much the same as ours. I also came away with a great little test for helpdesk operators too which I guess I’ll have to pass on. As to Barry he was entertaining and animated as always, and managed to not lay in to the recruitment consultant too much – and when he did, about the lack of technical knowledge they have, he largely agreed!

The final session was perhaps the one I had least idea before hand which I was going to attend. Eventually I resisted the temptation of Swaggily Fortunes, and went along to hear James Winters talk about how to write a Facebook application, mainly out of curiosity.

The first thing I learned from the session is that in order to make money from writing for Facebook you don’t need to do anything complicated, indeed James showed us an application that recently sold for about $25,000 that in reality took about three hours to write. To understand why, you have to go back and look at how the Facebook model actually makes money – advertising. Therefore the more users an application has, the more it is worth – so all the stupid little applications that some of the people wanting to use Facebook as a business tool tend to look down on are actually worth significantly more because they generally have many more users than the more serious applications.

The general impression I took away from the session is that a basic Facebook application is actually relatively simple to produce – the real skill is coming up with an idea that has the sort of viral penetration to spread through thousands of users, which is how you can make any sort of money as a Facebook developer. Aside from that the applications are really just web applications, albeit with some functional limitations imposed by Facebook.

Anyway, all in all it was a good day, and I picked up lots of useful bits and pieces – and maybe if I can think up a good idea I’ll make my millions writing a Facebook application… maybe not. Oh and if you’re wondering why I wasn’t micro-blogging along with some of the others on Twitter, blame the Twitter mobile service, as I tried to hook up but it wasn’t until I got home that I realised I wasn’t following the feed, so nothing had worked. Maybe next time…

DDD6 092 and DDD6 125 originally uploaded by blowdart2000.

Are There Any ‘Hardcore’ VB6 Programmers Left?

Although I’m pretty happy in my current job, the big problem has always been the location – the office is 44 miles of mainly country B-roads away. As a result I do have a fairly specific search running on one of the major IT recruitment sites for anything with my particular skillset in the local area.

Last weekend, in amongst the usual mix of regular programming jobs was one that caught my eye. The advert was looking for a pretty wide range of skills, but unlike many was specifically looking for a senior Visual Basic 6 developer for research and development, and significantly made no mention of .Net. Alongside that, it was pretty close to home, and money-wise was offering significantly above the going rate for the kind of job. Although I have been doing a lot of .Net work over the past couple of years, and ideally would like a good .Net role, I still do a lot of work with existing VB6 systems, and to be honest the money and the good location appealed. Whilst there was a bit of a question over why it was paying over the odds, I e-mailed off a copy of my CV to the recruitment consultant – it may look too good to be true, but I was sure I’d find out why pretty soon.

I had to wait a couple of days to find out, but on Wednesday I got a phone call from the consultant. Bearing in mind that a lot of times recruitment consultants seem to tell everyone that they are ideal for a particular job, she did seem pretty genuinely excited, saying that she thought my skills looked like a good match, and sending me more details of the company involved. The actual job details were more detailed, and definitely showed that the requirements on the job advert had been watered down a bit. Key among the requirements was that they described the VB requirement as wanting a ‘hardcore’ VB6 developer. Other key requirements were flexibility, and a broad knowledge, the emphasis being on finding the right tools to solve a problem, rather than being limited. There was also much more weight given to having worked with Windows API. Again, the .Net platform was not mentioned at all. The company involved was a software house, with their major product written in VB6, with Windows API to supplement the areas where VB6 can’t do what is required.

Having seen the details, I had a chat with a couple of friends, and decided that I may as well allow my CV to go forward. I didn’t have to wait long for a reply, when early on Thursday, the previously excited consultant phoned me to say that my CV had been rejected with the one line ‘nothing of interest’. She was somewhat surprised, as like me, she thought that I had the range and flexibility that was needed, and also a good amount of VB6 work to boot. After chatting with me she went back to the company for more detail, to which the company had said that they thought a lot of my CV was just CV speak, and that they didn’t think a trading system was overly complicated, so they weren’t interested. When the consultant came back to me with those comments, I pretty well decided that it wasn’t worth pursuing further, although I did have a more general chat with the consultant over the role.

This conversation was perhaps the most interesting part of the whole process. Firstly I established what I had already suspected, that they were planning to move to .Net. Frankly with the advent of 64 bit windows, which VB6 can’t target, and three releases of mainstream .Net it would be a brave software house indeed who didn’t have some sort of plan to move away from VB6. I also asked about how they had been doing trying to fill the role in general. The impression I got was that they were finding it particularly frustrating. The advert I had seen, hadn’t been the first time it had been posted, and although they had managed to get people previously they had all been rejected, either being long term VB6 developers who had tended to be rejected over lack of flexibility, or people like me with more flexible looking CV’s, who had been rejected for lack of VB knowledge. Of course there had also been developers who pretty well fitted the requirement, but hadn’t fitted personally. However, she did say that they were having real trouble getting the volume of applications they would usually wish, she thought that the problem was the VB6 and no .Net on the advert.

I have to say that I agree. It’s purely unscientific, but the kind of VB6 programmers they are looking for were the ones who, when they hit a wall with VB6, would dig down into the Windows API to get around the problem. Now I know several people who were like that, and without fail, they all changed to .Net as soon as possible, some even when there were only beta releases of .Net, and several of them deliberately now remove VB from their CV, and refuse to do any classic VB work at all. The question is whether there are any of this breed of ‘hardcore’ VB programmers left, or have they all jumped ship and moved on to .Net? (Incidentally, if there are any such programmers left, I’ve got the phone number of a recruitment consultant who would love to hear from you. 😀 )