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By MichaelCrawford (Mon May 02, 2005 at 11:14:47 AM EST) (all tags)
Greetings, this is my first diary at HuSi, but I've been lurking for quite a while.

I'm a software consultant. A while back I got tired of being mercilessly hounded by the recruiters who feed off the labour and naivety of contract programmers, so I wrote down everything I knew about how to find work in an article called:

It explains how I've only had to use a broker just once in seven years of software consulting. Today I revised it for the first time since I wrote Enjoy.


The's a photo of me in the article so you'll know I'm not just a disembodied stream of ASCII characters.

The occasion of my writing it was that I was visiting my desperately ill father in Washington State back in 2000. His liver was failing. I had my follow-me number forwarded to my parents' house, and kept getting calls from this one recruiter who wouldn't take "No" for an answer.

My follow-me service has a call screening feature, in which the caller must record their name for me to hear before I accept their call. After a couple days I just stopped answering her calls, so she tracked down my direct line back in California, and demanded of my wife that she give her my parents' home number.

That wasn't quite enough to move me to action. Later that evening, someone asked on alt.computer.consultants if it would be a good be a good idea to pay a search firm to find clients for him. My response was the first draft of my article, which I polished up and posted to my website while I was still at my parents. I was sure to email the link to the nice recruiter.

My father eventually recovered, and I'm very grateful to say was well enough to come to my wedding in Newfoundland later that year. I'm afraid though that he has since passed away.

My wife Bonita and I live in Nova Scotia now. She's a student at NSCAD in Halifax, where CheeseburgerBrown also studied.

There are some more recruiter horror stories in the article, both my own and those of others.

The article is one of nearly twenty on the business and practice of programming that I publish under the name of GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks. One of my marketing tips is to publish such articles on your website: many of my clients found me after they first came to my site to read something I wrote.

If work goes well, I'm planning on coming to HusiStock. If I can find more time to practice, I'll bring my guitar. I'm much better at playing the piano, but my wife bought me my guitar because pianos aren't very portable.

I'm going to fly to Toronto from Newfoundland, where I have the idea that I'm going to serenade Bonita's parents at the celebration of their fiftieth wedding anniversary. I had better put more time into practicing though.

I'll be back soon.

-- Mike

< Stuffers | BBC White season: 'Rivers of Blood' >

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Saying "No" to the Body Shops | 6 comments (6 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback
That's all very well. by dmg (2.00 / 1) #1 Mon May 02, 2005 at 11:21:25 AM EST
But if you have a very specialised skill set (e.g. Summit, Fidessa, Calypso etc) the only way you will get recruited is 1) by an agent 2) by word of mouth.

So this approach may work for the generic 'I need a website' type gigs, but for the other more hardcore positions, its best to go via the specialist agencies, they have the contacts, and they have access to the positions that you simply will not be considered for  through any other channel.
--
Hard work is morally wrong.


I am as hardcore as they come by MichaelCrawford (3.00 / 2) #3 Mon May 02, 2005 at 11:27:19 AM EST
I'm not saying it's easy, but for a couple of years before just recently I worked a number of contracts doing embedded SBP2 (FireWire storage) firmware. I don't know how one can get much more specialized than that.

These days I'm doing color management, which is also very specialized, but a lot more pleasant.

It's a lot more work to find work the way I propose, yes certainly it is, but it has that same clean, fresh taste that comes from kicking an addiction to crack.



[ Parent ]

Or kicking a crack addict by debacle (3.00 / 1) #5 Mon May 02, 2005 at 05:27:58 PM EST
Repeatedly.
"I'm very responsive to certain stimuli, and pain is pretty much at the top of that list." - BadDoggie

[ Parent ]

Here's my photo by MichaelCrawford (2.00 / 1) #2 Mon May 02, 2005 at 11:23:53 AM EST
I just realized HuSi lets one post photos. I won't mention the shameful consequences that's likely to result in. Let me give it a try:

Ah! I read the faq after my <img> tag didn't work. Very clever!

By the way, that's a polaroid of Bonita in the pocket of my shirt there, which is as close as she's come so far to having her photo posted on the net.





You're not ugly. by debacle (3.00 / 1) #4 Mon May 02, 2005 at 05:26:17 PM EST
But I wouldn't have sex with you.

Welcome to the site.

"I'm very responsive to certain stimuli, and pain is pretty much at the top of that list." - BadDoggie

[ Parent ]

Well thank you! by MichaelCrawford (2.00 / 1) #6 Tue May 03, 2005 at 05:22:01 PM EST
I'm afraid I'm spoken for.

I've been meaning to post here for ages. Glad to be here.



[ Parent ]

Saying "No" to the Body Shops | 6 comments (6 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback

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