I haven’t been posting for a couple of weeks now; I’ve actually been on an interview binge. I have been unhappy with the current company due to various reasons–I will discuss these in future postings. I was bombarded with requests for interviews as soon as I opened the floodgate to recruiters and headhunters. I did narrowed it down to three and went on to interview with them; ultimately ended up with all three very good offers. One of which was higher risk than the other two due to it being a startup, but the prospects are good and they do have the best offer of the 3.

The other two that I turned down were Apple and Palm. I know what some of you might be thinking in your head now; probably somewhere along the line of, “what the heck is wrong with you? why did you turned down Apple?” Well, reputable and exciting as that company maybe, the HR department or at least the recruiter (and maybe to a lesser extent the hiring manager) who worked with me were highly unprofessional. Lets just say during the negotiation process, she revealed certain comments about me to justify “in lowering my value” made by the hiring manager in which she really shouldn’t have. When I made it known to her that I had competing offers and one of them being Palm, she promptly replied and said “…Palm has reached its apex whereas Apple has not…” I found that hilarious because if she actually look back in history she would recall that Apple was near rock bottom before bouncing back with its iMacs and iPods. In tech industry, you never EVER count any one company out for the count!

That and Apple’s way of salary negotiation is to give you 3 prong offers [base salary, sign-on bonus, and options] then subsequent counteroffers they adjust 1 or 2 of the 3 prongs to make the other (the one you’re trying to negotiate on) appear higher. Say their original offer was [900, 100, 200], to make the base higher their subsequent offer would look like this [1000, 0, 50]. I wonder what type of negotiation classes they’re sending their HR recruiters to…

The other one I turned down was Palm. Supposedly this company is on its way back to prime time after having their asses handed to them by competitors such as RIM (maker of Blackberries) and Apple (maker of iPhone). The offer wasn’t what I originally expected it to be in that I went to the interview for a full-time position but instead they came back and offered me a contract-to-hire offer. Even though the contracting rate was quite good and competitive, it wasn’t what I wanted.

I ended up choosing and will be accepting the third offer–I will actually be keeping the name of this startup company from this post and may decide to reveal it in future postings. These two weeks have been taxing with all the phone and face-to-face 5-6 hours multiple rounds interviews. I’m just glad its over and I have choices available, its a very empowering and free feeling…

4 Comments »

Recently, a former colleague joined my current company’s SCM group and during one of our reminiscing conversation of past projects/companies/colleagues, we came upon a rather interesting aspect of the SCM group in our previous workplace. This actually applies to all SCM groups across all organizations. It has to do with the role an SCM group plays within any projects. This role can translate directly into how important the SCM group is to each of the projects. Ultimately, the role will only be as great or as mundane as the SCM manager make it.

Several months prior to me quitting my previous job, the company had a re-org and with its infinite wisdom, stuffed SCM under IT. That in itself might not raise any alarm yet, but being that the IT group was run by a complete idiot was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The guy have zero knowledge of what SCM is or does and has absolutely no interest in learning the discipline so at least he could make semi-informed decisions. All the people, including me, who had any sense of pride of our work and ethics left while those who remained were interns or contractors.

To make a long story short, it has been approximately 2 years and some months now and their build technologies, methodologies, processes, and procedures are exactly the same. It has not evolved one bit minus the dents and patchworks made by “hammering” and “band-aiding” support tasks to existing infrastructure; all the while the industry and discipline of SCM continuously evolve all around them. With that said, it is crucial to have a manager who leads the SCM group to command a good understanding of what SCM is or at least be humble enough to sit down and learn it.

Oh and if you’re an HR person belonging to my previous company, you really should look into the IT/SCM manager’s daily workload. The guy just comes into work to surf the web all day; there wasn’t one time where I walked by his cube did I not see his screen on a website of sort. Simply not knowing or refusing to learn SCM, the group that he is managing, does not make him an idiot. What made him an idiot was that he tried to hide his complete and utter lazy work ethic by tilting his LCD flat panel semi-sideway hoping his screen is not legible from passerby. This may work if your cubicle is configured such that you are facing the entrance, but this idiot’s cube is configured such that his back is to the entrance.

1 Comment »

We’ve all worked with one of these fella at one point or another (count your

blessings if you have never). This is the Milton of the Office Space except the modern version is slightly more talkative and abrasive than the one depicted in that movie.

This Modern Milton (we’ll call him Momil) thinks he knows all about SCM and will at every opportunistic chance interject his way of doing things as being the be all and end all. Momil will self-appoint himself as the team’s police man with a virtual nightstick beating on other developers who hasn’t fixed those annoying compilation warnings or conform to the strict standards of writing beautiful code. Momil has virtually no people skill whatsoever and will often come across as a life long hermit when you socialize with him. It would seem that Momil’s sole purpose of existence is to make the work environment more stressful than it has to be.

Yeah.. I know of several Momils and here are some tips to deal with any Momils within your org:

1. Stand you ground, Momils really are bully-wannabes
2. Be unwavering in your processes (Momil should never be the only exception)
3. Be adamant about your methodologies

At the rare case where a Momil is actually right, don’t be afraid to accept it and make it your responsibility to effect the necessary changes. Afterall, you are a professional; learn and move on.

Lastly, perhaps you’ve run into similar situations and have your own way of dealing with Momils — in which case, care to share?

10 Comments »

Numerous times in the past as well as recently my SCM group have ran into service related problems with the company’s IT. The underlying concern is where do we draw the line of support between SCM and IT when the build farm servers need servicing. In particular, when important reporting/build servers crashes which dramatically affects development, who should be responsible for the on-call duties?

There really isn’t one clean cut solution that will work for anyone because this largely depends on your organization’s structure and relationship with the IT group. What has worked for me in the past SCM group was drafting then approving a service agreement with IT. In it, we specifically address the following questions:

1. What is expected of them?
2. How urgent each request should be classified?
3. What is the reasonable response time?
4. Which personnel resources are available?

If establishing a service agreement is too formal, and you don’t believe in the CYA (cover your ass) route then your team must have a rotational on-call support where at any given time you’ll have a point-of-contact SCM person.

5 Comments »