Okay, I really can't complain about problems like that...

[jducoeur]

So following up on the "dooooooomed" post from the other day:

First of all, the universe does listen, and while it doesn't precisely laugh at me, it does giggle quietly. Even while I was writing that post, I was receiving an email from someone who wanted to hire me for a short-term contract. And shortly after, a friend pointed me at a very interesting 3-month contract that may not quite be The Most Perfect Contract Ever, but is damned intriguing.

As for the meeting with the client, the short version is that yes, the contract is ending sooner than I expected. I'm not really certain whether I had misunderstood what she'd been saying earlier, or if things did shift out from under me, but it's only going to run a few more weeks. On the upside, she's taking the limits off of how many hours I can work in the next couple of weeks, so I can get a lot done before feature freeze.

Further on the upside, she made it quite explicit that she *really* wants to hire me full-time -- she didn't quite hard-sell me (which would have produced a negative reaction), but she was very frank that they have a couple of positions that could use a good Architect. They're not willing to do the consultant thing for the long run, but that doesn't mean they want me gone. When she asked for my salary requirements, and I said what I'm used to making, she didn't even blink. (Which probably means I should have added $5k, but I'm not going to worry about that.) So I'm having an interview next week, which has a strong flavor of me interviewing them: she asked me which people at the company I wanted to meet with, which isn't exactly usual for interviews.

On the downside, it forces me to make a high-stakes decision, and I always hate those. It's a good company, has a reasonably sound business model, and has good people working on technically interesting problems: there is no question that the work has potential to be fun, and it sounds like at least one of the projects fits my skills perfectly. OTOH, it has *nothing* to do with my calling. I can make a pretty good case that everything I've done in the past 15 years has been in some way associated with social media, and I kind of think of that as my career. This is interesting stuff, but has nothing at all to do with social media. I'm not sure I'm prepared to completely leave that field. And of course, I'm not willing to give up on the CommYou project.

We'll see where it all goes. I'm thinking of insisting on part-time -- something like 80% time, so that I have one day a week to work on CommYou. If I combined that with open-sourcing CommYou, that might allow the project to mutate in some practical ways, while still keeping the dream alive. Don't know if they'd bite, but I suspect that it would work well for both them and me, so I may push for that.

Regardless -- like it says, I really can't complain. Under the circumstances, having someone trying that hard to hire me is very comforting...

Comments

[bkdelong.livejournal.com]

I spent 15 years doing Web development and Web standards/social networking. Information security analyst/writing work was a hobby for 7 until I turned it into my career in 2006. Doesn't mean you have to stop doing the tech stuff you love. I still have a big foot in the social networking/Web 2.0 community. Not as big of one as I'd like but I'm still keeping up on most of the developments.

[cellio]

It's good to be wanted, for sure.

The common way to implement 80% is four days/week. Another way is the annual sabbatical of a couple months or so. It's worth thinking about which of those models would work better for you.

[jducoeur]

Hmm. Interesting question. I suspect that the four days/week (on average) model works better for me (especially for the leadership role they want me in), but the sabbatical notion is worth sticking in the back of my mind...

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

Grasshopper, in this day and age? I don't understand your career universe, but by now I understand life enough to say: take the day gig, and keep your hand in social networking via CommYou.

Pecunia non foetet. (Money don't stink).

[jducoeur]

Oh, absolutely, but seriously: the career universe does matter. Supply and demand is crucial to the job market, and there are never enough truly high-end engineers with my breadth of skills and depth of experience. It's quite plain that I don't need to take any random job that comes to me -- if I decide I want one, I'll find one without excessive difficulty.

(Yes, that's a little immodest, but I've spent 15 years carefully cultivating my resume, and it doesn't pay to short-change myself. And while the recession has hit the programming field, there's also been a realization over the past five years that high-end engineers are worth their weight in gold. So I'm still a pretty hot property.)

And in the meantime, I can make a *lot* of money consulting (at the moment, I'm making roughly my normal salary while working nominally half-time); it just dispenses with the illusion of even short-term job security.

So the decision isn't about grabbing at a job because OMG, there's a *job*. It's about whether I like *this* particular company enough to settle in there for a while, or continue with the scary freedom of the consulting world. On the downside, it constrains me far more, and means I have to return to a more conventional lifestyle. On the upside, it does remove the tension and insecurity of the consulting, which might possibly allow me to focus on both them and CommYou a bit better. We'll see...

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

It's quite plain that I don't need to take any random job that comes to me -- if I decide I want one, I'll find one without excessive difficulty.

Golly, I remember those days. But know that thou art truly among the blessed.

Seriously: I remember those times. Back in the early 80's I went on a whirlwind tour of 30 interviews and got 29 solid offers. I hired my own employer. Those days are so gone, and I'm certainly not alone. To be in that position nowadays....wow.

[jducoeur]

Well, it has less to do with the current economy, and more to do with the state of the industry. Programming is still very, very important to a lot of things, and we're some ways away from my job getting automated away. Indeed, one lesson since the dotcom crash has been that essentially *no* number of low-level programming drones can replace a quality engineer. And the crash led to a massive shakeout, with a very large fraction of the people who *had* been programming for a living quitting.

Mind, there's nothing guaranteed about this in the long run. There's competition from overseas -- still mostly not good enough to threaten me, but that'll change over time, and it's a job that can in principle be outsourced more easily than many. (Although not as easily as many companies would like to believe: a lot of the off-shoring of the past five years has been coming back to the US again.) And it is very, very, very easy to rust: just a few years of taking it easy is enough to leave you with obsolete skills and an increasingly difficult time finding stuff to do.

But I'm aware of that, and work hard on it: my rule of thumb is that I should average at least half an hour a day on self-education, to keep myself reasonably up-to-date and make sure I can learn anything I need, fast. For the time being, that's enough to keep me in some demand. Due to the economy, I can't just assume that I can have a job in 24 hours if I want one (which I *could* safely assume a few years ago), but the odds against a long spell of unemployment are pretty good...

[mindways]

Having been there for a number of years, I'll say that working part-time is pretty fantastic. It's not so much "-20% days at work", but "+50% days available". (Or -40% vs. +100%.) Because unless you hate the job (in which case, it's probably an interim measure anyhow) it's not how much time you spend at work that's relevant - it's how much time you have for other things. For a high-paying field like programming, part-time strikes an excellent balance between the "money but no time" of full-time work and the "time but no money" of unemployment.

If I combined that with open-sourcing CommYou, that might allow the project to mutate in some practical ways, while still keeping the dream alive.

That's a pragmatic attitude. From what I understand of startups, going back to work (even part-time) and trying to push CommYou along on your own would be quite unlikely to work? But if it's less of a "I'm trying to get rich off of this" and more of a "I want to instigate the creation of worthwhile things", the constraints loosen considerably.

[jducoeur]

It's not so much "-20% days at work", but "+50% days available".

Yeah, that's about the way I've been thinking about it, but it's good to hear some corroboration from someone's who's taken that path seriously.

But if it's less of a "I'm trying to get rich off of this" and more of a "I want to instigate the creation of worthwhile things", the constraints loosen considerably.

Yaas. If I *have* to choose, then changing the world is the more important part to me. (I care about money, but I *mostly* care about having enough to be secure -- getting rich is just a bonus.)

Of course, whether I can manage to successfully run a significant open-source project remains to be seen. But it's at least plausible...

[dlevey.livejournal.com]

I've never been a developer, or a lawyer. That said, from what little I've seen the fact that this company's mission is nothing like CommYou would suggest that anything you do on CommYou would be far less likely to get entangled in contractual "what you do you do for us" sort of stuff. And, as Steffan said, money don't stink. Your goals for CommYou become very important, now: if you're not looking to build it up to a giant empire, and run it yourself, you might just be able to do both.

[jducoeur]

That said, from what little I've seen the fact that this company's mission is nothing like CommYou would suggest that anything you do on CommYou would be far less likely to get entangled in contractual "what you do you do for us" sort of stuff.

Yes, that's definitely a consideration I've had in the back of my mind. Not being in competition with my own employer is a clear plus: trying to do CommYou if I *was* working in social media would be dicier.

(Mind, it's possible -- my employment contract at Convoq was very carefully written around problems like this, with a long codicil of projects that the company had no claim on. But I never tested that contract, and I'm happier not to be put in a position of having to try. I'd still have to have such a codicil here, but the chances of it becoming an issue are much lower...)

[umbran.livejournal.com]

...and I kind of think of that as my career.

The days when most people normally expect to have "a career", meaning one sole career, are well past. Even my Lady, who is solidly trained in one field, has effectively had two since getting her license to practice.

To be a complete geek - consider your work path in terms of agile management. In today's environment, the requirements have changed. Go through the feature list, re-prioritize, and do the thing with the highest value to you first. :)

[jducoeur]

The days when most people normally expect to have "a career", meaning one sole career, are well past.

While that's true, it's still quite common (maybe even more common today) to have a specialty in one area of your field, at least at any given time. I've sort of fallen into one (almost by accident), and it *is* a bit of a calling, so it has to be a conscious decision to deviate from that.

Go through the feature list, re-prioritize, and do the thing with the highest value to you first. :)

Not a bad approach, but in practice things can't be teased apart quite that easily. In particular, one priority has to be "make a living", and CommYou can't currently provide that, even if CommYou *is* my highest priority from a "personal career goals" POV. And "make a living" really never stops, so if I put that simply as the top of the list, I never get to anything else.

So it has to be less a list, and more a collection of necessary priorities in tension with each other. In a situation like that, the appropriate approach is generally to find a reasonable definition of "enough" for both to function adequately, and run both tracks in parallel, a bit slower than you'd get if you were able to focus on only one. Hence the musing about seeing if I can make 80% time work...

[umbran.livejournal.com]

but in practice things can't be teased apart quite that easily.

Continuing with my analogy, because I'm at work so I'm in the appropriate headspace for it...

Who said anything about the process being easy? Quite the opposite. It is, however, necessary if you want the end result to meet your actual needs. Requirements gathering is your friend, sir.

And, I submit that "make a living" is a damned epic, not a properly sized story. Break it down to the actual requirements and identify the constraints, dude. :)

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Don't forget to discuss the benefits question with them. If we could get full medical from them it might even be worth nominal full time service (says the woman who just discovered the price that our insurance is being billed for her MRI from January).

[kihou.livejournal.com]

Hmm, if you open-sourced CommYou, I'd be practically forced to implement zephyr support for it...