I am meeting more and more people dissatisfied with their jobs. The top gripe is not job function, but management environment. Are you encouraged to learn new things? Attend conferences? Do you feel like you make a measurable difference? All interesting things to think about heading in to 2005 from the perspective of the employee as well as the employer. Companies are too busy to post articulate job listings and interview candidates. Most of the good job candidates are passive seekers since they cannot send an explicit signal that might get them fired or make life uncomfortable in their current…
I did not receive any e-mail from Friday afternoon through Sunday. I have contacted my host, and changed some things on the server-side to make everything work again. If you sent me an e-mail over the weekend I apologize, but it may be lost forever so please resend….
On Monday I started my new job at NexTag, a comparison shopping site in San Mateo. NexTag has offices in the U.S. and India, with over 30 software developers in Gurgaon (near New Delhi) in India. In some cases NexTag will hire employees locally, train them, and relocate the employees to India to lead a team in Gurgaon. How does the existence of a software center halfway around the world change your daily work load? You definitely need to reevaluate your time and spend a lot more time on clear specifications instead of building the application yourself. Once you develop…
On November 1 I will start my new job at NexTag, a shopping comparison search engine in San Mateo. I will be a product manager in charge of creating a developer and affiliate network to create a better community around the site and its offerings. I worked for one of NexTag's competitors — PriceGrabber.com — in the early stages of product search so I know the industry well. My weblog did not help me win the job, but my experience in the online community and developer space will no doubt be utilized in my new position. I am excited to…
I am currently looking for a new full-time position in the tech industry. My current employer, Callan Associates, has threatened to fire me for having a weblog and making any reference to my work life. While I have yet to be fired my yearly review is now ten months overdue and I have been told not to expect any pay increase or job advancement. There are so many interesting services in the tech sector right now I would love to work on. I realize that I am not aware of all of the companies currently seeking new talent and I…
I never really liked the design of my weblog. When I moved from Blogger to Movable Type I was more worried about getting every entry converted to the new system and lost sight of structure and design issues. I finally decided to do something. I have changed my XHTML to include more lists, spans, and divs to create more specific blocks of code. Each entry is part of an ordered list and has its own unique list item id. I might have gone too far when I made some lists with one item, but those lists have room for expansion…
I received an e-mail this morning from an executive from my company asking I remove all references to my current employer (Callan) from my Web site. Thanks to Lawrence Lessig, Wendy Seltzer, and Robert Scoble I am already aware of some of the issues at play with branding and trademarks. Someone came across my blog by doing a Google search on Callan. I assume it was someone inside the company because this was passed along to Callan's legal representation (Cooley Godward LLP) and then I was contacted. The first mention of my Web site within search results for Callan Associates…
Today I changed my RSS feed from excerpt to full text. I did not realize this was the default MovableType setting, but I do appreciate full text in other people's feeds, especially for offline viewing. I would like to follow the best practices of blogging and incorporate any community tools that are out there, so please let me know if there is something I should be aware of….
Spidering Hacks is now available for pre-order around the world. $20 adds these 100 tips and hacks to your library. 400 pages. Currently ranked 432,937 at Barnes & Noble. ISBN is 0-596-00577-6. UPC is 636920-00577-3. ASIN is 0596005776. As previously mentioned, I wrote a hack using Java to gather traffic statistics from Alexa. It will most likely come out in November, not October, but it's still cool to see it hit the virtual shelves as a pre-order….
I have been busy over the past week writing for a new O'Reilly book. Look for me in chapter 4 a to be released book named Spidering Hacks, part of the O'Reilly Hack Series. Interestingly enough I was the only person to author to use Java. I have a feeling this is going to be a book full of a lot of Perl. There is only one Python example. I wrote a hack that gathers data about Alexa toolbar users traffic to your Web property on a daily basis. Alexa collects subdomain information as well as property rankings, and I…
