Job Description Specificity

Today on twitter I was directed to a Job Description while being asked if there was anyone could possibly meet all the "requirements" that were listed:

At least 3 years of experience in MBS Expert and MBS processing. BA in C.S. or related disciplines. Proven leadership skills in technology, project management, and communication. Proven track record in design, development, debug/trouble shooting of complex software systems and logic. At least 5 years in the relevant technologies: C, Motif, SQL, Sybase, Oracle, Java, J2EE, browser-based GUI technologies such as JSF and AJAX, Solaris, Linux, GCC. CVS, Make, Ant. Shell scripting. Must be a team player, have excellent organization, planning and communication skills, excellent in time and issues prioritization and management. Must se self-managed and results oriented.

Now, the way my company does business a few of us here actually come pretty close to meeting these requirements with the exception of the "MBS Expert" and the "Motif" items. I've never used either of those. Plus I am opting for the AJAX option over the JSF for "browser-based GUI technologies." This seems like a pretty ambitious list of traits they are looking for someone to have 3 or 5 years of experience in.

I also see that this job is in the financial services and securities industries. As someone who has had the opportunity to work with the financial services industry I have to imagine they are also looking for someone who already understands the business language; and trust me it is an entirely different language than is used in pretty much any other industry. This additional unspoken requirement really limits the pool of candidates even more.

It seems to me that the people this company wants to hire are already working for someone and they aren't out actively looking for employment.


I wonder, do ads like this really work? Do they help companies actually find someone or do they make them so specific that they don't even get a good pool of candidates applying. I mean, is it really necessary to have 5 years of Motif experience or can you just pick it up as you go since you are strong in everything else. Or what if you've just been a backend developer - would you really need 5 years of AJAX experience to be a strong, positive contributor to the projects they are hiring for? I doubt it.

Finally, it seems to me that most jobs people want aren't advertised this way and most candidates that companies want aren't found this way. Instead word of mouth seems to be the trick which brings back the old adage; "It's not what you know but who you know." Sure, you need to your stuff but I doubt, for many jobs, that you need such a specific skill set to be a good candidate.

If we can find someone with 5 years of proven development experience where they are creating good tests and code in any language then they will probably be a good candidate for a project. Even when that project is in a language the candidate hasn't used. Just like everyone else we look for smart people who can get things done. If they have those traits they will learn what they need to learn in order to get the job done right, on time, and on budget.

I think the company that put out this ad would be better served having a more generic set of skills they are looking for and then narrowing down the field via interviews and then finally paying a few candidates to work with them for a week or so to see what they are really capable of.

Top Reason to Not Outsource your Corporate Email to Gmail

I just read this article The Top Ten Reasons to Outsource Your Enterprise Email to Gmail Now and I thought it merited a response.

1. Lack of Support
   The company I work for considered migrating to Gmail but when we contacted their support team in advance to clear up some concerns we had we never (ever) received a response. Thus we were struck with a new concern; what if something went wrong - would we be able to get a support response?

I don't feel like there is any other reason to counter the eleven great reasons cited in the linked article. They are fairly compelling but without a sense that the support staff will be responsive when a problem arises none of the other things matter. Email is far too important to every company to just hope that support will turn up when you need it.


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Disclaimer: I love Gmail and I use it for all of my personal needs. My personal email (and the email for my non-profit groups just isn't as critical as our business email) and thus I don't mind trusting Gmail to handle all of my personal email. The company I work for, however, has other priorities and the lack of support is a critical failure of the Gmail platform.

OT: I want my voice

I have been an active user of Grand Central for the past couple of years (not super active, but active) and I've loved it. Last Tuesday Google said they were going to let Grand Central users upgrade to Google Voice. Later they said they were gradually rolling it out and when your account was ready you'd see a message on your accounts inbox letting you know.

Instead I've been faced with this message since last Tuesday afternoon:

Your account is not yet ready to be upgraded. Please check back shortly.

Well, dammit, it's almost been a week; exactly how do you define "shortly?" I know, I'm just whining; sorry, but every once in a while I need to vent and I've chosen this forum for it this time around.

I want my Google Voice so, come on Google, give it to me!

Calendar Curation is Hard

I'm trying hard to find calendars pertaining to my hometown that are actually syndicated as ICS feeds. It just isn't happening very well. I have 3 so far and I am responsible for them. I realize I live in a small town that isn't all that high-tech but, man, it's frustrating.

Everyone seems to have an event calendar but almost none of them has one that is currently producing a ICS feed; instead they are just html tables, pdf files, or word documents. None of those, obviously, are very conducive to being consumed.

I want to provide an outreach to these people to get them up and running with a more standardized way of publishing even information but, truth be told, I'm not entirely sure how to do sell the idea.

I think, what I need, is a way to identify an easy method for these people to create their event data in the first place, and then provide them with a simple way have that information automatically appear on their website. Google Calendar does it ok but, honestly, their widgets don't necessarily fit into every website very well; though, perhaps the agenda view would work nicely.

Does anyone know if the Microsoft office online option has an agenda view type widget as well?

Oracle and Extended ASCII

Yesterday I ran across a problem where I needed to compare the resultant string from a query on a Sybase database and an Oracle database. The Oracle result involved pulling back a single row that was delimted with an unusual character, Extended Ascii Char 0001.

Due to the code page of my viewing tool the character appeared as Extended ASCII character 0218 but, when I tried to paste the character into a confluence page for documenatation purposes it didn't appear (since it is actually the non-printable character 0001) likewise it wouldn't appear in Eclipse where a co-worker needed it.

Why would we need the character? Well because in the Sybase database to get the equivalent string we need to concatenate about 8 columns. Initially we were just going to concatenate them with this odd character as the delimiter (we didn't realize it was ASCII 0001 yet). However, once things started to resolve into being more complicated we decided, instead that we would use the Oracle TRANSLATE function to replace the special character with another, safer, printable delimiter - the pipe | .

This reduced the number of times I needed to be able to print the weird character in either eclipse or confluence to once however the problem still persisted that the odd character wouldn't show up (obviously). Thus I had to use the ASCII function in Oracle to figure out the character value of each character in a specific record returned. At this point I had isolated the character as 0001. However I wasn't entirely sure how to tell the TRANSLATE function to look for unicode 0001. Fortunately there is a function for that as well - UNISTR('\0001\)

Thus, my final query had a line it it like so:

SELECT  TRANSLATE(accountInfo,UNISTR('\0001\'),'|')

Calendar Aggregation Woes

I am working on a few different personal projects and one is a community enrichment site. One of the features I really want to add to the site is a robust event calendar. I'm currently using one that is FULL of great information but it isn't very open. For example, there aren't any obvious ical feeds or ics attachments to any of the events in order to add them to an end users calendar easily. Really, it's a shame.

I follow along with Jon Udell's blog (Jon is very interested in and, active with, developing calendar aggregation services). Jon has done some cool stuff but, more importantly to me, he has opened my eyes to the importance of the open data format in calendars.

The event calendar I am using on my projects site has upwards of 6000 events in it at a time so obviously I would need a smart "limited time frame" feed of the events. Heck, they already categorize the events into 6 main categories so really, it seems to me, it should be six separate calendar feeds that can be aggregated however the consumer wishes to pull them in.

I understand that the newspaper that provides the calendar service uses the calendar as a means to bring traffic to their site and I think that's great - however once you are there to see the specific details of an event it is imperative that an end user be able to add that event, easily, to their own personal calendar of choice this way they can manage their notifications and reminders about the event.

What I don't know how to do is to convince the creators of my communities calendars, specifically the newspapers which is the most data rich, to support open standards. I live in a small, fairly non-technical city, so the newspapers calendar is the de facto source for event information. Each organization in town doesn't maintain their own calendar, they just fax or email event schedules in plain text format to the paper for inclusion into the "community calendar" - granted, it is aggregation of its own it just isn't open enough for my tastes.

If you know of any other folks who are actively working on the subject of calendar aggregation I'd love to know about them too.