Interesting Careers Sites

I have recently been using 2 separate job sites for various reasons.

When trying to get my main website rebuilt in Umbraco (a .NET CMS system), I investigated a few options. The main 2 I thought would be interesting to use (cost being key) were Stack Overflow careers and Odesk.com.

StackOverflow.com is really interesting. It is run by the software company owned by the blogger Joel on Software, a very popular software dev blog. The usage of it and google positioning has gone from nowhere to top billing in less than 2 years. The visits to this site and the user base has grown exponentially. Each user has a clear account and asks questions, post answers and comments on various topics. Through all this they build up a well laid out history and also a “score” or “reputation”. On the back of this success Stack Overflow Careers has sprung up. People post jobs and they get people applying using their Stack Overflow account. The poster can see the candidates and also the kind of expertise they have been using on the site. Therefore getting an instant understanding of their skills.

This is very interesting but not without flaws. The site is beginning to reach an interesting level of saturation. in C# an area we develop in, most of the obvious everyday questions have been answered which makes it tougher to build a reputation. I guess therefore the individual comments will be the most interesting. I have also put a box on the home page of the site with our latest answer to see if it is of interest to anyone, I worry that we will now be able to be that active in answering questions, but keen to give it a go.

I think this site will be one to watch and I have seen they are replicating across other disciplines and I am sure it will be equally successful.

The next site is odesk.com. I have been doing outsourcing for some time and I had always taken the approach of speaking to suppliers, giving them a small piece of work and then testing them from there. If they did a good job, for a good price, give them more work. The problem with this is that it takes time to work. ODesk is more about pre-existing reputation guiding you. Also each supplier on the site states the skills they have. You can then either post a job that people can apply for or you can approach suppliers on the database.

This is better than a lot of outsourcing as with that you don’t get so many dud providers. Our new site looks great (well I think so) and we found our supplier through this site. We compared the skills, the applications and then price. We didn’t take the cheapest, we took the ones who seemed to know Umbraco best. We did have lots of people apply who weren’t interested in using Umbraco and had to answer their posts. Generally the experience was good.

We went through ODesk rather than Stack Overflow careers purely on cost. However if I was next looking for people in the office it could be different.

Where is the UK’s massive Web Company?

The USA has Google, Microsoft, Ebay, Yahoo, Apple, Sun etc. We have, who? I am sure some companies would like to stake a claim to being a massive IT presence but unless you are turning over £2 billion a year can you really claim to be massive these days?

It has made me wonder why the UK has not been able to create a company of this size. In many respects our biggest one is Vodafone and these work in a different market. I guess the reasons could range from the fact that to be in the USA means you have access to a big market, that the development community in the USA is that much bigger but I still think the UK should be trying to cultivate something.

I have run 2 businesses now, Artificial Gold has never turned over huge sums and my furniture business failed for various reasons. In the USA they would say “Well now you have the experience what are you doing next”, in the UK “At least you tried”. This could be one reason but I wonder if the lack of available funds is another. The banks wont lend to someone like me unless I secure it.

I guess the key is the killer idea that people can buy into but then the UK still seems to struggle to monetise the great ideas, this is more obvious in engineering and manafacturing.

I have been trying to think if my previous thoughts around co-operatives and possible partnerships (like the John Lewis model) could come into play.

I am still very ambitious to create a good IT company and any tips are welcomed!

Facebook API

I have very mixed beliefs in the future of Facebook. It doesn’t make any money, lots of people are leaving it and the claim that it will replace email seems a little far fetched. I actually think the only way it will ever become the future as people seem to think will be through a shared and probably opensource API.

If the messaging, friends, apps logic was shared and you could choose your hoster, provider (whatever the term should be) you (or I) might be more prepared to get involved. In some respects Facebook could replace email; it has contacts, messaging, images and so forth. It could also enhance the experience a lot.

However the email I send within clients needs to stay within clients and therefore Facebook will not cut it there. However if the market for this format was opened up then people could develop there own clients. However in the same way I think Twitter might struggle in the long run (surely we will need longer messages soon?), if this is not opened up why should we all develop on platform we can not control.

What may end up happening is openid or another open source project taking control and being the driver. Google Buzz and Microsoft’s efforts have not worked as yet so they may well be keen to invest in this method. Also the phone operating systems are going to be crucial in this. In fact they could even drive it.

As it stands I have deactivated my Facebook account in the fall out from their attempt to make all profiles fully public. I decided from that point that Facebook has too much information on me and there was too little control on it. Until that changes I wont be going back.

Twitter Spam

It seems I may be a bit late to recognise the real threat to Twitter that spam is going to present. I have had spammy followers so far but only today did I come across the first really obstructive tweet. Alone it was not all that bad but if we get the hundreds of them like you do in other arenas, blog comments, chat rooms, email spam it could stop some of the more useful features of twitter.

The tweet I saw was following a search on #burnham-on-crouch where I am from. I was trying to see if there was any talk of cricket nets, a long shot that failed. However I saw a tweet about 360 degree feedback, a field I used to develop software in. Naturally I thought I should investigate further. However the user had posted tweets similarly for hundreds of towns. The offending buggers were: 360degree-feedback dot com (don’t want to give them the pleasure of a natural link).

This dishonesty has real implications. It could mean that a lot of useful searches on twitter will just return rows and rows of spam. It could also mean that ridiculous amounts of tweets flood on to the system, will the architecture cope? It already wobbles every so often.

This post offers some of the solutions presented in April 2009 : http://techcrunch.com/2009/04/26/here-comes-twitter-spam-and-how-to-fight-it/

Hopefully people are ahead of me on this issue and can see ways to prevent it. For the first time the unstoppable machine that was the Twitter of my eyes is now more in danger.

EDIT: Seems there is a whole site for this: http://www.stoptwitterspam.com/blog/proposed-solutions/

CMS Progress

I have been working on various incarnations of my CMS for a while. I am now convinced that trying to reinvent the CMS wheel is essential mental. Being a .NET organisation Artificial Gold had to build our own for a while as .NET lagged behind PHP and it’s friends. Now we have Umbraco and other CMS systems you can purchase.

As it goes though I still think that there are certain niches that need to be filled. I am working on one of those niches. Multi-lingual CMS systems are improving but ones APIs that can also be used on iPhone apps, Windows software and so forth are not so common. This is basically what I am trying to build.

So far we are still relatively early on in the process. The web services are currently being built which will enable development on the Admin System and also the API which can be consumed by websites.

Following that we will need to build other proxies to consume the webservices so that they can be used in PHP etc.

We are not following Agile processes all that well due to the fact that we have needed to plan reasonably far in advance. However we are using IoC, Active Record, ASP.NET MVC and TeamCity. I will update the blog with any exciting information (and probably some boring stuff too…)

Cooperatives for programmers?

The Conservatives have come out today with Cooperatives as the new way forwards for the Public Sector and even the private sector. The idea being that if a body of staff (say a school) work together to make the school more efficient and therefore cheaper to run, they will get a share of the spoils.

I am sure that what they are saying in other words “Get rid of the slack staff and work a bit harder and you can get some cash”. I.e. the public sector put up with crap workers a lot because they feel that working in the public sector is a career for life and not as cutting edge and they wont go bankrupt. I have witnessed this first hand, through my work at Couraud, I saw how the Foreign and Commonwealth office was equipped to deal with this.

I therefore think this is a good plan, in principle.

My thoughts about this have now turned to whether the model would work on a development project. It is something I have been at the start of a few times. The truth of those start-ups though were that the initiators had a stake but after that, there was no provision for new staff to have a cut. Also I have come on board a few projects on the payroll, been interested in the work, but as I am not a shareholder I have not been as committed. My work at Couraud could be characterised by that.

I would love there to be a model to make this work. How would you bring in people 6 months in, what would be there share, what if you needed an injection of cash, how would you get agreement. Also, probably more practically, who would be in charge and how would you handle dreadful managers that the rest of the staff wanted to get rid of.

I can see the model of Professional Partnerships, such as law firms, being a possible model. My experience of those though is that they are as flexible as me after a half marathon (not a picture of young bunny rabbits racing about the fields). A development project needs to be extremely flexible, look at some of the problems that people are now perceiving of Microsoft, although I am not all that sure they have big problems.

This is something I am going to keep my eye on and have some more thoughts, I would love to get involved in a project like this, if I get my say and cash and recognition and I can work from home and people don’t go off sick too much and etc. etc.