Recruiting The Top Notch People

We have figured out an exceptionally effective way to get the best people in the planet to work with us. This is a result of years research where we tried practically everything from letting juniors do the interviews to using recruiting companies for the job.

But now we have the solution and I’m going to tell you how are process works. It works like this:

1. Find out the recruiting needs i.e. identify what kind of people and how many we should hire
2. Wait a couple of months doing nothing – this is called the recruiting maturing process. Many times it happens so that some needs become obsolete as the projects are canceled due to under-resourcing. This saves a hell lot of money in the long run. Or was a small amount of money in the short run? Well it’s basically the same thing anyway.
3. Then when we finally know that we want to hire some people we’ll find out if there are any people leaving the company soon. If nobody’s found, we’ll return to stage #2 or fire someone. Usually the latter works best.
4. Here’s the best part. Now we know that we want to hire someone and we have one or few people who’re leaving the company soon and we’ll let the resigned/fired employees to handle the whole hiring process as the last thing they do in the company.

Man, this works so well. Recruitments are usually done in no-time and we end up hiring senior level professionals already on the first interview round. And the costs are practically zero as we’re putting job ads only on our company web pages.

Modern-day Nepotism – or – “Jobs for the Boys”

At Blomentor the CEO was like a dictator. He alone could decide who would work there and who would not. Like in the story about Burning CDs on demand there was a relative of one employee hired for burning CDs. Likewise relatives of the CEO were hired for all kinds of jobs there. CEOs wife worked there as a secretary. His dotters (and their boy friends) worked there occasionally doing e.g. copying and other kind of office assistant like tasks. A friend of one of the employees was not a bad looking young woman who liked to wear revealing clothing. So she was hired for all fairs as a presenter of the Blomentor products. Needless to mention she knew nothing about technology nor the products she was presenting.

This all might sound annoying for the other workers at Blomentor – those friends and relatives were getting all these nice jobs. Truth was, the CEO there was not really doing favors but saving money. His own relatives he could make work practically without pay and it might well be that none of those temporary workers never really showed in the official employee records of Blomentor. It was a win-win – payments (if any) were done in cash, no need to mess with the tax – or any other – authorities. Also these temporary workers appreciated being invited in the company Christmas parties.

At the HQ we have witnessed the real kind of nepotism. Or “Jobs for the Boys” as it’s being called. We have a lot “old timers” here, means people who have been working here for almost ten years or even more. These people are the “soul f the company” as one might say. Some other might say they are the “dregs of the company”. Time has definitely flewn past some of these dinosaurs. There are cases where people have been working in the same freaking silo for a decade. Then what happens when today’s evolving technologies and challenges make that silo unnecessary? The guy moves to a new position? No, that doesn’t happen since he can only do this one thing he has been doing for all of his professional life. So is he sent to training courses to upgrade his skills and knowledge? No, since he usually doesn’t want to go and actively training people is not really a practice at the HQ. What then? He’s being let go? He’s told to adapt or else?

No. Everything wrong. Let me tell you what happens. There are basically three choices:

1. Nothing. The guy continues doing the things he has always done. Either the results of his work are never taken in use anywhere or old product lines are kept in maintenance mode forever to keep some old timers happy.
2. New position. This is practically the same as number one. The guy is assigned into a new position and a new fancy title – but only virtually, in the organization chart. In practice the guy stays in the same room doing the same things as earlier and reporting to the same manager – who happens to also be his personal friend.
3. New team. This is basically for the old timers who have never done anything. They’ve just been around so long that everyone assumes they’re really good and valuable asset worth keeping in the company. These “key people” have worked in all departments doing all kinds of jobs. And never achieved anything. When they get bored – or their co-workers find out about their incompetency – they make a transition to a new team.

In all three cases the employee is usually awarded. Position change means opportunity for a raise. Being recognized as a key person means opportunity for a raise. As an end result these people never want to quit their jobs (why would they?) – they keep doing what they’ve always done. They can freely come late to work go straightly to lunch, drink coffee and have good time with each others when at the office. Want to know some good places in the net to spend time? You know who to go to for good links.

Sometimes the organizational structures are made complicated just to create more positions. Positions which have no practical meaning but which can be filled with the ones in need of a new position. Sometimes departments are kept in-house regardless of the fact that outsourcing would be a lot more cost effective solution. Of course – we don’t want to let our dear old time members of the community go!

Waterfall and Revenge of the body Snatchers

The software industry has always been about invention, reinvention, revolutionary ideas(or not as the case maybe) and fads. There was a day when everyone strove to follow the waterfall SDLC model. With countless job creation functions, what wasn’t there to like? You could get paid, enjoy a relatively good standard of living, despite the fact that you never released a piece of software that came anywhere close to satisfying anyone’s expectations.

What wasn’t there to love about the Big Upfront Design Process. Questionable vision, poor foresight, non existant customer requirements sprinkled with the “latest” technology and the outcome was almost always an unmitigated disaster. You’ll hear about the London Ambulance service and their system developed on windows for workgroups in the early 90s. It serves them right for trying to build a massive software system with jesus tape and intel 486s.

Disasterdev thankfully was not involved in that particular party. Thats not to say we didn’t have our own fun with waterfall. During our se jour with Aspiretrix, we had plenty. Aspiretrix replete with zero customers and modest funds, attempted to ride out the dotcom bust. First step was to stop company lunches. This was a blessing in disguise, there are only limited options with peanut butter, cheese, ham and surinamese chili paste. In addition to expense reductions, our team was relocated to an old sausage factory near the centre of Amsterdam. At this stage P2M was in widespread adoption and two of the developers who had some social “issues” had moved on to their own “agriculture” business.

Given the market at the time, Aspiretrix had fundamental issues. They had a product, that no one wanted, could easily be reproduced by competitors and it lacked innovation. The COO was not happy. What was he paying people to do, other than drink coffee and surf the web. So Aspiretrix began to look at their methodology. This was a relatively easy process, since there was none. Waterfall was without doubt the dominant methodology of choice for all struggling companies. In fact Disasterdev suggested, adopting the Rational Unified Process, but since that had a tooling and licensing cost….due to Budgetecture reasons, we instead had to make do with pretending to use Waterfall.

Requirements where fabricated, customer interaction imagined, solutions created and the outcome of this process typically resulted in a PDF on Aspiretrix’s corporate site. In the rare case that we created a prototype solution, it was typically the case that it could currently serve up to 4 users at a time. We had a philosophy, “It scales on my machine!”, a proven process. Our motto was if nobody used our system and no one was willing to invest in validating our architecture, it probably wasn’t worth it….so it proved to be.

The downside to having an office in an old sausage factory that was scheduled for destruction, is such property is in hot demand. One weekend a small legion of squatters broke into Aspiretrix’s corporate HQ and seized control of the warehouse section of the derelict sausage factory. The following Monday, after the local authorities had reassured the company founders that the squatters might be there for some time, we where summoned to an all hands meeting. With the back drop of the squatters fortifying their new home and people sporting mohawks walking across the roof, we heard the CEO and COO speak at length that we should not be afraid and that everything was being done to ensure our new neighbours found somewhere else to leave. The companies senior architect spoke of how most likely the squatters would last longer than the company itself, obviously only to the developers, since such public statements where never appreciated, regardless of their accuracy.

4 Weeks later, Aspretrix let go 30% of their staff. 12 weeks after that, they let another 40% go. The company in the end relocated whilst the squatters remained. The moral of the story is that sometimes a person with a shaven head and a mangey dog knows more about life than you do.

Who needs separate testers? Not me!

I visited The Headquarters a while back to attend some stupid interview concerning Yet-Another-Mobile-Portal (YAMP). The Big Guys at the HQ seem to use expensive consultants for basically anything. Those guys sure are good in wasting money! And talking about waste of money – can you imagine that they have loads of people hired to do testing??!? That’s true and I mean really, those tens of people do nothing but test the software there! And they are permanent employees not just temporary work force!

OUTRAGEOUS!

It’s like anything which can be taken too far or exaggarated – will be done so at The Headquarters. They’re so anal about everything – take security issues for an example. You gotta have your id badge where ever you go and you can’t open almost any door without an access token… Amazing… I even heard the employees at HQ are not allowed to use iPhones or MacBooks – since they are considered as security risks! No wonder they are so good in spending money and suck at productivity.

Now we at Blomentor are in my opinion a lot more cost effective and our use of common sense is something anyone in HQ should take as a good example. Like software testing – anyone can do that! We’re always placing the latest build of our software on the CDs when they are burned (remember that those are done on-demand so the customers really get the latest versions of our software while they’re still hot). This assures we have quick feedback from customers in case something doesn’t work quite as planned. As an additional quality assurance measurement, we do publish the latest software on our internal NT4 LAN server where everyone has access to it. Add there an e-mail telling all sales people to try out the new software and we’re pretty much done with the testing effort for a new release. If there are no big complains in a day or two we upgrade the software on the two laptops we use when visiting customers and showing the software. We’re in progress of getting a third laptop – I hope the budget proposal for H2 is now accepted in the HQ, we would really need one which is able to run Windows 95. The old ones can barely run Windows 3.11 so we’re not able to show how advanced our latest and greatest 32-bit software version is.

Lately we got a subscription for MSDN. That’s Microsoft Developer’s Network for you who know nothing about anything. It was a costly process – two of our employees had to go take these expensive Microsoft Certified Professional certification exams to gain the required status. But it was worth it – we no longer need to purchase any Microsoft software since they send the latest versions to us every month! There’s operating systems, database software, MS Office and whatnot. Amazing!

As a bonus – we now have all language versions of MS operating systems. So we decided to extend our testing efforts to test in Japanese operating system! So fun, but for some reason our application fails to start in Japanes Windows ME… We’ll need to do some extensive investigation. Good that we have no Japanese customers!

reVolution, Disasterdev introduce P2M

Disasterdev has almost 25 years developing systems to exacting specifications. In fact we’d like to think that we’re not satisfied unless we’ve been challenged to our limits. Whilst we’re primarily a product/application/service/solution development company.

We have participated in numerous consultancy projects throughout Europe. At Disasterdev, we’d like to think we’re early adopters. Before everyone else realised human talent development was important, Disasterdev had already outsourced the outsourcing of that process. Its all about top notch people! To have top notch people, you need top notch people managers and that’s where we excel. We’ve prioneered what we call P2M, Pair Mentoring Management. A process whereby we hire at least one manager to manage that developer, so the developer does not have to worry about that.

Our first implementation of P2M was in the Netherlands with a leading Dutch software house called Aspiretrix BV. Aspiretrix had an excess of management, mostly with nothing to do, this had allot to do with the fact that Aspiretrix also had no clients. Their hiring policy focused on hiring staff from the financial services industry with little management experience. This gave Disasterdev an opportunity to introduce P2M to a largely receptive Dutch audience. Our goals centred on engagement, empowerment and understanding. We managed to improve developer productivity at least 15 minutes per day per developer! No more standups…P2M always ensured a realtime stream of data by simply asking 3 simple questions every 15 minutes.

What did you do just then?

What will you do next?

Do you have any problems that stop you from working 12 hours a day?

This ensured that management data information support systems remained coherent. Not all processes work for all people and certainly not for all cultures. At an early stage we modularized P2M. We realised that social triggers where important. For instance, we realised smokers where less productive since they left their workstation on average every 15 minutes. Our consultants noticed this and reported this anomaly to the company executive team. This was an amazingly agile process, since the CEO and COO where husband and wife, whilst the CTO was their best friend. What we uncovered was many developers had some drug usage issues….since many spent their lunches at a local coffee shop. Rather than curtail this, the COO suggested that this be discouraged overtly, whilst secretly tolerating this, since from 13.00-18.00hrs the side effects could in effect introduce silent hours and further reduce bottle necks associated to early P2M adopters. We liked to call this P2M: Perf. A totally localizable, optional extra available only in the Netherlands for free! A price point that made our methodology a instant hit.

Next Up….Waterfall and the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Burning CDs on demand

At Blomentor subsidiary of Disasterdev Inc. we develop and sell computer based language learning software. We have an unique design of a main application which can be used with a customized set of language course modules. So one can buy a main program and then choose which language courses to take with it. Pretty neat, huh?

When ever we get a purchase in, we will burn a new CD for the customer with the main program and the language courses which were ordered. On demand manufacturing and delivery! Just like Dell does it – we just do it better. And if customer later on decides to purchase more language courses, we burn a new CD – with the latest main program and cumulative set of the language courses. Due to technical reasons, all the language courses must be on the same CD… Which must be kept in the CD-ROM drive while using the software. It’s an anti-piracy thingie. But as a bonus the customer gets free software upgrades every time new courses are bought.

One might think that producing the customized CDs on-demand would be a heavy process but in fact it is not. See, we the son of our sales manager comes to our office a couple of nights a week, gets the pile of orders and burns the CDs for the customers as requested. We only have one computer with the CD-R drive and the required software but we’re planning to invest more on this front in case CD burning becomes a bottleneck of the process. Lately we have increased the speed of the CD-R drive from 8x to 16x so we have basically doubled our production speed. Did I mention that this guy burning the CDs is 13 and we pay him in blank CD-ROMs and a permission to surf web freely while waiting for the CDs to burn? It’s definitely a win-win situation for everyone!

This 13 year old guy – we call him AB (Afterburner) – arrives usually around 5pm when everyone else is leaving home. He usually gets the ordered CDs done by the time the first employees arrive to the office in the morning. Sometimes customers get a wrong set of language courses if AB mixed the orders or accidentally re-used previously used CD-burning project. Or sometimes the delivered software refuses to start at customer premises because AB forgot to plug-in the copy protection module while burning the CD. That’s something we’re just used to. If the customer is located near (say 100km radius) we make AB immediately burn new CD and deliver that to the customer. He’s damn fast with his BMX! If the customer is located too far away, ABs mother makes the delivery with her 15 year old Volvo.

Yeah, I’d say that our manufacturing and delivery process is best of breed. That’s one of the things which works so well here at Blomentor subsidiary.