About that same time I read somewhere that the only way to become a good writer is to start writing what you want to read but no one wrote so far. I tried, but failed, as it turned out that there were things that no one wrote about and for a reason.

Similar things happen when you start offering something to the market. Something that you could use but no one bothered to develop before you. In case you were born late - that’s how Symantec’s Undelete (former Norton Undelete) came to life.

So, hopefully the following project is worth such a long introductuion. The web site Rate My Recruiter is, basically, just that - a Recruiter rating web site. Submit your stories, tell us what you think, what your experience have been so far and share it with other people.

Unfortunately, there’s a very little flexibility built into almost any corporate culture. This stems from “dog eats dog” approach everyone is taking, since it’s enough to have one asshole on the team to convert “Happy family” into “Survival of the fittiest”.

Nevertheless, I came up to the management with the idea long known from totally different area. I suggested that management (namely VP of IS and whoever is immediately underneath him, supervising software development) would create a so-called DMZ - a “de-militarized zone” for projects.

The project would be dropped into DMZ queue (as opposed to regular software development queue) if its execution would take a significantly less time is the documentation workflow is skipped. For example - updating couple of words on web site, changing an image or something similar. There will not be many of them, so it does not pose any threat of being too large to manage and growing out of proportion. On the other hand - it will free up a lot of developer’s time that could be used somewhere else.

The problem is that large companies only want to hire either code monkeys (so that thay can outsource their jobs later to India or Romania because of budgeting issues) or gurus who are capable of replacing entire departments. Such gurus want (and deserve, trust me) huge salaries that are, however, still offsetting salaries of few average programmers. The problem, though, is that such gurus are rare and hiring them means doing things in a certain specific way.

Let’s say you hire a guru for a project, the project gets completed, your guru moves on to another project at another company. Three months later you need an update to your existing software. You can’t hire same guru - he’s somewhere else and not interested. So you hire an average Joe (after all - the job isn’t that complicated, right?) who spends three times more time trying to figure out what’s going on. By the time he’s done there’s a new update pending, so you keep paying him three times more for figuring things that were done in a certain unique way.

Personally, I am neither a code monkey nor a guru, so I am sort of in between the bandwagons here. Can’t say if it’s a bad thing or a good thing. By the way, my own dream job of the moment is some large development project on which I will be working alone with a good and understanding project manager and business clients who don’t tell me how to write the code. Oh, and I prefer free bottled water in pantry, thank you.

If you are like me and mix and match working inside the corporate culture with freelancing, then this rant is old news to you. But I need to let some steam off, so here goes…

Whenever I work for a large company - and by large I mean a company that have departments led by different people, not Joe Shmoe being the director of IT and supervisor of accounting department at the same time - I can’t help by wonder why so much time, money and energy goes to waste. Thanks to bureaucracy, every good idea can go so wrong it would be doing just the opposite.

Take the company I happen to work for right now. The software development team is supposed to have decent laptops and additional 21″ LCD screens. Newcomers get their laptops pretty fast, but the request for memory and 21″ screen needs to be put separately and (I did the asking around) takes on average about 3 to 5 months. So all this time new employees are forced to work on a year model of an underpowered laptop with only one gig of memory, low performance CPU and an average hard drive. Two installed security suites, full-blown software hard drive encryption (with built-in security chip unused), bunch of software and remote management utilities running in the background being the default installation. Now add here MS Outlook 2003, couple of Internet Explorer (or Firefox) windows, MS Word or Excel - and you get a decent workstation for an average clerk. Now, on top of that let’s add Visual Studio 2005, SQL Management Studio or Enterprise Manager, maybe a feature-rich text editor (like UltraEdit) - and you get a pony trying to pull a firetruck to a fire.

Recently, I timed the bootup of this laptop (I happen to be the proud owner of one) - for all the tools to fall into place and start working properly it took from bootup (include two login/password entries - one for boot another for Windows/domain login) to being able to start typing the code in Visual Studio. It took me just under 20 minutes. That’s every day now. Talk about “wasting your time at the watercooler”, eh?

Interesting enough is that not many people get it. The big picture, as it turns out, is an entity that isn’t quite “gettable”, being too large or too complicated for some. So I have to use “generally speaking” to explain what I mean and how to take it. As a result I usually get much better attention and understanding from people I talk to. Which helps get things done.

There are not that many cases when people who want something actually know what they want. You can dig deeper if you try to see what each ad is trying to sell. Look at any ad that sells shampoo. It shows you the shampoo bottle, the hair (that most likely belongs to an attractive woman), the process of hair getting better and so on. But it doesn’t quite sell the shampoo or hair improvement. Rather it sells happiness, or sex appeal, or attractiveness. Which, essentially, leads to happiness. So the ad isn’t selling you a bottle of shampoo, it sells you something that will make you happy. Generally speaking, by buying a bottle of shampoo you are buying happiness. There, now you have it.

Ability to be “generally speaking” is rare. Most of the times I hear someone “generally speaking” I get very quiet and listen all the way to the last word. It’s about the big picture, so it must be important.

Well, it ain’t that easy. I had a chance to speak to a guy who sells Russian food. Not just Russian food though - any ethnic food that sells in Russia now. This includes Armenian, Georgian (wines, sauces and dressings, Ukrainian and even Polish stuff (some cookies, I dunno). Point is - you can buy food online and have it delivered. If you’re in Manhattan - that’s one thing, but if you live in Pennsylvania and your kid is in some University of Nebraska - you can still have it sent.

Always amazed me how that food survived the travel, but it turns out - it does. Amazing. I wish I could send something to someone…

I was 18 when the Berlin wall fell. States colonized by the former USSR were freed and democracy was put in place. I hoped for a better future for Russia. Since then, they have turned authoritarian, abused nations around them, threatened the world with missiles that can penetrate defense systems, poisioned and shot dissidents, and allowed a large organized crime sector to operate.

I know my response isn’t technical, nor even helpful, but I couldn’t help but express my sadness over all this. When you see a great threat removed, especially as a teenager, you hope for the best, but I guess we aren’t going to see much good news from Russia for a long time.

It is, indeed, sad, that instead of being business partners plenty of Russians decide to become business fraudsters.

What struck me as I was filling out form by form is how all those social web sites treat your information. Some of them post in large print that your information will NOT be shared. Another one (namely Blinklist) pushed some ads, some “Get Free Something” bait and switch offers and after declining - some more in-between advertising pages. Another one (Simpy) sent me three confirmation e-mails. The whole point of all three was: 1) to promote Simpy Firefox Add-on (first e-mail), 2) to welcome new user (that’s the one I expected) and 3) to promote Simpy blog widget. Why would I have to get all this junk in my mail box - beats me.

If anyone from those web sites can hear me, here’s my statement: if you want me back on those sites - get rid of these techniques. Now.