Elf Sternberg

Most Wednesdays I have the privilege of working from home, so that I can elide my commute and put that time toward getting the kid to places, getting other things done, and generally put in my work hours without sacrificing either work or family. Doing so gives me an opportunity to go to lunch with friends, or friends of friends.

So this Wednesday I went to lunch with a friend and his friend, and in the course of our conversation the new guy made a pitch that I come work for his company, rather than my own. I rolled my eyes; I get pitched all the time by recruiters, I don't need it from acquaintances. But out of curiosity, I asked him what his company did.

They do on-line surveys. That's what they do. Either through their own URL, or as a feature in-lined into a corporate URL, or even as an IFRAME session attached to a single page inside the corporate URL. "What do you want me for, then?"

They have all this technology for asserting that the person taking the survey is who they say they are. They have a massive investment in infrastructure for identifying users, and for putting in IFRAMEs, pop-ups, and other ways of getting information into pages that wouldn't naturally host, or naturally want to host, their content. So they want to branch out from where they are now to advertising. They want to get even better at surveillance. They see that the groundswell of surveillance capitalism is happening, and they want to get in on it before the tide sweeps them over and they're its victim, not its master.

The technology he discussed with me was utterly fascinating, and even as he spoke I could hear whispers of premature optimization being conducted in the cost of saving a few pennies here and there. But the more he talked, the less interested I was in ever joining his company.

He seems like a nice guy. And he was personally invested in the complexity and innovation of the software on which he worked. It wasn't just a paycheck, although that was nice-- it was a paycheck that allowed him to work on cutting-edge stuff. If he didn't do it, someone else would.

I won't. I just can't imagine contributing further to the regimentation and narrowing of human thought by the presentation of large-scale and well-informed influence. If I joined a hive-mind, it would be a smart and sexy one dedicated to great art and music, not the one toward which we're barelling, the one ritualistically confined to selling more Chicken Nuggets and Shake Weights, because that's how the bills get paid, that's how the system knows how to run.

While I've used recruiters in the past, right now I don't need one; I am gainfully employed and enjoying my work. That doesn't seem to stop recruiters from calling me. I view talking to recruiters as a necessary evil; I want to stay in their databases, and often I see it as an opportunity to educate them about what I'm doing, so they can target their databases more effectively.

But I had the most clueless recruiter the other day. She called me and started pitching immediately, without even waiting. "We have a great opportunity in your area," she said. "We're looking for a UI developer with five years of .NET and ASP experience. Some C# would be good, too."

I said, politely, "I'm sorry, I don't have any of those."

"You don't?" she said, somewhat surprised.

"No. I don't have any .NET or ASP experience. I have never developed for any Microsoft platform in my career."^*

"So, you're not a UI developer, then?"

There was a long pause while I restrained myself from yelling at her through the phone. I took a deep breath and said, "UI development is a programming craft, not a technology. It can be done in many different languages and on many different platforms. I do it in LAMP. Some people do it for Apple products. You want someone who does UI development for Microsoft products. I'm not a good candidate for that."

"Oh," she said. "Well, thank you for your time." She actually sounded snippish, as if I'd lied to her or something.

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^* This is not actually true; I had an eight-month part-time contract in 1993 that involved both MS-SQL database development and a VB-based UI front end. It paid the bills. But I hardly think a job 18 years ago is relevant today.

So, here's the weird thing. That "Resume Recruiter Bingo" that I mentioned the other day is even stranger. Two of the requirements are:

• Good knowledge of ASP.Net and C#.
• Ability to work and debug code in Visual Studio 2008.

My resume reads like an open-source, Linux-based history textbook. I contributed the time-to-service feature of the original Apache web server. I've fixed bugs in the Python standard library. I wrote a driver for the Linux kernel, goddammit.

What is making my resume show up on a keyword search looking for someone familiar with Microsoft products?

Is it just because I live in Seattle?

New post at the pro blog: How to look for "a job," or at least pretend that you're looking for one.

You’re a geek in need of a job. In the meantime, you need to convince unemployment insurance that you’re looking for a job. Here's how you go about finding the job openings needed to meet both requirements.

I discovered something very important about coming into a job as a rescue contractor. The client may have dug themselves a very deep hole. But if they have also dug themselves a very wide hole, sometimes, you can carry the dirt from one end of the hole to the other and at least build a set of steps that might get you out of there.

Really, it's not that Omaha and I are ignoring all of the invitations and things that we get from friends. It's that our life, with two children and full-time jobs, really is this packed. And I don't mean that in a deprecating kind of way. I like how busy it is-- usually. With all the things that the kids do-- and with Omaha unable to drive them anywhere-- it's very much a team effort to get anyone anywhere, much less everyone everywhere they have to be.

Thank the gods for mobile computing, which lets me get something done even when I'm sitting waiting for Kouryou-chan to finish her ballet class, or when Yamaraashi-chan stays late at school.

I have landed at a tiny startup that's trying to make it big. I work at IndieFlix, where we sell DVDs and month-long streaming subscriptions to either a single movie or our entire library. We get new movies every month.

They're Indies, and they're fun.

And today, I released my latest masterpiece: IndieFlix's microsite for The Detroit International Film Festival, as well as a framework for future indie film festivals. I got the voting and the commenting framework in, used the jQuery cycler but also wrote my own little chunk of Javascript to make sure all the images fit proportionally.

And now that I've demonstrated I can get a new site out that fast... I have a lot of work piling up.

Well, it was a pretty stressful Spring break. I had to spend three days at home shortly after getting hired, and spent most of my vacation head-down working on other people's problems.

People want to know where I've landed, so here's the answer: I'm at IndieFlix, an independent film distribution company, working as their central software guru. They're the ones I got up and running by digitizing their entire library in a weekend rather than a month, and needing only two hundred bucks in Amazon EC2 service to do it.

Right now I'm working on putting together a sister site for them. IndieFlix markets and sells independent films, but it needs input, and so we also reach out to independent filmmakers and indie film fans by hosting and sponsoring indie film festivals, which also gives us a chance to contact both filmmakers and fans who aren't familiar with our service, thus giving us resources for new movies and new subscribers. It's a good win/win all around.

Indie film festivals are communal experiences, so I've been noodling around behind the scenes with ideas of making the whole site more of a social networking toolkit. Not a big one like Facebook or whatever, but more of "There are fans like you who appreciate..." kind of thing, with notification boards: "Jim Smith just commented on Broken Elf, which is one of your favorite films..." and "Your to-watch list and Jane Smiths have a big overlap. Would you like to see what else Jane has on her shelf?" and "We're hosting the release of the new DVD Into the Darkness,shipping in late March 2010! You've listed Andrew Robinson as one of your favorite filmmakers, and we're having a movie club night..." That kind of stuff. Avoiding leaderboards and the like, and involuntary exposure, but also getting mucho social networking into the system.

They hired me as a Django expert, but I pretty quickly became both their AWS encoding expert and their general sysadmin in a heartbeat. They have a home-made deployment scheme that doesn't include database migrations, so I'm working on a Fabric/South replacement implementation. In my copious spare time, of course.

Omaha was gone all weekend, but the kids were great. Of course, I pretty much let them do what they wanted since I'm a very laid-back kind of dad, which isn't the greatest thing in the world, but they're well-behaved most of the time. I tried to make them a lentil and bacon stew one night, and that went over okay (the cornbread I made along with it went down faster), and I fed them steak, potatoes, and broccoli with mornay sauce, and that went down well enough. Pinched the hell out of one finger trying to clean the vacuum cleaner-- hair had gotten wound around the agitator brush bearing, and while pulling it apart I managed to snap the needlenose pliers against my skin, resulting in a huge ugly blister.

Other than that, though, things just kinda proceed as normal.

So, this afternoon, I was signing up for a work-sponsored 20-minute course related to our new insurance policies. We have to go through this silly sign-in screen that our HR director (an ex-Softie) apparently cooked up as a way of tracking who had taken what courses.

As I'm signing up for it, I'm filling out an absurd number of fields. I ought to be able to give it my email address and it ought to be able to look up everything else: manager's name, email address, phone number, the works. They're all right there in the company directory; the fact that it can't is just... auuugh.

Anyway, as I'm filling it out, I notice at the bottom there's a field with no instructions as to how to fill it out, labeled Modality. I've seen that word a number of times, and always wondered what it meant. I went and looked it up:

Modality, n., a particular way in which the information is to be encoded for presentation to humans.

As opposed to what, exactly? Nematodes? Butterflies? Ponies?

Yesterday, my chair ate my headphones. It's been threatening to do that for years, as the headphone's wire is just thin enough to get caught under the wheels of the chair. I have (and prefer having) a long extension cord for my headphones so that I can maneuver in this office with the computer way under the desk and all.

The chair didn't just eat the headphones, though. Not content with destroying my hundred-buck sound-cancelling headphones, it also ate the extension cord.

This morning I forgot to bring my iPod with me to work. Normally, that wouldn't be a big deal; I don't go to the gym on Tuesdays and I can miss one or two episodes of Daily Japanese without falling too far behind.

But now I have to sit here and listen to the rather loud HVAC system constantly running, and every time I sit down to tackle a project my hands reach for the pair of headphones that aren't there, and my psychic train creaks on its rails, if not quite running off. Arrgh.