James;

An excellent post and one of lasting value! I wish your post could be saved somewhere with a link to it under “Important considerations for potential employees” or some such title.

At age 61 I have had many opportunities to look for employment especially for the last 13 years as a programmer. Programming houses regardless of size have been the least professional organizations I have encountered. HR is an empire onto itself. Head Hunters should have his/her heads shrunken to meet reality. That would be about the size of a pea I would think!

Just as you have stated so well, there is more to a job then “casual dress day”. Companies look for people to meet their “culture”. Picking up on the type of culture is so important before becoming involved.

Sometimes a trip to the local library can help look up some very interesting information. Number of employees, how long in business, business line, officers, income, and the list goes on. If you are lucky you might be able to make contact with someone who works for a company of interest or know someone within an organization you are interested in.

The people on forums such as this do not need to be asked about abilities. They know enough to seek a job at his/her level. I agree we have to ask more about the potential companies we are interested in working for. You really do not know enough about a company until you have worked there for at least a short time. It can be a disaster to choose the wrong organization to work for.

By the way I enjoyed every word of your post! Good luck!

Tom



>Hi All,
>
>It's probably obvious to all that the job market for FoxPro folk is opening up -- and rather quickly too -- as companies start to realize they need to get ready for the upcoming business expansion.
>
>I am back on the market because my current 5-year project with Bass-Trigon will be done in January, so I'm starting to look at what's out there.
>
>Quite a lot. But only a small part of it seems to be through the usual job sites. Interestingly enough, a lot of fox shops are hiring the old tried-and-true way by referrals from in-house development staff and more than a few are now posting on developer sites such as the UT, rather than sticking to the usual monster.com, hotjobs.com route.
>
>This is good for everyone.
>
>When a company posts on a typical job site, the person doing the posting is usually from the human resources department or a recruiting service. Neither of these knows much about the job except what they have been told, often in a formal and not easily comprehended list of job requirements. It's not impossible, but nearly so, to find out any more about the position from the "contact" person -- he or she simply does not know.
>
>I obviously do not speak for every FoxPro developer, but I certainly want to know a lot more about any potential job that will ever appear in a job description. I want to know at minimum:
>
>• The level of challenge. Telling me that "we develop sophisticated administration software for the insurance industry" does not help me. My definition of "sophisticated" has more to do with the application's data design, architecture and coding than it does with how well it stacks up against the competition. The application may, in fact, be awful -- just slightly less awful than the other guy's application.
>
>I want to know what back end(s) the application supports, what VFP version it was written in. Is the application documented sufficiently so I can figure out what code does without having to ask a lot of questions? Who wrote it initially? Are those people still there? Is it n-tier architected? Am I going to be expected to bring this application into the 21st century?
>
>What skills are actually needed? Am I doing to be working primarily with the back-end, middle-tier or presentation layer, or some combination? Do I need to interface with or transfer data through the Web? In other words, more succinctly, how well does this position fit my experience and interests. I don't have much interest, for example, in translating from Fox 2.6 to VFP 8.0 or from Clipper to Fox, although I have experience doing both. I have already been there, done that and got the t-shirt, and don't especially want to do it again.
>
>If it is not a position that will stretch and challenge me to expand what I already know and look for original solutions to problems; if the application is written in Version 6.0 and there is "no present intention to upgrade to 8.0"; if the data base has not been revisited since 1993 -- it is going to be very hard to get me excited about it. I suspect you are of a similar mind.
>
>• About the Existing Development Staff. HR job postings will often tell you all about the superior benefits and casual work place with flexible hours and on-site child care. But they don't tell you that the guy you have to work with every day to get the job done is the idiot son of the owner who failed reform school -- or, more hopefully, that the staff includes only FoxPro MVPs. In fact, information about the people you will be expected to work with is virtually non-existent.
>
>But the people make the work environment -- not whether you can wear flip-flops to work. I want to know about the people before I even consider applying -- not half way through the final interview. Have I ever heard of the person to whom I am going to be responsible? If not, why not? I know a lot of people in this profession either by bumping into them from time to time at conferences and user-groups or by reading their articles and postings, reviewing their downloads or just visiting on the telephone -- so if I don't know him (or her as the case may be), then he is probably not very prominent on the UT, VFUG or Wiki, and does not go to conferences. So who is this guy and what does he know? Can I learn from him, or am I going to have to teach him? It makes a BIG difference to me. I'll teach a willing student, but I prefer to learn. And development managers are sometimes of the opinion that they already know everything important -- after all they wrote the application to
> start with (and it works just fine), so they are often, consciously or subconsciously, resistant to new ideas.
>
>A few years ago I had an opportunity to work with a very nice, bright fellow who was the original writer of a Fox DOS application. A very good one too. The program needed to be migrated to Visual FoxPro and modified to fit the OOP paradigm. Problem was, this individual thought a lot of his own code, and fundamentally, did not really want to see it changed. You can imagine the problems this caused. Instead of spending time developing, I spent most of my time convincing management that there really were changes that needed to be made. Not a happy situation for anyone. And not a long-term job for me, either. I hate that squishy sound of banging my head against the wall too frequently.
>
>
>• Professional development. Find a job description that describes professional development, and I'd probably apply just to meet such an enlightened HR department. Does the company sponsor conference attendance? How many times a year? How about advanced education, study time, and time to sit for tests? Yes? -- good professional development. No? -- look somewhere else. Most likely you will find that the designated contact person does not know. Why professional development is not trumpeted is beyond my limited ken. I'm just as interested in this as I am the stock option plan (usually displayed in bold print), and probably more so. I cannot imagine any reason for it being kept a secret.
>
>Postings on the UT, VFUG, and Stephen Black's Fox Wiki have the advantage that they are often posted by FoxPro people, not HR people, so the contact person is probably someone who really knows what's going on.
>
>For example, here are comparisons of two position postings: EPIQ Systems, Inc. of Kansas City posted on the Fox Wiki and PPM Information Systems, also of the Kansas City area, posted on monster.com, etc.
>
>EPIQ Systems was posted on the Wiki by a programmer and UT member, Bob Murphy who, when I telephoned, turned me over to the development manager who spent a few minutes explaining his situation and answering my questions. He knew exactly what he was looking for and at the end of this brief conversation I knew all I needed to know to make a decision whether or not to apply. I also got a very good impression of the company: it is responsive, candid and very serious about hiring the best applicant for the job. All good things.
>
>Contrast this with PPM Information Systems. The position was advertised on just about every job site, monster, hotjobs, dice, computerjobs -- all with exactly the same description. The contact person is Linda McCumber. You can't talk to Linda McCumber, however, who, according to her secretary is "too busy to talk to potential applicants". Nor can you talk to any one in the IT department because all recruiting is "being handled by HR." Interrrresting!
>
>I have nothing against PPM Information Systems. It may be a sterling company, high on the SEC's list of good guys, and a wonderful place to work. It may provide an awesome, sophisticated software product. It may have a professional development program second to none on the planet. It may have a staff of experienced, hard-working, driven, visionary VFP programmers whose only mission in life is to take VFP applications to new heights never before aspired to in the brief history of computerkind.
>
>I don't know. I don't know anything about the company except what I can find on the Web. There is nothing about the company as I now know it that would make me want to work there. I got such a poor impression from the people I did manage to talk to (short to the point of rudeness, secretive, evasive) that I wonder what the problem with the company/job is. I'm trying with limited success to imagine why the company would want to block potential applicants from finding out anything important about the advertised position. If I had a position to fill, and it was a good, challenging position, I'd tell as much of the world as I could reach as often as I could.
>
>So how does this fit in with my original premise that the process of finding good jobs has changed. Here it is:
>
>(1) While not every job on a developer site is posted by a developer, many are, and it is better to talk to a developer than to negotiate the Byzantine labyrinth of the typical HR department to try to extract relevant information from people who (1) probably don't know it and (2) don't think it's important anyway and (3) aren't the least motivated to find out. ("But we do have a 401(k) and on-site child care.")
>
>(2) If members of the UT, Wiki, VFUG etc. know of an opening in their organizations, please post it and be prepared to field telephone calls and questions from curious fellow developers. It's a pain in the neck, yes, and it takes time away from real work, yes -- but getting a good qualified co-worker is something you should leave up to the HR department only at your peril -- so it is most definitely in your personal best interest as well as providing a serious service to the FoxPro community to post the job on a professional forum.
>
>(3) Positions posted on developer forums should not duplicate the information available on the usual job sites: all the typical HR information is available on dice.com, etc. Developer postings should tell us about development stuff, the kind of information we as developers should know to determine whether the job is a good fit for us. How does it aid the community to provide just one more typical job posting identical to what's on monster.com? This is a professional forum and job information should be from developers to developers.
>
>(4) Only developers should be permitted to post, and the format for posting should require information that only developers would know.
>
>OK, I know the wails and howls this is going to get. If we don't allow anyone to post, we may miss the good jobs.
>
>Not a chance!
>
>They're all going to be on monster.com, hotjobs.com, dice.com, and so on anyway. Let the HR people have their sites. Let's use our sites for developers -- that's what they're here for.
>
>Regards,