Splash Web Effects

I am officially unemployed as of 5:00 Friday- oddly liberating and yet, terrifying.

As many designers and developers alike know, while quitting your job is a terrifying prospect- being laid off is far worse.

The idea of being laid off is not frightening in and of itself, if you are a qualified individual working in a market that has many available jobs. Being that I am that individual, I was not scared at first. However, being in the midst of  a recession that has hit the IT sector hard, my myriad skills are not paying off the way they normally do.

I am a multi-language, multi-skilled developer with design skills, copywriting ability, support experience and the ability to generally fix most electronic devices. This allows me to really spread my CV across the craigslist “resumes” section, it hurts me when competing for jobs as managers believe I will somehow be less skilled in one area because I am multi-talented.

This leaves one option while looking for a manager not afraid of extra skills: Freelancing.

Freelancing has its upsides and it’s downsides- I fully intend the bulk of my career to be in the freelance industry, but not while I am starting out. The meager, 250-dollar for a whole website jobs that I have to chase down, hunting the manager on his lunch breaks to beg him for a design approval, please read this copy, please sign this, etc. It’s maddening. I don’t already command the respect of a huge portfolio necessary to drop problem clients- their dollars are as good as any.

Most of my work is in-house, intranet based or outdated from my last bout of freelancing, so my portfolio currently contains one entry.

I’m in the process of rewriting a site, I’ll post before and after soonish. This should help me get some credibility behind my outlandish claims.

I want to redesign all of the local government websites.

Seriously, who writes these? A lot of time they don’t work or validate in anything but IE7 and when they do, they are still the most hideous things you have ever laid eyes on. Regardless- some of them get awards.

I genuinely want to redesign these, and I will take a significantly lower sum than I would normally charge, in the name of patriotism. I do not want our nation’s children subjected to bureaucracy, but when they do have to endure it, it can at least be pretty.

Not to mention the functionality. Most government websites have some sort of registration you can perform on them, be it for jobs or to pay your water bill- but the instructions are convoluted and obviously to make up for a developer’s bad user interface or a database designer’s bad practices.

What happened to intuitive, useful and accessible with these people? There are many documents people would love to submit online that don’t require actual paper anyway- stuff that could be submitted directly to the correct database and would only require you to mail in a signature form to satisfy their archaic standards. This would cut overhead by such a significant amount that they might be able to pay someone to, I don’t know, update their website? Scroll down to the bottom of the Tarrant County website, and you will see that it has not been touched since May of 2005!

Governments are slow to adapt to new standards, but the days of putting a website on the Internet and then being “done” are over. You are never “done” with a website. People expect more and more functionality every day, and you need to keep them updated with events and pertinent information.

The trouble with looking for a job in Dallas, Texas is not the amount of jobs availible or really the extreme market penetration of other professionals like you, or with more experience. There are plenty of jobs to go around.

One of the largest problems is out-of-state staffers that do not understand how large Texas is.

I live in Plano, which is just north of Downtown Dallas. This is not anywhere near San Antonio, Austin, Huston, Beaumont, Brownsville or Amarillo. Those are all more than 3 hours one way from my home, in good traffic and no highway patrol on the way down.

A lot of recruiters in India, Missori and even New Zealand want to place me in jobs that are there- asking how far of a drive it would be for me.

They then proceed to tell me they mean Houston, Texas not some other “far away” Houston in another state.

Texas is roughly twice the size of Germany. If you lived in Northern California, would you drive to a job in Southern California? No. You couldn’t do it.

Why do people insist on trying to recruit for these jobs in the wrong areas?

Database design for resume databases and for job hunting sites need to recognize this and divide Texas into distinct regions so one can search DFW and not get anything from San Antonio, and once can search Galveston and not get anything for Amarillo.

Remember, STATE is not a good search parameter, you need to add a REGION field or your results will always be shoddy and low relavance.

I am already tired of this recession. It has caused one company to fall apart under me and now another to restructure their entire business model, leaving me without a position in a few weeks.

I tire of the job hunt- slogging through the thousands of entries posted on job sites like monster and careerbuilder for jobs that require masters degrees in computer science and want 5 years of experience in technologies that are only 5 years old to begin with.

Early adopters are great to hire, but what about the rest of us perfectly capable individuals that didn’t want to hedge our bets too early- who are perfectly capable of writing what you wanting us to write and taking ownership of a large project but who didn’t play in intergal part in the early development of the language?

The other complaint(I shall file this post under “gripes”) I have with many of these postings are the education requirements- how many software programmers do you know that went through 4 years of school?If I entered school to learn software development today, everything I learned in the first two years would be completely useless by the time I graduated, I would have student loans weighing me down causing my initial price tag to be beyond my actual, real-world experience level and my programming technique would be a mirror of what an idiocyncratic professor with very strong opinions about how things should be done (which is why they profess) with flexability that would only come over a great deal of time.

The freshness of new minds entering the programming trade is weakened considerably by these institutions- I don’t see why we should have to fill an arbitrary beurecratic requirement just because we achieve a higher pay grade than an average unskilled worker. We are skilled. VERY skilled. We deserve to be paid as much- regardless of where we learned the trade.

I recently had the fortune(good or bad?) to fill a few internships at a company I worked for. I decided to post an entry on craigslist.

I made it a pretty open-enrollment, no school requirements, no previous experience, capped at one year experience. I was looking for a few eager young marketing break-ins like I was (not that I’m not eager, young or a break-in myself.) to teach the ropes and get cheap labor out of.

Well… my post went locally viral.

I am not sure why, or how, but every community college professor and abuser of linkedin found my craigslist post and ran with it, telling everyone they knew. After about a day, HUNDREDS of local applicants e-mailed me their desperate attempts to get an internship. I had to set up e-mail filters, and was intensely grateful I had given my Google voice number instead of my personal cell.