Craftlogic Blog

As a follow-up to my previous post, Youth is Wasted on the Young, this post will give a personal example of how valuable experience can be. I was working on a project back in the late 90s on a 2-month contract which lasted over 2 years. I was hired as a C++ consultant to help them with the communication protocol between a VRTX, a real-time operating system, and Windows NT. Yeah, this dates me a bit but this will help explain may major point of this post. On my very first day, I sat in a me...

When I hit 50+ last month (you can guess at the + part), I thought to myself. “Would I hire me at my age? Would anybody else want to hire me?” The answer I kept coming up with? Probably not. I’ve been writing software for about 27 years. I work in IT every day and write software a lot of those days. The rest of the time I’m deep in software and technology for my career. Although I can likely do a better job than most half my age, I would have a hard time finding someone to hire me. Thankf...

Do you know this quote from Steve McQueen in the movie Le Mans? "When you’re racing, it... it’s life. Anything that happens before or after... is just waiting." There's a lot of truth to it. I've been road racing cars for the past 6 years. I've had the privilege to race on some of the greatest tracks in the world like Daytona, Laguna Seca, Sebring, Road America, Road Atlanta, VIR, and many others.

Trying to hire IT talent in a seller's market is hard enough. Keeping the talent you have is even harder. There are a number studies and articles that go into this such as this Forbe's article which states in a nutshell, "employees who stay in companies longer than two years get paid 50% less over their lifetime." That’s a pretty dramatic statement.

People write articles, books, blogs, and such because they believe they have something important to say. They hope people will read what they wrote, appreciate it and maybe learn something or improve their lives and maybe even change the world! Well, I have no such naive aspirations. So, instead, I'm going to rant about something that WE should change in our business culture: the culture of non-responsiveness.

The business I'm in is always about talent. Whether it's talent for our development projects or for our clients', it's all about finding the right talent. Like I mentioned in my previous article, Are you trying to hire a Robot or a Human, hiring practices need to change with the times and you need to know the current market and job situation to do so.

I ask this question based on how I've seen companies hire people. I've interviewed many thousands of IT professionals and hired many hundreds of them over the past 12 years or so. What is it I look for? I look for smart people that can do the job.