Entries tagged 'jobs'

“We had the chance to review your application and while your experience is impressive, it doesn't align perfectly with what the team is looking for so unfortunately we won't be moving forward with your candidacy.”

I can’t help but feel that I dodged a bullet on this one, because looking for “perfect” alignment from a candidate is a huge red flag.

It is also a really strange thing to say when you put this in your job description:

“P.S. If you don’t tick every box in this ad, please don’t rule yourself out. We take pride in inclusion and hiring incredible human beings with great potential over ticking boxes – so if this role resonates with you, hit that apply button!”

I’m a white guy with an enormous amount of privilege, so whatever. But I hope that Linktree isn’t sending this awful form rejection to the diverse candidates they claim to be trying to include.

A popular response to the attempted backdooring of the XZ Utils has been people like Tim Bray talking about the maintenance of open source projects and how to pay for them.

When I transitioned from leading the web development team at MySQL to an engineering position in the server team, I spent the first year as a maintenance engineer. I blogged a little about the results of that one year and calculated that I had fixed approximately one reported bug per working day.

But you’ll also notice that I had to heap some praise on Sergei Golubchik who reviewed fixes for even more bugs than I had fixed. (He also was responsible for working on new features. He is extremely talented, and I’m not surprised to see he’s the chief architect at MariaDB.)

That sort of reviewing and pulling in patches is a critical component of maintaining an open source project, and a big problem is that is not all that fun. Writing code? Fun. Fixing bugs? Often fun. Reviewing changes, merging them in, and making releases? A lot less fun. (Building tools to do that? More fun, and can sidetrack people from doing the less-fun part.)

It is also a lot different for projects with a lot of developers, a small crowd of developers, and just a few developers. The process that a patch goes through to make it into the Linux kernel doesn’t necessarily scale down to a project with just a few part-time developers, and vice versa. A long time ago, I made some noise about how MySQL might want to adopt something that looked more like the Linux kernel system of pulling up changes rather than what was the existing system of many developers pushing into the main tree, and nobody seemed very interested.

Anyway, as people think about creating ways of paying people to maintain open source software, I think it is very important to make sure they don’t inadvertently create a system that bullies existing open source project maintainers to make them focus on the less-fun aspects to developing software, because that’s kind of how we got into this latest mess.

You already see that happening with supposed-to-be-helpful supply chain tools demanding that projects jump through hoops to be certified, or packaging tools trying to push their build configuration into projects (with an extra layer of crypto nonsense), or a $3 trillion dollar company demanding a “high priority” bug fix from volunteers.

I am curious to see where these discussions lead, because there is certainly not one easy solution that is going to work everywhere. It will also be interesting to see how quickly they lose steam as we get some distance from the XZ Utils backdoor experience.

(Also, I’m still looking for work, and I’m willing to do the less-fun stuff if the pay is right.)

I have been low-key job hunting since May 2023. Things were getting tough with our store, and my initial hope was that I would be able to get a full-time position somewhere and turn over day-to-day handling of the store to a manager. I should be able to earn way more as a software engineer than I could have hoped to through the store.

The first job I applied for was with Automattic. They don’t seem to advertise specific software engineering roles these days, but just have a general application for that department. I figured with my PHP and MySQL experience, I’d at least start to progress through their hiring process. I never heard back. I even reached out to Matt since he had commented on my blog post about when blo.gs ended up in their hands. I never heard back.

I kept looking. About a month later, I applied for a job with Canonical (makers of Ubuntu Linux). The specific role probably wasn’t a great fit for me, but I figured I would at least get on their radar as someone with a lot of open source experience that was looking for work. I got a form rejection the next day.

And then we started the process of closing the store, and my job hunting became more of a full-time endeavor.

Always I will mentally try on the job for size and temporarily fall in love or at least get comfortable with the idea.

Working for ProPublica or The Getty Foundation would be amazing.

Work for Convoso? Sure, I can make that work.

Amazon? Facebook? TikTok? Why not?

I applied to be the Director, AI and Emerging Technologies at the LA Clippers. Why not?

“Our recruiting staff will review submissions and will contact only those candidates who meet our job specific requirements.”

“If your application seems like a good fit for the position, we'll contact you soon.”

“After review, if your application seems like a good fit for the position, we will contact you to set up an interview.”

It is a frustrating process full of silence with a small sprinkling of rejection.

I have had one interview with a recruiter which led to a quick “After much consideration, we've made the decision to not move forward at this time.” (For Centerfield, working on web properties like TheSeniorList.com. It was a hybrid position that would have required going to an office a couple of times a week. Why not?)

The store is closed now, and I spend even more time searching and applying. Mentally trying on the jobs for size.

Some of the jobs seem like a great fit — a dream job.

Some of them seem like they would fit just fine — also a dream job.

greg knauss wrote “wide vs. deep” to explain why he is not happy being management, and what he thinks the difference is between people well-suited to management and those that are not.

i don’t know if i agree with his explanation, but i think it is very important for organizations to realize that there cannot be only one career path that leads up through management. to mysql’s credit, the recent work that was done to standardize our job titles and the path up the ranks acknowledges this, and there is a non-management path for developers. i don’t think we are quite where we need to be in terms of divorcing technical leadership from resource management, but we are getting there.

and mysql is hiring for all sorts of positions.

mysql has quite a few open job listings. some positions of note: web developer, support engineer, maintenance developer, qa engineer, and performance architect. all of these positions are available world-wide, so you get to work from home. some of the other jobs from the full list are location-specific.

if you mention that i referred you for some of these positions and are then hired, i get some sort of referral bonus.

mike kruckenberg shared his observations from watching mysql source code commits, and jay pipes commented about this commit from antony curtis which had him excited. now that’s how open source is supposed to work, at least in part.

i replied to a later version of that commit to our internal developer list (and antony), pointing out that with just a little effort the comment would be more useful to people outside of the development team. “plugin server variables” doesn’t really do it justice, and “WL 2936” is useful to people who can access our internal task tracking tool, but does no good to people like mike.

the other reason it is good to engage the community like this is because it is very healthy for your own future. being able to point to the work i had done on open source and the networking that came from that have both been key factors in getting jobs for me. i’m sure it will be useful next time i am looking, too.

mysql is looking for a north american mysql community relations manager. quality assurance engineer is another position available, and there are more listed on the website.

mysql is looking to hire a community relations person in the united states.

oh, and the mysql users conference 2006 was announced, and the call for papers is out. the deadline for submissions is november 7.

it occurred to me that i mentioned the product engineer position, but there are a number of other jobs at mysql that are open, including web developer.

if you love fiddling around with various strange unix flavors (and microsoft windows) and slowly trying to obsolete yourself with perl scripts, product engineer for mysql ab might be the job for you.

if you fulfill the job requirements (especially the work on-site bit) and don’t mind a little not-safe-for-work content as part of your work environment, this junior mod_perl/mysql programmer job in chatsworth might be for you.