Reflections

The good news is that I am about to go back to full-time employment.  My current contract position will be "converted" to something more permanent on August 1.  It's time for reflection.

My experience of being out of a job for the first time after over thirty years - and after my first layoff - was disorienting.  It took me more than six months to understand and appreciate the situation.  From April 2009 until the end of the year I was looking for a job in a conventional but almost completely ineffective way: looking at job postings and sending out resumes.  I did get a few interviews but these were productive only in that they showed me that I wasn't a good candidate for a development position because I hadn't written code since 2002.  My knowledge of current languages, frameworks, and tools wasn't adequate - especially in the current market.

I did one thing last year that turned out to be crucial: one of the first people I reached out to after I got notice and before I left IBM was a former manager of mine who had recently started as VP of Engineering at Bit9.  At that time he wasn't in a position to hire me, but he was my "lead reference" and I kept in touch with him throughout the job search.

At the end of last year I changed my strategy and did a lot of networking.  I started to write frequently in this blog, started a second blog, spent an hour or two every day on Twitter and LinkedIn and tried to learn as much as I could about social network tools.  I also started to go to local networking events: Mass Innovation Nights, Open Coffee, Social Media gatherings and Meetups.  These are all free and great places to collect contact information.  I was able to get my LinkedIn contact list to over 500 people (from about half that) in six months.  I have over 900 followers on Twitter.

I also volunteered for a number of things: facilitating a roundtable at Boston SPIN, recruiting for the Founder Institute, and helping with the judging at Mass Challenge.  All of these were valuable and Boston SPIN asked me to join their board for next year, which I was happy to do.

Networking didn't really help me find this job.  I'm here because I kept in touch with someone and he and I work well together.  But networking did keep me busy and thinking about professional and career issues every day.  I think that's essential.  When you go to a new place to interview, it really helps to be in practice in terms of meeting new people and explaining who you are and what you do.  In-person networking forces you to do this all the time, but it's with a friendly audience.  Try to keep your calendar filled with professional social events - and it's not hard to do that in Boston.  Just look at Meetup.com - there are dozens of professional and business-related groups.  LinkedIn also has hundreds of discussion groups, some of them local, that you can use to keep your name in the public eye.

The Gates

The Gates, Central Park, New York City

Christo and Jeanne Claude
February 12 - 27, 2005 ... See my Tabblo>

Enthusiasm faded

I don't know how it happened or why ... but when I look at Twitter today there's a sense of annoyance that's replaced the excitement of the last few months.  That's right: the honeymoon is over!
Twitter didn't change, I did.
It may have something to do with the fact that I reached the limit of following 2001 accounts.  Twitter won't let me follow any more because I only have 900 followers.  They admit that it's arbitrary and they won't tell me how they decided on this limit.  They do insist on it, though.
Now any time I want to follow another account I first have to find someone to unfollow.  It's not hard to do that, any more than it was hard to find accounts to follow in the first place.  But the thought of going back through pages and pages of "following" lists isn't a happy one.
There are on-line tools to help with the process.  The one I've used lately is called Tweepi, "a geekier, faster way to manage Twitter."
I have also tried Twit Cleaner to find candidates.

When it rains

I'm not talking about the weather but about the climate -- the local tech business climate.
Yesterday I was not happy about the state of my various professional roles.  My contract at Bit9 was about to end after three months, I hadn't heard back from the Deval Patrick campaign, hadn't heard back from a new client about a proposal I'd sent him on Monday, and recruiters weren't calling me.  The Founder Institute application deadline is today and I don't know if they want anything else from me.  There were a lot of dead ends and dark tunnels.
Today, some of this has turned around: I had a meeting with another new client, my contract at Bit9 was extended, and a recruiter contacted me for more information about a job application.
When I keep a lot of hats in the air, I have to be prepared to let one or two fall so that I can pick up others.  I can only juggle so many at one time.  The number these days is five and I expect to have a revised list soon.

Viewsflow

I have Google Alerts set up to email me every day with new mentions of my name.
Today's email contained the following:
Paul Geffen's view. This is the flow of @lpgeffen's views and interests. This is built from their public Twitter feed which we have been ...
www.viewsflow.com/user/lpgeffen
and I followed the link.
It's the first example I've seen of an identity integrator that works pro-actively to create accounts from the Twitter stream.  It's not a bad strategy.  In my view (as expressed many times on this blog) we can never have enough profiles that link to other profiles.  Many of my web profiles have no other purpose than to confirm the identity (in the sense of equivalence) of a number of other profiles.  As far as I'm concerned these are all helpful as they allow me to decentralize my profile information.  I don't rely on any one site to hold profile information.  Different services provide different levels of detail and as long as I keep things reasonably consistent the results are what I want: you can find me anywhere.