After eight years at the same (and my only ever) employer, I have decided it is time to move on to bigger and hopefully better things; not only professionally, but also personally. Yesterday my boss and I discussed my intentions to move out of the Erie area by the end of September. I have begun to cast my net (pun!) into the nearby Cleveland and Pittsburgh job markets, via dice.com and monster.com. So far during my first real experience as a job seeker, I have made some observations that maybe useful to others...

The Demand for .NET

    Demand is high for .NET workers. There are pages of current openings posted on dice.com in these two cities. Since posting my resume a week ago, the number of calls and emails has been overwhelming, almost to the point that getting a second phone line would be worthwhile. (I have one cell and no home phone.) Sorting between new callers and known contacts is quickly becoming a chore. I have had to put my phone on silent/vibrate and screen the calls via caller ID. Email inbox filtering rules are also now a necessity. My advice to other job seekers is to set up separate email accounts and phone numbers to use as your posted contact information, and then once you get serious with a potential employer, give them your real contact details.

     Demand is especially high for those with greater than five years experience with it. We are five and a half years since the platform officially launched in early 2002. This means early adopters are the target demographic. No joke, I've seen at least one posting that explicitly stated 5-7 years of .NET experience required. Seven years? I guess if you worked at Microsoft on the CLR/BCL teams you could claim this. I wonder what proportion of these companies are truly that progressive in their adoption of new technology versus ignorantly inflating the requirement beyond the point of reality. I am anxious to find out if these companies, so anxious to scoop up early adopters, continually support the adoption of new technology. Mr. Employer, will you continue to buy us the latest versions of Visual Studio and Resharper and invest the time and money in upgrading projects to new platform versions? I expect this to be and give and take relationship.

IT Staffing Agencies

    Many posted jobs are handled through a third party IT staffing agency, affectionately referred to as head-hunters. These jobs are usually contact or contract-to-hire. This means you make an hourly rate instead of a salary. Many of the agencies offer benefits such as insurance to their contractors. At the end of the contract, the client will either extend the contract, offer a full time position to the developer, or tell you to not let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.

    My experience with the recruiters themselves so far has been mixed...

• On the low end, there is what amounts to spam. I have gotten several emails that were not even addressed to me, but someone else, and I was a BCC on the email. My resume and email address were harvested, keywords were found, and fed through someone's mass mailing. No human being actually read my resume.
  
• The second worst are those that have perhaps a slightly better spamming engine that at least appears to personalize the email. On both Dice and Monster, I explicit stated that I am only willing to relocate to Cleveland and Pittsburgh, yet I am still getting solicitations for Nebraska, Texas, Connecticut, and Georgia. Either they're spamming me or they are incapable of reading or doing basic geography. Also important is getting my first name right.
  
• Next up are those that send a personalized messages that are too informal. Lack of capitalization, abbreviations such as "plz" and "ur", and so forth. This is unprofessional and makes a bad first impression.
• I have received several phone solicitations from individuals with a foreign accent so thick that I could not understand their name, the name of their company, or other key details.
• One recruiter hung up on me when I told him I was already in contact with the client he was representing. This was after spending fifteen minutes of asking me questions about my background. I will never accept solicitation from his company again.
• In the "not bad" category are plenty of recruiters that are doing a decent job with whom I have had email/phone discussion. While not bad, they also are nothing special.
• Finally I get to the good news. There are some recruiters that really kick ass at their job. They have great people skills, get back to you in a timely fashion, are show a real motivation to set up interviews quickly. They go above and beyond. I am moving forward with several of them to the interview phase of the job hunt. I actually feel bad that at some point I will have to tell all but one of them that I can't take the position they are setting up for me.
  
• One lady in particular has been extraordinary. She has given me guidance on how to edit/format my resume to make it more appealing, helped with determining appropriate salary requirements and so forth. If the quality of service she has provided so far continues throughout the process, then I will write a future blog post giving her and her company a glowing recommendation.

On a Personal Note

    While I'm exciting to be moving on to this next chapter of my professional career, I'm also a bit anxious. For my own experiences with some clients, tales from coworkers, and from years of reading The Daily WTF Worse Than Failure, I'm worried about ending up some place that has a development process that would give Rube Goldberg nightmares. I'm trying to come up with questions to ask potential employers to weed these places out. Unless of course they are looking for somebody to come in and whip them into shape... deploy Subversion/CC.NET and teach the team dependency injection, design patterns, automated testing and all of those awesome things that give my brain a chubby. I'm also worried about changing from big-fish-in-a-small-pond into little-fish-in-a-big-pond. Right now I've got my own office with a couch, a 3GHz machine with 4GB of RAM and a 30" monitor, and I can (diplomatically) tell clients and coworkers that they are being idiots because they love me. Next month I'm gonna be "the new guy" and will be giving up many of the comforts I currently have.

    The next step for me is the in-person interviews. I'm not used to being on this side of the interview. Right now I'm trying to mentally prepare myself... what are the key topics to discuss? I should make a list. During the next couple of weeks I will write about my experiences. Stay tuned...