Call this the I.T. professional’s guide to getting hunted. I sat down with my good friend Myna Sabado, who works as a headhunter for various companies and I.T. professionals. We talked about various aspects of her job, and how people are going about finding jobs these days.

In what industry do you work?
For recruitment? Mainly I.T.

Is there a particular reason why you chose I.T.?
Because I was a former I.T. person. It’s easier for me to evaluate the candidates because they work in a field familiar to me. Also, the clients that I know are mainly in I.T., so more or less my network is in that industry.

But of course the companies that you hire for are from different industries. Because everyone needs I.T., right?
Yes, that’s it.

So how do you get to meet your clients?
With the companies, I do networking. It starts with the client of a friend that’s referred to me, and then it grows from there. The client in turn likes what I did and he will refer me to another company. I don’t usually do cold calls, because the success rate is less than if you work with people you know personally. I work through relationships.

With the candidates, it starts with friends too. Friends refer them to me. I join online groups, and become active in them.

What kind of groups?
They’re all I.T. groups. Like Java programmer groups, for instance. I befriend their moderators. If you post regularly, the members get to know you, and they give you their resumes. And the others I meet through friends. But 80% of them I meet through networking and friends, 20% from search engines like Jobstreet and JobsDB. I network with the candidates I meet through Jobstreet and JobsDB, too. One percent of my candidates come from social networking groups like Friendster, Multiply and Linkedin, which is where I primarily find my top companies and candidates. Candidates also post their CV in Linkedin.

So if someone gives you his or her resume and it looks good, would you accept it even if you didn’t know him or her personally?
Yes. I can use any resume so long as the candidate is in I.T. I put these resumes in an active file, so when a job opens up, I can find potential candidates from that pile.

In your opinion, what kind of companies would benefit from hiring a headhunter? Read more

I’d always thought that people who worked with computers would have excellent communication skills. Computer programmers have to work with syntax, after all. And syntax is basically grammar for computer languages. As a matter of fact, syntax is much more unforgiving. Unlike humans, who can still get the gist of the phrase “Who did you met yesterday?”, computers require perfect syntax to be able to process your code. (Yes, they’re stupid that way.) Back during college, computer science majors could hold their own in writing contests. Also, teachers from the computer department had excellent speaking skills. It all made perfect sense to me.

Of course, at some point after leaving college I realized that computer skills and communication skills didn’t always go hand in hand. At least, not English skills anyway. (After all, just because you aren’t good at speaking or writing English, it didn’t mean you have bad communication skills — English probably just isn’t your first language.) I did notice, though, that most I.T. professionals were quite articulate. However, I did wonder: was it so important that they have good English skills too? Read more

I’m still having mixed feelings about the recent MRT policy of reserving the first car for women, disabled, children and the elderly. For one thing, I take the train every week and I’ve never actually seen anything that women commuters need protection from. Once I got an e-mail forward written by a woman who complained about a guy staring at her chest while on the MRT, but as I (1) didn’t know who she was and (2) wasn’t sure it wasn’t a hoax, I forgot all about it. That’s about it. (I know the LRT has had that policy for a while now, but I’ve only rode on that a couple of times, so I can’t comment about that.)

It’s not very flattering that the good people who run the MRT think that women need the same special consideration as people with disabilities, children and the elderly. After all, we can kick, scratch and run entire multi-national corporations. Read more

Telecommuting is a rather tempting job prospect. You can avoid the rush hour traffic, work in your pajamas and not have to worry about your boss finding out you’ve been downloading pictures of James Franco since 10am.

Other perks include

1. You save on gas.
2. You save on office clothes.
3. You save on eating out.

Because of the obvious advantages to you as an employee, you’d think you can take a pay cut and still come out ahead. This isn’t really true in all cases. Read more

Lately, I’ve been getting requests to make open-source versions of commercially bought software. The usual complaints about those software include:

1. They require the company to regularly renew licenses not only for that application, but for the O.S. and database engines. That costs a bundle. I, on the other hand, just need to be paid once.
2. They’re hard to customize.
3. They don’t work.

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Although I’m quite happy as a freelancer and not looking for a full-time gig, I do look at job ads in my industry if only to be aware of trends. The kind of expertise companies are looking for have much to do with what kind of technologies are popular these days.

It always annoys me when I see ads that specify the sex of the person they want to hire. It’s one thing to open up a modelling job for females only, but it’s different in I.T. Or at least, it ought to be. After all, a penis or lack thereof has no bearing on the work of programmers or systems analysts. Granted, a female is less likely to use variables like “$guwapo_ako” in their scripts (yes, I’ve seen it happen)*, but in the first place, managers really ought to be stricter with coding guidelines.
Read more

(Via Lifehacker.)

ChowsChina has produced a rather interesting USB gadget: a coffee warmer that plugs right into your computer.

Read more

“Grey’s Anatomy” has replaced “The O.C.” as my official guilty TV pleasure. It was looking like “Desperate Housewives” was gonna take that title, but after season 1, I found myself not laughing as much — plus Mary Alice’s voiceover was getting tedious.

Anyway, I’m watching “Grey’s” right now, and I got to thinking: why are there so many medical dramas, but not a single drama about people working in the computer industry? After all, geeky occupations are now cool, thanks to Bruckheimer and his CSI television franchise. Plus, we I.T. geeks can be very good looking — it’s not hard to picture, say, Ann Curtis, Kristen Bell or Chad Michael Murray playing us on the small screen.

Now picture the drama, the tension, the unbridled passions in a tv series like no other: “Ada’s Notes“.*

Episode 1: Love v. 2.1
Ada: Did you let me work on the Mercer system because I slept with you?
Michael: Yes. Just kidding.
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As much as I don’t want to be horribly prosaic and start doing new year’s resolutions, I think I can stand to make a few improvements in my work habits. So here are my work resolutions for 2006:

6. I should avoid grunge music while working, as air drumming gets in the way of the actual working.
5. No alcohol before 11 a.m. All right, I’m kidding: I meant 10 a.m.
4. Stop eating lunch in front of the computer. I mean it.
3. I will stop making fun of clients’ badly written site content as it is not professional behavior for a web consultant.
2. I will practice better debugging behavior. Yelling at the function script will not make it work.
1. I shall learn to talk to clients about money without my eyes glazing over or falling asleep.

Stuff I like to do while crunching code:

1. Watch television. Work is no excuse for missing “Scrubs“. I have my set right beside my workstation, facing me. It used to be positioned on my right, and I started getting the most horrible headaches and eye strain. I thought I just needed more sleep, then it dawned on me that twelve hours of sleep a day is just an obscene amount for anyone over the age of two.
2. Play music. Really loud. When one feels like headbanging, one’s fingers just fly across the keyboard. One starts to imagine one is in a hacker movie, and the soundtrack is playing to distract the audience from the fact that one’s regex is not working the way one wants.
3. Drink. After I’ve consumed my second cup of coffee, I binge on water to help keep me awake. Sometimes, I have a blogger (vodka and mango juice) if the work is so easy a handicap, such as slight inebriation, would make things more interesting.
4. Eat. I hate breaking my train of thought, which is what happens when I have to get up to go to the kitchen. So I like to keep snacks within reach — peanuts, cookies, a pot roast, etc.
5. Learn a new language. – Sometimes, I play foreign language lesson CDs even while the TV is on. If I had any actual pets at my flat, they’d go mad.