{"id":590,"date":"2012-10-28T22:39:50","date_gmt":"2012-10-29T03:39:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/?p=590"},"modified":"2012-10-28T22:39:50","modified_gmt":"2012-10-29T03:39:50","slug":"responding-to-recruiters-priority-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/archives\/590\/responding-to-recruiters-priority-list\/","title":{"rendered":"Responding to Recruiters: Priority List"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I get a handful of recruiters who are looking to find me a role in their companies. (Sometimes they are also looking for people who aren&#8217;t me to fill roles &#8212; which I usually pass on to others by saying &#8220;Anyone looking for a job?&#8221;, getting a chorus of &#8220;Nope&#8221;, and moving on.)<\/p>\n<p>While responding to one of these recently, I ran down the checklist I have in my head for what is important to me in looking at a new job. I think that the list of items on this list are essentially a log-scale order of binary predictors for how likely I am to consider a switch to another position; for example, I don&#8217;t think that it&#8217;s plausible to imagine that I&#8217;d consider any position that didn&#8217;t have the first two conditions met.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Work from Cambridge, MA, ideally in a local office or some other employer-sponsored working space. (Things that are close enough: Cambridge, Boston. Things that are not close enough: Lexington, Waltham, Billerica.)<\/li>\n<li>Working in a working environment which supports flexibility in work schedule, and is supportive of work\/life balance. <\/li>\n<li>Working on projects that I don&#8217;t personally consider dishonest or immoral. <\/li>\n<li>Working with user data &#8212; the bigger the better. <\/li>\n<li>Working on projects which are visible to the public. <\/li>\n<li>Working on interesting new technologies, especially technologies which can be open sourced and shared. <\/li>\n<li>Working with maps, or geospatial data. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>(Compensation also plays a role, but I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve ever not responded to a recruiter based on that fact.)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not actively looking for a job &#8212; despite Nokia&#8217;s overall poor performance, I work under the &#8216;Location and Commerce&#8221; group inside Nokia that is still making a healthy profit on our overall activities. Most importantly to me, I work with the same team I&#8217;ve worked with for more than 6 years now, so switching jobs would be a painful transition that is unlikely to be enticing without a really strong offer.<\/p>\n<p>That said, I often read the engineering blogs of places like Yelp, Netflix, and Foursquare and think &#8220;Man, wouldn&#8217;t it be cool to work someplace where maybe I couldn&#8217;t put out fires all the time? Where occasionally, I could actually work on cool stuff?&#8221; (Note that my brief research into Netflix indicates that it fails *both* of the first items on my list, so it&#8217;s evident that &#8220;Companies doing cool things&#8221; is not synonymous with companies for whom I would want to work.) <\/p>\n<p>I just miss the days of MetaCarta when occasionally, I got to put together something interesting without spending 75% of my time fighting against people inside my own company, and I dream that somewhere out there, there must be other cool companies to work for where that&#8217;s not the case. I&#8217;m not convinced this isn&#8217;t just a &#8216;grass is always greener&#8217; thought, though. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>(If you are looking for a senior software developer, and think your company can meet all of the criteria above and be cooler than where I work now, feel free to drop me a line.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I get a handful of recruiters who are looking to find me a role in their companies. (Sometimes they are also looking for people who aren&#8217;t me to fill roles &#8212; which I usually pass on to others by saying &#8220;Anyone looking for a job?&#8221;, getting a chorus of &#8220;Nope&#8221;, and moving on.) While responding [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}