Tipsy, my 18-year-old Maine Coon cat, passed away yesterday at about 12:30. I acquired him as a six-month-old abused kitten, and we haven’t been separated since. I’ve had him for literally half my life. And now, I don’t.
Eighteen years is longer than I ever could have asked for, and not nearly long enough. Rest in peace, Tipsy. I’ll miss you more than I will ever be able to articulate.
There’s a lot of bad research out there. And there’s lots of ways to disguise bad research. Perhaps I’m just overly sensitive to it, but it seems like one awesome way to disguise your bad research is via the use of infographics.
Take, for example, this infographic about the relative impact of social media activity between Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter. In their research, they say that getting more Google Plus activity to be most closely correlated to increased visibility in Google results.
Now, I actually found this picture that explains the differences in social media via donuts1 to be more accurate. I just went and looked at my G+ page. I follow ~100 people there. Now, I freely admit that my sample isn’t anything that could be remotely considered to be statistically significant, and my sample is clearly skewed towards my friends (who are, generally speaking, geeks), but here’s the posts that I found from the past seven days:
Looking over my own experience, this research just doesn’t sit well with me. I don’t know what I could do that would actually get 100 “+1” activities on G+, whereas my recent Facebook post acknowledging my wedding anniversary got ~70 likes and comments within the first 12 hours of the post.
Leaving aside my own experience, though, their methodology seems pretty dodgy. They say that they got 100 G+ followers, and that increased their Google ranking by 14.53; on the other hand, getting 50 Facebook links and shares increased their ranking by 6.9. And they even note that their methodology is dodgy, since they conducted their experiment in different markets with varying degrees of social media sophistication. Also, it’s somehow a surprise that Google’s algorithm would give a higher ranking to activity on G+ rather than a competing site?
But they’ve got a pretty infographic, and they’re trying to sell you search engine optimization solutions, so it must all be good. Their conclusion is just as slimy as you might expect from someone doing such bad research:
Regardless of the individual results, this study is another confirmation of the growing consensus that any well-rounded SEO strategy will have to embrace an element of social media signals.
Yeah. This study is totally confirmation that you need their services! I guess they get credit for being less shady than the fake malware scammers, but I prefer to set the bar higher than that.
I’ve gotten a bunch of fake antivirus/malware scammers calling my home lately. Like others, sometimes I take delight in stringing them along, playing dumb while they try to get access to my machine. Sometimes, I’ll ask them, “What’s Windows?”, waiting for them to figure out that I’m not actually a Windows users at all. Or sometimes, when they tell me that they’re from Microsoft, I’ll use my old Microsoft credentials and say, “wow, I wasn’t aware that we were being more proactive about this, I’m so glad that our company has decided to do more to eradicate malware”. Once they realize that they have someone technically adept on the call, they hang up instantly.
But I’ve never strung them along like this. A couple of weeks ago, one of these scammers cold-called a security researcher from Sourcefire. The security researcher immediately knew that it was a scam, but he decided to take it a step further: he quickly set up a virtual machine for them in VMware Workstation, and let the scammer go to town: “I realized I could give them an environment to bang around in”. So the scammer installed LogMeIn, and then he watched (and, yes, captured video) while the scammer disabled Windows Services and VMware services (but not actually realizing that this means that he’s in a VM!), all the while insisting that he’s removing malware. Then they force a reboot under Safe Mode, which (given that they’ve disabled everything) won’t work properly. This is how they try to get the victim of their scam to freak out and give them their credit card details, and likely will leave the victim with a computer that won’t work at all unless they can find someone else who can figure out that it’s simply that Windows Services have been disabled.
Dark Reading has a good breakdown of the security researcher’s call, and a shortened version of the call is available on YouTube.
On Sunday, my husband and I were sharing breakfast and the newspaper, when I discovered that the San José Mercury News has released its annual Top Workplaces list. Who made the list for large (<500) employees, do you ask? Why, VMware did. We’re also the largest company on that list of large employers, with 3300 employees in the Bay Area. Some of the reasons cited include supportive management, our green initiatives across campus, and our community commitment via the VMware Foundation (amongst others).
Jonathan Rentzch, a Mac developer, wrote an interesting post about the pros and cons of buying Mac apps in the Mac App Store versus buying them directly from the developer.
I think that he sums up the developer experience really well. From an end-user perspective, I think he’s overly dismissive of two major points (easier to buy and install apps, infinitely easier to know when software is updated). I think that he also completely leaves aside the point that the MAS gives a lot of visibility to apps that would otherwise be overlooked. This is good both for developers — even though the MAS takes a bigger cut of sales than developers would have by selling through other methods, the increase in sales probably more than makes up for it — and for end-users. He also doesn’t include the point that developers cannot offer trials via the MAS today, which is negative for end-users. For example, I’m using a trial of BusyCal right now because I wanted to see if it would fit into my workflow before plunking down $50 for it1.
It’s my hope that many of Rentzch’s points, especially those which are about the current sandboxing implementation, will disappear over time, and that the MAS will be a great solution for buying Mac apps.
Back in my programming languages days, when I was on the committee for a programming languages conference, I spent lots of time arguing the pros and cons of certain languages1. I still keep an eye on the programming languages community, even though I haven’t been actively involved since I was the Industry Chair for OOPSLA 2008.
So when I stumbled across this project by a couple of people at UC-Berkeley to cluster programming languages, of course I was interested. They’re collecting opinions about programming languages via survey, and drawing plenty of interesting observations from the data that they’re collecting. They’re showing correlations for various properties about the programming languages. For example, there’s a high positive correlation between “I would use this language for writing server applications” and “the thought of using this language in 20 years fills me with dread”, which I have to admit made me laugh out loud. There’s a high negative correlation between “code written in this language will usually run in all the major implementations if it runs on one” and “I would list this language on my resume”, another correlation which made me laugh. Actually, all of the high correlations for “I would list this language on my resume” are pretty interesting.
For my fellow programming language geeks, you should definitely check out this site. And, of course, you should fill out the survey and help further their research!
VMware did a totally awesome thing last week: we named our first VMware Fellows, Ole Agesen and Mike Nelson. Aside from Ole and Mike getting a spiffy new title, their alma maters each received $800,000 endowments.
Having just been promoted to Staff, I’ve been talking with my manager lately about what my next career goal is. Senior Staff is on my radar as my next move, but now I see I’ve got a new long-term goal to aim for.
I realized today that there’s a flip side to the unsolicited resume: the unsolicited request to submit a resume. In the first case, a job applicant sends an unsolicited resume to someone who they hope is hiring. In the second case, a recruiter or hiring manager sends an unsolicited request to someone who they hope might be interested in working for them.
If I, as someone who has an open position, email you, as someone who I think could be a good fit for my open position, part of my job is to try to convince you that you would be a good fit for the open position. If I’ve worked with you before, then I’ve got a lot of experience and information that I can use when I email you to say that I’m hiring and would love to work with you again. I can use that to craft an email that tells you how much I admired you when we worked together before, how I think that your skills would fit into this open position, how I think that you can grow in your career in this open position (and perhaps how I think that’s different from how you could do so in your current role), and what about the work environment is something that I think that you would find amenable.
If I somehow find you online and don’t know you, then I have to do a lot of work to try to convince you that my open position is one for you. I have to be able to figure out from what I’ve learned from you online (most likely from your LinkedIn profile, maybe from your website too) what it is about you that I think would make you a good fit for my position. I can try to guess at some of the other items that I listed above for the case when I know you and try to convince you that you should take this open position, but I have to tread carefully there.
It’s not enough to email someone and say “I think you’d be a great fit for this position” and then list out the job ad (or part of it). After all, since my contact is unsolicited, I don’t know where you are in your career or what you’re feeling about your current role. If I’m lucky, I’m emailing you at a time when you’re already thinking that maybe you’d like to try out something different, and so my unsolicited email is serendipitously well-timed. If I’m not lucky, I’m emailing you at a time when you have just been promoted, have received a great raise and bonus, are working on an awesome team with a great dynamic, and have the best manager of your career. In that case, I’d have to convince you that you’d get all of that five times over in my open position, and I probably would have to throw in an offer of your very own tropical island too.
These two cases have something quite important in common: since they’re unsolicited, they have to be extremely convincing. They have to convince their recipient that they should take the extra and unexpected work involved to respond in the hoped-for manner.
When you send me an unsolicited resume and I don’t have a job open, you’re asking for me to go and try to convince people that we should interview you, and then (after you’ve rocked the interview) try to convince people that we have to figure out a way to hire you. When I send you an unsolicited request for you to consider an open position on my team, I’m also asking you to spend unexpected time in updating your resume and portfolio, not to mention prepping yourself for an interview.
Whenever you’re crafting an unsolicited pitch, you have to be aware that you’re asking the person receiving your pitch to do work that they probably weren’t planning on doing. To improve your chances of the outcome you’re hoping for, you’ve got to do a lot of work to ensure that your recipient sees the value in taking the time to do so.
Every once in awhile, I get an unsolicited resume from someone who is in user experience and is looking for a new job. I don’t mind this — I know that finding a job is hard, and reaching out to people who have previously said that they’re hiring for a position in your field is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
If your resume is unsolicited, you’ve got to do an even better job than usual of telling me why I should hire you. If I’ve posted here on my blog or on twitter that we’re looking for a new researcher or designer, you’ve got a pretty easy opener for your email to me indicating interest and how you would fit into the team and meet the requirements laid out in the job ad. But if I haven’t posted anything like that lately, or if you’re responding to a very old post, you’ve got to work harder.
I’ve had a rash of unsolicited resumes recently. All of them have consisted of 2 or 3 sentences asking me to consider them for a position on my team. And I’ll be honest: I don’t even bother opening the attached resume or looking up their LinkedIn profile. I do respond to say that we don’t currently have any openings that match the type of position they’ve told me that they’re interested in in those 2-3 sentences, but I don’t look at the resume. If you can’t be bothered to tell me why I should hire you, I can’t be bothered to find out why I should hire you.
Writing a cover letter is hard. It’s hard enough when it’s for an actual advertised position. I understand that it’s doubly hard when you’re sending out a blind resume. But if you don’t even attempt to do so, then I have no reason to consider you.
When I’m hiring, here are a few of the things that I’m looking for:
If you’re sending me an unsolicited resume with only a couple of sentences, you’re not meeting any of these requirements. If you don’t meet any of these requirements, it’s not worth my time to try to dig deeper to see if you might meet other requirements. If I don’t have a position open but I have a great candidate, there’s a lot that I can do to try to create an open headcount. I can have a conversation with my management about why we should go to upper management or to HR to fight for a headcount. I can make sure that they understand how awesome the candidate is and that they would add a lot to our team, and that we should try to figure out a way to make this happen. But this is quite a lot of effort on my part, and it’s probably a lot of effort on the part of my manager too, and it’s all effort that we weren’t planning on expending.
If you’re going to essentially cold call me, you’ve got to have a very convincing story. If we talk and have a great conversation but I don’t have a position open now, and I can’t shake loose a headcount from my VP, I’ll remember you in the future. That means that when I do get a headcount, you’ll be one of the first people who I contact to let you know that my team has an opening that might be a good fit for you. Without that convincing story, you won’t stick in my memory, and I’ll never remember to contact you when a relevant position does come available.
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