My lifetime chance

I had my lifetime chance, but I turned it down

In the beginning of this summer I was offered a dream job, but I turned it down and I will tell you why.

What's a dream job

A dream job is something very unique, you and I have probably different ideas what that would be. What we do have in common is that it is something that we really want to have. It might not exist, or we are not aware if it does, or it exist very few of them. Probably its something that is really hard to get.

Something else that also could be said about a dream job, is that it gives something to you. It could be lot of money, a carer opportunity, working with latest technology or  something really interesting and motivating. It could also be so that it requires sacrifice from us that we are not willing to give.  

The first contact

In the beginning of the summer I was contacted by a recruitment firm and they were interested in my profile for a potential job position. This wasn't the first time I have been contacted, but I am a open person, so I always listen.  

-Wow! Is this for true? Does a such job exist?  Does they really want me?  

That was my first thoughts.  

Note: I have a good job with great colleagues and benefits, so I am not desperate looking for a new job, but I always listen if someone offering me something better. The "worst thing" that can happen is that I have to practice to market myself.

I discussed the offering with my family if I should proceed or not, mostly because it would require time away from my family and it was a international company without a office in Sweden (the purpose was to start up a business in Sweden). I decided to proceed. It sounded as a dream job and a lifetime chance. I updated my CV, mailed it to the recruitment firm and then the process started.  

The interview process

During one and a half month there were several interviews over phone and Skype, with the recruitment firm, potential manager and colleague and they all went well. Afterwards it was time for a test were my technical skills should be verified. I did really well (has I been told). It felt great and I actually started to believe that this was something for me, but also I was something for them.  

Because this company don't have any office in Sweden and I am full aware of differences in cultures, I raised some questions early, so we (I and them) could stop this process early if necessary. It would later show that the differences were not understood well enough.  

After all phone interviews and the test, it was time for the first face to face meeting in a hotel room in Copenhagen. The interview process started to reach its end. If this meeting went well it would then mostly be about formal issues if we would come to an agreement or not. I went to the meeting, it was a tuff meeting. They throw questions at me and I tried to answer them as good as I could. There were no room for rest and I was under hard pressure. In the end of the meeting there were room for me to ask questions. My focus was to be calm and answer honestly on all questions. If this job change should be successful, it must be a win-win situation.

I believe the meeting went well and I had probably proceed to the next step if it not were for something one of the interviewer said. I won't go into details but it concerns something really important in our culture and that was one of the the things I raised early during the process. This was the end.

Summary

Why am I telling you about this? When you do business with other people and they have different culture, you have to do your home work. You don't need to understand the other culture, but you must accept there is a difference, words can have different meaning and what you value in life is not necessarily the same. If you do your home work well, you will have a better chance to be successful in your business.  

About the job role, I am convinced it was perfect for me (and vice versa) and it offered lot of new challenges and possibilities. Unfortunately there was a culture collision and I felt very sad to call back and say no. I got to taste of something that could have been my dream job.

Now life consists of so much more than work achievements and I feel strong and proud of myself that I turned the offering down. Even if I didn't got this job, I have learned a lot.

• I got to practice to market myself
• I learned more about international interview process
• I learned more about the importance of culture awareness
• I learned more about another company
• and the best part, I learned more about myself

Keep it small

It has been written about before. Its nothing new. Yet it is so difficult to keep the code small and I am talking about functions, files and modules.

Every day I see functions that are so large that its more or less impossible to understand what it does. Writing unit test takes more time than writing the acutal product code. Metrics like cyclomatic complexity and fan-in/fan-out is so high you get terrified. The code speak:

- Don’t touch me! You are on a mine field!

Why is it so hard to write good code?

We can’t blaim lack of tools because there are a dozens of the them out ther. Some of them are even free!

I belive its about people and culture. If you are working in a enviroment were people only focus on delivery, the quick and dirty solution will often be the way forward. And often it works fine. Its first when someone new looks at the code the problems gets visible. If same people work with the same code all the time, the problem gets hidden, because they have grown togehter with the code and knew the history behind every statement.

By writing small functions, your code gets easier to maintain, understand and modify.
By writing small functions, it gets easier to write tests, which is you saftey net tomorrow.
By writing small functions, its easier to reuse code and keeps the footprint smaller.
By writing small functions, the are less bugs and they are easier to find.

Software Quality - Interest of improvement

In previous post I discussed if it's possible to improve the quality and the conclusion was: it is, which is not surprising. I also divided software quality into two groups, functional and none-functional, to make software quality easier to reason about (which it isn't).

In this post  and the next I will discuss what is required to improve the quality and two parts that are necessary are:

• interest of improvement
• knowledge of you current quality

Interest of improvement

Before you can take any actions to improvement, there must exist a interest of improvement. Normally a company wants good quality on it's products so the customer are satisfied and continues to buy/recommend the product. You want:

• the response time of your web browser to be than your competitors, else users will abandon you product.
• to be able to test the product continuously in a reliable way to changes can be made earlier
• the code to be clean and easy to work with, to make it possible to add new feature easier.

But all this will not happened by itself. It’s the people in your company that will make it happened. You need employee's that are like sports people that always seek ways to improvement. So how do you get them? Either you have been lucky with you recruitment or you have a company culture that endorse caring about quality and sharing knowledge. Geoff Schaadt has written an excellent post about How to make your employees care about quality. He writes:
“how do you make your employees care about anything? You can’t make them.”

It means that you can only create a culture that makes people care.

Different people
People are different and have different interest. We want people in our company and teams to be different, because it’s from their discussions innovations are started.
We want different people that are interested to learn more and a company that creates a caring culture.


In the next part I will continue with knowledge of your current quality.