Be a Better Leader

Searching for a job in Seattle 2/2

Sun, 09 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0700

This is the continuation of my job search odyssey (first three months may be found here).

Month 4 (January): coding

I stopped applying desperately for a job. In fact, I found out, that there are around 10 companies at most that could actually provide H1B sponsorship and those companies are the hardest to get into.

I decided to invest most of my free time now in coding skills improvement: I’m learning new libraries, remembering programming foundations, working on a couple of personal projects as well as contributing to an open source systems.

During January I had one more quite successful screening. This is how my work desk looks like just before the screening call:

I try to surround myself with different notes, diagrams, lists, etc - in case I forget what are my weaknesses :)

I joined hired.com, created a profile there, successfully passed a coding test. My profile got approved! They claim they approve 10% of all applications - so this is quite an achievement. They even have scheduled an auction date for me. But guess what!? :) Right, visa stuff, again! It appears that hired.com works only with the candidates that are authorized to work or have a transferable work visa.

So this is a list of tasks I have accomplished during January:

Got approved on hired.com
Found a hacker rank
Attended meet-ups.

Month 5 (February): high season

This was the month that any job seeker would be dreaming to have. I’ve been really busy, having in average 4 calls a week (there were days when I had two interviews a day) with different recruiters and hiring managers. In addition to that I had a full day on-site interview cycle, which was actually fun.

This is how I prepare for the tech interview:

I bought some thin markers (which I actually took to my onsite interview :), the thinner the line, the more code you can write on the same whiteboard area) and some huge paper sheets (that immitate whiteboard for me) to practice coding excerises.

Now I am a bit more relax, since I’m doing quite well with all those screenings and I’m moving further through interview processes with several different companies. My confidence grows, so as happiness.

TA DA! Late February I got an offer! It’s an awesome company and a job I could only dream of.

This is a list of events and tasks for February:

5 screenings with HR
5 tech screenings
1 whole day on-site interviewing

Month 6 (March): the end of job search ‘project’

After getting an offer I went through brief negotiation round and accepted it. My “searching for a job” project is completed successfully and in time. I’m so excited and want to share these great news with the whole world, but I guess I need to suspend emotions here - it’s just the very first step in a long “getting work visa” process. After accepting the offer and signing the agreement I canceled my interview appointments with other companies and unsubscribed from LinkedIn’s Job seeker’s subscription.

This is a list of events and tasks for March:

Accepted offer after one round of negotiations
Canceled interview processes with other 2 companies
Visa application process (I think I’ll have a separate blog post on the visa peculiarities)
Unsubscribed from LinkedIn’s Job seeker premium

Epilogue

Entering the new era now - H1B application process. Will see what it brings me. But that’s a totally new topic. Who knows maybe later I’ll decide to write a diary entry about it as well.

I hope this was if not useful then at least interesting to read. I think I will definitely look into these posts if I need to prepare for a job search, though I hope I will not be in a such situation again. I believe I will be “head-hunted” in the future, and I won’t need to search for a job actively ever again.

Searching for a job in Seattle 1/2

Sun, 24 Jul 2016 00:00:00 -0700

In this and next post I’m going to reveal my diary from almost two years ago. This is my story of searching for a job. I’ll be glad if someone finds it useful or interesting.

October, 2014. This is it - I’ve moved to Seattle, WA (my husband got an offer from Amazon and I decided to bring my career to next level and continue it in USA). With this I got a new challenge - find a job that I would love and be able to deliver value to people. I decided to think of this job search as a project with a very specific goal: to get employed; a huge number of requirements: job should be the one I would be happy at, would match my skills and experience, the employer should be willing to sponsor H1B for me, etc. I have a hard deadline I need to get an offer before March 2015 (in this case there will be a month left to prepare and fill H1B application to submit it on the 1st of April, 2015 in order to start working from October, 2015). So roughly I have 6 months. I have many different tasks to complete and 3rd parties to coordinate and communicate.

I’ve created a backlog with tasks to complete and major milestones to deliver (such as list of companies to apply, connections to establish, list of positions, CV, cover letters, etc.)

In this and following blog posts I’ll try to capture my journey to the goal of being hired by some awesome company.

Month 1 - October: Slow-slow start

It is October - the first month at a new work for my husband and the first time of being unemployed for me. I need to accept it. It still bothers me.

I did very little for a job search this month because I had lots of thing to set up due to reallocation. Here is the list of tasks I have accomplished by now:

Updated LinkedIn account for Job seeker premium: 1 month free, $29.99 monthly fee
Prepared “awesome job search” backlog
Made updates to my profile: changed location to Greater Seattle Area, updated the dates of my last employment
Asked my colleagues for references and recommendations
Asked my HR colleagues to share the best CVs they had ever received for an example
Started updating my CV - decided to do one (two at max) pager
Got recommendations!
Made a list of companies to check. Here it is: companies to check
Redesigned and rephrased my resume - check it out here
Also after browsing nearly 30 LinkedIn profiles of people having similar positions I want to have, updated my LinkedIn profile

Month 2 - November: Sad but true

Finally I got several calls with recruiters from different rather small companies scheduled. Yey! Not a dream jobs seems to be, but will be a great practice before desirable interviews, I thought. But very quickly I realised, these “screening” calls will not help me “practice” interviews at all, because all of them ended after the very first question: “Are you authorised for work in US?”. No. Thanks. Bye.

After constant work with LinkedIn profile, I got into top 2% profile views among all my connections.

This is a list of tasks I have accomplished during November:

Got enrolled into Microsoft referral program.
Applied for 30 MS positions.
Attended 2 meet-ups, met many Agile enthusiasts, developers, Product Managers

Month 3 - December: I have a chance!

Made a mini research about ATS (Applicant Tracking System) and got a critical look at my cv, analyzed tons of job ads and requirements. All findings from these activities resulted in changed resume. Here is the new version, I’m happy with this one - it’s confident, strict to the point and result oriented, at least I think so now :).

After heavily applying online to lots of companies with this new resume :) I finally got a response - meaning I passed through ATS! Huraayyy! Got 3 promising emails to schedule possible screenings. 2 of them somehow just stopped in the middle of arranging the date of a call. But one - ended-up in a screening call with a hiring manager.

Oh boy, how excited I was! I’ve did all the preparations I thought would be needed:

starting from reading everything about the company, news, CEO interviews, trends, teams, open positions, technologies, business, clients, etc,
taking a walk in the morning and bringing my self to the good, positive mood;
did some exercises right before the call to lift-up the energy.

The call went very well. I enjoyed it myself, we had a very interesting conversation, I was truly excited and liked everything hiring manager told, asked, answered. I think he liked this call too, he even mentioned he wanted me for the interview on-site. Next day I got an email from the HR, unfortunately they needed to fill the position right now and could not wait for the visa process. I am getting used for this response. I need to somehow solve this challenge.

So this is a list of tasks I have accomplished during December:

0 value from Microsoft referral program, consultant “worked” with me for 3 weeks. To tell the truth I didn’t get what exactly was his doing except of sending me 2 template emails.
Attended Career Excellence seminar and a Career Mixer
Spend a lot of time on algorithms and data structures, as well as solving various coding challenges.

Ideal team size: less is more

Wed, 05 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0700

There are different theories on what’s the optimal size for a team. In a first Scrum guide it was mentioned that development team should be 5-9 Scrum guide, February 2010. Amazon has two pizza rule, which is what? 4-7 members or so. Jurgen Appelo suggests it’s 5 in a blog post The Optimal Team Size is Five.

I say it’s - 3!

This is why I think so:

Smaller team - less risk. I see it as an analogy to Continuous delivery and risk correlation. The less code you produce and more frequently you release - less risk of breaking something you have.
The smaller the team - the more important each member is. When you are a member of a small team - you make much bigger impact in oppose to for example if you are one of 9 members in a team.
Having a constrain of small teams - you will be forced to architecture your solution as decoupled as you can. Most of the time it’s a good thing if you plan to grow and scale. Which is in synch with microservices concept, everyone is talking about now.

Since team is a group of people and 1 is totally not a group and 2 is a couple :), then 3 - is a group and the smallest possible team.

There are some more nice to have features that come with teams of 3:

When the team is 3 - it’s easier to cover for each other. Most likely you will avoid ending up with the situation when only one team member knows particular part of the code, because of a huge scope your team owns.
Conformance will be the highest in a team of 3. According to a social impact theory, conformance is at it’s peak when the team is 3-4. Meaning that attitudes, beliefs and behaviour will match easier in such team. And as you know: Social pressure, used correctly: far more powerful that hierarchy, no damaging side-effects from Organize for Complexity.
When you are in a really small team - the feeling of being involved and making a change is strong and direct - your actions are more immediate.
3 is an odd number, which is good when you need to vote for something in the team - you avoid ending-up in a dead heat.

I worked with different sized teams: from huge ones - ~15 people and to one person ‘teams’. I liked teams of 3 the most. To tell the truth, I prefer when teams form and evolve naturally; but if I needed to create one - I’d go with 3 developers.

How big is your team? What’s your optimal number?

Contributing to BeBetterDeveloper blog

Wed, 05 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0700

You probably have noticed, that a couple of my recent blog posts are a bit too technical to be published under BeBetterLeader name. Since some of my readers are leading or seeking to lead non-technical (not software development related) teams, I decided to move these posts under the BeBetterDeveloper name. I plan to continue writing more of them.

So if you are interested in JavaScript, React.js, Flux, AngularJS, Gulp, Mocha and other JavaScript frameworks, tools and libraries - check it out or maybe follow it :).

If you are not into programming, that’s awesome - you are more than welcome here ;) I will definitely keep on posting my ideas in this blog.

ES2015 + React using Gulp

Tue, 14 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0700

1/4/2016: I have updated this blog post by adding steps to install needed libraries and added command list for easy and fast start.

Recently I started exploring new features of ECMAScript 2015 while using React. So here is how I set-up my dev environment with gulp. I have 2 simple steps (running one after other in this sequence):

Transform XLS files: I precompile React JSX template files into plain JavaScript using gulp-react:
Transform ES2015 files: I take JavaScript files, produced after first transformation and turn them into ES5 files using gulp-babel:

Before running these tasks be sure you have all necessary packages installed on your machine:

$npm install gulp gulp-react gulp-babel gulp-open

Here it all gathered and chained together:

In addition to two transformation tasks I like to open output in browser, for this I use gulp-open.

I use Visual Studio Code as my IDE, so I have set this gulp task named “build” as a build task in VS Code settings.

And now once I change code and want to check it - I just press ⇧⌘B (on Mac) and the result is in front of me.

To try it working on your machine:

git clone git@github.com:LenaBarinova/react-es6-gulp-example.git
cd react-es6-gulp-example
npm install gulp gulp-react gulp-babel gulp-open
gulp build

'Static HTML' is the new Black

Fri, 10 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0700

This blog was created in March, 2013. Back then I decided to make it in Wordpress. Since public Wordpress has very limited functionality - I chose on-site Wordpress, but I needed to host it somewhere. My husband is Azure MVP :) so this was no brainer - Azure it was.

For two years it served it’s purpose, but now I want simpler setup with more freedom to change the appearance.

A couple of weeks ago I introduced new version of this blog. Now it is static HTML pages, originally written in markdown, then Jekyll generated to static HTML pages and hosted on GitHub Pages.

In this blog post I’ll shortly compare several aspects of previous and currents setups.

Infrastructure & costs

Since I maintain and develop and write my blogs all by myself, infrastructure is of the importance for me. It should be easy to support and low in cost.

Old (Wordpress)

Wordpress was hosted on Azure Websites (now it’s called Azure Web App) with PHP running on IIS, all the blog data (pages, posts, categories, tags - everything was stored in Azure SQL Database). Static data, such as images, videos - were stored and served from Azure Blob Storage.

This is a complete list of Azure services I used:

Monthly costs for Azure services were quite low: 30 days of Azure SQL Server and 720 hours of Web Services cost up tp 9 EUR (not that I need to pay it, this figure is basically for those bloggers who doesn’t have a Azure-MVP-husband).

New (GitHub Pages)

New blog setup doesn’t require to worry about infrastructure and services - it’s all taken care by GitHub. Current setup is very simple and easy. I just created gh-pages branch for my site - and it worked - seamlessly.

And by the way, it is free.

Workflow of blog post creation

So what does it take to write a blog now and how was it back then?

Old (Wordpress)

Wordpress has a pretty good administration site. So new blog post creation was very simple - just write a text, add pictures, press publish and voilà! - you have your post published. Though I had not that much control of how post looked.

New (GitHub Pages)

Now it’s even easier - I can simply write a markdown (and it’s very flexible I may flavour it with HTML - and make anything I like in it) on a GitHub and it automatically appears publicly. Although, as for me I don’t feel that strong to “code in production” - I need to double-check everything in a test environment (posts as well). So what I do - is I have two branches: master and gh-pages. In a master branch I have all the sources of the blog. Once I add new blog post - I run Jekyll locally to test it. Jekyll generates HTML to gh-pages branch for me. So when I’m happy with a new blog post - I just push it to GitHub.

Summary

Shortly - I love everything about my current blog: how it looks, the setup, maintenance effort[less].

PROS

no need to maintain infrastructure
easy to change looks (it was quite a job to change Wordpress theme to look exactly how I wanted)
just what I need, no additional features - I never use
free hosting

CONS

no UI for editing posts (which is not a problem in my case, I use VisualStudio Code to write markdown)
many of Jekyll plugins are not allowed on gh-pages, so basically many things you need to program yourself (which I totally don’t mind)

I would not be willing to return to Wordpress (not that it is bad in any ways, but this current setup works better for my case).

P.S.: In my next blog post I’ll go through migration process: shortly describe what steps did it take and what tools and technologies I used. So stay tuned :).

Quiet

Tue, 07 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Here is a brief take-aways after reading one more good book - Quiet by Susan Cain.

This book helps you to understand people better, to know how different they can be and what their behavior could mean, how to embrace your quietness and make it work for you.

Here are some quotes I liked:

We don’t need giant personalities to transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own egos but the institutions they run.

Open-plan offices have been found to reduce productivity and impair memory.

Studies have shown that performance gets worse as group size increases: groups of nine generate fewer and poorer ideas compared to groups of six, which do worse than groups of four.

Another study, of 38,000 knowledge workers across different sectors, found that the simple act of being interrupted is one of the biggest barriers to productivity. Even multitasking, that prized feat of modern-day office warriors, turns out to be a myth. Scientists now know that the brain is incapable of paying attention to two things at the same time. What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduces productivity and increases mistakes by up to 50 percent.

The “Bus to Abilene” anecdote reveals our tendency to follow those who initiate action— any action. We are similarly inclined to empower dynamic speakers.

For all the managers, who does “people management” (I so don’t like this phrase, but haven’t found a better one), I would definitely recommend reading this book, or at least watch for this 20 minutes Susan Cain TED talk. The talk is not that good and detailed as the book, but still it gives you the main idea.

P.S.: By the middle of the book I’ve started thinking that I am more introvert than extrovert, though always thought opposite :)

Here is how I spend my weekdays as unemployed

Wed, 25 Feb 2015 00:00:00 -0800

I was always curious what do people do all day long if they do not work!? For me it was frightening question. Since I can remember all my weekdays were preoccupied with important activities and rather strict schedule: first, school and after school lectures, then university and different kinds of part time jobs and later, professionally developing software for ten years.

Pretty much all the weekdays were predefined for me: wakeup in the morning, travel to work, work, travel home, yoga class, two-three hours of a free personal time, go to sleep. Roughly rounding: 11 hours work related activities and 5 hours of non work related activities and 8 hours for sleep. So what do you do 16 hours a day if you don’t work!!??

5 months ago I decided to leave my dream job and move to Seattle in search for even better one. So for 5 months I’m unemployed and have 16 hours of a personal time everyday in my possession. And believe me, from the day one of my unemployment I started getting this frightening “What do you do all day long” question very often.

Recently I’ve read interesting statistics on how do Americans spend their weekdays and decided to share my daily routine. Here is how my weekday agenda looks like:

7:00 Wake up

7:30 - 8:30 Brisk walk (I escort my husband to his office and come back home)

8:30 - 12:00 News & job search: catching-up with news and blogs on software development and management (mostly, via Feedly) or perform job search activities, such as: searching for new connections on LinkedIn, writing emails to recruiters, filling in job applications forms, etc.

12:00 - 13:00 Workout in a gym & short daily yoga class (while working out in a gym I try to listen to various podcasts)

13:00 - 13:30 Lunch

13:30 - 15:00 Listening to lectures (currently it’s Princeton University Algorithms course provided by Coursera or MIT Open Courseware Computer Science lectures)

15:00 - 18:30 Programming (I decided to learn Ruby, so now I’m implementing various classic algorithms, data structures and solve interesting coding challenges using Ruby)

I will not say, that all days are the same, the energy level is high and I wish to do all these activities instead of procrastinating on the internet or doing something else.

But when these days come, I go out to work in some public place: either lounge areas in my building or some coffee shop in a neighborhood. This helps to overcome laziness and to stay focused on a task.

In addition to this agenda, at least twice a month I attend different Agile, Project Management, Software Development Management and similar meet-ups and gatherings in Seattle. From time to time my agenda changes because of webinars I chose to listen online.

I tried to achieve two main goals while planning my time:

Make the day as similar to ordinary work day as possible
Perform only professionally valid activities during daytime

With such agenda I feel that I do not waste my time and I am no longer afraid of the question “So what do you do all day long (if you are not working)?”.

Although I am happy with my unemployment days, I’d rather found a job sooner to fill my 16 hours of personal time with actual work.

A 'must-know' for each dev and dev manager

Wed, 21 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0800

If you are a developer and seeking to become better - learn and constantly refresh your knowledge of basic data structures and algorithms.

A good motivational quote by Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux) why to learn basics:

I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

There is a great opportunity to take a free online class on this topic at Coursera. I’ve just finished these two: Algorithms part I and Algorithms part II. I can highly recommend these courses for all the developers and development managers.

Here is the minimal set of data structures and algorithms every developer and dev manager must know:

Data Structures (linked lists, hash tables, arrays, trees, stacks, queues, graphs, heap)
Big O notation, time and space complexity (very good cheatsheet for this: http://bigocheatsheet.com/)
Algorithms
- Sorting (insertion, merge, quick, radix, heap)
- Searching (linear search, binary search, depth first search, breadth first search, string manipulation)
- Iteration (various tree traversals, list traversal)

I know, that most of developers and dev managers are in continuous self-improvement process: learning new things, reading articles and listening to presentations, etc. You are doing a great job!

But for those, who feels a bit rusty - start today and these courses I’ve mentioned are the best way to do it.

By the way, for those who want to exercise - check this great site with tons of coding challenges: http://www.hackerrank.com.

P.S.: What do you think? What would you add to this list?

Late retro of 2014

Wed, 07 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0800

Following the tradition, in this post I’m looking back to 2014 to summarize most significant things that happened to me during this year.

Blog

I’ve managed to keep my blog alive! During 2014 I have written 25 blog posts (for 2013 it was 33), though I written less, visits increased almost twice - from 2500 (for 2013) to 4800 unique visits.

Travel

This year was exceptional in terms of traveling for me. Not only I’ve visited 6 countries, was abroad for 54 days, but also I’ve moved to US in October.

Presentations and trainings

In 2014 I started to give trainings and consulting for companies that want to adopt Agile. I’ve done 3 two-days Agile private trainings for companies and 5 lectures for students. Also made one new presentation on how to deal with challenges (slides).

Self-education and conferences

In 2014 I’ve completed coaching course, took a couple more courses at Coursera. Attended these workshops:

High Performance through Learning by Niels Pflaeging
Product management workshop by Bob Marshall
In October became Certified Scrum Professional.

Career

It was rather a sad moment for me, in October I left Adform and followed my husband to US. He got a job at Amazon, so I decided to look for new career opportunities in Greater Seattle Area.

Lots of great moments I had in Adform, meaningful and happy time working with smart people, newest technologies, creating the best ad platform.

Miss my great D&D team. In a photo you can see the farewell gift my team made me :)

Thrilled and excited I’m looking forward for 2015 and all the challenges and opportunities it’ll bring.