Senior Technology Architect
Are you a rock star architect? A programming champion? An expert in enterprise architecture and high-performance, event-driven systems? An authority on software development process and methodologies? Are you challenged by understanding the business problem and mapping out a clear path to solving it? Does leading a team to meet big obstacles head on excite you? If so, Bridgewater Associates wants you to help us revolutionize our mission-critical technologies.

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Architect/Technical Lead at ThoughtWorks
If you would like to…

• Architect, and subsequently help develop, Enterprise-scale Applications and Systems from the ground up.
• Guide a team to consistency and creativity throughout the software development lifecycle
• Take a technical leadership role and help shape the “big picture” on projects
• Collaborate on architecture and design decisions with a team of exceptionally talented developers in an non-hierarchical environment
• Help ThoughtWorks to continue to build robust, technically leading edge systems for clients, across a variety of domains that continually raise the bar in delivering business value.

We want to hear from you!

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The full job listing can be found here, and you can also subscribe for the RSS feed. If you’re looking to recruit the kind of people who read my blog and others like it, take a look here.

I’d also be happy to hear about anyone who found a job through this network and hear about their experiences.

I think that covers the topic.

Until I get all the details down, I thought I’d describe (broadly) what’s involved. I have my hands full these days managing several .Net projects, consulting on other projects, and training. I’m looking for an apprentice to handle some of this load. This person will need to perform as technical lead on projects, be able to manage projects and teams, and, most importantly, create win-win situations for us with our clients on these projects.

I don’t expect this person to have everything I’m looking for 100%. There will be time to learn, mistakes will be expected. What I need is for the internal drive to be there – always looking for ways to do things better, to improve our clients’ experiences with us, and to constantly be learning.

If you think that you’d like to be my “go-to” person, enjoy working independently, are looking for opportunities to learn and grow, and have experience in leading projects both technically and managerially, then I want to meet you! Email me at: TheApprentice@TheSoftwareSimplist.com.

Location: Israel, in the north

After the .Net software architects user group, a bunch of us stayed around and chatted a bit. I don’t really know how we got onto the topic but it started with Yosi Taguri remembering a question he was asked when interviewing for Microsoft. The question was “What do the letters of the acronym ACID stand for?” Out of the 10 or so people there, I think I was the only one who remembered – or, at least, I was the first; I have a thing for acronyms – (its atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability – just for the record.)

Any way, Gad Meir countered with a more relevant question that I think deserves to go into the hall of fame for candidates interviewing for an infrastructure position. The question is: “In what way is consistency maintained when performing a transaction against a single database that transfers money from one account to another?” Answers are welcome in the comments. I’ll post the answer – which only Gad knew – some time later.

Tip #2.

Have the “Professional Experience” section in the middle of the (first) page. Education above it, and keep it short. Nobody cares about your GPA.

I’ve been getting some requests to put my (new) resume online. I’d have to translate it to english first, though, but I don’t really have the time. If your really want me to put an english version up, or even the hebrew version too, send me a trackback, or write me a mail.

Well, haven’t I just been jumping from topic to topic lately! Resumes, object orientation, SOA <ack! /> I mean service orientation, TDD, and on and on. For no good reason I’m just going to keep doing it, because I just ran into a post that I had to expound on.

Kathleen Dollard (of code-gen fame) talks about “Breaking into Programming” and gives some great tips for those just starting out. Why do I feel the need to expound on this? Because in the last week I had to interview 3 people who could have benefitted from those very tips. IMO, the bar for programming is really quite low. Nowadays, anybody can get a cheap pc, and start mucking around with Web Matrix and the like and call themselves a programmer.

My problem is not with those just beginning, but those that already have some experience. For example, if you’re a GUI programmer, you MUST, MUST, MUST know about MVC (that’s model, view, controller). It has to be one of those things where if someone wakes you up in the middle of the night and says “Quick! What’s MVC?” you can spit it out right then and there. Now, I’m not saying that every UI has to be built using the MVC pattern, but you need to know what it is.

There are many more examples, but I guess my point is this: anybody can hack out a bunch of lines of code, but that’s not what I’m hiring for. Patterns are super important. Learn them. Use them. If you’re in an interview, show which patterns you know and how you used them.

About the whole issue about starting with objects or not, I guess that I’m ambivalent. But, (BUT!) I don’t hire people who don’t know how to do object oriented development. Not every piece of code needs to be OO, but, in that case, you need to know why OO doesn’t fit, and what else does.

The bonus of all this stuff is this: it’s not technology dependent. OO has been around close to 25 years now, and it’s still being widely used. This is the stuff that it’s worth investing in, because, as we all know, too often the technology becomes outdated before we’ve really gotten a return on the investment we made when learning it.

Reflecting on the things above, I think that these may be the steps a programmer would/should/might go through after getting through the basics Kathleen talked about. But, these are the things that will get you hired.

Tip #1: 1 page is golden.

If you can get everything relevant in 1 page, DO IT! If it ain’t relevant, it’s out!

Nobody cares about your objectives!

The one, and only, thing that you should be demonstrating with your resume is “What can I do for you”.

After accepting the job at my current employer, Korentec, I remembered the HR manager mentioning that my resume sucked. At the time she told me I was busy with something else and didn’t really take it in. Later, I went to talk to her about what she meant. You see, I worked pretty hard on getting my resume just right so I was quite anxious to find out exactly what sucked.

I won’t get into the details about what was wrong and how I fixed it, but suffice it to say that her tips really made the difference.

Why do I tell you this? So that you, yes you, will realize that before you go job hunting again – either by choice, or not – you utilize this great resource you have at your disposal – the HR manager. I personally found it very interesting to hear the perspective of someone who has to go through tons of resumes, each day.

One final thing, you may have the latest and greatest Word, or other text editor, and laid out everything just so on your resume, but a lot of HR managers don’t. So, when it comes time to cut the stack down to size (like, seven times a day) that really weird looking one probably will be the first to get hit by the ‘delete’ key. Keep to the simplest layout possible – tables don’t count !

After showing our HR manager my resume after incorporating her suggestions, well, let’s just say I’m itching to send out my resume to companies (even though I’m not looking for a job) just to see what a difference it made.

Any other overlooked gems in your organization? Let me know!