Peter Pilgrim :: Java Champion :: Enterprise Blog

This is a warning to the reader; your might feel at the end of this entry that it is all Dickens’s Christmas Carol and “Bah! Humbug!”. You would be rightfully semi-accurate in your analysis, of course.

Quite simply, I hate when I go to an interview that is either face-to-face with a potential employer, or a client, and then I have to fight tooth and nail to get those statements of fact that many ordinary souls could consider to feedback from the interviewers or clients. I am amazed, more often than not, in today’s climate when I get unexpected feedback; most of the time I have specifically ask for it.

In my long career of some twenty years or so, I have attended many competency based styles of interviews, and I have learnt in all that time, you cannot effectively improve your skills without a third-party honest ethical reference telling you exactly what you were strong on and what specifically you were weak on.

When I use skills here, I am deliberately being very wide in the definition of term; it can be communication skills, behavourial skills, technical skills or even sitting-still-in-chair-with-your-hands-motionless whilst you talking skills. I will also include puzzle solving, listening to the interviewer, technical analysis and getting off my bum to do a bit of white-boarding, and rapport building, submitting a sample test programming project and panel interviews as part of this scheme.

There is a nothing worse than when you have done all that you can do to perform by giving your valuable time and effort to a round of interviews, and then hearing the cacophony sound of silence; and seeing nothing wafting in the email inbox for a few days. If you have ever attended an interview and waited more 24-48 hours for an answer, and seen and heard nothing, then you probably know placing your on heart that this is an instant fail. If you have ever attended an  interview and got the answer of “no” and the client and the recruiter had no feedback in their response then that I too would classify the end as a similar fail. If you have ever received an “no” and then asked for feedback, and then also received a blank response, then, in fact, that is plainly rude. If you have never received any feedback from the interviews whatsoever then that series of flawed communication from a so-called officer of a reputable business, from beginning to end, actually, is very revealing about the target organisation; and says that perhaps enduring the entire process was a close miss, from your point of view.

Sometimes, after receiving a “no” from an interview, then I have, to be absolutely fair, received some great feedback and pointers on things that I missed and definitely things I could improve on. I have gone over those weaknesses, then revised, educated myself and rehearsed. I improved myself. Sometimes the mostly painful feedback is the stuff you don’t want listen to. I certainly had to train to listen and not just hear.  When I have won a contract and got the job I have learned what the interviewer and recruiter also thought about my appearance, skills, white-boarding and communications; basically the whole lot. So this gripe is not for those who are good at giving prompt, fair and concise feedback whether it is in a good or bad light. They do not have to worry.

In the earlier part of my career, long before the Facebook and Twitter, it was customary to receive the rejection letters through the post. Nowadays, it is the rejection email. For university graduate developers, in these Twenty Tens, it is now even worse, if they they do not receive a response then they may as well consider themselves rejected. Is this the state of business communication in the early twentieth first century? Really. And we thought that we were a classless society; elitism had been knocked cleanly on the head. Surprise. It never actually vanished into the thin air. When we have laden the front-door to new software engineers in our industry with a flaming glass ceiling of unemotional dependency injection. This action is a contempt for an industry and the people working inside it. This, very sadly, is a disgrace.

Dependency injection may work for building the infrastructure of application software and abstracting two components from explicit referring to each other, but does it work not at all for human beings, especially the newest talent? Feelings are hurt; belief and hope with ambitions are trampled; dreams are thrown asunder. No wonder it has hard to attract new people; whether they are youngest and brightest undergraduates, or they are mature folk and utterly serious about retraining in to computer science, if this final result of lack of feedback is a spit on the face, which they have, ultimately, to look forward to.

It is just not enough to say “no”. It does not help the recruitment consultant and the prospective candidate. How can the recruiter help to get better people for the organisation? How can the candidate ever know what went wrong? We are reaping bad karma and more misery on those people who are trying to keep fighting the good fight.

The stock answer from the client that is unforgivable and long-term patched in the synaptic memory is “Sorry. I am so busy that I really cannot afford to do it. You want me to give feedback on all of the candidates who interview here. I got more important things to do in the meantime. Unfortunately, I don’t have time for that.” If you read that and do happen to agree with that sentiment, then shame on you. Here it is the crux; effective candidates require feedback. Senior developers and technical leads always want to improve. The most talented inexperienced engineer who only has a couple of A-level’s wants to improve. If you do not care to give feedback, I guarantee you this fact; they will remember you and your company. Candidates who interview with or without a recruitment agent deserve feedback. You, as a technical leader, have a duty to provide it. It is your job description, so just do it.

It will be a terrible day when one of those candidates that you interviewed and failed to provide feedback for remembers you and your company when they do just give up; and instead grow to become to the next successful generation of rock star developers: a public relations disaster of your own making.

+PP+

PS: Managers and technical leaders need to be give regular feedback direct to their team members. If they do not then they are not being effective in any organisation. If they want all people to perform then they need to coach and mentor others too in order to become better.Tweet

About three weeks ago, I was watching a Film 4 late night with my partner. We stumbled upon on a martial-arts movie, called Ip Man. We thought it was one of the best Kung Fu movies of recent times, up there with Kung Fu Hustle. Donnie Yen who played Ip Man, a semi-biographically account of one of Bruce Lee’s mentors. Ip Man was a discipline, evolutionary innovator and a formidable master of a fighting style called Wing Chun.

I thought after watching this amazing award-winning film that Chinese culture teaches us about excellence. Especially, in the movie, at the very beginning other masters of Chinese Kung Fu were attempting to defeat Ip Man is bouts of educational study. In other words these fights were not about making money, popularity contest or even on how to pull. They were simply impressive in the objective to gain further knowledge, to live better healthily and be enlightened. Thus it posed a question in my mind about the concept of masters, disciples and followers.

I have been trying to figure why developers and designers, especially in the financial services, are suddenly tied to a cast iron grate, of fire-fighting the Java Virtual Machine, attempting to make it do things that it was not originally designed for. Sometimes these non-functional requirements have meant a thorough knowledge of the operation JVM, how it manages memory, what sort of byte codes are executed in order to obtain the best performance. People suddenly want a great deal of understanding of the garbage collection mechanism way beyond that was required for Java EE 5 or 6, as they try to service 10 million records from database tables that are joined. Suddenly many more professionals are very interested in “Making it go-faster still”.

Why are developers in certain investment banks so willing to write Java like if it was C or C++? Surely this is wrong way to go? What is it about multiple threads that developers are not willing to use the Java SE 5 Executors or apply Java SE 6 concurrency utilities? Why are they willing rewrite their own Collections API? (Of course that is interesting for me personally for study in terms of the Scala Collections version 2.8 and better)

Master Pepperdine

I know a little bit about Java Performance, but I need to understand it in much better than I do now. So like the prodigal masters of Kung Fu in alternate style, I need to understand performance on Java from someone who definitely knows what they are talking. Remember that concept of reputational risk that I mentioned in the JavaOne reviewer blog entry, well that risk is minimised when you sit, learn and study with a master. For me this master is Pepperdine.

Come September 2011, I am off to Crete to study with a master: Java Performance Tuning Training Course from Kirk Pepperdine. These old JAVAWUG videos can provide the reason why?

PS: Photo credit from the artful, talented and impressive Chicago Wuhsu, Illinois, USA, 2011

JAVAWUG BOF 38 Concurrency and Performance Part 1 from Peter Pilgrim on Vimeo.

JAVAWUG BOF 38 Concurrency and Performance Part 2 from Peter Pilgrim on Vimeo.

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Today, I feel humbled to experience another QCon London conference. It is the fourth time I have been involved, and I consider it the biggest event in my home town.

What were my favourite events and happenings at QCon?

• Meeting with the people and having inspired conservations about technology
• Meeting Wendy Devolder of SkillsMatter and discussing the Functional Exchange
• The Java Community Panel on Thursday afternoon with Stephen Colebourne, Ben Alex, Mark Little, Jerome Dochez and Patrick Curran.
• Twitter conversation with Alex Blewitt about the JCP, the future of Java
• Mark Powell’s evening key note on the Jet Propulsion Lab, which contains many Star Trek references
• Speaker’s dinner where I tabled with Mark Powell, Glenn Vanderburg and Kevin Henney and had a fantastic conversation about The Mote in God’s Eye and science fiction writers, TV, movies and books
• The speaker dinner’s at the restaurant Inn The Park
• Meeting individuals like Christian Kellner and Daniel Temme of TimoCom, Duesseldorf, Germany; Juan Germano of Core Security from Argentina; Gary Harvey of Trifork;
• Winning an Amazon Kindle 3 Wi-Fi bundle in a FuseSource prize drive!!! (Thanks to Matt Thayer) 
• Being asked questions about JCP, Future of Java
• Paul Albettele asked me about the future of Java / Scala. Should I learn Scala? Should I learn functional programming? Michael Klove also inquired about Scala’s future too
• Chatting with Googler Ade Oshineye and eavesdropping on his photograph tips to a fellow conference goer
• Meeting Simon Ritter on the Oracle booth and discussing the JavaFX 2.0 early access release and experiments there of
• Meeting Artifactory / JFrog folk again Yoav Landman, Shlomi Ben-haim and Talin,  et al

Listen to AudioBoo: Thank You QCon London 2011: It’s Been Emotional

What were my favourite sessions?

• Glen Vanderberg’s Clojure on the Web on Friday
• The second half of Rod Johnson’s Friday morning keynote: Things I Wish I’d Known
• The NoSQL at NetFlix on Friday morning by Siddarth Anand
• Musical singing and playing of a certain Roy Osherove: Team Leadership in the Age Agile (Thursday)
• Kevlin Henney’s talk Putting “Re” into Architecture (Wednesday)
• Gil Tene of Azul interesting talk about Java without GC Pauses (Wednesday)

What were the things I did not like this year?

• No being there for the whole thing, missing out Wednesday and Thursday mornings
• Dealing with Another Other Business during the conference
• Being so emotional after the event (always sad to have an ending)
• Domain Specific Language technical session should have been much better than it was
• Smaller scale conference party on Wednesday evening

See next year and best endeavours for the rest of 2011

Meanwhile here are some photos:-

Collecting the Amazon Kindle from FuseSource’s Matt Thayer

Standing with Ade Oschineye near the Google and Wolfram booths

Wendy Devolder of SkillsMatter (left) and Ben Shlomi-Haim

Geeta Schmidt of Trifork (left) and Floyd Marinescu of QCon (right)

The indefatigable Rod Johnson during his Friday morning keynote

London Agile User Group night at QCon London

I suppose nobody can tell any more lies now.

Photos from Creative Commons (cc) Peter Pilgrim’s Photostream on Flickr.com

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I got really pathetic bad news today from [SIDWELL AND GIEEVES]. The answer was a resounding no, we won’t be pursuing this application further. The reasons given was 1) My desire to pursue Beyond Java 2) Lack of Technical Depth at the Java EE and 3) My desire to have Agility or pursue Agile. What the fuck?! I was really angry today. [DELETED] I was perplexed by the technical depth bit, what did I not answer in that interview [DELETED]. The only thing I can think of was my answer on global transactions on message queues, and JDBC connection on a web logic server. Well buck them all. They really do not know what they missing out on. I have SCEA accreditation from 2007. Idiots! I know bucking Java EE, even I cannot remember every single flying buck about a bucking application server or how it was bucking configured. A couple of Audio Boo done today. Had a chat with fellow conspirators [CHARLES and SHEEN] later in the day. They are also going through a hellish job search process that leaves much to be desired.

Lesson: I have to park my anger to the side. 

Bright spark: downloaded the JavaFX 2.0 SDK Early Access release 16 today. It is getting better and the API has changed. ObservableValue interface yes that makes a lot more sense.

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As I write this early in the morning I am really tired on being on the back side of what counts as information technology. Recently a friend asked me to simple two questions. I could not give a satisfactory answer.  The questions were why are you (as in me) not yet a manager of a team? Why are they no black people who are senior managers in banks? I could not answer without embarrassment and a bittersweet taste of foreboding of the excuses that I was about to make to the individual. In fact I was confused, disappointed and then suddenly very annoyed by the questions. Emotions ran high, as blurted out a weak answer, that I consider myself more technical and an engineer type rather than a manager. Okay I thought, I can clearly talk about my personal situation. The second question left me vacant of expression. I could not answer it at all.

Listen to AudioBoo: Black People Will Never Be Promoted

Through my own eyes, you see, I have certainly met plenty of black people working in IT, inside investment banks, for over my 13 years of experience in the City of London and the  Docklands. During that range of times I have met many Afro-Caribbean, Afro-North-Americans, Afro-South-Americans, and just Africans. However you are unlikely to see an abundance of smart and intelligent black people in the London work place. Much of this is down to simple city and national demographics.  In the capital city, London, whose population is 7 million people. Black people would count statistically as a one in ten. Inside an investment bank it is safe to say this is 1 in 100, thus we are few and far between.

However it is not the demographic the ratio that upsets me. The job titles of have been depressingly non-inspirational such as PC Support, Oracle Database Support, IT Support, CISCO Phone Engineer, Hardware Support, Network Administrator, IT HelpDesk, Quality Assurance, Systems Tester, etc. .. I think I have met one other Black senior developer in my 13 years of investment IT software development.  I cannot recall from memory any one in my career path, who has been a Software Architect, Team Manager, Line Manager or Technical Leader.  Most of black staff, therefore, which I have witnessed in 13 years, have been in the non-creational roles. In other words they have not been typically software engineers or developers. Why is that so?

Where is these other notable Black engineers, designers and developers? And where is that other inspirational leader? It may be just because we are missed each other in engagements, yet, in the square mile. Maybe they have been working in C# and Microsoft Dot-Net, or perhaps they have been working in another investment bank completely opposite to my the one I was involved during any time in a decade.

During my time in banks and IT, whilst I can take away five years of contracting, 2003-2008, I never witnessed a promotion of a single black individual of note inside Information Technology inside an investment bank. In many of the institutions, the company sends emails, memos and announcement of senior management personnel who received promotions, I cannot recall one with a black person. Maybe I was blind to it or did not pay attention.  Tell a lie, I can remember one senior manager, three staff levels above me, however only just one. He was Black and definitely African.

The source of my chagrin was the question that I could not affectively answer without deep resentment about my profession:

Technical versus managerial career path – the fact that software creation people, technical engineers do not have path to follow

Poor excuses about our communication skills – the fact that black people are continually being put or marked down for poor communications

• Lack of influence of external vectors – the fact that being involved in the external community outside of work, e.g. running a user group, building a network has had little effect
• Lack of evidence of improvement – the fact many of those Tech Support, Help desk people are not in upper echelons of management. Surely one would expect a black Head of Operations IT or Head of Networking Administration by now if most of us Black person are in non-creational roles?
• Lack of training – the fact we are black people, non-blacks are offer more opportunities on external training courses by their white managers. In other words trying to getting training is like getting blood from a stone.
• Talking a good game – the investment banks talk a good in diversity, they over promise and seldom deliver
• Lack of coaching and mentoring – the fact with hardly any black technical leaders in town, inside investment banks and their IT operations systems infrastructure, we do not see chances of being coached or to do the coaching with the approval of the (white) senior management of such organisations.

For this very reason, I found solace outside the banks, contracting paid for JavaOne, Devoxx and other conference tickets, hotels and flight. It is also obvious to me that creating the JAVAWUG (a Java user group) allowed me explore roads and discuss technology outside the organisation. Consequently, I do not believe that black people with ever be promoted or rewarded satisfactorily, especially in this new decade. Sad,  but true. 

ADDED 01/Feb/2011: Some one pointed out that many IT developers tend to be (post) graduates, they have at least one university degree or an equivalent HND BTEC qualification, and therefore they were surmising that, in any case, only small ratio of graduates can be black against the whole populace of available qualified folk. I would contend there are enough black graduates out there and for precisely all of the reasons that I alluded to in the above blog, they might be deflected from pursuing a software development (technical) career. I am also at large, on the bench, in between contracts and gigs at the time of writing.

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