Heard this week in an interview:  “This area isn’t exactly a Mecca for IT”.  Truer words were never spoken. 

So…I live in Ocala, FL.  I’ve mentioned it before.  We are about 40 miles south of Gainesville, known primarily as the home of the UF Gators, the home town of Tom Petty and Danny Rolling (no meaning implied in their juxtaposition), and briefly starring as the home town of Keanu “whoah” Reeves and the ever-so-tasty Charlize Theron in The Devil’s Advocate (oddly enough Charlize played serial killer Eileen Wuornos, one of whose victims was from Ocala, and another was found here) .  We are roughly 85 miles north of Walt Disney World (that’s generally the mileage I use on expense reports for driving to the Airport).  We are known for our horses (1978 Triple Crown winner Affirmed is from here), primarily.  Also we are the lightning strike capital of this hemisphere (16,000(yeah, 16K(that’s THOUSAND)) lightning strikes…this afternoon,  You heard me.), were mentioned as the home town of Colin Farrell in The Recruit (though Pacino pronounced it incorrectly), and house “Nature’s Theme Park”, Silver Springs, where many films and television series have been shot, the Rhesus monkeys all have HIV, and strangely enough…people have heard of and been there.  Also Closetmaid has their headquarters here.  Which I find strange.  Here’s the Ocala Wikipedia link detailing some of our famous or quasi famous claims to fame.  (Yes, I do know Daunte Culpepper.  I delivered pizza to Travolta’s Jumbolair estate as well.  No, he didn’t try to convert me to Scientology.  My ex-wife used to work with Deanna Wright at Chili’s.  She’s less hot in person.  And her sister is kinda weird.  Worked at Best Buy here last time I saw her.  They neglect to mention former Phoenix Suns player Frank Johnson, who graduated from Lake Weir High School, which is where I attended.  As did former WNBA player Grace Daley, who graduated Tulane as the all time leading scorer in school history (male or female) and who was a hell of a nice girl as I recall.)

Ok, so where am I going with this?  We aren’t exactly a Mecca for IT.  We’re a cow-town.  This place is lame.  And that makes it very difficult sometimes to be me (or someone in our line of work, more generally…but more specifically, me).  I happen to work for a very technology-oriented company in a non-technology-oriented market.  This is not an uncommon scenario.  I’m sure there are hundreds of companies that have sprung up here and there, well beyond the city limits of the major tech centers in this country, that somehow, some way, have to find solid technology talent to complete the puzzle.

Finding talent is a challenge in the small market to be sure.  The lack of an overall tech market doesn’t do much to attract outside talent, and the educational programs, from the local high schools to the community college, don’t exactly promote up and coming technology.  Further, what tech does exist in the area to support local companies is largely outdated, and decidedly non-progressive.  There are no user groups, no local community to speak of at all (some of you don’t know how good you have it).  In short, it’s pretty much a dead-zone.

It’s funny what technology-forward companies have to deal with when looking for developers (or other technical personnel for that matter) in the small markets.  In this article over at Joel on Software he mentions getting about 200 resumes for a given position.  I get like 2 if I’m lucky.  I remember during the tech drought in 2002 trying to get a job in Boston.  It was madness.  You would see the same people entering and leaving interviews…like there was a professional interviewing circuit.  There had to be hundreds of us, all more or less equally qualified, vying for every position around.  I would kill to have that kind of selection around here.  If I am looking for a .net programmer to be my right hand man (which I currently am) I’m lucky if I get to interview someone who knows VB6 and has heard of objects.  Trying to find someone around here plugged into “the community” is a joke.  Ask someone what they do to keep up on their skills, keep abreast of what’s going on in the industry, things of that nature, and you will get blank stares.  My kingdom for at the very least a blog reader!

As a hiring manager in this market I’ve faced a lot of challenges that don’t exist for a lot of my peers.  You learn to spot rare nuggets of talent (like Doug, my junior programmer) that can be molded into proper developers over time.  Those diamonds in the rough are few, and mostly you end up with coal.  You often settle for people with some experience in some tangentially related technology and hope that you can get enough productivity out of them to make it worth not just doing it yourself.  You get burned.  A lot.  You learn how to fire people.  You spend a lot of time mentoring.  I’ve gone as far as to take smart friends and train them up as programmers, with mixed results.  The bottom line is that you usually end up frustrated with the lack of options available.  Some quick stats:  In the last 2 years I have interviewed candidates for a few developer positions.  I’ve probably talked to about 20 total people who saw a job description for a c# developer and threw their hat in the ring.  Of those 20:

0 – had used C# in a professional capacity

1 – had used C# ever.

2 – had used VB.Net

1 – had heard the term “design pattern”.

0 – had any clue what a design pattern was.

0 – had ever done TDD

1 – had ever heard of TDD

1 – had a solid (beyond googled definitions memorized before the interview) understanding of OO

0 – had a clue what you would want to use an Interface for.

1 – ended up as one of the first Daily WTF stories (get the commemorative mug!)

Shall I continue?

I think you’re getting the picture.  So what do I do?  Well, I look for people that seem to have the capacity to learn that stuff and become a dynamic developer.  I probe people’s thought processes.  I try to have design debates.  I’m rarely impressed.  But when you are told you need to hire someone, you try to hire someone, and sometimes you have to settle and make do with what you have.  Such is the plight of the small market.

Another problem this leads to is a fear of moving on when you have the wrong resource.  You get this kind of paralyzing fear that if you have an underperformer and you get rid of him, you will never find a replacement…and hey…maybe an underperformer is better than nobody right?  Almost never.  But that’s the state of mind you enter in a market like this.  A couple of years ago I was running the development efforts at a local healthcare service provider and I had at the high point 5 developers working for me.  One was there for almost 3 years and to this day nobody knows what he really contributed…least of all me.  But on the other hand we thought we needed bodies in cubes, and he seemed to be doing something, and it’s not like I had resumes flooding my inbox.  Another talked a good game in interviews but when he got hired it was as if his alternate personality had never seen a computer.  I mean, in an interview I sat the guy in front of the VB IDE and had him whip up some program that did something…I forget, it was trivial enough to only take him about 20 minutes, but he did it right.  Then, just a couple of weeks later when he was working for me, he tried to check the CHECKED state of a checkbox by writing “If checkbox is checked”.  Bizarre.  More recently I have had two severe underperformers on the team, and the knowledge that replacements are near impossible to find certainly contributed to the length of their employment beyond the reasonable point at which they would have been shitcanned in a bigger market.  Trying to find ways to turn them into performers contributed to both my boss and I ending up in the hospital.

The other side of the coin is equally bad.  I’ve tried to find a job around here.  It’s not pretty.  When the aforementioned healthcare provider lost funding and went out of business in 2002, the best job I could find was as a part time webmaster for roughly 1/3 of my prior salary.  The guy flat out said (I’ll never forget this phone call) “Scott, we couldn’t even begin to afford you, but if you want to work here anyway you can start tomorrow.”  Fantastic eh?  I tried like hell to stay in Ocala in 2002 because this is where my son is, but it wasn’t going to happen.  There was just nothing here.  So I packed up and moved to a big market, Boston, and latched on to a major biotech company for a year (which is where I learned .Net).  When I moved back down however, I had all but given up on finding a job in this area, and honestly had all but given up on my career.  I worked at Barnes & Noble being snooty to the less-well-read and did some consulting work here and there.  I picked up two very bad programming jobs in a row that paid well but were short-lived (remind me to blog about these sometime).  Eventually I landed where I am, which if you had the inside scoop would turn out to be basically where I started, but it’s a good company with a solid technology foundation that pays well.  But then again, I know 3 of the founders.  It wasn’t chance.  Someone like me, but not me, would probably still be murmuring about the lack of substance to the summer reading lists that all these people keep coming in to buy books for (I do miss the 30% book discount though).

Of the developers I’ve worked with in this area, most are not still in the business.  A couple are plugging away at small companies with small needs.  A couple wisely got out and are getting a chance to step up their games in the bigger ponds.  I’m proud to say that one of my former employees has moved first to Orlando and now to Manhattan and is making quite a career for himself.  But for those that stay, it’s largely a dead-end around here.

Chicken and Egg time.  Can you not find good tech jobs in small markets because the companies aren’t there?  Are the companies not there because the talent pool in the area is too shallow?  Do the would-be developers reach career dead-ends because there are no jobs?  Or do they do so because they aren’t in the kind of place where career-resilient developers are made?  I don’t know.  I do know this.  I went to a big market and programmed my ass off as a small fish in a very big pond.  I saw the real world out there, and it transformed my career and my understanding of the industry.  I got the kind of experience that one doesn’t get writing database apps for some manufacturing company in Po-dunk USA.  Am I more frustrated with what I see around me because I have gained that broader perspective?  Probably.  Does knowing that make it any easier?  Nope.

So I don’t know.  I guess this post is mostly a rant to get some things off my chest that have been going through my mind as a result of what is going on in my job.  It’s also partially a note to you guys with your user groups and your geek dinners and your code camps and 200 applicants per job to say hey, realize how lucky you are.  Some of us don’t have those simple luxuries.  Maybe I’m also seeking some advice.  Maybe I’m telling my boss how I feel about the prospect of hiring someone :P.  In any case, the story of the small market developer needs to be told so that nobody makes the mistake of thinking that we all work in some technology Shangri-la where everyone is agile and does TDD and uses the Observer pattern and can read IL.

Fuck I’m frustrated.  Thanks for reading.