Pre-Pandemic and Post-Pandemic Job Hunting

I have some insight into pre-pandemic and post-pandemic job hunting.

Before the pandemic, I started looking for a position because my company refused to let me work from home, even part-time. It took me six months, but I found a well-paid remote position.

The first day of my remote position was the first day of California’s lockdown (March 13th, 2020). Which was a bit ironic because most employees became remote on that day.

Pre-pandemic remote positions were a novelty; I applied to 1 or 2 remote jobs a week, and I scoured all the job boards (Indeed, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Dice). Most companies wanted you in the office at least part of the time. Managers wanted to see you in a cubical; you might not be doing anything but seeing you put them at ease.

The problem with going into the office is that it drastically limits the number of jobs available to you. Remote work opens up the entire United States.

Fast forward to February 2022, I received an email stating my contract wouldn’t be renewed. So, starting in March 2022, I was back in the job market. This time, my experience was the opposite. I changed my status on LinkedIn to “Open to Work.” and for the next week and a half, I received 30 to 50 emails a day, 99% being remote. When I received an email asking me if I was open to relocation, I felt bad for the recruiter. Because that position would never be filled in the current job market.

At one point, I was interviewing for 5 positions, at the same time, with base salary expectations of 175k to 200k per year.

After a week and a half of searching, I accepted an offer, for a remote position, from a large company that everyone would recognize.

If companies hadn’t been forced into remoteness, we’d likely be stuck driving into the office to appease our insecure managers.

Centralize Your Data Integrity

Systems (i.e., databases) managing their data integrity sounds like common sense, and in simple scenarios, it is common sense. However, when the business rules get complex, it’s harder to validate the data in a central location.

When a system (i.e., a database) can no longer enforce the shape of the data, something else must pick up the slack. When might this happen? 

The phone number format in the US is (area code) (prefix) – (number), here’s an example: (734) 555-3212. We’ll talk about the database in this article for simplicity’s sake, but the datastore doesn’t have to be a database. 

Phone numbers in the US always have ten digits (we are ignoring the international digit). Phone numbers can come in a variety of formats:  

  • xxx.xxx.xxxx 
  • xxx-xxx-xxxx
  • (xxx) xxx-xxxx
  • (xxx) xxx.xxxx

Most databases are limited to data-types (i.e., numbers, strings, dates, etc.) and don’t support formating. Many applications opt to use the string data-type to store the phone number. However, the string data-type accepts ANY string. To ensure the phone number is valid, we need an additional layer of validation. 

In a single application connecting to a single database, data validation is typically enforced in the application.

When you’re architecture grows to two or more application sharing a database, two things can happen:

1. Each application has its own data validation:

2. There is a central service the applications call to validate the data and persist the data:

The risk of data validation in multiple places is the validations might be out of sync. A valid format for one application might not be valid in another application. In the worse case, a bad format will throw an error or, in extreme cases, crash the application.

The best case is to centralize the data validation so the format stored in the database is consistent for the entire organization. There are exceptions, of course, and I’m assuming multiple applications read and write to a shared database base.

Give a Safe Space to Express Ideas

When leading a team, it’s important to create an environment where everyone feels safe to express their ideas regardless of their experience level.

Early in my career, I was leading a team of six. One of the software engineers approached me with an idea; I knew it wouldn’t work. Instead of telling him, he’s wrong. I told him to set up a meeting with the rest of the team.

In the meeting, the team agreed his approach wouldn’t work, but they took aspects of his solution and incorporated them into the final solution. If I had told the software engineer no from the get-go, the engineer wouldn’t have felt heard, and we would’ve had a less robust solution.

Scrum is Overrated

Most companies follow some type of Scrum process. Typically this entails 2 or 3 week sprints. At the end of each sprint changes are demoed, retrospectives are performed and the backlog is groomed. During each sprint task completion time is captured, which allows management to project into the future when projects will reach completion.

Many of the Scrum projects I’ve been apart of emphasize “committing” to tasks or “taking ownership.” At the end of the sprint many engineers are held accountable for incomplete tasks. Sprint velocity is another idea that is hammered home. We have to keep our velocity! It’s like creating software is a race, it’s not. If engineers are held accountable by a metric, they’ll optimize for the metric, this isn’t want you want.

Scrum creates an easy to understand framework for teams to follow and it gives management the tools to predict the future. Teams that have practices waterfall find Scrum easy to grok.

Many of Scrums practices aren’t needed. For example, most issue tracking software allow managers to run reports on the frequency of ticket completion. With this information, managers are able to infer velocity, instead of baking velocity into the process and making it a big deal. Taking ownership is a farce, we do it naturally, to make it explicit is insulting. All the projects I’ve been a part of each engineer has a corner of the application that’s their space.

Other ways to improve software delivery:

  • If you need weekly deployments, schedule them. Deploy what’s ready.
  • Keep the backlog groomed; then engineers never run out of work.
  • In my opinion, retrospectives are the most essential non-development activity. Without it, you have no chance of becoming a better and more efficient organization.
  • Automate, automate, automate
  • Committing to a list of features is ridiculous. Rank the tasks and complete what you can. Fretting over why “task A” wasn’t complete is a waste of time. It’s clear the task was either too big, or higher priority work was taken on.
  • Demos are a waste of time unless the client cares and provides feedback. 
  • Daily meetings may or may not be needed. I prefer meeting every couple of days.

At the end of the day it’s about providing value to the client in the most efficient way.