Just had a phone call from a “London based head hunting agency”. Sounds dangerous.

They proceeded to ask me about my current work situation and whether they could help me find a job. I politely declined, telling them I am completely busy at the moment and I am perfectly capable of finding myself a job if I were to require one now or in the future.

Failing to take this hint, they enquired as to my current work situation, for the express purpose of potentially getting in touch later. I told them that they should do their research first: a simple Google search of my name would give you probably everything you needed to know and more about my work situation at the moment. I then told them (again) that I do not require their help. They hung up rudely.

They clearly took my advice: a few seconds later a LinkedIn invite appeared for someone from a London based head hunting agency. I reported it as spam.

Here are some tips for recruiters looking to get in touch:

• Read On Communication. It’s only short and will tell you that phoning me isn’t a great idea. I won’t call you back if you miss me and there is an overwhelming probability that you will interrupt me doing something important (contrary to popular belief I do not have the time or will to sit around doing nothing at any point in the day).
• Do your research. Here’s my LinkedIn. Here’s some search results for my name (if you can’t pick out the right person you’re in the wrong job). Congratulations, you’ve already found my website. If you’re going to interrupt me at least have a damned good idea who I am before you do it. If you have a good idea who I am (and you are capable of reading the previous bullet point) then you won’t call me to begin with.
• Don’t add me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn says: “Important: Only invite people you know well and who know you.” Note: a rude phone call interrupting me and trying to get information out of me that is already available online does not in any way constitute me knowing you. I will simply report you as spam. This will prevent you contacting me in the future, unless you can figure out my e-mail address (which is not rocket science either – if you can’t do that either you’re still in the wrong job).
• You can send me a LinkedIn message.

Thanks to the person that phoned me this morning for reminding me to write this post. No thanks to them for wasting 15 minutes of my time.

Update: It appears this person called at least one of the companies I do some work for and tried to talk to me using the age-old “I’m calling about a delivery”. If you try that I will never talk to you again and take great care to instruct everybody I possibly can to avoid you as much as possible.

If I ever make some statement about thinking about joining / applying to Google, please remind me of this post so that I come to my senses.

Follows is a non-exhaustive enumeration of the reasons I do not wish to work at Google.

1) I will not sign a contract that prohibits me from telling my significant other what I did at work today. I can promise you she is not a Bing spy, and wouldn’t even know what I’m on about if I said the code I had been working on had provided a 3x speed boost for users of a certain API. There’s something wrong with being contractually obliged to hold secrets from your other half.

1a) Same as 1) but for mum.

2) I will not have “sweetners” used to offset wages, which may subsequently be removed. See here for more.

3) You can slap as much lipstick on the pig as you like, but Google is still a large company and will still feel, look and act like one. No thanks.

4) I’d like transferable skills. Sure there’s learning programming languages and people skills etc., but I can learn those elsewhere. Learning behemoth internal APIs and writing apps that will only ever run on one architecture (Google’s massive one)? What’s the point in learning about scaling if you can only scale on one architecture? Hardly transferable.

5) I do not want to be bombarded by questions I cannot answer. Not that I do not know the answer, but I am not allowed to give you the answer. I.e. any conversation I have with anyone who asks “So what do you do?” is limited to “Work for Google” and “I write software”. Booooorrrrring. Additionally, because I work for Google, everyone spends the whole time trying to extract information out of me in increasingly stupid ways. Also boring.

6) I don’t need the CV boost it could give. (I deleted my CV anyway)

7) I fundamentally disagree with their hiring process. Specifically, the bit where they pull some names of algorithms out of a hat and ask you to state their time complexity. This will be controversial, because Google engineers say “But this is the simple stuff”. It is a waste of my time to remember this – I am sat at a computer, and if I really need to know it then I can look it up quite easily. What matters is that I can analyse algorithms in code for their time complexity, and suggest optimisations; properly assign problems to suitable data structures and pick algorithms for specific cases optimally; and understand common formats for expressing algorithms in pseudocode so that they can be easily implemented if necessary. I see memorising this lot just for one interview as counterproductive and an inefficient use of time. Unfortunately for Google, this is the first pre-screen on their phone interviews, so it never goes that well.

Microsoft is a huge corporation, with divisions on all the world’s continents and employing thousands worldwide.

But what jobs actually get done at Microsoft? The sheer diversity of positions may surprise. Here’s just a small sampling of what is available.

Microsoft TVP

Every worried about getting a job after University?

You’re not alone. There are a lot of ways you can increase your chances of getting a great job when you graduate.

One of these is a Microsoft initiative called Students to Business.

Microsoft Students to Business

I’ve been doing a bit of work on my websites, and as well as getting a new 404 page for this domain, I have revamped my CV page.

The old design did the job but didn’t really convey where I think I’ve improved in website design and execution recently, so hopefully the new version does my skills justice.

Please check it out and let me know what you think either in the comments or in the Connect tab at the top of this page.