Now that it’s official — I have the offer letter in my hot
little hands — I feel comfortable spilling the beans.
As many of you know, I left IBG at the end of February. It was no
secret that Anna and I despised living in Jersey City. And although I
knew I’d miss many of my co-workers, IBG simply wasn’t the right place
for me.
My goals were to move to a smallish town and get a job near where I
lived. We succeeded admirably in the first goal by moving to Rhinebeck,
NY: a quaint little village near the Hudson river in northern Duchess
County. Because we’re only 1/2 mile from the center of the village, we
can walk to all the shops and a couple parks. When I go cycling, I get
to wave at cows and horses.
It took a little longer than desirable to fulfil the second goal.
But last Friday, as we were driving to the Albany airport to catch a
plane to Florida to celebrate my sister’s engagement, I received the
call for which I’d been waiting.
Starting Tuesday, 6 July, 2004, I will be Director, Business
Development for Harte-Hanks
Interactive located just across the Hudson from Rhinebeck. I’m
really excited about this position because it marks the first time I’ve
had a purely non-technical role. Although I’ll draw extensively on my
technical background to know on which projects we should bid and what
sort of solution we should propose, my primary responsibility will be
expanding the reach of Harte-Hanks Interactive beyond their primary
market: the pharmaceutical industry.
Now Anna and I can start living the life I’d envisioned back when we
got together; instead of the impoverished pay check to pay check
lifestyle we’ve been enduring lately.
One of the lessons I’ve learned from reading What Color Is
Your Parachute and many articles over at Ask the Headhunter is that
the traditional method of job seeking just doesn’t work. You type up
your résumé and send it off along with a cover letter in
response to vaguely worded job advertisements — most of which are
fictitious.
Without an extensive network of colleagues, I’m reduced to cold
calling. My approach is to enter an address in the Yahoo yellow pages
and find all companies listed under the Computer Software category.
Some of these companies have web pages which I use to learn more about
the company; but they all have phone numbers.
Getting through to a real human being can be tough. The approach
I’ve found which seems to work best is to use something like the
following with whomever answers the phone:
I’ve moving to the Hudson Valley area at the end of March and
would like to talk with someone in your company who can share with
me a little information about your company and others that develop
software in the area.
Of course, most of the companies I’ve contacted have been small
enough that their receptionists haven’t been trained to turn away calls
like mine.
In Cringley’
s latest article, he takes on the way business uses PowerPoint
presentations. It’s about time someone spoke up about this practice of
using slides in lieu of real information.
Read The
Cognitive Style of PowerPoint by Edward Tufte for a sobering
analysis of how the truth typically gets mangled on its way through
your PC. It isn’t the fault of PowerPoint, of course, but in the
way we use it. Our first error is sending those darned stacks,
since the intent of PowerPoint is to be an important component of a
live presentation. PowerPoint is supposed to play the role of the
nerdy kid from the A/V department who keeps all your slides
straight and makes you look good. But more often than not, I get
the stack without the presenter, and no matter how smart or
informed I am, any solo effort to expand that stack into an
adequate proxy for a 10,000-word document is simply bound to come
up short.
I’ve often come under fire for my PowerPoint presentations: I
typically have 1 slide for every 20 minutes of talk time. Compare that
with the more typical 1 slide for every 2 minutes and you begin to
understand the difference. You’ve probably all sat through a
PowerPointed presentation in which someone basically read to you
directly from the slides. Believe it or not, when this happens to me, I
get up, excuse myself, ask to have the slides emailed to me, and leave.
Of course, this can be a bit awkward if I’m the only attendee.
My approach is to prepare a presentation first. That means all the
words before the pictures. Once I have the meat of the
presentation together, I can highlight a couple key issues with slides.
Because I’m a software development guy, these slides frequently are
screen captures of an application: words just wouldn’t do them justice.
I’m not quite up to Cringley’s level. I can’t do the entire
presentation without slides; but simply because there’s some material
that can’t be verbally explained.
Almost no one asks me for my slides after a presentation. There’s
simply no point.
