Potential Group Sponsor

[Troy Howard]

All,

I was recently approached by a local recruitment/staffing company
asking if ALT.NET had a sponsor and if not, would we be open to having
them sponsoring us.

They have a nice large conference room space at their building where
we could hold our meetings, could pay for our meetup.com account and
possibly fund refreshments (beer/snacks, etc). In exchange, we'd
credit them publicly for that sponsorship.

Do we want to go there? Thoughts?

Thanks,
Troy

[Christopher Wright]

I'm all for it, but wouldn't it be better if the sponsor was a beer company?

 

Chris

--

Thanks,

 

Chris

[Troy Howard]

Chris: Yes. That would be significantly awesomer.

[Adron Hall]

I've actually pondered that... and am interested with the idea of expanding the ALT.NET to be more inclusive around the ideals of say "software craftsmanship" or something. There is no reason (and we sure have not) limited ourselves to .NET. But by having the .NET attached to the ALT we tend to have a lot of devs just kind of ignore the group. I'd be happy, and would love to stretch this group into a bit of a "Software Craftsmanship" Group that doesn't just have a monthly meeting, but helps or organizes outright hackathons, startup weekends (or something similar), product development around open source, and other such things.

I'd love to banter some ideas back and forth on ways to expand the group, so please feel free to toss more ideas out there!  :)

Cheers,

Adron 

--
Adron B Hall

Tech: http://compositecode.com
Transit:  http://transitsleuth.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/adron

[Justin Collum]

It seems fine to me (the sponsorship) but I wonder if they are aware of how ALT we are? I'd prefer not to have recruiters coming to meetings and posting on the mailing list. Hearing that Dot Net Shop #21 has a new opening for a .NET Dev with 5+ years experience in ASP.NET, SQL and heavy use of stored procs is not at all interesting to me (wow talk about first world problems eh?). Padnug is perfectly adequate for that. Not that I actually go to Padnug anymore -- who wants to fight 530 PM Sunset traffic to get to Hillsboro? 

My vote is: if they want to sponsor, great. If they want to post on the list: no. If they want to come to meetings: no. If they want to "pop in" to the meeting (since it'll be at their office) and tell us about openings: no. I'd be fine with them leaving a list of openings in the conference room, that seems like a reasonable solution. Apparently I'm a hard-ass today. 

[Ben Jones]

Absolutely on Other languages.

Sponsor would be great...for beer as well as other things...maybe something along the lines of contribution to the cost of a code retreat?

I enjoy the monthly discussions, but would love to code with fellow alt.net peoples.

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 3:26 PM, Adron Hall <adro...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Adron Hall]

Justin - That's the part I agree with too. We need to have that as a controlled medium so it doesn't overwhelm the meeting and also control who/how things are provided to the group.  Maybe we could provide standards for submission of positions and only allow them if they're not just a laundry list of skills.  i.e. Maybe we could actually get some shops to get directly involved too that have ppl interested in being a little more active?  Who knows... but there has to be some way to prevent the clashing of horns.  ;)

-Adron

[Justin Collum]

How about this: if they've never heard of it it's something that we might be interested in :D

[M. Travis Volker]

That should be easy to sell to a sponsor (but I agree).  So essentially "no".

Travis

[Troy Howard]

I'd love for someone to pay for beer/snacks and for us to have a
stable meeting space (wherever that is). I don't have any strong
feelings for or against recruiters but I recognize the community
opinion regarding the potential for excess and for steering our focus
away from technology.
My opinion about "job opportunity" thing... We should allow them but
only from principals.. So, suppose, you're a company, who needs a
sweet ALT.NETter to come work for you... You can show up at a meeting
and at the end/beginning shout out your opportunity to the group or
send a message to the list. Recruiters (even though they are great
guys and totally useful) would not be allowed to do this, however they
are more than welcome to show up at the meetings and chat
afterwards/before with whoever they want to.

Mostly the restriction about non-principals is one of volume. We could
also just express it in another way: no posting or announcing of job
postings more frequently than once a month/quarter from any
particular member/organization. That should totally work for most
companies (because who hires that often?!?) and should set defined
limits to prevent recruiter spam.

Thanks,
Troy

[Justin Collum]

I'm fine with having a sponsor, I just don't want to be forced to listen to how many "great .NET positions" they have open before every meeting. It violates our charter. Or at least what I remember of that 2 minute speech that Jason M gave before the first meeting. 

[Justin Collum]

Also I think we are in an odd space (technologically) where the companies that we respect (see Adron's list) typically don't use recruiters. Although a recruiter that I know asked me about Monsoon today and I found that odd. 

I like Troy's idea: have companies send someone to the meeting to explain the position they have open and drop off some business cards etc. You can sell that to the recruiting agency as increasing their mind share among companies that typically don't use recruiters. In sales being the first company someone thinks of when they think "Hey I need a [blank]" is a big deal. That might sweeten the pot enough for them. 

[Adron Hall]

Here's another proposal. We obviously like to hear about truly awesome, cool new jobs, and what companies are doing out there. The networking and connection possibilities alone offer a lot of topics we could discuss or have someone come and show us what they're doing. So here's the lowdown on what I think might work:

We could get some volunteers to get the positions that X Company has that they'd like to talk about (Company being a company that is hiring directly, recruiter, agency, or whoever). We'd make sure the position met certain requirements of:

1. Providing a description of the technology used (this could be the standard laundry list of tech items).
• Example:  We're a Ruby on Rails/.NET MVC/Pixie Magic Framework Shop. We have NoSQL inserting SQL Code into multidimensional OLAP cubes with temporal awesomeness.
2. Provide a description of the company's work environment, interactions, and processes/workflow.
• Example:  We use lean agile extreme methods that include a 5 minute stand up, we take whiskey shots, and then we get to coding without interruption in ping pong pairing intensity. We deploy often and keep a solid and safe, yet high communication level from IRC, to e-mail, to verbal chit chat during the day. However if you need an hour or three in silence or at the nearby coffee shop to just focus we don't have all have to take a break sometime from the intensity!
3. Provide an idea of the size of the company and development team (based on employee count).
• Example 1:  Our company has 0.2 people so far and we're looking to hire 3.4 more people as soon as we can find the right people!
• Example 2:  Major Enterprise with 150k total people, the development team is broken into 4 people per team with 2 QA utilizing an ATDD style with a dedicated UAT and move to production through continuos integration involving the customers directly on a weekly basis.
4. Provide the general geographic location of the business.
• Example: Some people want to be in the heart of downtown, some are ok with Lloyd Center are, Pearl District, or might want to be out in the far, far, far removed and distant unknown of the Intel Campus in Aloha or the barbarian lands of Vantucky.

With those core bits of information I think if a principal or even one of the volunteers could then provide the position on a separate google groups thread (maybe we could call it "software craftsman jobs of pdx") and post it online on a Jobs page on the meetup.com or other site that we dedicate to "awesome positions".

Just to throw in another catch all to prevent spam - I wouldn't' mind stealing the whole Joel Spoelsky Test idea. 

Ok, I realize I might have just proposed a niche/select way to advertise programming gigs in Portland, or any city for that matter, but I did mean to keep it simple in wanting two specific things if we're going to allow jobs to get listing:

1. I'd like to see more information in the job posting.
2. I'd want to filter the positions. Either me or a couple people in the group, possibly with somewhat picky standards.

-Adron

PS - Vantucky was used as a joke, I mean no offense to those living in Vancouver.  Just sayin'.  ;)

If anybody is interested in this idea, I think we can have reasons for "sponsorship" and still keep the postings/jobs discussion to an appropriate and autonomous part of the group. This would be a win-win for the recruitment companies, direct companies, and us developers that are not looking and want to focus on technology.

So how does everyone vote on this?

A: Like the idea, let's do it.

B: Still not 100% sure, kind of on the fence.

C: This idea sucks, no postings anywhere.

D: Just lurking.

Cheers!

-Adron

[Mike Lonergan]

Vantucky: hilarious.

D) lurking.

But I have to admit that the non-stop stream of genera-.NET/SQL jobs makes my eyes glaze over. I can only imagine what it's like for someone who's really looking.

Mike

[Christopher Wright]

"Software Craftsman" - I really like the sound of that, but  I think I'll keep "Stunt Programmer" on my business card for a while longer.

 

"Violates our charter..." - I guess I need to attend a meeting sometime soon because I'd like to discuss why "...by having the .NET attached to the ALT we tend to have a lot of devs just kind of ignore the group."  I thought this group was all-inclusive in respect to technologies.  Has something changed?

 

Thanks,

Chris

--

Thanks,

 

Chris

[Justin Collum]

We talked about this in the first meeting. No recruiters at the meeting (I think) and no recruiters on the mailing list. It's about signal to noise I think. 

[Justin Collum]

I'm going with B (on the fence). I think the issue here is that we'd need to have someone being a gatekeeper for the postings or it'd be a "Please read this first" that maybe someone would read and maybe not. 

You mentioned the Joel Test, why not just use SO-careers for this? 

I do see your point though, having someone "approve" a job before it gets posted would be nice. I'm just concerned that the group of mods might get apathetic or busy and the moderation might die on the vine. 

[Troy Howard]

I agree with Justin that SO's Careers 2.0 is the way to go for a
curated list of pretty cool jobs.

As much as I appreciate the spirit behind Adron's idea, I don't think
we should expend effort to be a job list curation group of any sort...
or even that we should pretend to have any authority to say what a
'cool' or 'good' job is. Those boring .NET jobs that make your eyes
glaze over might be exactly what someone else has been wanting for a
long time. Who knows. Our goal though is to keep things focused on the
technology though, not the job hunt, which is why we are called
"ALT.NET" not "ALT.NET Jobs". Don't forget -- the reason that
recruiters want to be involved in the users groups is that they know
they are chocked full of talented, ambitious, and passionate people
who spend their extra time, outside of work, to learn more, share, and
grow as a community of craftsman. If we get distracted from that
focus, then the value prop for them goes away. I don't think any
reasonable recruiter would want that to happen.

I think it's also worth restating, since there's been some rumbling
assertions to the contrary lately, that regardless of why, this group
is about .NET technologies. Specifically, it's about using .NET in
conjunction with alternate technologies to find the best solutions to
problems. To that end, we might cover topics like Ruby, MongoDB,
various open source libraries (both .NET and non), Mono or Moonlight,
weird ways to use and abuse the CLR, yada yada yada... but in theory,
when talking about non-.NET technologies, we'd be covering them with
the understanding that we're using them as part of our larger
ecosystem which includes .NET as well.

Even if most of our members might be hacking on pure Node.js apps 90%
of the time, and we might talk about that a lot, we aren't the
Portland Node.js User Group (btw, that group just got started over at
http://nodepdx.github.com ). We might have all the same members, but
the agenda of the ALT.NET meetings is to discuss .NET technology and
from an alternate perspective than the Microsoft Marketing Party Line
(tm) (aka the MMPL) as retold by the Microsoft Certified Marketing
Party Line Regurgitation Professional (MC-MPLRP). (Not that I've got
anything against that. More power to them.)

Thanks,
Troy

[Jason Mauer]

I basically agree with these sentiments, both about not getting into the chore of job opportunity review for recruiting companies, and around our foundation being .NET.

With regards to sponsorship, the thing I don't think has been considered enough is -- what are we getting out of it? Who's the recruiter offering the sponsorship? Where is the space they have to offer? Does it have a projector, etc?

Perhaps we can invert the relationship -- have PDX ALT.NET members put their resume in the hat when they are interested in job opportunities, along with a description of the types of work they'd be most interested in. The sponsor(s) could be sponsoring for the right to get their hands on our list of group candidates. That way only the people interested are the ones getting the job solicitation, and the recruiters still get what they want -- a pool of good potential candidates. We could have a rule that says you have to attend a meeting to drop your resume into the bucket (to ensure it's at least someone we know).

I think it could also encourage positive behavior in having members let other members know when they're available for work. We may be able to foster more working directly together, finding each other opportunities, etc. Puts the focus more on our members and their needs than being led around by the needs of the recruiters. Thoughts?

On the group focus issue (which is a separate issue *cough* focus on topic, Adron *cough*), though my current leanings are to remain the ALT.NET group, it is something to consider. When I first started at MS in 2001, I met up with Ken Starnes of the local VB group, as well as Chris Goldfarb and the gang over at PADNUG when they were first getting going. The VB group had considered rebranding themselves the PDX Visual Studio UG in the face of .NET's arrival, but they decided to stay under the VB umbrella. They wilted over time and are a shadow of their former selves (if they're even still around at all). PADNUG has also diminished somewhat in recent years, but for different reasons. The group's focus is important -- knowing what common bond it is that brings this community of developers together, and not missing the forest for the trees (like VB).

The real uniting factor of this group, in my mind anyway, is the fact that all of us have ties to the Microsoft development platform in some way. There are developers and groups out there that won't go near anything MS with a 100-foot pole. There is also the inverse -- MS fanboys who poo-poo other platforms because they came from somewhere else. I would like to think that we are more open-minded than either of these extremes. We provide a home for pragmatic developers who still count themselves in some way as part of the largest developer community on Earth (that being the MS platform), but aren't attached to MS's rear so directly as a group like PADNUG might be.

I do wonder what the term ".NET" will mean over the next 10 years, as MS goes through platform shifts every decade, and they made it clear during Build that .NET will not be at the forefront of their marketing as it was the last 10 years. There is a shift to embrace both more native and HTML5 development. .NET isn't going away anytime soon, but it likely will represent less of a percentage of where we are twiddling our bits.

If there is a catchphrase that better conveys that open-and-MS-friendly sensibility than "ALT.NET", I'm all ears... so far that is the best the collective community has come up with. I don't think it's "software craftsmen" or anything overly generic like that... that's my 2 cents, anyway.

-j

[Justin Collum]

Someone would have to play cop on this one. 

Scenario: I drop my resume into the hat. Recruiter from Agency X (the sponsor) calls me about a job at Generic .NET Shop (EF, MVC, WPF, WCF, TFS, so on). Me, I'm specifically not interested in working with TFS. Yet I keep getting calls from Agency X about jobs at Typical .NET Shop #1 (or 2 or 3). After a while, I don't really want to hear from Agency X anymore because they didn't really listen when I said "don't want to work at Generic .NET Shop". Someone has to tell them that they aren't fulfilling their end of the bargain. Could be awkward. 

[Adron Hall]

Justin - I think it would be the developer's responsibility, ultimately, to break it to X recruiter that you don't want approached about anything that involves X. However if Y company gets regular complaints we'd have to remove them from getting to see the resumes in the "hat". I think that reversing the relationship as Jason suggests we'd however get good behavior.  ;)

Jason - I dig the "hat" idea. It provides an opportunity to learn and be contacted about jobs if you want to be, while eliminating getting the jobs pushed directly into the actual conversation of technologies. I like it.

As for a better phrase than ALT.NET...  not really sure at this point.

-Adron