Scott Porad

Yesterday’s post on being more productive in the morning reminded me of Paul Graham’s essay regarding manager versus maker time.

Paul’s simple point is that “doing work” requires a different type of mindset and workflow than “managing other people doing work”.  Most programmers completely agree, so I encourage you to read his essay.

One of the points that complete resonates with me is:

…there’s [a] way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

I couldn’t possibly agree with this more.  I feel like in order to be maximally productive, I have to have at least a 3-hour chunk of completely uninterrupted time.   And, sometimes that doesn’t even work…as Graham writes:

…one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning.

Yes!  Absolutely!

Rereading Graham’s essay is going to cause me to be more careful about scheduling meetings at Cheezburger.

Right now, we only have two types of meetings: an all-team meeting at Monday morning, and several daily standups for smaller project teams.  Typically, those meetings are all held in the morning, and I’m going to work to keep them that way…perhaps designating the afternoon as “maker time”.  Although, that is incongruent with the whole “morning people are more productive” idea, so maybe the key is to move the meetings earlier in the morning.

I’m not sure…what are your thoughts on this?

After the last two days of posts about resumes, I thought I would take a moment to outline the hiring process we have at Cheezburger for developers.

1. Candidates submit their resume and answer a brief questionnaire at http://jobs.cheezburger.com.  The questionnaire asks a few simple questions.  For example, for a senior position we ask years of experience with C# because it’s really easy to screen out the resume-spam-blasters who apply for every position with out reading the job requirements.  We also as a few logistical questions, such as “when can you start?”.  In total, the questionnaire has less than 10 questions.
2. We screen resumes looking for candidates that meet our core requirements in terms of skills and experience.
3. Candidates who pass our screening are invited to submit a coding sample based on a simple project spec that we provide.  For a qualified candidate, we expect that the project should only take a few hours.
4. As candidates submit their sample projects, we review their code to get a sense of their overall coding ability and style.
5. Candidates who’s coding sample is satisfactory then enter an interview loop where the will meet face-to-face (or in some cases via Skype, depending on the locale) with four people from our team: one senior developer, one other developer, one product manager and me, the CTO.
6. The two developers are tasked with assessing technical skill.  In other words, does the candidate have the chops to do the job.  The way we think about this is that having the skills gets you “in the door”…
7. …then whether or not you’d be a good fit for our team gets you hired.  The PM and I focus primarily on this assessment, although the developers consider this as well.  When we look at fit, we look for two general things: a) does your work style fit with our work style, for example, preferring Agile over Waterfall, and b) does it seem like you’d be pleasurable to work with 8 hours a day.
8. Finally, if the candidate has made it this far—meaning that all four people who have interviewed indicate we should hire—we check personal references.

There are occasions where we vary from this process—for example, when hiring a short-term contractor.  In general, however, we like it because we get to look at three examples of code (the coding project, plus two developer interviews where the candidate is asked to write code), and four face-to-face meetings to assess personal/culture fit.

The feedback in comments and on Hacker News to yesterday’s post about getting your resume noticed was really spectacular.  I don’t purposefully write controversial posts, although I enjoy it when a post is controversial.  I find the exchange of ideas exhilarating.

I encourage you to read the feedback, although my analysis is that it fell in two general camps:

• Sometimes it’s culturally appropriate depending on geography and industry.
• It doesn’t make sense to screen based on a photo when what matters are skills.

As I see it, these two points of view are opposite sides of the same coin: what may be good for the candidate (the first point) is not necessarily good for the employer (the second point).

My intention when writing the post was to address candidates—to explain something that, as an hiring manager, caught my eye.  Although, as I said:

…it wasn’t his pretty face that was the deciding factor; he was a very qualified candidate who would have passed our screening regardless.

However, I was influenced by the commenters who advocated for anonymous resumes and screening.  That is, developing a process to screen resumes that don’t have names, addresses, photos or any other information that which might indicate anything beyond skills and experience.

As a candidate, I’m not sure that anonymous screening would be in my favor (see: yesterday’s post).  Yet, having considered the notion, as a hiring manager, this makes sense because I really do want the most qualified candidates.  The time to assess corporate culture fit is after having identified (through screening and interviews) the candidates who are most qualified to do the work.

I may experiment with this (anonymous job applications and resumes) at Cheezburger, although I haven’t determined exactly how just yet.  If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments.

In the last few months I’ve reviewed dozens and dozens resumes for potential developer candidates.  After awhile, they start to get blurry and blend together.  I don’t want to miss good candidates, so I only review a handful at a time in order to stay fresh.

But, not all hiring managers might be as conscientious as I am, so this is pretty bad for the candidates: they want to get noticed, but they’re blending in.  In today’s job market, that’s not what a candidate needs.

Today, I saw a new technique for getting your resume noticed.  Something I’ve never seen before, so elegant and simple…literally anybody and everybody could do this and improve their resume in a matter of minutes.

The candidate included a picture of himself.

As you can see from the image below (which is actual size) it was just a small head-shot taken with a digital camera.  Nothing fancy or garish.

In fact, the rest of his resume was pretty ordinary and tedious.  Yet, the impact of that photo was immediate and powerful.

Automatically, the picture caused me to form a personal connection with this candidate.  For better or worse, in my mind, I could look at his face and imagine what it might be like to work with him.

In the end, from a set of 30 resumes, his was one of 8 that were selected for the next phase in our interview process.  But, it wasn’t his pretty face that was the deciding factor; he was a very qualified candidate who would have passed our screening regardless.

There’s a counter-argument: wouldn’t it be awful to be judged by your photo in the blink of an eye?  Yes, it would be, but I think the gains out weigh the risk.  To me, personal connections are priceless, so the value of the image is entirely worth it.

I am reminded of how Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the power of first impressions in his book Blink.  The core assertion of Gladwell’s book is that:

There are lots of situations…when our snap judgments and first impressions offer a much better means of making sense of the world.

This candidate was able to tap into the power of first impressions by using the simple feature of Microsoft Word that allows an author to embed an image into a document.  As a result, he strengthened personal connection, and increased his chance of being hired.

Recently, I’ve had conversations with Marcelo and Jennifer at Seattle 2.0 about the Seattle Startup Index.  Often they receive complaints because they don’t include blogs or content sites in the index, and just about everyone they deny says “but you allow Cheezburger!”

I can understand why an outsider would think this because I often describe Cheezburger as a media company, and our product as “a collection of entertainment sites”.  Many consumers and people outside the company see Cheezburger as just a blog.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The business story is that of a media and content company, but it’s built upon innovative use of technology.  Our technology story has four pieces:

1. Dealing with scale and volume.
2. Creating a product where audience drives the content that broadcast to them.
3. Building a platform where we can launch new sites very inexpensively.
4. Building our product by using the most progressive product development practices.

All of this technology is in support of a business.  That’s right…the technology is just the means to an end.  Our mission is for that end to make everyone happy for five minutes per day.  And, we’ve developed some pretty innovative means to do that.

For example, one component of our technology strategy is to rely on commodity software as much as we can instead of “rolling our own” in-house.  Instead of spending time to build a display layer for our product we chose to use commodity software—Wordpress.  Wordpress is commonly used as a blogging tool, but is easily adapted for use as a general purpose content management system.

We chose this route because we believed that our technology resources were best put toward more difficult and valuable problems.  In many quarters, this is considered a “best practice”.  I cringe to use such consulting-speak, but we’re often faulted for this choice.

On the other hand, if we had spent time building our own display layer instead of figuring out how to moderate high volumes of content we might have not ever reached this point.

How much content?  Every day, we receive 15-20k submissions that are each moderated and evaluated by our team and community, then the top content is published back onto our sites.  This is not a trivial task, and for it we need a system that can’t be bought off the shelf like Wordpress.  This is software we wrote to meet the unique needs of our business.

But, really…does software to support  a business really a technology company make?

I’m not intimately familiar with every company on the startup index, but my personal opinion is that very few of them are actually technology companies.  Perhaps I’m old school on this, but my view is that a technology company is in the business of creating and selling hardware or software.

Most “technology startups” today don’t do that—they use technology to make existing business models (or social models) easier-better-faster-cheaper.  In other words, they use technology, like we do, as a means to an end.  I’d argue that if smoke signals were easier-better-faster-cheaper than the web to achieve the end, then that’s what would be used.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention our software development practices.

Cheezburger is pioneering and embracing the most modern and progressive development practices.  The piece I enjoy highlighting is a continuous deployment system we’ve built that—with the exception of one human checkpoint—performs a completely automated commit-to-deploy cycle.  (We don’t trust our robots completely…yet.)

To achieve this we have written several pieces of proprietary software that I consider some of our core competitive advantage.  One of them has to do with how we manage our database schema and allowing us to do upgrades on the fly with out downtime.  I’m not going to get into the details of how it works, but a) I’m certain it would be a profitable business if we sold it independently, and b) it’s a beautiful piece of software that makes my geek-engineer heart go pitter-patter with glee.

This post is quite a bit longer than I planned, so I’ll stop beating you over the head with why we’re a technology company.  Oh, wait…we’ve also developed a social network at cheezburger.com, a public API, and we’re working on our own iPhone and iPad apps as well.  (And, as soon as I can hire a developer with the right experience, we’re going to build a Facebook app too!)

So, as you can see, the technology story never ends…

An update from yesterday…

Seattle 2.0

I talked to Jennifer Cabala of Seattle 2.0 about some of my professional experience—how I got my start, on getting a successful product to market, and what I will be speaking on at Seattle 2.0’s event for technologists, Deploy 2010 on June 24th.   You can read the whole interview here.

SMASH Summit

I presented at the SMASH Summit on the keys to the success we’ve had at Cheezburger.  The slides of the presentation are below, and in summary the presentation goes like this:

• We have lots of sites
• Traffic is moving up and to the right
• There were three secrets to our success

1. Create great content — in particular, content that strikes and emotional chord
2. Create lots of it — more content means you’re more likely to resonate with someone
3. Create it for less money — the key to this is knowing what about your content people are coming for; in our case, it’s the captions, not the pictures.

Seattle Weekly

One of my passions is music, and I was interviewed by the Seattle Weekly for their weekly Reverb Questionnaire, a list of questions they pose to folks outside the music industry.  Previous participants include Michael Chabon, Michele Norris, and Janeane Garofolo, so I’m in pretty good company!

I’ve been reviewing a lot of resumes lately.  Why do developer candidates list all the technologies that they have ever read a blog post about?  Things like this on web and software developer resumes are very common:

.NET (all versions), C#, VB.NET, PHP, Python, Java, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, SQL, SQL Server, TSQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MongoDB, Redis, IIS, Apache, nginx, xUnit, nUnit, RhinoMocks, ninject, StructureMaps, NHibernate, SparkViewEngine, SVN, Git, MVC, ActiveRecord, O/R Mapping, IoC, JSON, BSON, XML, Web Services, Threading, Sockets, TCP, HTTP.

Last summer, when I hired a carpenter to complete the unfinished basement in our house I didn’t ask him to enumerate all the tools he knows how to use:

Hammer, screwdriver (flathead and phillips), drill (including bits), saw, wrenches (imperial and metric)…

Could you imagine trying to hire a carpenter based on this information?  What I need to know was if he could do things like build walls, install flooring, replace windows, repair siding, etc.

My question for you: how could or should candidates write their resumes to be more effective?

Hiring is hard.

Actually, hiring isn’t hard.  Hiring the right people is hard.  Very hard.

The more time I spend in the professional world, the more I realize that the fit of the people on a team is really, really important.  Just as important, if not more important, than skills.

I am reminded of something Kent Beck said at the Startup Lessons Learned conference last week.  Kent was reviewing the Agile Manifesto, and suggesting updates.

Agile, the manifesto says, values, “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”.  True, but Kent added that in the ten years since it was signed he’s come to value “team vision and discipline over individuals and interactions”.

I think both are true.  Good teammates value the people they work with and think carefully about how the team interacts, but (paraphrasing Kent) are also willing to optimize for the success of the company, and have the discipline to think about the whole team.

[Why am I thinking about this?  Because I'm trying to hire a good developer at Cheezburger.  We've been looking for about two months, but haven't found the right person yet.  Maybe it's you: here's the listing.]

Seattle 2.0 is a hub of the Seattle tech startup community, and holds an awards banquet each spring.  This year, Cheezburger and the several people on our team were honored to receive nominations.

I was fortunate enough to be nominated for one award—Best Startup Technologist.  To me, the nomination is especially flattering because it comes from a committee of leaders in the Seattle community.  That they think of me with such regard warms my heart.

You can vote for the winners until May 11th.

Best Startup
• Cheezburger Network

Best Startup Technologist
• Scott Porad

Best Service Provider to Startups
• Pearl Chan, CFO Selections (Pearl wrangles Cheezburger’s finances)

Best Event for Startups
• Hops & Chops (Todd Sawicki, our main business guy, is a regular)
• Ignite Seattle (Randy Stewart, one of our product development team members, is a key organizer)

At Cheezburger, our mission is to make everyone happy for five minutes a day.  Often, around the office, we’ll say something to he effect of “we’re not ending world hunger, but that doesn’t mean our work isn’t important”.

Every few weeks we get an e-mail like the one we got last week from a fan of our site who has been sharing our stuff with a friend who’s been in the hospital for five weeks….it’s been cheering her up.

Or, once I met a fan of our site who told me the primary way he communicated with his 17 year old daughter was through LOLcats.

And then, today, I found out that one of our pictures made it all the way to Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States!

From the book Game Change which gives an inside account of the 2008 presidential campaign:

Obama attempted to retain his balance through the outbreak of Palinmania. When his team’s first instinct was to criticize Palin’s selection, he dialed them back. He counseled them repeatedly to keep their eyes (and train their fire) on the top of the ticket. When Jarrett informed him of a series of meetings she’d had in New York with frantic Democrats in that first week after the conventions, Obama said, “Just tell them to calm down.”

A couple of days later, Jarrett received a viral email that pictured Obama staring forward sternly and pointing in the direction of the camera. Above his head were the words “EVERYONE CHILL THE FUCK OUT,” and below that, the message “I GOT THIS!” She forwarded it to Obama.

“That’s what I was trying to tell you!” Obama replied.

That picture came from one of Cheezburger’s sites, Pundit Kitchen.  How cool is that?!

Caption by Barack2thefuture