Blowing my own horn

I don’t do this often, but I feel a fever coming on and I’m hoping a little ego self-gratification will make me feel better.

Please allow me to quote from Joel Spolsky’s article “Finding Great Developers“:

…you can go through thousands of job applications and quite frankly never see a great software developer. Not a one.

Here is why this happens.

The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market.

The average great software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career.

The great college graduates get pulled into an internship by a professor with a connection to industry, then they get early offers from that company and never bother applying for any other jobs. If they leave that company, it’s often to go to a startup with a friend, or to follow a great boss to another company,..

On a completely unrelated matter, let me provide a quick description of my career: “During university did an internship at a large software company. Hired on by them fulltime upon graduation, to work in the Waterloo office for a boss in Boston. Left that company to move to a startup with my boss and several other key developers. Startup was in New York, I worked from my home in Waterloo. Later left the startup with my boss and several other key developers to move to another large software company, this time in Boston, working from my new home in Nova Scotia.”

That’s a simplification–it glosses over the four corporate acquisitions, none of which really impacted my work directly.

So, during the intervening ten years, which I’ve spent working at several companies for the same boss, how many job interviews have I done that related to jobs I’ve worked at? That would be zero.

I’m just saying.

Oh, and what do I do now? I’ve moved up through several levels of technical titles: I’ve been a Software Engineer, a Senior Engineer, a Principal Engineer, and for the last couple of years I’ve been the Software Architect for the product I work on.

What’s the product you ask? Well, it’s CA’s Identity Management product, creatively named CA Identity Manager.

On another completely unrelated note, please enjoy this clipping from Yahoo Finance:

CA today announced it has been named the worldwide market leader in Identity and Access Management (IAM) software by IDC for the sixth consecutive year

…

According to IDC, CA continues to lead the IAM software market, a position it has held for several years and further solidified with the 2004 acquisition of Netegrity and its SiteMinder Web SSO products.

Hm… achy fever symptoms persist, but oddly I do feel slightly better.