Category: Career

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Career Podcasts What I’m Up To

I’m the latest guest on Cyber Florida’s “No Password Required” podcast!

The past couple of weeks have kept me pretty busy, but I didn’t want to let this one slip through the cracks: I recently appeared on Cyber Florida’s No Password Required podcast! I talked with host Jack Clabby and guest host Tashya Denose (who hosts the Do We Belong Here? podcast) about how I got into my line of work, and a lot about how saying “yes” when opportunities arrives can pay off big time.

It was a fun interview that you can listen to using the player below…

…or if you’d like the video version, it’s here…

…or if you prefer more standard podcast sources, you can listen to it via these services:

What is Cyber Florida?

Cyber Florida: The Florida Center for Cybersecurity Logo

It’s the short name for the Florida Center for Cybersecurity. In addition to being the people behind the No Password Required and Do We Belong Here? podcasts, they’re an organization with the missions of making Florida a national leader in cybersecurity education. They’re funded by the state of Florida and hosted at the University of South Florida, and among other things, they:

  • Work to build a robust pipeline of future professionals by introducing cyber safety and career awareness programs to K–12 schools.
  • Help Florida’s public colleges and universities offer degree and certificate programs that produce ready-to-hire graduates.
  • Create and champion pathways for women and minorities, veterans and first-responders, and career changers to enter the field to help address our nation’s critical cyber workforce shortage.
  • Invest in novel research that contributes to our nation’s competitive edge and conduct studies that yield new insights into cybercrime, privacy, user behavior, and organizational needs to help craft local, state, and national policy.
  • Engage millions of Floridians through awareness campaigns and host events and resources to help protect those populations and organizations that are most vulnerable to cybercrime.

What is No Password Required?

The No Password Required podcast brings in monthly guests who are at the very top of the cybersecurity field. I have no idea why they think I’m in that category, but I’m grateful!

The focus in this podcast is less on dry topics like cybersecurity measures, practices, techniques, and technologies, and more on their guests’ personalities and how they reached their current career status. This fits with Cyber Florida’s mission to create more Florida-based cybersecurity professionals! Each of their guests shares stories that made them laugh, think, and learn. It’s a fun listen.

What is Do We Belong Here?

Do We Belong Here? is a podcast dedicated to proving that everyone has a place in the world of cybersecurity. It’s hosted by…

  • Tashya Denose, the Cyber Whisperer
  • Pam Lindemoen, the Chief Information Security Officer Advisor at Cisco

…and it’s produced by Cyber Florida’s Sarina Gandy. It focuses on highlighting the industry leaders who are working to make cybersecurity a more inclusive and welcoming place, and having open conversations to show that we are never alone in our struggles.

Categories
Career Humor

Career protip: Choose a neutral desktop background when presenting from your own laptop

Learn from this presenter’s mistake.

Categories
Career Current Events

Looking for tech work? Check out these two info-packed spreadsheets!

Programmer sitting on sidewalk with laptop holding up sign made from a cardboard box that says “Please help! Will code 4 food! Even VB! God bless!”
Creative Commons photo by “bugbbq”. Tap to see the original.

Hey techies! Want to know who’s hiring or what positions are open right now? Here are a couple of Google spreadsheets that you might find helpful in your search:

Help your fellow techies out there and share these spreadsheets far and wide!

Categories
Career Current Events Humor

Twitter employees: Today’s the day!

Tap to view at full size.

Choose wisely.

Categories
Career Current Events

The options for Twitter employees, “Star Wars” style!

It’s official: Elon Musk sent out an email to the remaining staff at Twitter, offering them this choice…

  1. Stay and be “hardcore,” committing to long hours at high intensity, where “only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” or
  2. Leave and take three months’ salary.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog and a fan of Star Wars: Andor, you already know which choice I recommend.

Categories
Career Current Events

Intentional or not, getting fired by publicly contradicting Elon was a brilliant move

The whole mess started with this Tweet:

Elon Musk tweet from November 13, 2022: “Btw, I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!”

This should have been something like “We’re working on Android performance issues, and you should see improvements in the coming weeks/months,” but that’s not Elon’s style. This was a combination of management by shame and a little red meat for his fanboys.

I myself have delivered working software that was later know-nothingly criticized by a pointy-haired boss, so I understand former Twitter developer Eric Frohnhoefer’s response…

…which led to this Twitter exchange, where Eric defends the team and points out the work they’ve done to improve the Android client. It’s an even-tempered response…

Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 on Twitter: "@TeQ @dankim Android has a wider range of devices with different performance characteristics. It is what makes Android great but also frustrating." / Twitter

One of Elon’s fanboys — or at least a fanboy-adjacent person — decided to re-ask a question that Elon asked earlier and which wasn’t answered in Eric’s series of tweets, and again, Eric responded matter-of-factly:

Adn that’s when we got our fanboy moment:

On the urging of users, without any apparent managerial or HR review, Eric Frohnhoefer was fired.

We’ve gone from this…

Elon Musk dismisses valid criticism of Tesla as 'weird' attacks from the media | Electrek

…to this:

You’ve probably already guessed that @Langdon’s Twitter account now looks like this:

Reporter Cyrus Farivar (an online friend) talked to Eric, and the firing had all the characteristics of current Twitter:

In fact, Eric’s confirmation of his dismissal came in the form of being locked out of his company laptop:

Now about that brilliant move I mentioned in this post’s title…

Under normal circumstances, contradicting the boss in a public forum is a bad idea. But these are not normal circumstances.

This is a boss who’s happy to grind his employees with overwork (I have friends who’ve worked at his companies), treat them like 19th century factory workers, and fire people for working from home during the 2020 pandemic. He’s taken over Twitter without a real plan, slashed the workforce with more thought about cost-cutting than actually running the place, and is telling people close to the code that he knows more than them.

We’ve seen this kind of unearned intellectual overconfidence before:

This is not a workplace you want to be in. It is toxic. And it’s not worth the effort. As a Twitter employee, you really have just two options:

  1. Quit.
  2. Be fired.

Under normal circumstances, option 1 is the preferable one. But these are not normal circumstances.

Getting fired by Elon under these circumstances, given what is publicly known (and who know what we don’t know yet, but the smart money says it’s much worse) is a badge of honor. You get:

  1. Points for courage for standing up to the world’s biggest and richest pointy-haired boss.
  2. Points for integrity for standing up for the Android development team, and defending them in an even-tempered manner.
  3. Sympathy points for taking on a no-win David vs. Goliath battle.

Someone from the Reddit team has already reached out to Eric about a senior Android development position, and I’m certain that it’s just one of many communications about an open position that he’s received.

Godspeed and good luck in your job search, Eric.

In the meantime…

Categories
Career

Three tips for Amazon employees who’ve been laid off

Pile of various Amazon ID badges.

The New York Times published a story today announcing that Amazon will lay off thousands of employees this week — possibly as many as 10,000. This is similar to the number of people that Facebook laid off.

If you’re one of these people, you have my sympathy. I’ve gone through four layoffs myself, and I have some tips to share below.

Remember that you have Amazon on your resume.

As a FAANG/MANGA company, Amazon has serious “street cred” among recruiters and hiring managers. Emphasize the “Amazon” item on your resume, mention it in your LinkedIn headline…

Screenshot of Joey deVilla’s LinkedIn page, with the headline highlighted.
Your LinkedIn headline is your personal description of yourself
that appears just below your name.

…and play up your Amazon experience in interviews.

Borrow a trick from the former Facebookers / Metamates who got laid off and make a “badge post.”

Facebook badge and departing intern checklist paper form.

Facebook/Meta has the outgoing employee tradition of the “badge post” where you write a farewell post on their internal portal. When the big layoff happened last week, many laid-off Facebookers/Metamates posted similar posts onto LinkedIn, complete with a photo of their badge (the photo side has just the person’s photo and name, which are already on their LinkedIn profile).

These generated a lot of sympathy, re-connected a lot of people who’d lost touch, and from the comments to these posts, also got a lot of attention from recruiters, hiring managers, and other people who either were trying to fill positions or knew of open ones.

Once the initial shock of getting laid off has worn off, write and post an “Amazon badge post” — along with a photo of your badge — on LinkedIn as soon as possible. Don’t forget to add the “Open to Work” indicator to your profile photo!

Do this sooner rather than later. The longer you wait, the more “badge posts” will be out there, and you don’t want to get lost among the multitude.

Join an Amazon alumni group.

Screenshot of the Day One Syndicate site.

Every company, once it gets big enough, has at least one alumni group founded by former employees for networking and finding new jobs. Amazon is no exception, and you should look into the following: