Hiring Technical People

Extreme Workloads: Smart or Stupid?

A colleague emailed me this question today: “I’m looking for Agile and extreme programming jobs, and I keep seeing stuff like this. Are there really people searching for jobs described as having extreme workloads?” Here’s what he saw:

“incumbent regularly works under deadlines and is capable of handling extreme workloads”

Ok, I have several reactions here.

• Clearly the tool to match keywords doesn’t understand Agile and extreme programming. There are tons of other places where the tools don’t work, but the searches people put in place are triggering these non-matches as matches.
• Why would anyone want a job where the organization is playing schedule chicken or some other schedule game?
• Why would a candidate want a job with an extreme workload?

I must be missing something.On the other hand, this ad will certain screen out reasonable people who recognized that regular deadlines and extreme worksloads are the mark of a death march environment. So, maybe it’s not as stupid as I thought.

3 comments April 10th, 2006

More Praise for Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds…

I love hearing good things about my book. I heard two great things last week. First, the book was reviewed by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) in the Software Engineering Notes Volume 31, Issue 2. Here’s the review. You need to be a member of ACM/SIGSOFT or have access to the digital library to read it. I am, so I did The part I liked the best was this quote:

I’ve done some interviewing for the third corporation I’ve worked for early on, and I wish I had this book twenty years ago.

The other praise was a private email from a reader:

I bought the book after recently listening to your 12/04 interview on ITConversations. I was immediately comfortable with the interviewing techniques described because they’re generally very similar to those I’ve used all along during my career when interviewing sales and marketing people. I’m not a developer but I was able to do a credible job of interviewing developers recently thanks to your suggestions.

Ok, enough basking in the glow. Back to work.

Add comment April 10th, 2006