After a recent family gathering, my son reported that one of his wife’s big-mouthed relatives was bragging about how he was getting one to two phone calls _a day_ from companies begging him to go to work for them.
In the two to three weeks around the first of this year, it wasn’t unusual for software developers to get one or more calls a day from headhunters, this being an exceptionally good job market. I was surprised, though, to hear about such a volume of calls from direct companies, and decided to test this out.
I invented an alter ego, a man in his late 20’s with a distinctly Asian name, and posted a resume on Monster with the same technical background as mine, but under a made-up company.
I figured to uncover a scandal in tech hiring that would be worthy of an article to one of the local papers, or even a spot on Oprah.
Sure enough, my new friend Robert started getting emails and calls immediately – but almost entirely from recruiters, not HR departments.
I’ve been getting calls as well, sometimes for the same job from the same firm, but not from the same people.
“Robert” only received one call from a company. Ironically enough, it was from MSN Search, a subsidiary of the mother ship, Microsoft.
This is consistent with something some of us have noticed and even discussed about Microsoft events. As one colleague put it, the number of women at MSFT technical conferences equal the number of men named Brian, her husband’s name.
It’s been my impression that Apple and Open Source events have a larger proportion of women attendees, and this motivated me to apply for a long-shot job as a Java developer at a local company. They granted me a close to four hour interview yesterday. Much to their credit, their department has a good balance of gender and age.
Meanwhile, I have another offer for a contract-to-perm job in a Microsoft shop, and have interviewed recently at three firms either headed by women or which have a female CIO.
The conclusion from all of this? My industry is possibly less sexist, racist and age-ist than I thought.
So much for being a guest on Oprah.