Archive for June, 2007

Archives for Perfect Job

Are you curious about what it’s like to work at Google, Yahoo or Microsoft? You’re not alone.

Even people who work or have worked at one of these cyberspace giants speculate and debate about the merits of one versus the others. And there are media mavens, including yours truly, who keep tabs not only of which company’s search engine is first tier, but also of which company is the hottest place to work.

The Wall Street Journal jumped into the fray Thursday with an article called “Start-Ups Make Inroads With Google’s Work Force.” The article talks about why some Google employees may walk now that their options are vesting and the company is becoming rather large. On the other hand, company officials say that attrition is holding steady at a low five percent rate and they expect to receive some two million résumés this year.

There are several anonymous blog posts, including one apparent leak of a Microsoft memo, that are getting lots of play in the blogosphere. Web Worker Daily posted a link to the notorious and anonymous “Just Say ‘No’ to Google” blog today.

One of my favorite takes on MiGoYa, however, is found in a post called My Work Stories by a University of Illinois Masters student who interned at Microsoft and claims to blog as a form of procrastination from research. He gives us his impressions of the Search Engine Giants, including the woefully underappreciated category of computer monitors! Google serves the most food and offers the best monitors, but it offers the least personal space for programmers.

Another gem from his blog post was his recollection of his first interview for a Microsoft internship:

I did one screening interview as a freshman on campus where I was rejected without mercy. Apparently the answer to “Can you tell me what was the most difficult bug you faced while programming and what you did to resolve it?” isn’t “My programs don’t have bugs.”

MiGoYa is worth paying attention to because they are willing to improve the way they treat employees to stay competitive and successfully lure the world’s top talent. These are not the kind of employers who stand on ceremony and say ‘We have always done it this way.’ Innovations MiGoYa employers make will spread quickly around the globe.

 

Archives for Coaching

You give your word that you will accept a job, but then you change your mind. As they say in basketball, “no harm, no foul,” right?

Just 24 hours after Billy Donovan, famed coach of the two-time national champion University of Florida men’s basketball team, held a press conference to announce that he had signed a $27.5 million contract to coach the Orlando Magic NBA team, a funny thing happened. He changed his mind.

According to various accounts, Donovan, 42, informed the Magic that he had “a change of heart.” This reconsideration did not go over well with Magic fans or team ownership.

Or the local media: The Orlando Sentinel quips that “Billy the Kid has become Billy the Kidding.”

Who knew that even a champion coach should hire a careers coach to think his moves through? Instead, Donovan’s hiring a lawyer in case the NBA team comes after him. Fortunately for him, UF apparently wants him back and fan sympathies that are now with the Magic may turn against them if there is retribution against the coach.

“The basic rule in America is if you sign what is called a personal service or employment contract, even if you breach it, the court won’t make you work for the party you signed the contract with,” says Frank Snyder, a law professor at Texas Wesleyan University School of Law, in another Sentinel story. “There’s no way if Donovan wants to get out of the deal that he can be compelled to work for the Magic.”

To try to enforce the contract or extract blood from Donovan, the Magic will need to prove that they have been damaged by this ordeal, adds Snyder. There is some speculation that the team could try to bar Donovan from coaching in the NBA until the five-year-term of his soon-to-be-voided deal is up. But common sense suggests that the wiser course of action will be for the Magic to put this experience behind them.

Yet from Donovan’s perspective possibly there were no bad career choices here - the money and fame were good either way. A good careers coach might have helped Donovan to manage his off-court moves just as artfully as he does during a game.

Archives for Employment

Would you rather work for a founder or a professional manager?  Yahooligans will find out in the wake of CEO Terry Semel’s demotion this week. Co-founder Jerry Yang is returning to shepherd the company.

Yang is a sharp and savvy tech veteran who understands Yahoo!’s culture from inside out. Just as with Michael Dell, who resumed leadership in 2007 of the company he founded in 1984, the concept is that the founder can’t do any worse. In the head to head competition against Google, Wall Street viewed Semel’s Yahoo! as Avis to Google’s Hertz.

Certainly Yang and Dell are likeable fellows who understand their customer’s needs. Still, I wonder if founders have the objectivity - or stomach - to make substantial changes.

In general, founders are not considered excellent professional managers (not that you require an M.B.A. to shepherd people). Though they never lack passion or interest in employees, founders often lack objectivity. They may cling to ineffective ideas longer than is healthy. And investors often fear that the founders lack the ability to scale operations, sell or merge the company when the time is right.

On the bright side founders have the corporate culture imprinted in their DNA. Sometimes companies need a shot of the original Mojo and that’s the perfect time to bring back the founder. Certainly that idea worked pretty well for Apple when it brought back Steve Jobs.

No one ever said Jobs was easy to work for, but that’s not what investors care about. It’s an issue both for employees and prospects to consider.

Archives for Branding You

We applaud change agents who triumph over organizational resistance to blaze new territory. And we tend to hear more about successful change agents than we do about the ones booted out of a company.

Former SAP AG executive Shai Agassi was characterized as a failed change agent by the Wall Street Journal last Friday. “I became not only an agitator, but a lightning rod for a lot of things,” Agassi told the Journal. He resigned in late March from his highly visible job as head of product development, apparently frustrated over SAP’s culture.

Agassi should take heart - his departure is an occupational hazard of innovative leaders. A new study by Accompli, a change leadership advisory firm, of 83 change events from 36 companies between 1995-2005 indicates what’s clear is that only a minority of change agents personally profit from the experience, says Bob Gunn, the firm’s co-founder.

Far from an easy payoff, the Accompli study shows that:
*  28% were promoted
*  29% were terminated
*  43% received a lateral move

Once considered a leading candidate to become CEO of the German software giant, Agassi, who resigned effective April 1^st, reportedly will leave hi-tech to pursue his “interests in alternative energy and climate change,” says Wikipedia. He’s launched a new blog called The Long Tailpipe. Commenting briefly on his departure, Agassi wrote, “In any case, I am sure this will be a fantastic ‘pride adjustment period’ learning how to fly with my own wings, not the borrowed one[s] I got at SAP.”

Archives for Branding You

10. You can stay busy on a 17-hour plane ride without watching an in-flight movie.

9. For four weeks of vacation in year one you would learn enough Flemish to say Het spijt me, ik spreek geen Vlaams.

8. Six years of German - what else is it good for?

7. Your friends know it’s faster to Skype you with geography questions than it is to type them into Google.

6. You no longer fear salad on any continent.

5. Sao Paulo enacts a city-wide ban on the Portuguese pickup line “Didn’t it hurt when you fell from heaven?” just when it started yielding results for you at Apollinari.

4. Your CEO’s global business vision is limited to outsourcing customer service to Manila.

3. Career coaches talk about building your brand, which you take to mean “will my consulting act play the same in Tokyo and London?”

2. You have a better idea of how many frequent flier miles you’ve earned than you do about how many miles are on your car’s speedometer.

1. You have already dated both interesting people in your zip code.

If these points match your perspective - or seem wildly off-track - let us know! Are you ready for a global career?

Editor’s note: On occasion, especially when I’m stuck on planes instead of phones, we will feature ”the Best of MGC” posts.  Your comments are welcome!

Archives for Branding You

Ray Sweger is a 25-year-old operations manager with a mid-market financial firm who landed the job he wanted 2,000 miles from home, not by flying out for an interview but by answering employment questions over a webcam.

Although video résumés are controversial and have not been accepted by corporate America, video interviews conducted over the Web or on videoconferencing systems have caught on quickly. Video interviews are considered a fast, cost-effective and excellent way to filter job candidates.

At first blush, it might seem like a double-standard. Why do hiring managers feel video is okay for interviews but not for résumés? In a word: control. It turns out that employers are comfortable using video for interviews when it’s clear that they can both control the process and save time and money by not having to fly (or even bring) in three candidates for every one they hire. Currently employed job candidates like it because they don’t have to miss work or travel just to complete a job interview.

“I love it primarily for the efficiency but one of the bonuses is there are people we wouldn’t have considered otherwise,” says Sweger’s new boss, Devin Thorpe, CEO, Thorpe Capital, a middle market investment banking firm in Salt Lake City. “We did an interview [for an internship] last night with a woman in Paris.” She had found a Web-based internship notice that Thorpe Capital placed with the nearby University of Utah’s career center, contacted the company, and within hours had completed the process online.

Archives for Education

Do foreign students realize that the university they chose is targeting them as part of a burgeoning billion-dollar industry? The fact that a few thousand colleges dispatched 7,000 educators to Minneapolis, Minn. this week to exchange ideas at a conference about global workforce development indicates that there is quite a bit of money and prestige at stake for these institutions of higher learning.

It’s no secret that foreign students pay higher tuition fees than domestic ones and colleges will go to considerable lengths to reel them in. Even the U.S. Congress is getting into the act.

A new piece of bi-partisan legislation called the Paul Simon Study Abroad Foundation Act sets an ambitious goal for 1 million U.S. students to study abroad by 2017. The bill authorizes $80 million for grants to individual students, colleges and universities and nongovernmental institutions that provide study abroad opportunities.  The bi-partisan bill is in tribute to the late senator from Illinois. (I remember Simon’s bow ties, and recall that he jumped into a presidential race in 1988.)

One of the session highlights involved a presentation by Hobsons spotlighting data from a 2006 study of college students planning to study overseas from their bases in China, US, Nigeria, and India. By far, the most popular reason to study abroad was this: “Standard of education is better abroad than in my home country.”

Students from more affluent countries prefer to study abroad more for the ‘experience’ than to learn a particular skill.  Have you studied abroad and would you recommend it to others?