Hiring people - update 1

It has been an eventful week. Last Sunday, at this time I was putting together an employment contract to sign up my first employee. Fast forward a week now I have an employee, scheduled to start in a couple of weeks.

I cannot say that my recruitment campaign is a complete success. I am still on the search or my second employee. I have a couple of potentials, but I am not 100% convinced of either of them. The problem is that their skils are highly skewed. Not the kind of all around skill set that I want to have on my team.

I want to build a team that posses all the skills needed to build modern web sites/solutions. While our core technology is going to be ASP.NET and I am primarily seeking ASP.NET developers I still want them to have decent ancillary skills like Javascript and HTML/CSS. I want a build a team that can take up a full project.

Specially when it comes to ASP.NET devs we tend to ignore front end skills like HTML/CSS an Javascript, a shortcoming I myself had a few months ago. I think partly the blame should go to ASP.NET itself as from the start it ignored these technologies by promoting server side validations and also validation contols that generate the server side markup. But with the rise of MVC framework the spot light is falling on those technologies and we find that the asp.net developers are grossly unarmed. Javascripts steep learning curve and lack of debugging and IDE support in the visual studio adds to the woes.

Stepping aside from technical nitty gritty, a point that I had raised earlier as well is the lack of quality people in Sri Lanka. I am not even remotely implying that we don't have such people, it's just that those people are comfortable in thier jobs and majority of our technical community is happy to be mediocre.

Out of about hundred resumes that I went through, during the past week weeks there were very few which were screaming out the skills and the talents of the applicant. Most of them were just a template with the personal particulars changing. When a recruitment ad is specific about the skills that it seeks in the candidates sending a templates resume which does not highlight any of those skills are a sure fire way to not to get shortlisted. At least make and attempt to highlight the relevance in a cover letter.

The next is if you recieve a communication from the company, protly respond furnishing any information that is required. Please keep in mind, the hole recruitment process is used to evaluate you. If you are slacking in the process, it is not going to reflect good on you.

In the end, I didn't hire the most skillful people who gave me the impression that they were just fishing around. I was looking for people who were passionate about what they were doing and about the technologies. Another factor was how comfortable I felt with those people.

Finally my company is taking shape. Come August we are graduating from being a company with no employees to a company that is staffed, even though it is going to be one staff member. By the eng of August I think we may grow to about a team if four, myself included. Looking forward to doing some cool things in the months ahead.

Hiring people

I am finally moving towards my dream of putting together a team in Sri Lanka.  This also automatically means that my dormant company (which I registered about an year and a half back) is being resurrected.

Hiring people is a tedious and cumbersome process. I tried to do away with the complexity of hiring unknown people by offering a couple of people that I have worked with and known for sometime. These were people who had earned my respect and regard. One of them turned my offer down straight away. He was happy where he was and was earmarked for a promotion, etc. and hence didn’t want to make a move.

The other one, considered my offer and I thought I had him (almost). He felt obligated to his current employer and when the current employer offered to give him some added responsibilities that he was yearning for,  for years he also decided to stay back and try and leave his mark on the his current company. I wished him well.

Then I turned to looking for options to get my vacancy advert across. I had published them on a blog, an industry forum, tweeted it, but it didn’t yield much success. I got one response that was worth considering. Then I placed a paid advertisement in a local jobs website.

I started getting resumes in my mailbox starting from within the first hour of the ad being posted. To be honest, most of the candidates were not of the caliber that I expected to hire. I think these web sites are frequented by those who do not have a job. But to be fair, I got a few good ones as well.

I wanted to tread the hiring path with caution. I read somewhere that it is good to NOT to hire one good candidate if your not 100%  sure rather than to hire one bad candidate in haste. I have personally seen how one bad apple can breakdown the team morale and bring highly capable teams to total mediocrity with their negative rants. And such one bad apple can make or break my operation. It can mean the success or the failure of my new venture.

Therefore I designed the hiring process to be somewhat longer, with a few interactions with the candidates to allow them to sink into my system and to test my comfort levels with them. Since I am starting operations in my home office, it was imperative for me to hire the right people.

To cut a long story short, I have now zeroed in on one candidate. I will be making him an offer tomorrow. Then within the next couple of days I will be zeroing in on one more candidate which will make up my initial team of two programmers. Hopefully, if all goes well, I will be launching operations of my new company, on the first week of next month.

Freelancer woes: cash flow issues

Freelancing is not all rosy and smooth sailing at all times. There are risks associated with it and one of the more common ones is getting paid on time.

At the beginning of my career, I faced the issue of not earning enough. My income dropped below the salary that I used to earn and had to face a few hardships due to depleted income. But within a couple of months my income came up to the level of my previous salary and then it went even higher.

Though there was a drop in earnings, I still had the money coming in on time. So I still managed to make the critical payments on time.

But his month I faced a serious problem of not any money coming in at all. I haven’t still got paid for my work last month. And I haven't got any money left in the bank right now.  Already I am overdue for my CC payment and on the verge of getting interest charged for the delayed payments for my mortgage and the lease.

The reason for the delay is my client has not got paid in time by his client. Technically though it is not a problem of mine, I have had to accept the delay. Our current working arrangement does not include any penalties for delayed payments.

To be fair by the client, he offered me to his CC number in case if I can make any payments using that. He also offered to pay for any interest or delay charges levied upon me.

I do trust my client and have had a very trusting relationship with him. I have worked for him for over an year now and he is a great client to have. No two words about it. I think I could have averted all these headaches had I built a emergency fund. But by undertaking a refurbishment of our home, I had dug into all my savings and even went into additional debt. Luckily I have repaid most of that debt.

I think this is an eye opener for me. I need to immediately start building that emergency fund as without it I’m walking a very fine line and living month-on-month payment. That is worse than living paycheck to paycheck, as my monthly income ha the potential to vary. A significant decrease may put me in another quandary.

Outsource your life aka I need help

I think I have reached a stage where now I can outsource some aspects or tasks of my day to day life. I have too many things going on and I find it difficult to male things happen. And as there are a million things in my head I find it really difficult to concentrate on the task at hand.

I think the most parts of where I can use some help is getting things done with respect to the application ideas that I am working on. My applications are getting pushed to the back burner and the the prospects of them seeing the light of the day is getting delayed as I am concentrating my energy onto client projects, which I need to do to pay my bills.

But if I can find help, that costs me less than what I earn from my clients, and also for the skills that I do not posses or am not an expert of, then I can actually get more done and move my projects to completion. But in order to pay for these services without taking a dent in my income I will need to put in more hours into my client projects and earn the cost of outsourcing.

Cost of opportunities

I hold another gig as a consultant to a local IT company apart from my usual gig as a freelancer for foreign clients. I took up this gig as it gives me an opportunity to get out of the house once in a while and interact with local colleagues and business people. I didn’t want to alienate myself completely from the local IT industry. Let’s call this company LIT.

I am working for them as a project consultant for LIT. When I signed up, my estimate was that I would put in about 5 hours of work for this company for a week, and in return I didn’t ask for a regular pay, but negotiated a percentage of the profit form each project that I worked on.

Some opportunities are opening up for LIT. With each new opportunity, requires someone to work on them, create proposals, forge partnerships, do a bit of pre-sales. As things stand now, I am the one who has to do all that work. All these opportunities come to me as project consultant and it is my job to bring them to the stage where the deal is inked.

I AM exited about these opportunities. For starters it gives me a chance to interact with some of the top people in the industry and in business and public sectors. I am the deal maker and the negotiator. The financial prospects of these opportunities are also pretty good. In the event of them working out, LIT stands to make millions. And and per my agreement, I also tend to benefit.

But this money will realize for me only when LIT makes money, which is sometime down the line. I was not planning on making expense money with LIT. The money I make from LIT was going to be my bonus money. And I was planning on only putting around 5 hours of work into it.

Taking up any additional work would throw some spanners into the work that I do for my regular, expense earning clients’ schedules. I don't want to antagonize them too much as without the income earned from them, I would be in a major fix, without the means to meet my monthly financial commitments.

This made me realize that I am more of a freelance employee, who depends on a monthly paycheck, rather than the entrepreneur who works on building a business so he can move away from the daily grind of the business operation and look for more investment and business opportunities. That is where I want to be, and for that I need to work on a strategy to create multiple, recurring income streams that are not directly dependant on the time that I spend on them.

Getting back to the LIT opportunities, they are high value projects and as such, tend to drag over for sometime. Specially the projects involving the public sector are not swift. I have been working on a couple of projects for the past ten months and as we are about to close it, something happens that will drag the project for another month. There were two elections alone that resulted in a delay of 6 months. Also, there is a degree of uncertainty and an element of risk associated with these opportunities. Sometimes they may never work out, the government may cancel the project or they might run out of funding or there maybe a change in the government and the projects may take a completely different direction.

If I wasn’t dependant on the number of hours that I put in for my foreign clients to cover my monthly expenses, I would work on these opportunities without any hesitation or a wink of an eye. I would rather spend my time on opportunities that have the potential of giving me a higher return, rather than putting in hour after hour for an income that has a ceiling. But right now I can’t afford to do that.

The key to me breaking the cycle of dependency will also come from these opportunities currently at LIT’s door and from the other application ideas that I am toying with. These are the opportunities which has the potential to earn lump sums or earn an income which is not going to have a direct link to the number of hours.

Right now I am weighing the cost of all the opportunities on the table. While I am not free to choose the opportunity with the greatest return I am trying to engage all these opportunities as much as possible, at the expense of all the time I have, day and night. My hope is that I would be able to break free from the employee pattern and move to an entrepreneurial pattern.

Ideas galore

My mind has been a flush with new ideas lately. An idea for a new product or service has been dawning in mind at the rate of one per week.

These ideas have been keep me awake at night and I have been spending g quite a bit of time going through them, refining them and designing them in my ideas book. This makes it seem like I am working forever.

The problem with all these dawning at this rate is that it is next to impossible to bring them to realization. I have started to work on one such idea and it is shaping out quite well. I have set a deadline to get a beta version out.

But with my regular gig which is an hourly gig, also flush with work these days. The client is giving me more and more projects to handle as well as additional responsibilities. I have become an important cog in his machinary and I am puttin up 40+ hour weeks for him.

It seems to be a season of high brain activity for me. I need to either find funding and work full time developing these products with a team. Or I need to put lean start-up ideas into practise and run through them as fast as possible.

I need to find a couple people to team up with me to take care of specific areas. I need to team up with a graphic designer with an eye for clean design. Then I need another person to take care of social media marketing.

Why Engineers Hop Jobs

Interesting post: Why Engineers Hop Jobs

I can quite relate to it myself. As a twenty something software engineer I used to change careers almost at a regular cycle of two years. Only once did I change the job for pure monetary reasons. I had a dick of a boss who went to great lengths to not to raise salaries of his staff so he could get a fat bonus at the end of the year.

Twice I changed jobs (thrice if you include the above as well) because I didn't quite agree with the management style of my bosses. One guy (not the above) was the #1 a%% of all time. The other time the boss of my boss could not properly evaluate my contribution because I didn't graduate from the same university as him. He could only see value of graduates from his university or school, and I was from neither.

And once I changed the job because I was really bored and was seeking a bigger challenge. (The challenge was great but the boss ended up being the a%%)!

So now I am working for myself. Luckily managed to find clients who are great to work with, who appreciate my contribution to their businesses. But the most liberating factor is I am not doing a job. They are my clients. Don't feel obligated.

Now the only thing I have to worry about is when one day I grow into a company, I have to make sure I don't act the way those bosses acted!

Many Silicon Valley start-up companies work from home - USATODAY.com

Many Silicon Valley start-up companies work from home - USATODAY.com

Something close to my situation. I am not yet a company, but even if I do grow to become one, I'd still prefer to keep my current home office as my corporate headquarters. Of course I would add a few necessities such as a meeting table, air conditioning and a coffee maker.

I would want my team to work from wherever they prefer, their homes, coffee shops, or even a bus stop, if that suits them. Our standard corporate equipment issue would be a laptop and a HSDPA modem.

One thing I'd like to see popping up in Sri Lanka is a co-working space. Something basic would do. And I think the ideal place is the WTC, where the 'Deli Market' was. Hmm, that's a business idea. I am sure some multinational offices that have representative offices with only a couple of employees can be lured into permanent tenancy, possibly from WTC itself. Now only if I can find a partner to put in the down-payment for the space.