Ben Slivka led the Internet Explorer team when I was at Microsoft, and he helped make it one of the most intense and exciting projects I’ve worked on. 

These days he’s heavily involved in education, both through the Wissner-Slivka Foundation and by co-founding a new startup called Schoolsoft.   They are currently hiring a VP of engineering; this is a unique opportunity to do important and rewarding work and to define the engineering culture of a new startup. 

Below are a few snippets from the Schoolsoft VP of Engineering job description:

The successful candidate will establish, elaborate, and evolve our Culture of Engineering as he builds and leads his team in the design, development, and deployment of our web service.

The successful candidate will work effectively to leverage the passion, experience, and vision of the company while balancing the day-to-day and strategic business priorities.

 Until the engineering team grows larger, a successful candidate will also design systems, write specifications and code, perform code reviews, debug and fix nasty bugs, and perform all of the other skills of a world-class software design engineer.

The successful candidate will describe his job thusly: “My role is to set the high level goals, get the right people in the right jobs — where they can leverage their strengths and work on their weaknesses — while I coach.  I try to push down authority with responsibility as deeply into the organization as possible.  I also represent the customer to make sure we meet our goals.”

Read More if you’re interested in this position.

In the past, I might have used Google to find pages on the web, folder browsing and liberal cursing to find documents on my own computer, and the start menu or the command line to launch applications.

With desktop search, there is now a convergence of all three activities into a single search based interface.

Let’s review the current state of the art:

Google Desktop Search provides a single, speedy interface for finding any kind of content, either web pages or documents on my own computer. It also includes local applications in desktop search results.

MSN Desktop Search does the same, and also provides the ability to define easy-to-type shortcuts for launching applications or invoking web based search forms, as described by David Brunelle in MSN Desktop Search Hacks.

As a geek power user, search shortcuts are great: I can hit a single shortcut key regardless of what I’m doing, bring up a search box, and launch my key applications using concise shortcuts I’ve defined. It does hint at a day when lines between search, GUIs, and command lines are blurred.

It will be interesting to see to what extent these ideas will be incorporated into other desktop search applications, and to what extent such an interface because a mainstream way of launching applications. The lines will continue to get blurrier between content and applications, and between local versus web based applications. As this happens, the start menu or dock becomes less and less appropriate as a way of navigating to applications.

As Jobster welcomes Jobby to the fold, I thought it was worth sharing some of the ideas that we think make Jobby special.

Jobby applies folksonomies to career skills, to make the process of creating and searching profiles faster, more entertaining, and more relevant.

1.  When you create a profile, you can quickly click on relevant skills in a tag cloud for your speciality (say web geek).  AJAX means instant responses as you add skills.   Instead of hardcoding the set of skills in the system, Jobby relies on the community to create and weight the different skills, ensuring that they stay up to date and relevant. 

2.  If you have a skill that’s not in the system, you can add your own tag. Jobby will search for similar tags already in the system to avoid duplication.

3.  The AJAX search interface allows users to quickly rapidly filter down the set of users by clicking on tags.

These ideas become even more compelling when integrated with other social search features we have in development for professionals and recruiters.

Jobster is delighted to welcome Brian and Tony from Jobby to our product team, as chronicled by Jason and Alan and reported in Michael Arrington’s Techcrunch.  

The Jobby team has a good blog post describing their experiences meetingJobster the team. I’ve never seen two people click right off the bat so well as Brian and Tony. They were smart yet modest, and passionate about exactly the same things we were– using technology and innovative user experiences to make meaningful career matches.

We have a great roadmap of shared ideas about how to combine the two sites, as Jason notes in his subtle wink.

Here’s how Ajaxian describes Jobby:

Ever wondered when the online job searching sites would get out of the “old web” and into a more Web 2.0 kind of attitude? Well, a new site, Jobby, is looking to change that image.

Jobby is a new way to think about resumes that lets you show off your
qualifications and make it easy for hiring mangers to find you.  Instead of digging through job postings and submitting resumes to countless companies and recruiters, Jobby lets users make their qualifications available in an easily to search format.

Jobby uses a tag cloud-based qualification entry interface, and AJAX powered search filters based on category, name, level, location, and more. The search page also lets you subscribe to customized search filters via RSS in case you don’t find the person you’re looking for right away.

The site combines a solid combination of interface and functionality to create an easy to use kind of user experience. As as hiring manager, you can search on a term and get the results. The real fun starts when you apply filters to the data dynamically. Your list is fine tuned down to a few candidates as you narrow the field in different categories like Location, Business, and Availability.

They’re also working up a system that would allow developers to add a “drop in” script to the page, linking directly to their information on Jobby. You can keep track of this and other advancements they’re making on their blog.

A Berry411 user has contributed an EBay search plugin for Berry411. After doing a search, the results pages allow you to conveniently view and bid on items using your Blackberry.

If you wanted to find antiques on ebay, you could type “ebay: antiques”. If you do a lot of ebay searches, you can add EBay to the Berry411 search menu using “Edit plugins” and entering ebay as the name of the plugins.

Berry411 v3 has now shipped; read the Berry411 project page for details and installation instructions. I’ve had the new version out there quietly for several days now and it seems like few issues are being encountered.

The most significant new feature is address book integration. You can get driving directions to any person in your address book, or do a reverse lookup to get their address based on their phone number, or set your Berry411 “Other” location to their address.

Moving forward, I believe this functionality is a hint of the way in which the built-in software and data on mobile devices will be merged seamlessly with additional, live data out on the web. Using the mobile web will no longer be a separate, unnatural activity.

There is also an important bug fix which resolves the class cast exceptions [*] that AskMeNow and 8700 users were seeing.

V3 is the first version of Berry411 that requires OS4.0+, but my logs show that the vast majority of Blackberry users are (surprisingly enough) running an OS this recent.

[*] It turns out that the Blackberry PersistentStore implementation depends 100% on the goodwill and competence of software developers not to trash each other’s setting. Each persisted item is supposed to have a globally unique key obtained by hashing the class name, but RIM doesn’t specify the hashing function or emphasize strongly enough the importance of uniqueness. Both AskMeNow and Berry411 choose “1″ for their first key, leading to predictably bad results.

Humanity is a startup with 6 billion employees, a million year track record of innovation, and uncertain chances of ever becoming profitable.

Lacking any real competitors, the management preoccupies itself with title inflation, maximizing burn rate, and increasing head count. However, they have made little progress tapping into sustainable sources of revenue.

No one can quite remember where Humanity’s enormous first round of funding came from– some claim the venture was self funded, while others point to angel investors. Only one thing is certain– there will be no round B.

We just shipped an update to Jobster.com that improves the quality and relevance of the job summaries displayed next to search hits; for example see the results of a search for search engine jobs in Seattle.

Google has trained users to expect hit summaries that are frequently fragmentary and hard to understand. A hit for “string theory” might include the summary “Interest in string theory is driven largely by the hope that it will prove to be a … It is not yet known whether string theory will be able to describe a …”

Vertical job search services, Jobster included, largely followed Google’s lead in their initial implementations of hit summaries. It’s a challenging problem to choose a few sentences that capture the essence of a long job description. Our next iteration is a good step forward but there’s clearly lots more we can do.

I believe that even for general web search it should be possible to greatly improve the quality of the summaries so that users have to do less pogo-sticking to find the results they want. One example is what Live is doing with their academic search. Notice how you can mouse over the hits on the Live results for search engine to view the title, abstracts, and authors of each hits.

When general web search summaries become good and comprehensive enough, it may not even be necessary in some cases to click through to the site hosting the content, which will result in increased tension between search engine and site authors and increased pressure to find ways to compensate content authors regardless of where their content is hosted.

In authentic conversations and recruiting, I asked whether the web couldn’t introduce a more real and meaningful conversation between employers and jobseekers.

Colin Kingsbury at HRM Direct replies with some well placed cautionary notes regarding the strong feelings inspired by hiring and firing, and the danger that cranks and negative commentary will come to dominate the conversation:

The problem here comes with the term meaningful. It is surprising how difficult it is to find out what your customers really think of you, whether you have five of them or five million. To the extent that “social computing” techniques help draw authentic and unfiltered customer opinion out, they will help businesses to do better. The problem is that many of the critics you may find yourelf engaging are not really honest brokers…

Recruiting is going to encounter an especially large challenge here because like dating, it is a process of rejecting people. No matter how nicely you do it, some people are going to take it badly, and a few of them are going to make it their life’s mission to cause you as much pain as you caused them. Unfortunately, it’s precisely these kinds of critics that take the most time and energy to deal with.

Of course, someone who got rejected for a job at Morgan Stanley has always had the right to carry a sandwich board on the sidewalk in front of the building and hand out leaflets. But this took energy, and reached very few people. With social computing, the gadflies can reach a global audience from the comfort of their sofas.

And contra Ms. Li, I think bringing these sorts of critics into your own forum lends them a credibility they might otherwise lack. Today any crank with an axe to grind can lash out at TGI Fridays on his blog and have it come up page one of a Google search for “work TGI Fridays”. But, the casual web browser will also play a little game of “consider the source” and perhaps conclude, “this guy is a crank.”**

To wit, MySpace and Blogger are like the sidewalk, and you can’t legally shut up someone who is determined to make a scene there. But, should you invite them into the lobby and offer them a refreshing beverage? And don’t forget, when you ask them to leave, all their friends may show up to join the protest. After all, it’s certainly not your best interests they care most about.

Is there no way to sustain a forum that provides value in the middle ground between “Careers at ShinyHappyCo” and f***edcompany.com? Perhaps unrealistically positive and depressingly negative forums about companies predominate because it’s so difficult to create a balanced forum.

Assuming a balanced employment forum could be created, would companies be better off encouraging participation, or attempting to limit employees to officially controlled spaces only?

Colin draws an interesting comparison with online dating services, which face similar issues:

If you really want to see where this is headed, I would keep an eye on the dating services. They are well ahead of the recruiting space in terms of sophistication in these areas, and the issues are very similar.

Sounds like it’s worth checking out the dating sites (with appropriate disclaimers in advance to our spouses, of course!)

Laurel has a
insightful comparison of the different software development philosophies of Joel on Software and 37 Signals.

In a nutshell, Joel says programmers are most productive in a splendid bubble of specialization and isolation (”A programmer is most productive with a quiet private office… a tester to find the bugs they just can’t see, a graphic designer to make their screens beautiful, a team of marketing people to make the masses want their products, a team of sales people to make sure the masses can get these products”, etc, etc.)

37 signals, in contrast, says developers are most effective when roles are blurred (”When the edges are blurred, and one thing is many things, you can achieve so much more with less time, effort, and people.”)

I love startups precisely because of the chance to blur roles and to experience first hand the end of end process of understanding and meeting the needs of users.

At Jobster, as Laurel explains, we are working to retain this level of ownership and experience even as we grow from a small company where everyone has to do everything to a medium sized company where’s the luxury of specialization is possible:

At Jobster, in the past few months or so, we’ve been gradually growing our development team past the point where it makes sense for everyone to work on everything. At this point, we could decide to slice things horizontally – define everyone’s roles more strictly, have core developers, library developers, project managers, product managers, program managers, UI developers, UI designers, graphic designers… But we’re taking the approach of slicing vertically. Spinning off parts of our product into independent chunks worked on by independent teams. This wouldn’t work if everyone was stuck in their roles. We simply don’t have enough people to fill a small independent team with specialists. Sure, I’m not a good UI designer. But our good UI designer is busy with other projects right now, and we can’t hire another one before I want to demo my project next month. So this project won’t work if the 3 of us “software developers” can’t come up with a UI design that’s adequate enough that the decision makers get what we’re trying to do and believe in it enough to give ours priority over the designer’s other projects.

At a medium sized company like Jobster instead of a really small one like 37signals, we have the luxury of having people who specialize in certain areas (we certainly have a lot of sales people who call people at Fortune x00 companies and try to get them to sign big contracts). But we’re not big enough to be able to move people around efficiently. This is an opportunity and a challenge – at a small company people have to do everything; at a large company people can’t do everything. At our size we could do either, and we have to figure out what makes sense both for the group and for each individual.

Alan Steele continues the thread in it’s not all about productivity:

This is why optimizing for the ability to type ’svn commit’ makes no sense at all. If you break down a software project by elapsed time, it usually looks like this: 70% figuring out what the problem is, how best to solve it elegantly, efficiently and in a manner that delights the customer, and getting everyone to agree that this is the best way forward; 3% writing the core code; 27% getting the code you just wrote to work as intended, fleshing out the supplementary features and closing in down with a minimum of bugs.

Not only does the up-front part represent the vast majority of elapsed time, it’s also the part that affects the end-result most dramatically. And it benefits enormously from people talking to each other, which is rather more difficult when those people are ensconced in their private, temperature-controlled offices hooked up to their caffeinated carbonated beverage IVs.

If you don’t believe me, try this: go buy a really, really nice new computer; load it up with the newest bad-ass development tools on the planet; learn how to program (ok, this part could take a little while); and then write some great software. Right between steps 3 and 4, you’ll find yourself facing something that feels remarkably similar to writer’s block. In fact, it’s pretty much the same thing as writer’s block, and it happens to organizations just as it does to individuals.

The good news is that designing software, unlike writing, benefits enormously from having a small team of people working together to overcome that block. Getting a few people together to think about a problem produces far superior results than putting someone in an office and saying “Think!”, particularly if each has a slightly different take on the problem (say, one with more of a business/customer focus, another with a design/usability focus, and a few techies). The myth of the lone wolf programmer is crap: great software is built by teams of people. The reason Excel is such a kicking piece of software is that literally hundreds of people have worked collaboratively for many years to make it great. Software development is a team sport.

The secondary argument is simply against Joel’s attitude of coddling his programmers to the ridiculous degree of comparing the rest of the company to the servants of the Roman army. This kind of attitude doesn’t do much for collaboration with those supposed servants, many of whom have very good ideas about how the software should be built. It also encourages a distasteful kind of laziness where developers expect everything brought to them on a silver platter. Any software manager who has witnessed the electrifying effect of a customer visit on a previously insulated developer knows what I’m talking about: there is nothing so powerful as getting out in the world, watching and talking to people to learn what is actually needed from your software. It’s also a lot more fun that way.

There is one sentence of Joel’s recent article that I agree with, which is that an abstraction layer is needed between development and the rest of the organization. But he’s got it backwards: a software manager needs to create for the rest of the organization an abstraction (more like an illusion, really) that makes product development look like a predictable shipping machine, producing regular deliveries of software containing bright new innovations, when the reality behind the scenes is considerably messier. Otherwise, it gets very hard to justify the fancy computers, comfortable salaries and free soft drinks…

I feel lucky to be part of an industry new and vital enough that it’s still possible, meaningful, and impactful to have conversations like these.