I arrived at the office before 10am energized in part from 1000mg of vitamin C and some DayQuil wearing an IU t-shirt and jeans having not shaved for days if not more than a week. As if scripted in a sitcom, both pots of coffee were empty so I made another while joking with a member of the product team. A “(hopefully) last” revision of a design waited for me in my inbox. The designer happened to be walking by giving me the chance to ask him if everyone understood the difference between character count and word count, a minor oversight in the user interface (UI). A stand-up status meeting was forming behind me to discuss the progress of the next features for our newest product. I had been pitching in where I could, so I spun around to sip my coffee and listen.

At 11am on Mondays and Wednesdays, major feature releases must be demoed to our quality assurance (QA) team. I had stayed late the night before so that my refactoring of a few thousand lines of code could be admired in one curl request. Everyone was happy for me that it worked so well locally, but insisted it needed testing in a broader environment. I adjusted the test scripts and tunneled into log servers praying it would work flawlessly, and as programming goes, it didn’t. Considerations and compromises were made to continue with the release before I headed to my noon interview.

For the past couple months, I’ve been interviewing candidates to join me in the ever broadening world of front end development. My in-house specialty is CSS so for about 45 minutes I questioned and quizzed and made myself available to answer any and all questions. Towards the end, someone thought to bring both of us lunch, which was much appreciated.

Refueled, it was time to start juggling projects three and four for the day. Another designer wanted my input on the flow of a new multi-step feature that requires as much backend magic as it does design clarity. We’ve been meeting in brief stints for the past few days to rework details and cut out non-essentials. Bugs have popped up in other parts of the code-base from my refactoring but are easily fixed. I got distracted and nailed down a re-opened display issue with Internet Explorer 8. I got distracted again and wrote an email suggesting a schema for storing some new data when the release ops manager came over to clarify the details of a new repository that was being created for the project whose design I first reviewed today.

After helping another engineer resolve some SVN conflicts, we discussed a new API she had designed and developed that I would be using for a reworked portion of our product. We came up with a few solutions weighing the efficiency of the code vs the most awesome user experience I could imagine during which I was pulled over to review another revision of the multi-step feature. As I was walking back to my desk confident in our decision on how to implement the API, another engineer was having trouble setting up apache on his new MacBook Pro. I sat with him comparing configs until we realized he was restarting OS X’s built-in apache server and not the one part of our development environment.

A few more bugs came up surrounding my imminent release and were easy to fix. I started to write a script that utilized some PHP classes that abstract our database calls and asked a chatroom of other developers if the classes supported MySQL LIMIT. Someone was able to help me right away, and I continued to hack together queries until dinner came.

That’s what I juggled today. I started six months ago fixing CSS and JavaScript issues while learning the custom PHP MVC, and now I’m involved with just about every step of the product life cycle. It can seem like controlled chaos at times, but it’s exciting and rewarding once it all ships.

(If you think you’d like to juggle some of this, Reputation.com is hiring, and I’d love to have you join our team. No, no one from the company asked me to write this.)

To give a little background on how I understand the state of the School of Informatics, IU Bloomington, and the State of Indiana, there is a significant brain drain. The State of Indiana can’t keep the talent it produces from their state universities that found first-of-their-kind schools. Hello from California by way of Illinois.

Funding Ideas

A competition that funds business plans is ultimately funding ideas. The timeline of the competition is purely academic and verges on the pace of corporate. Submit in November, select by February, and present in April.

It’s open to seniors and graduate students meaning if you didn’t already secure a job offer by mid-November, which you should in such a hot tech market, feel free to throw an idea out there that appeals to Indiana based investors (hint: faster assembly line). If you still don’t have a real job offer or couldn’t build a prototype to get funding, you could still make a presentation by February. After six weeks of deliberating over PowerPoint slides, you, you and your partner, or you and your team will win at least $100,000.

“As an Indiana University graduate and local software entrepreneur, I am thrilled to have been involved in the formation of BEST. I am optimistic that pairing talented student entrepreneurs with seed capital and business mentorship will lead to entrepreneurial success”

- ExactTarget CEO and BEST investor, Scott Dorsey

You’ve proven you’re a talented student entrepreneur after a few rounds of presentations spread over six months. Now, CEOs from all over Indiana will drop what they are doing to mentor you to bring your idea to life. Your seed capital should give you at least a year (maybe two if you’re lean) to build it.

Build It

Now imagine it’s the beginning of your second semester of your junior year, and you’re scheduling classes for next Fall. (That’s how it felt for me.) An upperclassman didn’t tip you off that your internship from the summer before junior year could be used as your capstone (thanks Tyler) so you’re blocking out half of your schedule for one course where YOU BUILD SOMETHING.

For the next 6–8 months between homework, Little 500, and a summer internship, you can formulate and iterate over half a dozen serious ideas before showing up for your first capstone session where you form a team to build something. You and your team then have two semesters of student loans (plus endless credit card offers) to build a business. Student loans (and credit card interest) are way cheaper than venture capital funding, especially if you’re a “talented student entrepreneur.”

Better Yet

In all seriousness if you think you’ve got a good to great chance at this BEST competition, drop out and come to Silicon Valley. There’s a valuation bubble. Port your PowerPoint slides to HTML/CSS/JS and talk loudly at University Ave. coffee shops, and odds are you’ll have $100k before everyone else has finished submitting their business plans on Nov. 15.

Shamelessly, the company I build products for needs more help. If you just need someone to talk with about building ideas, I’m open to that, too.

Weaknesses

What concerns me most about this business plan competition is the lack of involvement by two key players in the Indiana technology scene as I see it. Gazelle TechVentures and Scott Jones used to play a substantial role in driving technology innovation and hi-tech job growth in Indiana with the support of Mitch Daniels. Jones and President McRobbie have a long history. I was present for their first press release over four years ago. If this was a sound plan for job growth and technology innovation, Scott Jones would be involved.

SproutBox has been investing in solid, vetted business plans for years in Bloomington. Why aren’t they involved? They even host a technology conference that boasts the benefits of starting a technology company in Indiana!

It frustrates and saddens me that this is what is announced the day before the SOIC Career Fair. I’m still proud to tell people I have a degree in Informatics from Indiana University even though it matters less every day. Throwing money at problems like this rarely works, especially in technology.

Students, don’t plan it– build it.

People

You’re not going to get along with everyone in life. You will naturally work better with some rather than others. Having good people on a project can be hard to judge initially, but you can usually get the gist of a manager or team through your network of associates.

Location

Consulting involves a lot of travel. If you don’t want to travel, local projects take a high priority. Some destinations are sexier than others. I had the chance to spend a month in Hollywood and loved it. Bentonville, Arkansas, on the other hand, isn’t as glamorous.

Work

Lots of people will tell you to “do what you love,” but that isn’t always possible in consulting. As a consultant, you’re required to be flexible, and the work isn’t always exciting. Some people love pushing PowerPoints and bloated Excel docs. I would rather do something more technical.

Hope For Two

If two of these are in your favor, you’re in for a good project. Having all three is a home run. If you only manage one or none, you can either suck it up and take one for the team, or try to get off of it like a sinking ship. It ultimately comes down to rationalizing compromises and remembering who is in control. I know I was able to rationalize editing spreadsheets all day in LA because at night I got to go out and have a lot of fun with the great people on my project.

Just remember, it’s okay to say no. Thanks to Andy for sharing this with me!

The company my roommates and I used last year to find our apartment sent a timely postcard in the mail acknowledging our lease may be up soon if we hadn’t renewed our lease with our current landlord. I thought it was brilliant because it came just as we were beginning to look for new places. They hadn’t bothered us all year long just to keep them in mind when we didn’t need their service.

(Services like Turbo Tax on the other hand send out emails at least every other week all year long even though I only do my taxes once a year. It gets annoying and doesn’t make me want to use their service any more than if they’d only send me reminders 90 days, 60 days, and 30 days before tax day.)

After meeting with some other apartment finders, we ended up using the same company as last year. When they wanted to run another credit check, we asked if it could be waived since we filed one last year . Unfortunately, their policy was to delete credit app information after 6 weeks. Fair enough. I was actually happy to hear all my personal data wasn’t sitting in some filing cabinet.

Then just 24 hours after signing a new lease with a new landlord through the same apartment finder company, I got a call that tarnished the whole experience.

“Hi Max, this is [NAME] from [COMPANY] giving you a courtesy call regarding your lease that’s up in July. If you’re interested in our services again, please call us [PHONE NUMBER]. Thank you!”

I went from feeling like an individually valued customer to just another database entry.

Customer Experience

They were so close to delivering WOW through service. Everything had gone swimmingly from the polite postcard reminder to the professional showing (Patrick, our leasing consultant, even suggested a place for dinner in the new neighborhood and dropped us off there) to trying to save us some money only to say they couldn’t because they took our privacy seriously by deleting sensitive personal information.

When my roommate and I both got the same scripted calls today, we chuckled. It wasn’t a big deal. The company dropped the ball on keeping track of who we are which, like I said, tarnished the experience.

Technology Fix

Obviously, not all of our credit app data was deleted. Name, phone number, and address were probably kept in some sort of CRM tool. Maybe the data was just kept in some huge shared address book making it impossible for the leasing consultant to notify the sales team that I had not only already contacted them, but had already signed a new lease as well.

Apartment hunting is a big business in Chicago, and investing in some decent software to keep track of customers seems like a no-brainer. Something as simple as 37Signal’s Highrise would probably be sufficient for this company. Personally, I would like to see it taken a step further.

I don’t ever want to fill out another form by hand so that someone else can type it into a computer. I can type just as fast and know how to spell all the names and streets someone else might misspell. Let me manage my own profile so I can update contact preferences, methods of contact, and even past data on old credit apps.

For example, they want the name, contact information, and rent amount for your previous two landlords. My previous landlord in 2009 would be my landlord two years ago in 2010. Guess who would be my previous landlord in 2010? The landlord I applied to in 2009! I could fill all of this out and submit it from home instead of having to go to their offices on a Sunday. I know the leasing staff would rather be home with their kids than watching me fill out paperwork that’s going to be digitized. I could pay my application fee and first months rent online, too!

Personal touches make great customer experiences. I thought this company had delivered WOW, and they came close. I bet with a few software upgrades (or implementations) this office could be ready to deliver consistent positive customer experiences. All it took was one little snafu to start questioning what was really going on in their office.

A Month of Training

The first five weeks were actually all training. It was like boot camp for corporate life. We were showered with branded writing utensils, a locked down company laptop, and a corporate AMEX while being introduced to the endless online portals. It took a few days to cover the company’s core values and overall structure. I still pause when people ask me what “group” I’m in (simplest I can put it: Technology Consulting — Security — Identity & Access Management). There were two weeks of learning the “Solution Delivery Fundamentals” which was really encouraging to see how serious they were to sticking to good development practices. The final two weeks were spent out at the Q Center in St. Charles, Illinois with  230 other new analysts from across the world.

Core Analyst School was challenging for me, but we made sure to have fun. My technology background came in handy for a total for 2 hours for the entire 2 weeks. There was a lot of team building, business workflow, and mock client meetings. They put together this video at the end along with a photo album that kind of sums up the rest.

(at 7:51 you’ll see my idea they used for our section’s mascot )

A Month on the Bench

We finished up CAS on December 18th just in time for Christmas. And New Years. And the week after New Years. One of the downsides (perks?) of consulting is that you don’t go to an office M-F 9–5 but if there isn’t a project going on you don’t work at all. I learned that nothing really gets done between the week before Christmas through the week after New Years, and then it takes another week to put together logistics. I got a little stir crazy but ended up helping out on a few tasks that people in the security group needed done.

A Month on a Project

Finally on January 18th, I was on my first project! The waiting paid off as I got to escape from the cold Chicago winter to sunny Los Angeles from Monday through Thursday for four weeks. The work wasn’t glamorous, but the nightlife made up for that. I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions by kids right out of college. They think they’ve put in their time and now it’s time to have a dream job, but that’s not really how it works out most of the time. You have to put in your time and wait for your dream assignment. If you’re in a field you really like (or love) then waiting shouldn’t be hard.

What I’ve Taken Away So Far

There’s still so much to learn about — business, technology, security, career development, networking (people kind), the list goes on. I’m taking it all in but so far:

1. I’ve tried to not put a whole lot out there about my new job on Twitter, Facebook, or this blog. I’m still feeling out what’s acceptable and working on security related projects makes that even harder.
2. Corporate America (esp. a tech company) love TLAs — or three-letter acronyms to the layman. Every day I hear a new one or at least some sort of abbreviation for a word or phrase.
3. I didn’t think “building my network” was going to be enjoyable or worthwhile, but I was totally wrong. I might just make it as a people person after all

Now I’ve started the next chapter in my Accenture experience at a new project here in Chicago. I was a little bummed to stop traveling (i.e. rewards points), but the work is more interesting and challenging. I also hear Chicago has a summer if it ever stops snowing.

First, I hardly sleep. Sometimes I don’t at all. First days make me anxious and nervous so I overanalyze and think critically about what’s coming my way. It usually makes me really prepared, or the lack of sleep keeps me on my toes all day. It’s great and makes me wonder what else my human body can do.

Second, I wear the same outfit. I’m a guy who loves to take chances with his wardrobe selections but not on the first day. I have an “IBM blue” dress shirt and standard grey dress slacks that I pair with black dress shoes and a black belt. I can’t think of any important occasion that I haven’t worn this ensemble. My dad gave me the shirt, giving me the “IBM” line for interviewers, and I was with my mom when she bought me those dress shoes from Glendale Mall in Indianapolis. I think she shared some of her knowledge about retail upselling at the time. I have a terrible memory, but I remember those small comforting details that relax me on a first day.

Third, show up early. This is actually one of “the rules” but it’s very important to me. I hate being the first one there. It’s an anxiety trigger that I’m doing something wrong (e.g. where is everyone else?). If I’m cutting it close on time, it usually sparks an adrenaline rush that makes me super attentive for the first hour. Being just early enough is the most challenging part of a first day for me.

Finally, do you. If you need eight hours of sleep and a cup of coffee in the morning, do it. If you function better without sleep and a quirky routine like me, do it. The sooner you identify your DNA (what makes you, you), the more successful you’ll be on your first day. Some need chaos, some simplicity, some don’t need anything out of the ordinary. What do you need? What are your first day habits?

Before I start, I’m sorry to any experienced designers and developers who have read these dozens and dozens of times before. Sadly, the laymen still continually make these mistakes so every couple months beginner bloggers like me have to reinforce these issues.

For the past couple weeks I’ve been hunting for freelance jobs in the Chicago area on Craigslist. I’ve slowly learned that this is the worst place to look for work. There’s a bonus freebie. After going through a couple hundred listings, I’ve noticed the same reoccurring trends that have started to make me cringe and not even bother replying. If you have or are thinking about making a job posting on Craigslist or any other service, please avoid listing any of the following.

“I need someone who can do EVERYTHING!!!”

As much as I hate to admit it, no one can design you a logo, design and code you a website, incorporate some e-commerce, make it #1 in every search engine, and also be a systems administrator who is an expert in Flash and Final Cut Pro and is a Social Media Ninja with strong graphic design skills. They did start design firms and ad agencies for a reason. I find it perfectly acceptable to seek someone who can do frontend work as well as backend work, but there are limitations.

“I want it fast and cheap.”

Fine, but you’ve already picked your two. This kind of thinking is so old and common there’s even a Wikipedia entry on the classic “Project Triangle”. In other words you have three options:

• Design something quickly and to a high standard, but then it will not be cheap.
• Design something quickly and cheaply, but it will not be of high quality.
• Design something with high quality and cheaply, but it will take a long time.

If you need to think about this outside of web design, think about what happens when you build a house in a day with just cardboard. Cheap, right?

“I’d like a sample of your work to compare against someone else before I hire you.”

TOTALLY UNDERSTANDABLE! I’m happy to show you my portfolio and even projects that are nearing their completion that haven’t made it to my portfolio. Wait, you want me to “enhance a photo” or give you all of my ideas before I start? Well if that’s the case why did I spend all that time revising my resume and putting together my portfolio in the first place? Ah, you want it cheap, fast, and good. Doesn’t work like that (see above).

You don’t hire someone for a job, see how they do, and then decide whether or not to pay them. In reality your hiring thought process should be more along the lines of, “hey this person has done quality work in the past and I can see that. I expect them to do the same, if not better, work for me,”

Time Expectations

It’s a fact of life that deadlines need to be met. But! If you think you’re going to post something on Craigslist and get it done in a day or a week, then it’ll probably take a week or month, respectively. (Unless you don’t require high quality, see above)

What’s even worse than putting a designer or developer under the gun, is “knowing” how long it will take them to complete a project. The posts usually read, “I’m a programmer so I know how long it takes to design” or vice versa. Newsflash: your math savvy applicant is going to adjust their hourly rate to accommodate the amount of hours you think it’ll take to “get the job done”.

Job vs. Internship vs. Volunteer Position

The economy sucks. Fine. I can’t afford someone who is experienced. Fine. I want someone to work for me for free. Not fine. Seriously, it’s illegal and insulting. I could go on and on with phrases people use to say, “I don’t have any money to pay you now, but there will be TONS of future work”, but I think my favorite from today is:

Please don’t respond if you aren’t willing to start on internship basis, we’d be offering $ now if we could.(link)

First, there are such things as paid internships. (I’ve had a few) Second, if you’re starting a business why would depend on complete strangers to help you succeed? Friends, family, and fools. Ok, there are a lot of fools on Craigslist.

Bottom line, don’t call something a “job” or say that you’re “hiring” if there isn’t any compensation. Let people come to you if they want to work for free, don’t go out phishing for them. Internships are meant to be valuable experiences so individuals can go on and perform at a higher level at their next positions, not for young college and high school kids to be taken advantage of. If you aren’t offering a cup of coffee or a couple bucks an hour, then you’re just offering a volunteer position.

Every designer and developer understands that not everyone understands how much time and effort goes into their work so for every layman out there — please don’t underestimate us! Our work is valuable, specialized, and, for some, a livelihood. Thank you for not making yourselves sound like oblivious morons in your job postings!

Pandora had a huge win in an Internet radio royalty ruling but this also meant that they would have  “to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per month on the free version of Pandora”. If you go over the free 40 hours in a month it’s just $0.99 for unlimited listening for that month. I think that’s a great deal, especially since I sit at a desk most of the day and can’t stand listening to my coworker’s idiotic side comments.

My new favorite web service of the summer has been Dropbox which allows you to store files online and sync them across multiple computers. They sent me this email last night about changes they’re making:

The Dropbox team has been hard at work these past few months and we’d like to tell you about some upcoming changes and enhancements to the Dropbox service.

We’re Changing Undo History
Did you know that Dropbox automatically:

• Safeguards any files you delete in case you need to undelete them
• Saves old file versions in case you need to go back to them later

It’s like having “undo” for all your files and folders.

Today, Dropbox keeps these deleted files and old file versions (“undo history”) forever. For many people this creates clutter, and it also wastes space.

Because of this, beginning August 1st, our new policy will be to keep 30 days of undo history.
…

I actually had no idea about that feature since I’m new to the service, but once again you can see they are scaling back the free service and pushing the premium subscriptions (freemium model).

The last email I received about “new policies” was from Vimeo who starting August 1st will only keep your original video source file for one week after upload unless you become a Vimeo Plus member. I wasn’t as bummed about this one since I have only uploaded one video there to date. I may do more if I ever start editing stuff I film with my Flip HD.

I’m not mad at any of these companies for cutting back free services. I understand it costs money to offer them to people for no charge. SMS messages are expensive and so is streaming music and paying royalties. Hard disk space has become cheaper and cheaper but it still costs money. I don’t think any of these companies are trying to force people into becoming paying customers, they just can’t simple take on the costs and subsequent losses like Facebook and YouTube do.

Mashable’s had a great article today that was very Mark Cuban-esqe talking about how “free will not last forever”. It was less about how companies can’t survive giving everything away for free, but more about how the end users are willing to pay for services if it’s better and easier than the free alternative.

If users are persuaded to sign up for a premium account for Tatango, Pandora, Dropbox, or Vimeo, they’ll expect more whether it be more features or a more polished experience. And if those users are willing to spend the money, they’re probably going to shop around for some alternatives where their money could go further. If they lose the functions they love the most about these services and don’t have the money, then they’ll find the next best free alternative or maybe get inspired to start their own service.

I’m lucky enough to have more disposable income to subscribe to more premium services and buy more apps and software, and I think a lot of people are with me at least in their willingness if they don’t have the extra cash. (I mean who wouldn’t pay for TweetDeck?) All of this breeds competition which is great for me– the end user. I want the best of the best for as cheap as possible and while that might not be free as often as it used to be, I should still be the one getting more out of it.

Businesses have to learn to admit when they are wrong and be somewhat transparent about their alternative motives. It’s a new world where if you aren’t customers like me have to call you out. Today’s example is Pavilion Properties, the best worst real estate management firm in Bloomington, Indiana. I politely emailed one of the owners, Mark Hoffman, about when we would be receiving our security deposit. Here’s what he said

Well I finally got it on 6/25 which meant it took two weeks for a letter to travel from Bloomington, IN to Carmel, IN. It should have only taken one day– but wait it did! Look:

Envelope from Pavilion Properties postmarked 6/24

Postmarked 24 Jun 2009

Why couldn’t he just admit that one of his dumb secretaries forgot to mail it out or admit that 6/25 was exactly 45 days after our move out date which means that was the longest he could hold our money? Don’t tell me it was sent out two weeks ago when it obviously wasn’t. I’m not an idiot.

If they keep being morons, lying to their customers, taking advantage of their customers, I’m going to keep writing about it which means negative blog posts from MaxBeatty.com are going to come up in search results before PavProp.com. Just something to think about…

I promise my blog isn’t going to become just “deals of the day”, but now that I graduated it’s time to adjust my wardrobe for the professional world. A lot of my clothes have become ripped and worn without the help of Hollister or A&F. I also won’t be able to get away with wearing t-shirts and gym shorts for a majority of the week anymore.

Since I don’t have much else going on, I’m going to try and get a post out a day for my blog. See you tomorrow!