Coderific

blog - the real reason I started Coderific

posted by witten on August 14, 2007

When I first tell people about this whole employer rating web site thing, they usually assume that I created it simply for the benefit of my fellow coders the world over, or that I was attempting to reward the good employers and punish the bad ones, or possibly that I'm just a dirty hippy with no respect for the fine, upstanding corporations that employ the very software developers writing nasty things about them on this web site.

Well, that's all more or less correct, although I think I missed the hippy movement by a good forty years. Even though I did create Coderific for all of these reasons, there was still another driving force behind the creation of the site, the real reason I slaved away after I got home from work every day, coding into the wee hours of the morning until the site was finally complete and ready to wow the world with its breathtaking utilitarian design and cutting-edge, populist ideals.

I wanted a job.

That's it. That's the big secret. I created Coderific to get hired. I didn't just want any job, however. I started this site because I wanted to find a good job, at a good company, working on interesting problems with interesting people. I started this web site for myself. If anyone else happened to benefit from it, well, that would just be a really cool side-effect.

Here's how the plan was hatched. Some time in 2006, I thought to myself, "I would really like to work for a company that knows how to treat software developers well. If only there was some way to harness the collective wisdom of all the coders out there..." And thus was born the idea of putting together an employer ratings web site. Then, once the site was in place, I would only have to sit back and wait for the employer ratings to start rolling in, and before I knew it the best employers would be automatically tabulated, sorted, and ripe for the resume-sending.

It seemed like a brilliant plan. In hindsight, it was really quite a daft idea. I created a whole web site because I didn't know how to go about finding a good place to work. It's like Jeff Bezos starting a little web site with product reviews called Amazon.com because he didn't know how to go about finding a good vacuum cleaner.

So a few months ago, my job slinging code at a soulless corporation ended. Rather abrubtly. I didn't feel too bad about it, because although the timing wasn't exactly of my choosing, the feeling was certainly mutual. Oh, and half the workforce was let go a couple of days later. And there was some sort of hostile takeover. And then there was that whole business about not getting paid.

Anyway, that's all the past. Parting ways with my employer did give rise to an opportunity. I could now finally put Coderific to the test and find myself that dream job! All I had to do was send in my resume to the best-rated employers, ace a couple of interviews, and before I'd know it I'd be writing code on a beefy dual-head box in a forward-thinking, well-run organization.

That was the theory anyway. I applied a few places, I did a few interviews. After several weeks, it began to dawn on me that perhaps I had gone about this problem of finding my dream job all wrong. Maybe, since I had such specific ideas about what a good software development organization should be like, my ideal role wasn't within an existing company. Perhaps, I was better suited to blazing my own path.

This thought wasn't entirely without precedent. When I was a teenager, I owned my own software company. Now, before you start getting all impressed, let me explain exactly what I mean by that. I produced a tiny DOS shareware program that, for the low, low registration cost of $5, would uudecode binary files off of Usenet for you. Unless there was an error. In which case it wouldn't. (Barbara, if you're reading this, try the "/d" option and see if that helps!) I think a total of four hapless souls actually registered the program, which worked out to something like a whopping 25 cents an hour.

Despite the rather modest revenue, going into "business" for myself was a huge rush. People not only downloaded and used my program, they actually voluntarily parted with legal tender in exchange for it! At the time I was fed and housed by my parents, so actually living off the "income" wasn't a concern. I got to write what I wanted, how I wanted, and the only real constraint was that the software had to be moderately useful in order to be a viable product.

So all of this got me thinking. Even though my reason for starting Coderific was to land a job, maybe I'm going about things incorrectly. Maybe, since I presume to know how a software company should be run, I should "put up or shut up", and try to start a company myself. I'm being granted this golden opportunity in the form of sudden unemployment. All I have to do is bathe irregularly, whittle down my life savings, and find within myself an affinity for all things ramen. Oh, and spend several months trying to write some kick-ass software that other people will use of their own volition.

So that's pretty much what I've been doing the past couple of months. My goal is to make a viable software product that enough people will find interesting and useful such that I'll be able to pull down wages slightly exceeding 25 cents an hour. I'll let you know how that works out.

In the meantime, I hope Coderific continues to serve the needs of those who are still seeking that dream job within the sphere of companies that actually exist. For the rest of you, well, I hope you're at least enjoying the posts.

3 comments