Software engineers, steer clear of Aura Frames and Canoe Intelligence!

It's Saturday morning, time to write for fun...

Skip Aura Frames / "pushd"

I'm still not certain that Ronnie Chen, the vice president responsible for an infrastructure team of 3 people (including manager), is a real identity. An artificial intelligence outfit called "FindEm" sends thinly veiled recruiting spam in the name of this 'executive', inviting the lucky recipient to schedule 30 minutes with Ronnie Chen.

In 3 interviews over the course of 3 weeks, I never saw Ronnie Chen and she never wrote back.

Instead, I got a manager barely 5 months into his promotion. According to his LinkedIn profile, Joshua Banton majored in film studies. I believe in STAR ("skilled through alternative routes"). Really. Truly. I took some years out of my software career to become a teacher, so I have firsthand experience opening doors for people.

This greenie hasn't learned about motivation. He thinks employees want "easy" tasks. He doesn't understand that people thrive on hard work, as long as it's the work they're actually being hired to do. A little Maslow would help Joshua Banton on the long journey toward becoming an effective manager.

Aura Frames posted and re-posted its PostgreSQL position as far back as 2024, and has been struggling longer than that to manage peak database load. I was assured that the database stores user records and photo metadata, not photo blobs. How much metadata can there be?

All the usual signs of an inexperienced software team and a company that hadn't been willing to invest in hiring a database specialist were present. In fairness, money must be tight, given that Aura Frames offers unlimited, perpetual photo storage and has to cover network charges to serve photos continuously, even though it doesn't charge a subscription fee. How much of a margin is left on a $131 cloud-dependent digital photo frame after the high-resolution screen, the "free" shipping, and the affiliate marketing payment to Wirecutter / The New York Times that keeps those great reviews in the spotlight?

Skip Canoe Intelligence

Canoe Intelligence aggregates financial reports for portfolio investors. The startup's DevOps team is entirely off-shore, except for the manager. Canoe wanted to hire a U.S.-based team member, probably to comply with standards or contractual obligations governing access to data by non-U.S. persons.

I take a balanced view of off-shoring. No country has a monopoly on talent. We and our trading partner countries should be buying goods and services reciprocally. Companies should treat off-shore workers like true partners, capable of exercising independent judgment and making substantial contributions. In exchange, as I have written again and again in LinkedIn discussions, companies should pay off-shore workers fairly and give them benefits and professional opportunities equivalent to what their U.S. colleagues receive. Entire business functions and entire teams should not be off-shored. With this sort of balance, off-shoring would stop being a source of cheap labor and a mechanism of arbitrary control over workers, at home and abroad.

One thing off-shore contract technical workers should never do is to interview candidates for employment in the U.S. After showing up online 15 minutes late, one of my interviewers opened with, "So, where are you from?" I doubt that this interview question is legal anywhere in the U.S., let alone in my state, California. Certainly, it's not recommended. It was a completely innocent question from a sincere interviewer who is not familiar with non-discrimination rules in the U.S. I answered his question in all of its potential dimensions (my national origin, my parents' national origins, my current domicile) but someday, a candidate will balk. The risk to the company is immense. This interviewer was gracious and rated my solution to Canoe's long take-home technical exercise highly, saying, "You're the first one ever to..."

In the next interview, an openly hostile off-shore contract technical worker, Guzmán Morré Duhau, couldn't understand U.S. and/or English-language job titles. He got hung up on the fact that the literal term "DevOps" appears in only one of my past job titles. He couldn't understand that "data infrastructure" and "core infrastructure" in the other titles, plus the substance of each job description, expresses DevOps. I had to apologize for not being allowed to write my own job titles! Not noticing that this was my 4th interview, and not having taken time to examine my technical exercise or my GitHub portfolio, Guzmán paused to read from his screen, then opened with, "Are you only here because you were referred?"

On LinkedIn I write often about technical workers and managers who exercise management responsibilities but who haven't learned management. Guzmán surprised me because, like me, he is a software professional with an MBA. I looked up his institution's MBA program and it includes the usual coursework. Did he sleep through classes in communication? International business was my MBA program's specialty, so there was a substantial intercultural component. Perhaps intercultural matters were relegated to an elective in Guzmán Morré Duhau's MBA program. Tact certainly wasn't on the syllabus!

The U.S.-based hiring manager, Lukas Lozovski, indicates management experience but not management training on his LinkedIn profile. He disappeared 2 weeks into the 2-month interview process, never to be heard from again. He didn't bother to acknowledge my technical exercise. That he delegated the rest of the technical interview process to people who are not qualified to interview alone (pairing with a U.S.-based manager or human resources representative would have been ideal) shows a lack of judgment. Lukas Lozovski is not a manager I could trust.

Kyle Hamel, the internal recruiter, runs a leisurely recruitment program. He would ask me to (manually) e-mail my schedule for the coming week. Then, he'd let the clock run out and have to ask again a week later. He'd promise to schedule two interviews but only schedule the first, make the second one contingent, and let the clock run out again. All e-mails to him go through Canoe's applicant tracking system (ATS), Teamtailor. In 2 months, despite my having completed the long take-home exercise and attended 5 interviews, I was still not trusted to know the direct e-mail addresses of the recruiter or the hiring manager. Teamtailor's generative AI features will soon render Kyle Hamel's non-value-added recruiting work obsolete. (Thanks to Jeff Bolton for the term "non-value-added". He led planning and budget at my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University. I learned so much from him when I served on the Enrollment Process Re-engineering Team, as an undergraduate student.)

Rejection doesn't bother me. It's always the employer's prerogative. Considering one manager's lack of experience and the other's lack of judgment, not working for them is a merciful outcome. Wasting time does bother me. Each company could have ended its interview process weeks earlier instead of stringing me along.