In July of 2001, I was looking for a job. Here's an email I sent one
day back then:
So I finally tried out something a friend of mine had suggested for
how to get the nice people at TiVo to notice me.
I went to the TiVo headquarters about 11:45, armed with bean bags,
clubs, resumes, and a little sign that says "SOFTWARE ENGINEER FOR
HIRE" clipped to my shirt. I stood in front of the the main lobby,
and started juggling five balls. A few people walked back and forth
between the two buildings (whose entrances are right next to each
other, on the corners of the two buildings), and seemed to look at me
somewhat amusedly... I said "how's it going" to a few of them, but
they didn't really respond. After five or ten minutes, a guy comes
out -- looks like an engineering type -- and he comes up to me and
says "what do you do?" I said "mostly java, server-side stuff", we
said a few more things, he introduced himself as Richard, and then he
said "I'll go see if I can get some engineering managers out here".
Woohoo!
So he brought out four different people (one, then one, then two),
which was convenient because I'd only brought four copies of my
resume! I talked with them about my background and stuff, and they
all four seemed pretty impressed, like they would certainly be
interested in having me in to interview, except they're in a hiring
freeze. D'oh. Interestingly, Richard said that it was the VP of HR
that had told him, "there's this guy juggling out there, you gotta go
talk to him!"
One of the last two guys gave me a tour. They're pretty small, but it
looked like a cool, fun place...
So all in all, it was pretty much as successful as I could have hoped
for, except for the damn hiring freeze. They all said they would hold
on to my resume... One said he guessed it would be a month or two
before they'd be able to hire anyone. Sigh.
So anyway, I think what I need to do now is go back through the other
companies that I sent my resume to and never heard back from, and
consider using this approach at each of them!
I didn't in fact ever hear anything back from the TiVo folks, and I
also didn't in fact ever try again to exploit my juggling skills to
get a software job. But hey, made for a nice story.
