Community Software Lab summer 2008 VISTA application & info

We are located in Lowell Massachusetts

There are other less hard-core jobs at the CTCVISTA project.

• Prerequisites and disclaimers
• Hiring contact
• Job Descriptions
• Information about our work
• Positive bullet points about the job
• Negative bullet points about the job
• Details on why you might want to work with us
• Details on why you might not want to work with us
• Interview process
• Timeline and Deadlines
• Online Application form (tech)
• Online Application form (grant writer)

[top] Prerequisites and disclaimers

You should not apply unless you have:

1. Excellent good writing and speaking skills (for grant writing)
2. Solid entry level sys admin and coding skills (for tech work)
3. US citizenship or green card. (sorry)

Your specific responsibilities will vary with the skills and interests you demonstrate. Your work will not fall (far) outside the job descriptions below.

You should:

1. Read the material at the national VISTA website.
2. Read the VISTA FAQ provided by UMass Boston

[top] Hiring contact

**Please** email or call with questions, comments or suggestions. We want this to be a happy experience for everyone.

• Dan MacNeil (Dan's own 2002 VISTA pages)
• dan@thecsl.org
• 978-934-4350 (lab)

Job Descriptions

1. Software Engineer
2. System Administrator
3. Lead Tech Support
4. Grant Writer / MVHub Evangelist

There will be overlap, Everyone will do at least a little bit of everything. How much of each job you wind up doing will depend on your interests and accomplishments. For example, If you do well with sys admin, you'll get to write more code. If you are struggling with grants, you'll get to do more presentations.

General Qualifications and duties:

Everyone we work with needs an:

• Ability to communicate.
• Ability to keep a consistant schedule that allows close work with other people.
• Ability to send and recieve helpful criticism.
• Ability to solve problems.

Note: We do not require people to be "team players", cooperation is good, groupthink is bad.

Everyone in our group must:

• Gather requirements and define specifications
• Research new ideas
• Share new ideas
• Sweat to turn new ideas into useful ideas.
• Help create effective procedures and processes
• Contribute code or documentation back to the open source software movement.
• Create useful technical and end user documentation.

Note: We have somebody who likes to make the coffee, this will not be part of your duties.

Note: New ideas are worse than useless without the commitment to implement them.

Software Engineer

Goal: Useful web server based software for non profit organizations

Duties:

• Program in Perl, PHP, SQL and HTML.
• Write unit tests.
• Observe user behavoir and modify software accordingly.
• Other duties as assigned.

Qualifications:

• Coding ability as demonstrated by past work for school, hire or hobby.
• Love of UNIX command line environment.

Network Manager

Goal: Keep 12 servers, 3 switches and 1 router running smoothly

Duties:

• Work closely with our (2) year VISTA almuni fearless leader
• Evaluate, Install and configure server based software (ftp,smtp, pop3, NFS, etc)
• Write scripts in BASH and Perl to automate system adminstration
• Tune system performance, security and reliability.
• Monitor logs and other systems
• Contribute to systems that allow rapid and reliable change.
• Other duties as assigned.

Qualifications:

• The belief that every 10 minutes of downtime is like a needle stuck in the eyeball.
• Love of UNIX command line environment.
• Absolute certainty that there are no bad users, only bad systems.

Tech Support Manager

Goal: Make our users feel informed and supported (perhaps by informing and supporting them)

Note: It is a difficult to find a person with skill to solve technical problems, skill to communicate the solutions and empathy enough to help the user enjoy the expierence. It is very difficult to find a person who enjoyes this particular work. This postion is most likely to be funded at higher than VISTA wages.

Duties:

• Work closely with our (2) year VISTA almuni fearless leader
• Answer telephone and email support requests. (no this does not make you the receptionist)
• Insure that documentation orriented toward end users is useful
• Suggest new products and services based on end user experience
• Create procedures to insure that tech support requests are answered
• Determine what tech support requests can not be answered because of lack of resoruces
• Other duties as assigned.

Qualifications:

• The ability to take a few scant clues from email or phone and determine the nature of the user's trouble
• Absolute certainty that our systems exist to serve the users and not the other way around.

Grant Writer / MVHub Evangelist

The mix of duties for this job depends on the skills, interests and accomplishments of the person doing the job. If you are introverted and successful writing grants, you will spend most of your time writing grants. If you enjoy meeting strangers, you'll probably spend more time making presenations.

Goal: Write grants that bring in $50,000 in funding.

Goal: Increase the number of agencies and programs listed in http:/mvub.com

Grant writing Duties

• Research Grant opportunities
• Develop grant boilerplate
• Write grants
• Re-write grants
• Re-re-write grants
• Accept more failure, Re-re-re-write grants
• Other duties as assigned.

Evangelist duties

• Find groups willing to be told about http://mvhub.com
• Attend meetings & make presentations about mvhub
• Make followup phone calls
• Send followup emails

Skills and Qualifications

Qualifications:

• A belief that criticism of one's writing is a good thing.
• A belief that George Orwell's Politics and the English Language and Jakob Nielsen's How Users Read on the Web are very useful.
• The ability to write clearly and directly
• Taking pleasure in making good presentations.
• Enough attention to detail to be able to follow up

[top] Positive bullet points about the job

1. Meaningful service
2. Real work experience
3. Medical benefits
4. $4,700 Education award
5. All expenses paid trip to national conference

[top] Negative bullet points about the job

1. $10,000 per year for 40 hours per week
2. No other paid work allowed
3. School limited to 1 class per semester (work schedule permitting)

[top] Details on why you might want to work with us

We run the best web based community resource guide and provide a level of service to 35 organizations that they otherwise could not afford. We don't feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, or teach the young. We provide reliable services to the people that do.

Twelve out of fourteen of our former VISTA and long term volunteers now work at market rate tech jobs.

Our projects are often quite substantial. It is one thing to apt-get install apache2 and drop a few files in /var/www/default. It is another thing to configure an apache server with 500 different sites.

[top] Details on why you might not want to work with us

Failure is the norm for the IT industry. We have a small budget. Sometimes we favor ideology over results. We are very informal . Honesty and criticism are essential to our work. There are only a few people in our group. If you see only bugs and no features in these facts, you probably shouldn't spend the next year with us.

Ten of our twelve past full time volunteers are happy with their experience with us. Three people are still in touch, contributing via our listservs. At least 4 volunteer alumni have contributed cash to our efforts.

However, two people bitterly regret their time with us. Your milage may vary

We have a budget of about $50,000 per year. Most of that goes to labor. (Management is volunteer) Sometimes we have to substitute labor for equipment. For example we run smartmontools and monitor hardware health instead of buying new servers every two years.

This lack of money is (mostly) not a bug. We have enough money to do what we need to do. Empirical, scientific research indicates salary is not strongly connected to competence and that projects more often fail because of a surplus of resources than a shortage. In my own experience, I've not done better work when getting paid $45 an hour than I've done working for free.

There is often a conflict in our legally incorporated non profit purposes . We exist to support non profit organizations and to promote free software. Sometimes, the best solution for a non profit organization is not free. It is not good for morale when we choose less than the best.

For example, We didn't install exchange server to serve the youth center than needs Outlook integrated calendaring and task lists that can be synced to street worker's smart phones. Instead we are spending months experimenting with free software replacements for Exchange Server.

We are very informal. We do not have a personnel manual. You should not need a rule book to know what is right and wrong. For example, Our holiday and working hours policy is:

	Take off whatever time you want. Set whatever schedule you want. 
	Be sure everyone knows what your schedule is and stick to it. You 
	are responsible for results and that is how you are judged.

If you lack have real world information technology experience, you should be open to the fact that norm in IT projects is failure Arguably, 4 of 5 projects fail. We don't keep statistics of success and failure. (This lack of statistics is of course a failure). However, on major projects we're batting about 500. mvhub.com is an unqualified success. On all of the smaller 1-2 day projects we've done, our success rate is probably very close to the IT industry norm. Our full time volunteers probably do a good bit better on small projects. The later success is probably because we don't set arbitrary deadlines and therefore don't fail to meet them.

The failure causes we seem most prone to is poor requirements gathering or poor requirements communication. Often people will work for days or longer on a project, before we (I?) realize that this is not what we needed and work has to start almost from scratch. This is an area in need of improvement, but possible improvements may be limited. Arguably, many small failures are more demoralizing than one lengthy complete plan that sits idle. However, in many circumstances, trying and failing in a small way is more effective and less costly than an lengthy planning process.

Right now there are the equivalent of 4 full time people in our group. Given our scheduling policy, you might spend many hours alone in an empty basement room. If you do not have local friends or an online life, our work can be very, very lonely. We've made some progress on this problem, but haven't solved it and it may not be solvable. If you are lonely and isolated where you are now, you will only grow more lonely and isolated when you join us.

Criticism is essential. It is our firm policy not to scream, belittle or make personal attacks. However, we often do not have the skill to nuance criticism to preserve feelings. To succeed with us you must like criticism. It is probably not enough for you to tolerate criticism, if you don't see it as good, you probably won't be happy. We will attempt to be as honest and clear with you as we are with ourselves in this document. If we notice even a potential problem, we will mention it. We expect the same from you, if there is a problem, you are obliged to mention it. Criticism is futile sometimes but we are all obliged to make and accept the effort to criticize. Criticism is required for success.

Work with us is both rewarding and frustrating. If you are prepared for the frustration it will not overcome the reward.

[top] Interview Process

Interviews and interview questions are probably a good way to hire sales people. We're not hiring sales people. Our past experience has been pretty mixed. A couple people who interviewed badly did very well for us or other organizations. A couple people who interviewed well, did bad work.

You'll probably have a 1-2 phone interviews with past VISTAs.

If the phone interview(s) don't go horribly, you'll come to our space, answer 10-20 questions, do some actual work for 2-4 hours and talk with us about the work you did. While there will be some questions that come up in discussion, you'll get most questions in advance.

For sys admin people, The actual work will probably be to run our All Servers First checklist

For coders, The actual work will probably be to take a short production perl script, and add more tests using Test::More

For writers, We'll probably ask you to write small section of a grant.

If money, time and geography don't work out, the final interview will be virtual as well. We'll give you a xen instance to work with.

For phone interviews, we don't care what you wear. For the physical interview, as long as you remember to bathe and aren't wearing anything extrodinarily distracting (no flashing leds please), we don't care what you wear. You should wear what you are most comfortable in. If you are comfortable in a tux wear that. If you are comfortable in jeans and a tee-shirt, wear that. We'll probably be wearing jeans.

[top] Timeline and Deadlines (subject to change)

Dates and Deadlines are approximate. If things change, they will probably change for the worse. On the other hand, asking if a deadline has really past, works better than giving up.

[top] Application Form (tech)

If you submit things before they are due, we will try to point out any errors and give you a chance to correct them.

You may submit the online form as often as you wish. Only your last submission will count. (Assuming it is before the final deadline)

For many people it will take a few hours to fill out this form. To avoid frustrating data loss, it would be a good idea to create and save the information for this form outside the form.

Before starting, you should understand what the VISTA program is about.

Before you can complete this form, you must complete the long online form at the Corporation for National Service . Specifically, you will need an application ID.

[top] Application Form (writer)

If you submit things before they are due, we will try to point out any errors and give you a chance to correct them.

You may submit the online form as often as you wish. Only your last submission will count. (Assuming it is before the final deadline)

Before starting, you should understand what the VISTA program is about.

  While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features 
  which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, 
  agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition 
  is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the 
  rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have 
  been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."