Email from a headhunter and my reply

I have received an email from a headhunter today and I have replied.

Read below:

Dear Gorycki

We have a CV on file from you which is more than a year old. Have you secured employment in Ireland or are you still interested in moving here? If so – can you email me an updated CV with details of your current remuneration package and outline what types of roles you are interested in hearing about? We will then update your file and keep you informed if suitable roles arise.

If you are no longer interested in hearing from us about new roles in Ireland – can you email us saying so and we can remove your file from our database.

Many thanks – and looking forward to hearing from you.

Kindest regards

Brian McFadden

Director

If this were the first time my last name is misused in an email from the headhunter, I woudl let it pass. But as these guys cannot be bothered to even try to think which name is the first name and which one is the last, I felt obliged to respond in the following way:

Dear McFadden,

Six years after Poland joined EU and since hordes of Poles invaded Ireland and the rest of British Islands, I really hoped to find you guys to be able to distinguish our first names from our last names. I am absolutely sure that there are numerous Januszes, Marcins, Piotrs, Wojteks and so on (hint - these are the first names of Polish folks, which I assume are still customarily used in your country as header lines in email and other correspondence).

On the other hand, Gorycki (typically mispronounced badly by everybody from England or Ireland), Nowak, Kowalski, etc. are our last names. I really expect professional headhunters from the Islands looking for potential candidates in countries like Poland to be able to tell which name is which and use the correct one while making the first contact. Or, if unsure, to at least try to figure out some sort of neutral form that would not be offensive - hint: using just the last name is very much a no-no. Or, if everything else fails, as the last resort, ask your secretary or a cleaning lady (she is more likely than not Polish, or Lithuanian, or Czech or Slovak - all of which will be able to help you out).

Kind Regards

Janusz Gorycki

Kalamon Software Web Site Facelift

I have spruced up the KalamonSoft web site, to make it a bit less generic. What do you think of the new layout and colors?

DeskBeam Junior Coming Along Nicely. And Other Good Stuff

I have been silent for a while, because I spend almost all of my evenings and nights coding my new baby - a lightweight screencasting application which I call DeskBeam Junior. Why "Junior"? Because this is just the first approximation of what I have in mind in the "Senior" version, which is going to come later, and which will include advanced video editing capabilities.

The picture on the left is the logo for the application, which I created a week ago. It is supposed to represent a flower. I hope you find it cute.

The whole thing at this moment is a bit secret/unstable/in statu nascendi, so I am not giving you samples, screenshots or downloads to try out just yet - but do expect some early access preview (of alpha-to-beta-ish quality) in a couple of weeks.

Unlike my previous creations, the software will not be open source - I am going to charge for it.

But - it will be rather cheap - to the tune of $20-$25, so I guess everybody should be able to afford it.

On a totally different note, I am preparing a long-ish post/presentation/essay on the subject of "Earned Value Measurements in Agile Projects" (yes, the title is deliberately controversial, as typical Agile approach is that EVM is bogus and worthless). I seem to have found an interesting metric for agile projects, which I guess nobody had though of before (at least Google does not know of anybody with an idea like that - I have been looking for it on the internets for a while). I hope the metric will be useful to some project managers out there, so if you are one of them, stay tuned. There will be formulas, graphics, and all sorts of good stuff