SalaryTweeter prototype put live....

Last weekend one of my coworkers and I finished up a prototype Twitter bot we'd been working on. Read more about the PayScale SalaryTweeter.

You'll have to understand some Twitter parlance to understand what I'm about to type... but here goes anyways. To use the SalaryTweeter you can just tweet your salary questions at it. Within a minute, the SalaryTweeter will tweet back at you with the answer. Go ahead, ask some salary questions.

First post in a long time. I'm taking baby-steps back into this... so this is a pretty short post. Maybe I'll have more later.

My Latest Project Launches: PayScale Meeting Miser

Have you ever wanted to know how much the meeting you were in was costing? Back when I was working at a huge company, I felt like I often had to go to big and boring meetings. More than once I figured out an approximate cost of the meeting, and more than once I was a little flabbergasted by how easy it is to rack up a $3,000 meeting.
Back when I started at PayScale, my coworkers were listing off all of the projects that I would be working on in the next couple of months... and this was one of them. This project made sense to me, and I knew exactly who was going to be using it. me.
So, give the Meeting Miser a try, and see if you think its as cool as I do :-)

Why PayScale is Better than Boeing

A couple of months ago, I asked a friend if they wanted to come work for PayScale. They responded: "How do you think working at PayScale is compared to working at Boeing?" Well, I answered question... and decided that I liked my response enough to post it.

PayScale	Vs.	Boeing
Our office is in Pioneer Square		Their offices are in Renton, or Everett, or Auburn, or Bellevue, or BFI. You don’t get to decide where you’ll be, and you will be expected to drive between the places
For lunch, you have the option to go one of several cheap and delicious establishments. Most notably is the world famous Salumi. But don’t forget about Tat’s Deli, Bakeman’s, The New Orleans, and many others.		Boeing’s lunch café. You’ll be able to choose from rubbery meat, an iceberg-lettuce salad bar, or a Snapple. Nothing delicious; everything overpriced.
You’ll be working on stuff that people actually see, use and find helpful in life		You’ll be working on an internal system to track other internal systems so that “upper management” can complain that we have too many internal systems.
You’re 1 out of 55		You’re 1 out of 155,000
You get lots of stock options		You get ShareValue Trust (which is pretty damn sweet)
You don’t like how something is going? Go talk to the CEO, or the VP of Engineering… their offices are 20 feet away and they’re always willing to listen		You don’t like how something is going? Go talk to your manager, who will talk to his manager, who will talk to his/her colleague, who will talk to one of their employees, who is the person in charge of the project you’re working on… and maybe things can change.
You have a good idea how we can make money? Sweet… we’ll put it into the dev cycle.		You have a good idea? Too bad, the Chairman’s Innovation Initiative got shut down. Your manager’s budget is already too overbooked. Their manager’s budget isn’t doing any better. While the company is on one of the strongest up-swings it’s ever had… every group there is having to cut budget.
Want to go to a conference? Sweet, that sounds like a good idea. Take good notes because this conference looks really good		Um… yeah. Submit your request to the Conference Attendance Core Team for approval. While the CACT recognizes that this conference looks good, there is not enough time to get all the necessary approvals for your request. Plus, do you really want to use Travel Manager?

Remember: A lot of people love working for Boeing; it just wasn't the place for me. There are lots of reasons to work for Boeing, they're just documented elsewhere in this blog.

PayScale on ScobleShow

Its funny about the little things that change when you move to a small company. When I was at Boeing, there were (and still are) dozens of articles written every day about Boeing, most of them being totally insignificant to the company. Now, being at a Startup... every article that comes out is important.
Robert Scoble interviewed PayScale's founder, Joe Giordano, recently for the ScobleShow. Joe talks about PayScale's methodology, our search technology, and he mentions one of the features that we're working on right now: the Job Flower (although, that name is totally unofficial and will be changing :-)). If you want to hear about it, he mentions it at about minute 19 in the video.
Why am I excited about the Job Flower? Because its my first major project at PayScale.

Arbitrary Milestones

I am talking to my friend Zaheer on the phone... and I mentioned that I was about to break 60,000 page views to this website (according to my stat tracker). Zaheer visited the site, became the 60,000th visitor to Doing Boeing. Thanks for playing Zaheer. He doesn't actually win anything, but I still think its cool.

More arbitrary milestones:

• 3 years before May 11th, I wrote my first blog post about Boeing.
• This is the 140th published post to this blog
• I wrote several posts after frustrating days at work, but decided against posting them
• May 30th was my 25th birthday
• Today was my one month anniversary at my new job
• I paid my first mortgage payment on June 1st

Done with Boeing

I've made a big decision: I've left Boeing.

I guess I'm not sure what else to say. Why did I leave? Honestly, its because I wanted something new. I'd been at Boeing for 2 years, 3 months, and 10 days... and I felt like I was beginning to stagnate.

What am I doing now? Tomorrow (Monday) is my first day at my new job. I'm going to be Program Manager at PayScale.com.

What is going to happen to this blog? I'm not sure yet. I plan on leaving it online indefinitely. Will I keep writing to it? yes. Indefinitely? probably not. I've got lots of material left to blog about, I just have to find the time.