Archives for April 2010

As I’ve considered how to steer my career path, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about how to build and present skills to potential customers and employers.  Experts often suggest to specialize and appeal to a specific niche.  But then other experts say that companies don’t want narrow focus specialists and that they would rather have well rounded cross disciplinary skill sets. 

As I thought about how to reconcile those two viewpoints, it occurred to me that perhaps it would be possible to combine the best of both ideas by looking for an overarching theme or business objective that ties together multiple skillsets.  In other words, build a higher level niche where the value proposition is that the whole of the combined skills is greater than the sum of the parts.

In my case, I have a strong background in enterprise software development, database administration, and network engineering.  I also recently kicked off a project to add information security to my portfolio.  That left me wondering whether I was a developer, engineer, or security guy.  Then I remembered a comment that Buck Woody from Microsoft made during a presentation to my local SQL developer’s group meeting last month.  He pointed out that he thought of himself as a Data Professional, not just a DBA.

I can position the Data Professional role as an umbrella concept that can encompass the development, DBA, network and security skillsets. As a Data Professional I can deliver value by enabling a business to create, interact with, and securely store their data. That may consist of coding an application that accesses data in a database (developer), optimizing SQL queries (DBA), developing and implementing a backup strategy (DBA, infrastructure), adopting encrypted storage (security), designing an enclave network to keep data safe (network, security), or developing and deploying a business continuity and disaster recovery plan (security).

This concept can apply to any group of skills, not just IT.  It’s important to remember that when you’re marketing yourself (or anything else for that matter), it’s always about benefits, not features.  Employers and customers don’t care if you’re a Renaissance man.  Skills and experience are only of value to the extent that they fill a customer or employer need.  The challenge is to find the overlap between your interests and specific needs that customers or employers find valuable, then find ways to map your skills and experience to those needs.

It’s been a while since I wrote about my housing crisis frustrations.  Thankfully I got things wound down with my property that I was selling (more details here and here).  At the end of the day, my HELOC lender refused to release liability so I ended up up filing Chapter 7.  I couldn’t see spending the rest of my life paying off a loan for a house I no longer own.  If the banks and Wall Street hadn’t played games that tanked the market, I wouldn’t have been underwater in the first place, so I don’t feel particularly bad about making that move.  It gives me a fresh start and allows me to move on.

If you’re in a bad housing situation, don’t just wait and hope it will get better.  There are no guarantees and few indications that things will significantly improve any time soon.

I have three friends that are also involved with short sales.  One is selling and two are buying.  The friend that is selling has a clean offer, but it’s for less than the lender thinks the house is worth.  The lender needs to do their homework – the house needs a lot of repairs and won’t bring the money that the lender thinks that it will.

One of my buyer friends just finished his purchase.  It turned out to be quite an ordeal, in part because he used VA financing.  The VA inspector demanded some repairs which the lender and the seller refused to pay for.  He had a solid approval, so he chose to go ahead and pay for the repairs out of pocket.  That was a brave and in my opinion risky choice, but it worked out.  He closed a couple weeks ago and is now moved in.

My other buyer friend is thus far in a less desirable position.  He found a house that he very much likes, put together a deal, and made an offer.  Again, the second won’t release liability.  But in his case, the seller refuses to close unless both the first and second mortgage holders release her from liability.  I really don’t understand why these second mortgage holders take this approach.  In most cases, the homeowner would keep the house and keep making the payments if they were not in financial distress.  How can lenders think that they will really recover enough from a homeowner that has already decided to walk for it to be worth the effort?  I just don’t understand the rationale.  All I can think of is that they want to keep the loans on their books as an asset regardless of whether they are performing or not.  You can read more about this sale at http://wellsfargolies.blogspot.com/.

All in all, the pain is far from over.  There just aren’t any economic indicators showing that demand will increase, and it will likely decrease when the tax rebates expire.  I’ll be interested to see how things play out over the next few years.