Andy's Mind

Yesterday we have decided to publicly show “Sprinters Search” – a research project we did at Code Sprinters in the recent month. It is a meta-search engine that attempts to provide the user with a short definition of the search term followed by unaltered results of a regular, traditional web search.

This project is a result of an idea that came to me last year. It occurred to me that today people are frequently using search engines not to find a well-sorted list of pages on something they do know, but rather they want to learn what a word or a name or a phrase they picked up somewhere (in a conversation, on the Internet, on TV etc.) means, what that is. Said well sorted list of pages helps only partially in getting the definition people are after. An attempt to provide a very succinct and correct description as a result immediately would be much better. Such a result could be followed with a traditional page list if the engine’s guess was wrong or the user wants to research further.

I thought that with lots of structured information now available on the Internet building something like that should be quite possible. After all, when current search engines were invented they were designed to parse just general web pages with no structure to them at all. Now we have all kinds of data and content bases that provide good quality information in a structured way. It seemed quite possible, so we gave it a try.

And here it is our fully working attempt at demonstrating that it is indeed possible. The aim was to provide – in most cases – a correct definition of the search term upfront, on the top of the page, possibly with an image, so that the user doesn’t have to scroll down or click through to get the definition he needs. I’d say for an early beta our meta-engine does pretty well – thanks in part to simple yet ingenious algorithms applied by Pawel Stradomski who designed that part of the code.

Of course, it is still just a research project. To make it robust and scalable resources we don’t have are be needed – much more computing power and fast storage + more time to fine-tune the algorithms. So for now we’ll leave it as it is – a good demonstration of our capabilities.

I know someone who recently applied for a job in a recruiting agency and learned quite a bit about their working methods. As it turns out a recruiter at that agency has to handle in parallel 14-16 cases – positions that they have to fill for the agency’s clients – and there is no industry specialization. So, one might have to find three accountants, two C# developers, one scrum masters and three floor cleaners – and five other people from other, completely unrelated fields. With this number of cases to handle and lack of focus on a given industry the recruiters they have can’t be good, even if they wanted to. It becomes a number game, hence retorting to database handling and everything really that can make the process faster. Hence I was not surprised when I’ve learned that on top of all that the recruiters at that agency were required to strictly follow company’s procedures.

And this is not a small agency, they employ some 60 people and have been recently acquired by an investment fund (who, btw, requires them to be more profitable – read increase the load of cases on recruiters).

This corroborates what I was long suspecting and explains why no recruitment agency I’ve worked with was able to deliver really good programmers, IT managers, routing specialists and the like. First – the best rarely ever look for a job or read ads in newspapers. You have to go after them and fish them out of the universities, this or that language users group etc. And you have to know that a typical geek is a completely different type of fellow than a sleek marketing graduate looking for a job. I bet fishing out good accounting & finance talent is equally hard and in this day and age requires much more effort than just shuffling CVs around as they flow in.

Somehow this – and most other recruitment agencies – don’t get it. Why? Well, because the truth is most jobs – especially many corporate jobs – don’t require exceptional talent and outstanding skills. Filling the seats with half-decent people is a success already so anyone who can deliver them in numbers has a business. That’s why I expect also this agency to grow along, congratulating themselves they do the right thing – and still missing the point completely.

Here is the first presentation about our work methods.

I feel it is still a bit too long – people these days expect more punch in less time, my conversational style is suitable for lectures put probably not for that. I already have another one prepared – I just need to record it and share.

The last year was quite successful – I’ve managed to change my development team into Code Sprinters and we did some interesting projects. We also have some ideas of our own that we work on – and here comes the challenge: how to sell a really great idea to a larger company without being ripped-off.

That’s what I’m thinking on when I’m not talking to clients and preparing a series of webcasts about our work methods.