Author: blambert

What About Us?

What About The Citizens?

In the political frenzy being paraded in front of us let us not forget the purposes for which we elected the representatives and senators. Critical issues close to the safety, comfort, and health of individuals, their communities, their states, and their country are at risk of being ignored or “back paged” during these next months.

Our municipal, county, township, borough, state, region, and nation are not attached to the issues touted in the media or by the politicos. Quietly the money powers are redirecting our attention away from fundamental issues.

Human need starts with safety at the base of everything. If you’re feeling safe right now they have sufficiently redirected your attention.

If you feel like you belong to something, ask whether it is a form of shelter from the outside influences on your life. If you feel you belong to something ask whether it is shelter or enhancement of your life quality. If it is enhancement then the redirection has diverted you once again.

The air you breath, the water you drink, the havoc nature is wrecking on your surround, the nervousness you feel about affording anything, the lack of work and life balance, health, and countless other serious human issues are what our congress men and women are to be working on.

We have received none of these from the current government in Washington. Woe are the people who do not get out and vote in the next election.

  • Bernard Lambert Friday the 13th of December 2019

The 70’s Miniseries

I just finished watching the miniseries The Seventies produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman.  They also did The Sixties.   It reminded me of what I grew up in and what went on around me.  I highly recommend these.

The presentations provoked thoughts that had remained dormant for these many years and renewed how my present life was formed.  I played in a band, I protested, I played sports in school, I went to concerts, I enjoyed all the youthful experiments in drugs, marijuana, sex, music, cars, motorcycles, and cohabitation.  Our ideals were dismissed roundly in the early years.  Many things have made it into the mainstream.  The real loss has been our youthful optimisim. 

While I remain optimistic about our lives in this world, I am convinced that there are large capable forces at work erasing and diminishing the hopes of the 60’s and 70’s.

Please comment on this subject.

 

BLL 2019-09-26

A Good Read On Facebook Use

I had this pop up on an index page:

A Two Year Study Of More Than 5000 People Shows This Activity Destroys Your Emotional And Physical Health

It seems UC San Diego and Yale researchers have identified how emotional health deteriorates with Facebook use. The nature of the virtual social environment creates an adverse emotional sense of well being.

It is probably better for you to talk to the person next to you in the coffee shop… BL

Core Competency…REALLY?

I was engaged recently in a project to identify the traffic on a global network to solve slowdowns in the work being performed by engineers on high performance workstations.

The most difficult part of the work was the total lack of tools. The second most difficult thing was the failure of the management to be concerned about that.

The mission was to gather requirements to be submitted to enterprise network plan, build, and run teams so that the slowdown problems could be remediated.

As I began the requests went in for basic information like a global network map, monitoring tools, and access to machines in order to place probes.

Network maps, either physical or logical, were non- existent.

The monitoring tool was a well known more than adequate management and performance monitoring system that I had used for many years. It was not set up properly, it could not retain much information for analysis, and custom reporting access was refused. It was installed in three regions without any joining together of the database backends.

Requests to get access to the machines to place probes was refused.

While this is going on I learn that the purchase of undersized, out of specification, equipment for a remediation of a site that was a decade overdue was being done so that a schedule was met and the money spent before the end of a fiscal cycle. The kind of work to be done on the site had no bearing on the decision.

One other interesting thing was that all datacenters were to be consolidated by collapsing them into fewer and fewer sites all colocated off-site from existing corporate sites.

Everyone in every technical discipline was concerned that the plan was inadequate and that given past practices the future was not going to be good.

The corporation was grown by acquisition. It was not grown by innovation. Decades old talent that had worked at the acquired organizations left in droves. Those that remained were waiting for their retirement.

When asked about why the organization would place their data centers into another organizations hands the reply was “It is not our core competency”.

Given the experience one wonders what is their core competency? I know! Pass the buck.

Two Civilizations?

History tells us that civilizations rise and fall. Typically the nation state rises as it conquers the surrounding countryside and resources. Peoples are assimilated into this. The cycle is to pioneer the frontier, civilize the outlands, redistribute the resources and wealth, centralize power and distribution of the wealth, and tax production until the resources are overrun and go into decline. Concurrently government and its infrastructure further burdens the populace and the available natural resources.

Fast forward to today. We no longer make anything, as individuals, from the natural resources. Corporations have been formed to do most of that bidding with a scant few “hardy individualists” left to attempt it solo. With this love of the corporeal entity has come a furtherance of the civil and criminal rights of the non-human to the point of creating two civilizations.

If the corporation cannot feel pain and is only obligated to generate wealth at any expense then it is free of the normal human encumbrances like pain, hunger, love, empathy, and many other such feelings. Running roughshod over people and protecting their well being is not in corporate policy for the most part. Policy is sculpted to provide legal protections and not human protections.

The work of the marketeers, spindoctors, and politicos then becomes catering to the deep pockets of the corporations. Altered states of awareness are pushed onto the masses by every means imaginable in order to gain acceptance for the behavior of businesses and their representatives.

The general population is kept distracted by finance, need, manufactured want, and entertainment. As in Roman times; bread and circuses. Today it is popcorn, nuts, beer, hot dogs, halftime shows, and sporting events. And it is all sponsored by the corporeal entities.

Two civilizations exist and the general population is NOT the one benefiting the most from the experience.

What My Cover Letter & Resume Should Say

The resume is too long. Yes the resume is long because I have worked for decades and all of it is relevant.

When using the Internet for collecting job offers one places resumes and cover letters on myriad sites. The fond hope is that carefully crafted work fits the requirements of the individual looking for talented people.
Unfortunately in this day and age the process is layered with several people or web forms prior to getting to the actual individuals that can judge one’s abilities.
This brings to mind thoughts of what I would rather have said when wordsmithing the erudite cover letter and resume.
What follows is a mixture of venting and fun at the expense of the reviewer of my submitted products. It is in the form of their response followed by my response.

1.  The resume is too long. Yes the resume is long because I have worked for decades and all of it is relevant.

2.  An inventory of skills is just a list of “buzzwords”? No you idiot they are the actual hands-on devices, applications, and systems used in my experience.

3.  The form of the resume is not in the correct “person”.  May I point out that the form is not in the correct person’s hand?

4.  There are too many jobs in a short time frame.  Yes consulting work runs a few months to a year or so; seldom longer unless hired into the organization.

5.  There needs to be more narrative.  Wait a minute. You just complained it was too long.

6.  The content is too technical.  Duh! Who is reading this?

7.  I do not see any relevant experience.  Could you if I gave it to you in any other form? A documentary maybe?

8.  There are only successes shown in the resume.  What?

9.  You should have a professional write you a resume.  Would you recommend your secretary?

10.  You should have a professional write you a resume.  You were right…….and the massage was fantastic!

Latest Twist In Recruiting Practices

Lately, since I refreshed my resume on the job boards, I have been receiving duplicate calls from recruiters who are outside of US borders and obviously are not speaking English as their first language.

I do not harbor any ill toward those hard working individuals, but I cannot understand them given my impaired hearing.  They are given the task of doing all the cold calling to potential recruits based upon scans of the job boards and matches of keywords.

It seems that many big name agencies in the US have now resorted to doing this in order to compete in the recruiting business.  It is drudgery and very unpopular among young recruiters.

The problem is a “Freakonomics” problem where the analysis of the money stream finds conflict with the purposes of recruitment.  The callers are paid by contacting the potential recruit, confirming answers to basic questions on a script, and getting the recruit to send a confirming email with the latest resume attached.

This would be innocuous if it were not for the redundant calls made to the potential recruit and if it was communicated for what client or customer.  The clients or customers want to be withheld until the cold caller secures the confirming email and resume.  That is their guarantee of payment for the work.  The problem is the candidate has no idea if they are being resubmitted many times to the same job; which eliminates them from consideration.

If that hurdle is cleared by the candidate, the recruiting agency that hired the cold caller then calls and wants to discuss the job when the candidate has not been told that someone else might call.  This is often made worse by having the cold caller’s “manager” call to verify the contact or to ask even more scripted questions.  At this point you may have had three to five phone calls and spoken to total strangers that have no idea about your true capability or experience.

Once these challenges are met the recruiter then wants a couple of things to make their job easier.  First they want the recruit to talk to the account executive that has the requisition from the client.  Again a nontechnical stranger does a filtering of your resume details and experience.  Second they ask to have your resume modified to a shorter length and to only discuss details pertinent to the job offering.  The reasoning is that the “hiring manager” doesn’t read long resumes.

At this point I often look at this circumstance as impossible as I may never get to talk to an individual who has the technical moxie to see I have more than enough capability to perform the job requirement.  To make maters worse they then often want two or three references from supervisors from previous, read most recent, jobs.

What they may fail to realize is that when one signs on to a contract there is specific language that precludes discussing any details of the contract with anyone outside of the contracting organization and the customer.

They’ll do dumb things like ask “why did you leave the last job after eighteen months?” when it is obvious that contracting jobs last short periods and complete so that you leave and go looking for more contracts.

They’ll ask what you want to do.  The employment desired section of your resume is never read.

They will always ask for you to lower your hourly rate.  They must not realize that one looks for another job or contract expecting to receive the same or greater compensation than what has gone before.  They also could just be chiselers.

Alas I have amassed a long list of blocked phone numbers, do not answer phone numbers, PITA phone numbers, spam email sources, and trash email lists in an effort to not waste too much time on these characters.

Tell me about your experiences please.  -BL

Bad Men with Personal Agendas

I recently finished a permanent position after taking too much abuse. It was a toxic environment where my team was constantly overburdened without regard for anything but covering the boss’s incompetence, lack of honesty, rudeness, egocentric behavior, over commitment of our time, technological incompetence, and misuse of the corporate human resource process.

I cussed the man vigorously to his face. He was a liar and he only sought to eliminate my efforts to repair long standing technological missteps. In the guise of the pursuit of perfection, all team and individual efforts were regarded as insufficient or incompetent. I have lived too long and done too much to accept that assessment.

The really bad news is that this boss rides herd on the systems that take care of the collection and distribution of the blood supply. He is uneducated and only has the experience of that business and a limited previous work life.
The idea of work life balance is lost on that individual as they have no family, spouse, children, or significant other to care for in this life.
The same individual appears to not have any social skills related to mixing with people and having sensitivity or compassion for others.
A nerd run amok.