Category: Jobs

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.

Undefined Expectations

The process of building IT infrastructure is particularly difficult when the managers you’re working for do not express specifications or expectations. To exacerbate this the method of tasking one to perform work and then roundly chastising them for not fulfilling the manager’s every expectation is somewhat of a manic behavior.

This behavior is common in the middle management of organizations today.The managers are ill-trained and ill-prepared to deliver the demands of their superiors. The demands or expectations exceed reason in that they do not have adequate specification nor do they contain the fundamental information necessary to produce the outcomes desired and expected by those managers and their superiors. This is largely caused by their ignorance of the technology.

The worst offenders in this case are those that once had their hands and minds in the work but now, in order to make the better paycheck, have been promoted to oversight and do not maintain a daily “hands-on” knowledge. They will spew things like “it must be perfect” without expressing any specifications whatsoever.

This all begs the question of how does one work in an environment like that? You would have to be able to take a beating on a regular basis without complaining nor being bothered by the fact that you are not appreciated. You would have to accept the fact that your skills would be deemed inadequate in the eyes of those managers. Lastly, your future paycheck is at risk.

Does this seem to be a reasonable observation?

Core Competency?

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 or badly outdated.

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 organization’s 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.

 

 

The “Promise” of jobs?

The main reason jobs are an issue is that the “bread and butter” manufacturing jobs of the post World War II economy disappeared over the last 35-45 years.  While the Military Industrial Complex is well in America, it is not the employer of the ages gone by.  The component pieces of our military, consumer, and industrial goods are manufactured overseas in factories whose employees are economic slaves within that country and whose employees cannot rise out of that desperate situation.

We Americans cannot compete with that economically as our costs of living are astronomical high compared to those employees.  Further efforts to tax or tariff the import of cheap goods is going to raise our costs without any increase in employment in our country.  The international cartels of corporations will keep the price just under the level that would make sane business people invest in making the goods within our borders.

When we have frittered away the trillions we needed on infrastructure, gutted the Affordable Care Act, defunded Medicaid, and otherwise allowed the fanatical conservative right of the Republican party to refuse to support the society, we will begin to experience subsistence living akin to what our ancestors experienced around preindustrial agrarian times in America.

Simple things like running water, roads, food, electricity, communications, and transportation will become carefully and closely managed priority needs for every one of the 98%.  The promise of “increased productivity” simply means that the corporations will minimize the use of humans beings and human knowledge to produce the products for those same people to consume.

As that has gone in my lifetime the erosion of “native talent” went with it. In my parents time, post WWII, all you needed to do was produce because the want and need was unfulfilled and you could largely name your own price.  Today incomes are so low that we must return to “going without” or “producing it ourselves”.

Most people do not have the basic tools and skills to accomplish this.  The patient planning, preparation, and forbearance required for raising food is beyond most American’s skills and means.  You can still get a couple of burgers, fries, and a drink for less than five bucks. This will be available until the water, electric, fuel, and infrastructure fail or crumble.

History dictates that all civilizations will rise and fall.  The governments organized by the citizens are the cause of their demise.  Government overburdens the citizenry and causes the citizen to overdrive the resources fueling their lives.  It is gradual and ultimately leads to individuals working alone and away from the encumbrances of the politicos and their surround.  The hard working, thick skinned, determined, and unafraid will wander off and care for their small clan.  The ability to learn will be more valuable that accreditation.  Knowledge will be employed.  Philosophies will be simple.  Actions and their results will be most valuable.

What do you think?

Mismanagement

A former colleague sent me an email about how the latest manager of their department quit after just one week on the job.  This was in the wake of the dismissal of the former boss, a twenty plus years veteran of the corporation, and the retirement of their second, another twenty plus years veteran, shortly thereafter.  Months would pass before a new manager would be hired.

I had just left the corporation as my contract was not extended after seventeen months. In the last of the months I was assigned to a “NOC” which was really only a relabeling of the “Integrated Command Center”; an administrative group which notifies team leads when corporate systems run afoul.

While the room is filled with displays, few deliver meaniful information and are too small to read.  In my tenure I identified the lack of complete monitoring of all the one hundred and forty applications, the lack of integration of the toolsets in use, and the failure of any of the displays to provide proactive capabilities for the “NOC” team.

This situation was exacerbated by the total lack of training, nonexistent documentation of processes or procedures, dire staffing shortages, and unfinished monitoring tools of every ilk.  Further the team skillsets were groomed for responding by starting a bridge call or alert paging of a subject matter expert.  No direct intervention and remediation was allowed.

There were manual health checks going on while completion of automated health checks went unfinished.  This consumed hours of work effort daily and prevented work on remediations.  This vestigial practice also required hourly updates to upper management.

Emergency change control processes in the corporation were requiring three day prior approvals by a team of executives without any comprehensive understanding of the complex interrelationships among the technology pieces.  Their preoccupation seemed to be to prevent priority one events which adversely affected their bonuses.

I was sure the new manager had a grip on this and all the other issues within the ICC.  He was well informed as to the needs of a “NOC” and quickly became aware of the problems facing him.  Within the first week his findings and interactions with higher management caused him to rethink the “opportunity” to which he had just committed.  He promptly left the corporation.

Now I really liked the folks I worked with at that corporation’s ICC and the network teams.  I tried my best to make the work easier for them and help take up some of the load where it was possible.  When I heard of the new manager quitting just one week after arriving I sent this response to an ICC team member:

< name deleted to protect from retaliation>,
I’m afraid I may have informed the man too well. I think that the financial issues are substantial. Because everyone avoids talking money except at the very high levels, then it’s a surprise to everyone when they get down to the actual nut cutting.

The same thing is happening in places like the build area for networking where impossible expectations are raised and no resources are provided or no means are provided to accomplish the desired outcomes. Wishing in one hand and craping in the other.

Don’t despair however because cash is flowing into your pocket and they can demand their ass off but the human being can only do so much and you are not accountable for anything more than what you can do in your time. Long gone are the days where basic human respect are part and parcel of the job.

Young managements, and this company has some very young management, cannot possibly raise a reasonable expectation and carry with it the respect of those individuals actually producing the work. It is beyond them! It is far beyond them.

The old structure of corporate management hierarchy used to involve a board of directors that trusted the executives that executed upon the corporate policies and the corporate direction. Today there is no trust between the board members, the stockholders, the middle management, the chief executives, or any of those nonproducing ranks.

The modern problem is that there are very often 10 to 20 management types who don’t actually “Hands-On” make anything involved in the chain of processes that make a product or deliver a service.  They have no experience creating or making anything.  They definitely do not have the coping skills necessary for the work.

None of them is truthful about their cost to the organization nor are they willing to admit to how much of a burden they are financially upon the operation. You will even find that their cost is not even accumulated anywhere or is obscured among many other costs.

So it gets to the bottom line and when they’re trying to cook the books as they are this time of the year and address issues like the performance of the machinery that makes money, they have hidden so much and mistated so much they cannot determine how to get themselves out of the quagmire.

It is at that point they realize they do not know what actually goes on and what the cost of continuing to operate that way is going to be. They reassess what the expectation is and generally back off the amount of the expectation so that it can be accomplished with the reduced resources and the hidden liability of not knowing what anything costs.

Concurrently other middle managers raise their expectation of all of those around them and in the chain of command their demands are supported as it is necessary to the operation of the machinery or the processes. Thus the expectation grows for the actual producers in the organization while the available resources to accomplish that are reduced in order to meet financial expectations.

Good management today is measured by how well you can transfer the responsibility for something to somewhere or something else. All of this comes to roost when you finally have consumed all of your resources, all of your people, and all of your time. That is the point to which the corporation has arrived.

Fortunately you work in an area that assures that cash flows from someplace else into the corporation’s coffers. When this fails you are charged with contacting the “responsible” parties so that cash will return to the proper flow rate. This work effort will never be satisfactory in the eyes of the dysfunctional management.

If you were to accumulate metrics and telemetry to show how you are working effectively and efficiently they would dismiss it as untrustworthy information. They’re actually so dumb that they would argue with you that the sun has come up or not when they’re sitting in a different time zone.

Don’t despair however because they’re so inept they can’t even find a replacement for you. So long as you show up, put in your time, and make your effort they’ll pay you and bitch, moan, piss, and complain the entire time.

They can only withhold love and honor if it matters; does it matter to you what the **** they think?

Sadly in my experience this is prevalent everywhere. If you were to seek out other opportunities you would run into the same problem. You’ll have to work on your self-esteem through some other means than employment. You see the poor bastards you work for don’t have any self-esteem so why should you?

Do not dispare that you are somehow an enabler for these inept and incompetent pricks. They eat their young, they eat their seed, they eat all of the food and leave nothing to invest with. They can only clear-cut the forest and they have no idea about replanting it.

Other than that I’m fine. I’m sitting at home fielding phone calls for new job opportunities. It’s actually an excellent time to get all my garden ready for the summer and spring. I got all the apple trees and peach trees trimmed and already have blooms on the apple trees. I will very soon have that pickup truck that I’ve been working on so long ready to go and drive down the street. I even went so far as to remove the blackout curtains from my bedroom because I no longer need to sleep in the daytime having worked all night to keep things running there.

Tell everyone I’m thinking about them. I hope the best for them. Please keep me posted. Pass around my contact information please. I have managed to misplace my cell phone yesterday so I’ll be finding that then I can be reached by phone 480-382-6720. It is a Google voice number and it will ring all of my phones and take voice mail.

Bernie

 

Unacceptable Behaviors

Dogmatic  Misogynistic  Bigoted  Antagonistic  Egocentric  Gauche  Bullying  Unmerciful  Untruthful  Intimidating  Elitist  Prideful  Corpulent  Acerbic  Racist  Prejudiced  Sardonic  Noncreative  Virulent  Pernicious  Vitriolic  Overentitled  Uncompassionate  Acrimonious  Malevolent  Baleful
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