Category: Jobs

A Good Read For Techies

I got this download today about Apache Kafka from this URL: https://assets.confluent.io/m/1b509accf21490f0/original/20170707-EB-Confluent_Kafka_Definitive-Guide_Complete.pdf
It is the open source of Confluents work. The guide is free. Give it a read if you make or maintain sites on the net.

Covid-19 & Work From Home

For a three weeks we have been working from home. My wife and I are both doing this. We have a excellent garden, well stocked larders, freezers, and refrigerators. We both have a substantial amount of work on our horizons. We are both healthy. We wish that the shelter-in-place was not necessary. We wish others could do as well in light of the layoffs so many have experienced.

Our agreement on the issue of the perils of everyday life, especially the present day’s newest ones, is that we have always been so aware of what could go wrong, what we were able to overcome, and how in the end we survived, that we are very much less concerned for ourselves than most folks.

This does not mean we are not concerned for ourselves and for others. Our concern is for the people that have not ever worried about the perils surrounding them and how they remained oblivious to the danger. This current crisis is going to interfere with their life. How will they react? The greatest danger may be their awakening!

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.

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.