Category: Jobs

About Conspiracy and Knowledge

This note is to cover the connectedness of government, business, and the populace with relevant observations on the applicability of current theories and the genesis of such theories. An attempt will be made to connect the dots.

Today much controversy is swirling around the Covid Pandemic and conspiracies. Public controversy surrounds the selection methods state health departments are using to allow or disallow businesses to operate.

The conspirators in this instance are the public drivers of the state health department, the business owners, the public, the medical industry, the insurance industry, and of course banking.

The concurrent need for all involved is for life to return to what it was last summer and fall. Prosperity is measured and perceived in that way. Any deviation from that causes uncertainty and fuels our suspicions. This alone divides us into separate conspiracy categories.

Next add the public-facing actions of each of the stakeholders. Today this causes further division in the public and feeds subdivision in the stakeholders. Add the isolation of the pandemic environments and financial want and you have nothing but time on your hands to scheme on what is conspiring against YOU. At this point, the real conspirators have won as you are totally distracted.

You are allowing this to happen and all you need to do is refocus your attention. The unknown is uncomfortable. A lot of what we are uncomfortable with today is the lack of solid indisputable facts to help us. A sense of macro proportion must be developed to gain some insight into the scope of this pandemic.

How long in time it will take cannot be known right now, progress is being made, miscues have been many. It is dangerous. It spreads before you know it. Normal social behavior is now extremely dangerous. Getting a bunch of us together is now lethal and a spoke in the spread of the pandemic.

I do not believe that any of the efforts to limit spreading is disputable by way of civil rights. It is arguable by way of financial wants and needs. The danger of grouping up inside, in any way, is absolutely guaranteed to affect more people badly. If the effect was immediate, easily observed, and tested quickly, then we would not have the superspreader generation happening at the gatherings.

The pandemic came from social gatherings. Families, restaurants, airplanes, trains, buses, airports, cars, schools, etc. could be infected and the infection carried on to others before anyone knew it. This cannot be fixed financially. Our want to gather has to be changed so we don’t superspread any more. This conduct will be necessary until years after the widespread use of medical treatments that prevent the attack on our bodies.

Bernard Lambert – August 12, 2020

At a Bad Time ….

The phrase “at a bad time” seems to be the sweeping assesment of where we are in time and place right now. Many are the troubles of the ordinary people of America. Job loss, no healthcare, no money, no shelter, brutality, all seem to press hard against the American dream.

I would suggest that we begin all assesment with:”Is this at a bad time?”

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.