Category: Money

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.

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

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?

Controlled Obsolescence

One of the promises of the new electronic age was that reliability and product life would be improved.  While a transistor can live longer than an electromechanical relay for the purposes of switching or controlling, it may not meet the promise of reliability purported years ago.

The enemies of all electronic devices are heat and uncontrolled currents and voltages.  Modern electronics run on five and twelve volts.  All devices used in the home and business desktop tend to use this by way of power supplies which convert the power from the outlets in the wall to something usable by the electronics of the device.

Troubleshooting those devices requires a complete set of documents that detail the schematic design as well as the expected outputs from large scale integrated devices used within the device.  In some instances test points are available and documented well by the manufacturer so technicians can service the device once it is in use.

Because the actual cost to manufacture these devices is so incredibly cheap compared to the old methods, things like the radio, phone, television, and home appliance are only made today using this new technology.

Unfortunately the economies in manufacture are not always passed along. While it is true that a modern smart phone can run circles around the supercomputers of yore, they burn up on the dash of your car in Arizona and cannot survive a short fall unless somehow “armored” with an accessory surround.

To make matters worse manufacturers and marketeers have prevented the distribution of complete manuals for owners as a nuisance and unnecessary cost for the products.  Citing that users are not concerned with such minutia, the obfuscation of operation, care, and maintenance information is lost and or unavailable.  The Internet forums are testament to how rampant that is.

What is really unsettling is the engineered death of the device.  An example I love to cite is how the microcontroller on your self-cleaning oven, which approaches one thousand degrees Fahrenheit, is located immediately above the oven and in the exhaust stream from the oven.  It stands little chance of survival in the long run.

Then there is the abuse of the customer by way of grossly overpricing the replacement parts and service technician costs.   Electronic controls on that same oven cost half of the price of a new oven for an electronic controller that was manufactured for a few dollars.

Early unexpected device death is easily taken care of by replacing the device.  That is why people buy new products. They want a warranty to cover defects in materials and workmanship.  The entire package is replaced.  The defective device is then often returned to the manufacturer and shredded for recycling or refurbished for discounted resale.

So what the oven example shows is that twenty dollars of decorated sheet metal with exotic features provided by a microcontroller and a few switches plus a few fans and heating elements will sell new for six hundred to several thousand dollars and become unusable or unreliable within a designed period of time.

To further the need to replace the oven, the cost of problem diagnostics and replacement of the parts becomes prohibitively expensive.  A fresh customer is born.

What do you think about the “Kleenex” age of modern technology?

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
Unoriginal  Nonveracious  Rancorous  Obese  Antisocial  Obsessive  Hardhearted  Manic  Psychopathic  Deceptive  Narcissistic  Atheistic  Avaricious  Acquisitive  Amoral  Covetous  Intemperate  Maladjusted  Neurotic  Unbalanced  Disfunctional  Unstable  Malcontented  Overindulged Condescending  Aloof  Unethical Deprecating  Eccentric Gratuitous  Unreasonable  Specious  Casuistic  Fallacious  Deceptive  Spurious Feigned