Austin Employment Web Log

In Gulliver's Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift describes the Laputians, people so lost in their own thoughts that they needed servants (flappers) to bean them with a small bag, on the ear if they were supposed to listen, and on the mouth if they were supposed to speak: Gulliver's Travels, Chapter II The flappers did this, when in the opinion of the flapper , the master was supposed to listen or talk. The novel was biting satire, of course, directed at the legions of court advisers and servants who populated the governments of Europe and shielded the nobles from the rabble, and from reality . Anyone who thinks about it for a few minutes can see the obvious danger in allowing those who wield real power from depending on their underlings for everything...  Oh! silly me, forget I said that. You might be asking yourself why this story is on a blog devoted to employment issues.  I'll tell you why: companies are using software to screen resumes .  That software is calle

This post is like a table of contents for the blog.  There are now over sixty articles here, covering a fairly focused list of subjects: Blog Governance - the rules of the road for this blog   The Table of Context   Comments Opened   Thank you, kindly Job Hunting - articles with specific guidance for job hunting A break in the silence, and a true story   Gig Economy I - Introduction Videos   The Job Hunt, part I: initial preparation for the hunt   The Job Hunt, part IIa: Employee job hunt   Different types of job   The coming gig-based economy   Persuasion, Your Personal Hydrogen Bomb   Highest and Best Use of Skill   I'm older and scared of losing my job. What to do   Ageism and LinkedIn in the modern world   Smart Women Love the Cloud   Learning the Cloud from clear blue sky    The Bell Curve and your chances of success, part II    Some light at the end of the tunnel    On the incredible value of Glass Door    Equity How about a few smaller, scrappier

Notes from the field:   First, some links to comments by people who have actually done remote managing of workers:   10 Essential Tips for Managing Remote Employees   How To Manage Remote Workers Like They’re Right In The Office   How to Successfully Manage Remote Employees   How to Effectively Manage Remote Employees   8 expert tips for managing remote workers Note that many of these contain the same tips - provide good hardware, regular (but not nagging) communication, very clear instructions, clear, objective acceptance criteria for work done.  Web cams and Skype can help a lot. Absolute essentials for remote management:   These are: initial tooling and access, learning curves, written instructions, written acceptance criteria, time constraints . Although obvious, they are omitted or ignored often enough so that there are frequent failures in the use of remote workers, most famously Yahoo! under their final CEO. These failures, likely due to management rather than workers,

" Going Galt " is a reference to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged .  The precise meaning varies with the user, but in general it means something like, "To Hell with this.  I'm working my *ss off and getting robbed blind.  Might as well flip burgers and be happy!"  Some folks add a political spin to it (I don't) but it signifies a deep disgust with the system, enough to want to opt out permanently .  It is much more than a protest. I just paid $725 ( after a 20% cash discount) to find out there was nothing wrong with one of my sons.  That was for two people seeing him for a total of about 10 minutes each and for a few X-rays.  Insurance was not involved . I have paid well more than $2700 for my other son's broken wrist. Both bills appear to me to be inflated by about 100%.  The insurance I buy for my two kids is nearly worthless; I pay for it to satisfy a divorce decree and the ACA.  I worked at the jail a long time ago, and have no desire to be a guest t

The modern world of high tech work is dominated by only one principle: minimizing time-to-market .  This single concept overrides quality, overrides thorough market research, overrides common sense, often overrides simple human decency. There is very little room for error. In such a system, from the standpoint of the workers, they hear: It's not what you have done, it's what have you done lately It's not what you can do, it's how fast can you do it Yes, you've never done X before , what is your timeline ? Is it any wonder so many people in the work world are anxious and constantly on edge?  That they constantly cover their derrieres and try to lay the blame on someone else?  That the "waste" management is attempting to stop, with the above dis-blandishments, suddenly and forcefully shows up again as increased CYA behaviors that are even more wasteful and much harder to stop? I worked at a major, very famous, huge company that literally ordered us

Apparently, there was a class-action lawsuit over those horrible "You have won a FREE Carnival Cruise" robo-calls.  Former victims can check here to see if they qualify: Charvat v. Carnival et al You can check whether your number is on the list and then file your claim here: File a claim Valid claims apparently will be awarded $300-900.  I suggest you hurry . Did I just get you some money?  Thank-you donations may be made to my PayPal account potken at yahoo dot com.   You are welcome!

In an earlier post I first mentioned the gig economy, without actually saying much about it .  Contracting appeared to have something to do with it, short-term work has something to do with it, but the concept was murky where we left it. For example, there is no such thing as a "Gig CEO", the very concept is ludicrous.  I doubt there will be many gigs for management, but there might some day.  Gigs are services that are needed and hired on a temporary basis.  Exactly what that means depends on the specific situation. This post will help with that a little - here is a set of videos that describe different points of view on the gig economy, and flesh out a bit better exactly what the gig economy means.  In addition, the pitfalls and dangers of the gig economy are at least mentioned.  As always, thorough research is recommended before diving into the water.  At a minimum, knowing how to participate in the gig economy for your own skill set should soften involuntary unemplo

This post to LinkedIn got a lot of views (at least compared to my other posts), with 27,515+ views, 73 likes and two comments 3 weeks after posting.  The views just keep rolling in. I must have hit a nerve with a lot of people.  Here is the un-edited post: Funny thing, just to the right as I write this, I see "How companies killed employee loyalty". I read the posts there, and wondered where the authors had been the last 40 years. Mass and frequent layoffs have been a part of employment so long, that I'm amazed anyone is seriously talking about loyalty. I've been laid off at least six times, and four of those were certainly not productivity concerns about me - the company just went belly-up. It seemed sudden because management hid the true state of the company from the employees until the last minute. Gradually, over a long period of time, we've gone from quality and relevance to time-to-market as the primary determinant of success. By doing that, no one is

Employee job hunts are different from contractor job hunts.  Prospective employees have a far better chance of actually realizing the single paragraph description of what they will do than contractors.  Most employers vastly prefer to have employees in critical development and coordination roles, since there are few restrictions on how the employees are to be managed.  They can be told in detail what to do, when to get it done and how to do it.  The employer does not have to think or prepare as much. W-2 contractors are usually wanna-be employees, and so follow the same rules as employees. Once a person seeking an employee role is done updating the resume and uploading it to the various job boards, then the optimum path is to create job alerts on all the boards and harvest the results via e-mail.  I also recommend at least weekly manual searches of each job board with various search strings to possibly catch jobs missed.  Apply to every job you might barely be able to do .  Don

Here I document how I look for a job .  You may have an entirely different methodology.  As long as it works, you're good.  Did you write it down? This post details the preparation steps so that the job hunt goes as well as it can. Step 0 : Read your resume as though you have never seen it before.   Pretend you are a hiring manager seeing the resume for the first time.  Does your own resume bore you? Rewrite it until it motivates someone to pick up the phone and call you right away.  Use persuasive language .  NB: every time I read my resume, I make changes to it. Read it, rewrite it, again and again.  It matters a lot! Make sure that you have a fast, well-written summary of skills and qualifications at the very top of the resume.  This is what hiring managers will read first, and it may well be the only thing they read, so it has to be a masterpiece.  Emphasize content, brevity, simplicity and clarity.  The summary is what you do . Be careful about putting skills in the s

This post has nothing to do with employment,  I'm posting it anyway, just because. I saw a video today about a guy who was a total jerk, all his life.  He routinely and regularly, severely abused people all around him, made them feel terrible.  One day, as he was abusing a waitress at a diner, he had a cerebral hemorrhage and basically died on the spot.  The waitress he was abusing tried to save him, but he died on the way to the hospital.  She found his wallet, and looked in it, to find that, on his drivers license, he had checked the organ donor's box. His liver went to a terminally ill man, and saved his life.  His other parts saved many other people, in many ways.  In death, he transformed from a total asshole to a savior. That man, although he deliberately caused much harm while he was alive, became a saint as an organ donor after his death.  What does God feel about him now?  What do you feel about him now? Think on this deeply.  I was impressed. I found the vid

First, some needed legal background : Legal considerations for use of Independent Contractors (Lawyer) Practical Do's and Don'ts when using contractors (more lawyering) Proper Classification of Contractors vs Employees, Benefits, Caveats Legal and Financial Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Contractors On Hiring and Paying Independent Contractors Second, the Tax (IRS) background : IRS Definition of an Independent Contractor   IRS Document describing differences between employees and contractors IRS Topic 762 - Independent Contractor vs Employee Texas Workforce Commission - Independent Contractor Test US Small Business Administration - Hiring a Contractor of Employee? Third, practical preparations : Read the background documents above, thoroughly Consult with company attorney, if possible, draw up sample contract and statement of work Consult with Accounting to ensure contractors are paid correctly ( not out of payroll, but out of accounts payable ) and

This article sheds a little light on the apparent exodus from California to Texas, particularly Austin .  I have written before that I believe there is net outflow of people from California, New York State, New Jersey and Illinois, and that Austin is getting fairly clogged as a result . I am unsure of just what this might mean.  On the one hand, business in California (at least according to the article) does not appear to be suffering much in the aggregate. I have little visibility into specifics for different companies. If companies were fleeing California and the other states like rats jumping from a sinking ship, and all moving to Austin, there would be more salary growth in Austin.  So far, and I am a long-term veteran of the IT field here in Austin, I don't see a large amount of growth in average salaries.  That tells me that companies moving here and people moving here to get jobs are more or less balancing each other, at least for now. Also, if there were a huge short

This means, loosely, that some people in an organization have more power than others .  In the military, this is formalized by rank and regulations that govern the treatment of people of different rank. Ex-military people typically get RHIP. If you need an introduction to power imbalances, go to YouTube and search for "gunnery seargent hartman first scene" (concepts, language and trigger warning).  I will not link to it here, because the scene is very hard to watch the first time.  Folks, that is RHIP, right in your face. In industry and other enterprises, there is far less formalization of rank.  Often, everyone is on a first name basis.  I have often felt this is a bad idea, since it can fool the unaware that they are entitled to act and talk in a manner that breaks rank.  Today's young people can exhibit high levels of entitlement, and that is a very career-limiting attitude.  There just aren't enough signals to warn people in advance to shut up and obey. I&

This post is intended to be a simple road map of the basics of the job market.  Here, I will explain the different types of hires and what differentiates them, and give my opinion on where the types are headed in the near future.  NB: No one has ever successfully and reliably predicted the future on a long time scale. Employee : There are two sub-types; exempt (college degree) and non-exempt (usually associates or unfinished college degree). Both are assumed to have a fairly long-term interest in staying with the hiring company.  In past times, for example, database administrators and system administrators were looking at about 3 years average employee job lifetime, while developers might have an 18 month average job lifetime. Exempt employees are considered more elite than non-exempt, and can be "encouraged" to work ridiculous hours.  Non-exempts pretty much are limited to 40-hour workweeks.  There is considerable flexibility in both.  Exempts are first in line for prom

The Austin Chamber of Commerce released some tech numbers for 2017 last month .  This should give some perspective and data to the state of the high-tech sector.  The report is short enough to read in a few minutes.  Here are some highlights: There are more than 5800 high-tech firms in Austin Total jobs almost 130,000, or nearly 14% of all jobs Only about 1% growth in last year Manufacturing high-tech is contracting, non-manufacturing high-tech is expanding A few consequences of these points are in order.  I would guess that some of these firms are one-person operations not in a position (yet) to hire.  If we assumed that all of them are capable of hiring, it would take contacting about 125 companies a week to check all of them for potential jobs.  That is a lot of resume-emailing.  NB:  It will probably take more than e-mailing resumes to find a good job. I'm doing my job search in a rather traditional manner, and it's just not as effective as I would like.  More on

This post is addressed to my fellow high-tech workers.  I want you and I to become friends in the most enduring sense - we must become the people who make the cloud happen. We must give up our positions as technical experts.  We must stop doing the silly technical debates that never end.  We must serve our business customers in a totally efficient way that we have never before imagined. We must actually deliver end-to-end, completely well-designed, thought-out solutions to our customers, so that they never even know about technical challenges.  They don't care, and neither should we.  Technical stuff irritates them, and makes it harder for them to do business. We have to save them from technical stuff.  Forever! It should be possible for a rather tech ignorant business analyst to use our services to create a web application to do exactly what he needs it to do , with little or no training, entirely intuitively, point and click.  Does this mean complicated OLTP applications?

I received some good criticism via e-mail on the blog entry here .  The premise was that, where he worked, the principal company went out of the way to make certain he could not be mistaken for an employee.  Agreed, sort-of. Some workplaces, especially if they have had trouble with this issue in the past, are extremely careful to handle contractors per IRS guidelines and legal concerns.  In a later post, I'll flesh out the basic differences and talk about the persistent unfairness in labor laws and how it affects players who come into the game late. Other companies are not so careful.  In fact, some are quite sloppy about it, and are, of course, at elevated risk. A company that has never had any serious trouble with either lawsuits or the IRS is less likely to be as cautious as one that has has such trouble.  Maybe they will never have trouble, maybe they will.  The point here isn't history, it is risk .  Brief blog posts such as mine (brief on purpose ) cannot deal wit

* In a series of previous posts, I have: Crafted a brief narrative showing a mix of success and failures in hiring and managing contractors .  NB: Employees have vastly different incentives and workplace experiences than properly managed contractors. Analyzed the narrative from the standpoint of winners and losers, and show a glimpse of the effects of power imbalances between the various parties . A (admittedly quick and non-comprehensive) guide to using contractors .  This post is the tl;dr edition, so interested parties should read between the lines and be thorough.  I hope to write another post about this topic soon. I also wrote a brief post about contractors and tried to contrast them from employees.  Again, this post is far from comprehensive , but it does give some flavor to the difference. I will assume for now that all managers and employees have some understanding about what an employee means.  Employees are "supposed" to be permanent (until the next roun

Does anybody remember Thomas Kuhn , the author of the very challenging The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ?!? He was talking about science.  The scientific paradigm shifts he spoke about happened about every thirty years or so, and did so for hundreds of years.   Interestingly, there hasn't been a major scientific paradigm shift in more than 40 years, the first time that has happened in centuries. In contrast, I am talking here in this blog about technology, where fundamental, major, periodic revolutions are par for the course.  These paradigm shifts in technology happen roughly every few years.  I try to document how this affects employment . Remember the Dot Bomb era? 24 year old CEOs controlling billions of dollars of investor money? It went Kaboom! in a big way, and dragged everyone with it.  I got lucky and landed a job with the then-small business process outsourcing industry, which supplied 7 years of employment.  That industry matured and is now made up

No, I don't mean this , although I have to admit, this guy has one of the most fascinating hobbies I've ever seen . What differentiates a 20-year veteran of high-tech, struggling at a new job, from the tenured 2-year tech, who flawlessly and rapidly gets one thing after another done, with far less experience and education?  Tribal Knowledge . What scares the hell out of managers at an established enterprise, when they learn they are going to have to do a massive RIF at their company?  It isn't loss of headcount, I can assure you.  It is loss of Tribal Knowledge . Tribal knowledge is what you pick up, on the job, just from doing it.  You learn where everything is, what you need most, who to talk to, who to avoid.  By its very nature, tribal knowledge cannot be written down, cannot be documented (documentation is no longer tribal knowledge), is absolutely necessary, constantly changing, almost ghostly.  Yet, it is a reality.  It is so real, that it is the one thing t

How did our last two Presidents get their jobs? Neither had job-specific qualifications, neither were particularly good matches for the job and, considered from the standpoint of reason, it is odd that either of them got elected.  How did they do it? One word: Persuasion . Scott Adams , the creator of Dilbert , writes one of the very best blogs I have ever read .  A persistent theme of his is the power of persuasion.  I have to agree.  Here's a reading list .  Here is a good, recent example of how he looks at a seemingly impossible situation , and wondrously comes up with a plausible way around the problem using only persuasion .  Magic, pure magic.  Fortunately for all of us, Scott enjoys sharing his insights, and has copious videos explaining exactly how to do it. Ever been in a job interview where you knew you could do the job, but the interviewers were trying to disqualify you ?  If you got the job anyway, you used persuasion.  The job interview was actually a test of ch

I'm currently a database administrator, programmer and architect.  I trained to be a chemical engineer and chemist.  What happened? This post is for the very young (pre-career), or those considering a re-tread of career later in life . You have undoubtedly heard aphorisms similar to these: Follow your bliss! Do what you love, and the money will follow. Be passionate about what you do. The first is an invitation to follow a Bohemian lifestyle.  I tried it, for a long enough time to get the flavor of the consequences.  Good luck getting stably married or supporting a family.  Very few people find their bliss in being a welder or working in a chemical plant.  Most bliss-followers want to pursue the fine arts or play in rock bands.  Marketability: 0 (zero) or negative - you'll have to pay for the right to practice your bliss , like working at a fast-food place.  There are better choices available.  Ignore this advice. The second one is a false syllogism for