Austin Employment Web Log

This is a personal remembrance. More than ten years ago, when I was the sole DBA at Texas CHIP, I remember an idea I had.  I told my manager, Jeff, about it, and several other people. In a nutshell, it was an idea for "Oracle at the end of a network cable".  I thought about a company that just did Oracle databases for clients, and handled almost everything except the content of the database.  All the intricate and crazy structures of databases were in the background, deliberately hidden from the customer. Customers would tell us merely what they wanted to do, and we would make it happen, like magic.  No technical knowledge on the part of the customer required.  The customers would access their database via an Internet URL.  At the time, I thought they would want to retain their front-end developers in-house, so the idea was just about databases. That was somewhere around 2002 - 2003.  Amazon started AWS in 2005.  In a way, I conceived of the idea of cloud computing befo

Companies love Could Architects and Data Engineers.  Even more, they love female Could Architects and Data Engineers. For you ladies, here are some links on how women are using managed services to advance their careers: The Women-Led Companies Of the 2016 Managed Service Provider 500 Cloud Now I’m Not a Woman Engineer, I’m an Engineer My Journey from a mechanic to AWS Certified Solutions Architect About IMS: IMS Technology Services Women and Cloud Computing There are not enough women in this field.   It is much more business-oriented than the boring, old, stuffy, hyper-technical fields, easier to learn, more valuable, and growing fast, fast, fast.  What's not to love? This is a big hint, ladies!   Here is your opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a truly earth-shaking revolution.  This could change your life.  Happy job hunting! Welcome, - Phil

OK, so you've read my previous articles about the cloud revolution and checked out the articles cited , and made the decision to start at least playing with cloud stuff.  How do you go about doing that?  I asked Google that question: What is the faster way to learn AWS and any books suggestions? The first response, while partisan, is nonetheless not a bad suggestion: Cloud Academy   You can try it first, buy it later.  That's always a good deal.  BTW, I wouldn't waste money or time on books about computing .  I stopped buying books years ago.  You can't sell them for any significant money if you wait more than a few months, and then you have more junk around the house. You can go directly to the Source (Amazon): Getting Started Resource Center Amazon will be more than delighted to sell you expensive certification training: AWS Training and Certification Investigate for yourself the value of doing this given my previous caveat about

In the previous post on this topic, The Bell Curve and your chances of success, part I I said, in essence: Employers prefer employees in the middle of the performance range (average +/- 1 standard deviation) who are competent enough but not too expensive.  Add to this that the company has to need what you do * .   We've all been asleep at the switch, lulled by the comfort and convenience of the job we've held for a long time.  That is changing, and not for the better, right now .   While there are still a few high-paying jobs requiring high levels of skill, the number of those jobs is shrinking and will continue to shrink.   Many of us will be caught off guard and will lose our livelihoods, thanks to the wonderful, disruptive cloud computing revolution . You may have scoffed, as I did at first ("Oracle isn't going anywhere!"), but then you kept reading.  You looked at articles like these: Revolution not Evolution - How Cloud Computing Differs T

This article is old, but it does add some balance to the Clouds on the horizon: Revealed: The jobs that will be wiped out by cloud computing One of the things pointed out is that the baby boomers are retiring (leaving the job marketplace).  That's a big generation of people.  The better ones occupied some top positions.  The boomers' collective retirement will certainly ease some of the job pressures. My caveat is that a lot of boomers don't have enough savings to retire, and so will stay in the workplace as long as they can. The other thing the article points out is that new, more generalist jobs will appear to replace the old specialist jobs.  The new workers will be expected to pick up new learning quickly, and this will be facilitated by automated tools.  The new jobs will be closer to business activities than say, an Oracle DBA.  They will also require less training and experience, and so will command less money. The IT worker of the future learns everything

"Fungible" means easily replaceable for use .  For example, one cup of granulated sugar is almost exactly like any other cup of granulated sugar, and so, for any two cups of granulated sugar, either can be chosen without altering the use.  A cup of granulated sugar is fungible . Crude oil is (more or less) fungible - one barrel of crude oil is roughly equivalent to another. I have been hearing IT managers refer to IT workers as "resources" for almost ten years.  The language is deeply troubling because, eventually, we think as we talk . Hear it and speak it often enough in management meetings, and eventually, the brain adjusts and people really become (to the managers at least) resources . Worse, people become  fungible resources .  The other troubling thing about the resources  word is the implication ( never  stated) that resources are fungible - in other words, interchangeable.  This unspoken assumption is manifestly false . Take two Oracle DBAs, each wit

I've opened up the blog for comments.  Google's settings are not quite as granular as I would like, but we'll try it and see how it goes.  Moderation is turned on for now, so be patient.  I'll process comments as quickly as possible.

As of this writing, this blog, less than two weeks old, has received more than 600 views.  That's not bad for a voice crying out in the wilderness . From a Google search, there doesn't appear to be a similar blog outside of LinkedIn, which is more general, and full of advertising.  You can significantly help add value to this blog by contributing to the conversation . As I have detailed here , send me reports from the field and participate in the form of comments to the blog. If you are concerned about employment consequences, take on anonymous identities. Under your own name, you will probably be better served sticking to the "window of acceptable discourse". Collectively, you have power. Continued marketing of yourself as a employee is the most basic tactic, but is not enough. Continued research into the changes to the job market gives you an additional edge. Making the often painful decision to make a job move can change your life for the better. Problematic or

I strongly recommend you get an account at Glass Door , and even more strongly recommend you do not do so with authentication from Facebook, Google or any other third-party source.  There is a way to do it, look for it yourself.  Unfortunately, Glass Door makes it more difficult than it needs to be to just sign up for an account and use a password.  I did it, but I forget how.  Your assignment, not mine. There are two excellent reasons you need an account at Glass Door: Reviews of companies (critical, critical, critical) Huge number of job listings Glass Door has surpassed almost all other job sites.  AFAIK, they do not sell their listings to staffing companies, so you won't be getting irritating spam, irrelevant job postings, or aggressive phone calls as a result of having an account there. The reviews of workplaces are very welcome.  You can read hundreds of reviews of organizations you are considering.  If they are net negative, I'd look elsewhere for employment if I

You can really clean up with a small, rapidly growing company, if they offer equity (a piece of their action) as part of the compensation package. You will give up some salary (perhaps up to 10%) to get an equity position. The clues you need to understand thoroughly, in order to do this successfully, are roughly: They have a tightly focused, unique business idea that can be explained in no more than two brief sentences and is fairly obvious.  You read those sentences and feel is it a great business idea (as in, why didn't I think of that?! ).   Key component here is no significant competition .  If they already have competition, you're probably too late to clean up. You can get access to, and can read and understand, their tax and accounting filings.  You'll have to do your own homework there, but looking at their financials for the last 4 quarters prior to your hiring is very important, especially if you learn to read between the lines .   The company shoul

Some of these small companies look very interesting as employment opportunities.  All are software companies.  I'll publish more as I find them.  In this case, the website does a very good job with the list, so I'll just refer you there: 18 software companies in Austin you should know   I suspect there are hundreds more.  More to come as I find it.

This list comes from here .  I don't know how old the information is, but at the very least, this supplies a list companies here in Austin, doing business (government is included, too), hiring people , sorted by number of employees.  I suspect it is subject to rapid change . Employing 6,000 & over Apple Computer maker's tech, chip engineering, & admin support center (Americas Hdq.) Austin Independent School District Public education City of Austin Government Dell Technologies Computer technology solutions & equipment mfg./sales (Hdq.) Federal Government Government IBM Corp. Computer systems, hardware, software, & chip R&D Samsung Austin Semiconductor Semiconductor chip mfg., R&D (Hdq.) Seton Healthcare Family Healthcare (Hdq.) St. David's Healthcare Partnership Healthcare (Hdq.) State of Texas Government University of Texas at Austin

A blog like this will go nowhere if I depend merely on what I see (and how I view it).  The job market here in Austin is vast and changing very rapidly.  No way I can see more than a small fraction of it. My views could be off, erroneous, imagined, right on the money, or somewhere in outer space.  I need to keep this real .  You can help enormously. At times, I will take a look at a situation, and write about where I see it going instead of where it actually is now.  Nothing wrong with that, it just needs to be labeled properly.  Other times, I will be highlighting troublesome practices, trends, conditions.  Your comments can help me in this effort a lot. I might exaggerate or use hyperbole to make my points.  Some people call this trolling, I call it journalism.  If I don't put the issue in clear, concise, impossible to misunderstand language, I will wind up qualifying everything I say with useless phrases like "maybe", "possibly", "it seems that ...&q

How many times have you started to fill out an online form, had second thoughts, then closed or surfed away from it, thinking you were safe and your data never made it to the server.  You did not  hit submit .  Well, think again: Before You Hit 'Submit,' This Company Has Already Logged Your Personal Data Ye cats, that is creepy.  Think twice before you even try to fill out an online form.  Ugh!

I'm encouraging recruiters to send me briefs on the jobs they are trying to fill, starting with corporate recruiters trying to fill positions within their own companies.  Later, I'll work on staffing companies (and for disclosure, I have had less than happy experiences with all but one staffing company in the last seven years*).  These are real segments of the Austin job market. I will not publish derogatory information on any of them here. If I suspect there are issues with a company, I just won't publish any more stuff from them.  People who have an axe to grind with a company are free to write a review on Glass Door and keep me out of the process.  Don't involve me.  I'm just trying to provide a window into hiring in Austin.  I don't have the power to change anyone. I do have the potential to make it a bit easier for willing candidates and companies to connect.  That's the part I wish to develop.  If it doesn't work out, that is between the two

As you might have surmised, I suspect the job market in Austin will be moving in a few particular directions .  Currently, I see a lot of recruiting activity , but I also expect that to be ephemeral and temporary.  For job seekers, my recommendation is grab while the grabbing is good . For job seekers, there are exactly two classes currently operating in the market: principal companies (hiring mostly employees) and contracting companies , hiring mostly W2 contractors.  In case you missed the memo, a W2 contractor is an employee of the contracting company, but a contractor from the point of view of the principal (hiring) company.  All contractors are considered disposable by definition, which is why they were hired under those conditions in the first place.  NB: A W2 contractor is in a weak position legally and from a taxation standpoint.  Accountants and attorney are recommended. Contractors : The Austin job market, and I suspect a large fraction of US city job markets, are movin

Readers of this blog may be scratching their heads at some of the articles I’ve put up so far, so I think it appropriate to explain (briefly) what I’m doing and why. For starters, here is the welcome message , including the scope and rules of the blog. This blog is about the Austin, Texas high-tech employment market specifically, and US high-tech job markets in general. High-tech pretty much dominates the Austin job market. A lot of what I write will apply elsewhere, like in Europe, Russia, China, India, but since I don’t live in any of those places, my understanding of conditions there is sketchy at best. I'd love to hear from people in these places about what they are seeing.  Just the facts, please. Job markets are made up largely of companies and human beings. Like human beings, markets are organic and so subject to injury, sickness and disease as a result of internal and external events and processes, symbiotes and parasites (for example, bacillus imperium ). They are

Oracle is powering up in Austin, bigly .  Here are a few articles tracking Oracle in Austin: Oracle Set to Build a Cutting-Edge Cloud Campus in Austin, Texas Oracle's Southeast Austin campus begins development, site work Oracle cuts Austin employees — but it's also hiring hundreds How about a few reviews of Oracle in Austin? What should you take away from these? Oracle's big new Austin campus is focused on cloud computing They are hiring like crazy: nice, fresh, new, total chaos Cloud jobs They are also laying people off, almost simultaneously I noticed that Oracle Austin's Glass Door ratings are higher than Oracle in general, so I suspect this campus is living proof that Oracle is in the midst of "out with the old, in with the new" . Since I have been an Oracle DBA for 18 years, I am a shameless Oracle partisan.  It is my keister , after all. NB: Oracle has ~136K employees.  Compare with IBM (380K), Amazon (341K), Google (57K - must be un

This one is embarrassing.  I had the opportunity to get wonderful experiences from truly great men, and blew it totally, through being young, arrogant and obtuse.  Perhaps some of you might learn from my mistakes.  Here goes: When I was in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin Chemistry Department, my professor, the late and great W. H. Wade , would occasionally push us to learn something from our elders.  I met one of the men who worked on the Manhattan Project, and was part of the teams that discovered the chemical elements Americium and Curium, Dr. Tom Morgan .  He helped me understand NMR graphs, necessary for my Master's degree. Dr. Morgan never talked about what he had done 44 years earlier, he was just nice and incredibly helpful.  I found out about Dr. Morgan's achievements years later, long after he had died.  I felt very sad years later when I realized he was one of the true giants of science.  Had I known, I would have invited him to one of our m

When I was in graduate school during the late 80’s (probably 1989), our chemistry lab at the University of Texas at Austin hosted a visit from the then Vice President of Sun Oil Company (now Sunoco). The man’s name I cannot recall, he was an old friend of the late Dr. William H. (Bill) Wade, our professor. I knew he was a chemist, since he told me he liked to “put stuff in the bottles”. Wade had to go around the lab and round us grad students up, that’s how clueless we were at the time. Our VP guest was a nice, very personable older guy. He showed the grad students in the lab some of his notes about employment. He had something very important he wanted to share with us.  The graphs showed average salary against years out of college for BS, MS and PhD grads. The curves increased roughly exponentially with time. Then, he said, “Now, let’s add in the effect of inflation.” and he turned to the next page. The same three curves were there, but all of them curved down, roughly exponen

See: http://www.zdnet.com/article/ security-lapse-exposes-198- million-united-states-voter- records/ Appears these will be Cloud Security opportunities, perhaps for some time to come!

There are several cities in Texas (Waco and College Station come to mind) where the overwhelming majority of adults work for small businesses rather than large corporations.  While not rich, these are pretty happy places to live.  Crime is relatively low, most people know each other, things aren't too crazy.  Culture, values and politics tend toward the traditional. What's going to happen to the multitude of high-tech workers who will be driven out of the high-tech labor market in the coming years?  Where will they go? The ones who saw it coming (and the Cloud revolution has been going on since at least 2010), took stock of the market and did back-of-the envelope computations, realized that the mass of jobs would start evaporating.  The really smart ones took that as writing on the wall, and started their own businesses years ago.  The good ones are through enough of the trial and error process so that things are looking up for them nicely. Some of us, yours truly include

This article takes a fairly dystopian view of employment, frankly admitted up front. The purpose is to try to educate job holders and job seekers in some of the most important realities of the job marketplace, true anywhere, not just Austin, Texas. We'll use the ubiquitous Bell Curve as our paradigm, since your employers are almost certain to use it, even if only intuitively.  Here is what most people think it looks like, from the standpoint of employment: The narrative is that the low performers eventually get laid off, and the high performers get promoted.  I suspect there is some dirt behind this daydream. Here is the likely result, seen from the viewpoint of employers: The employers know they can get results with the people in the middle. These are results that suit them and make for standard business progress.  These people also do not scare management . There are a few exceptions.  For example, both IBM and Oracle, very large corporations with extremely techni

Ever noticed colleagues (or done it yourself) with non-degree initials after their name in e-mails? Megyn Soandso, B.S., M.S., PMP, ITIL, OCP This is a form of professional virtue-signaling called credentialization .  If you've never done it, you take some course, either at night, weekends or taking time off from work (not smart unless you get paid to do so), a course you pay lot$ of money to attend, and at the end they give you a test.  If you pass, you get a certificate ( the credential ) , and presumably the right to attach the initials after your name. Seriously, can anyone believe this is actually going to help you do your job?  The courses, by their very nature, are not "tuned" to your particular workplace.  That means they have to be generalized, and by definition, you then have to do the work to instantiate the entire course to your specific workplace, not a trivial or easy task, in order to actually benefit from the course material.  That'll take

It took a little over seven years for Los Alamos to get from the atomic bomb, as dropped on Japan, to the hydrogen bomb.  Although tested, we are fortunate that no one has ever used the H-bomb in war.  All atomic weapons in service now are H-bombs. A-bombs are obsolete. This is 2017.  The Dot Bomb era was essentially over by late 2001.  It has taken sixteen years since to weaponize the Internet . What do I mean by this? The Internet speeded up the pace of business and dramatically lowered the cost of starting a business.  A single person can start a business for a few hundred dollars and be selling product in days. The increased pace of business changed the business landscape forever.  Now the only variable that really matters is " time to market ".  Successful businesses go fast, very fast. Since time to market is the most important variable, the pace of software development had to be speeded up, too. Big software projects gave way to rapid, incremental development,