Austin Employment Web Log

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 b...

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 y...

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....

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 we...

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 u...

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 fir...

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 effec...

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 c...

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...

* 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...

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 ma...

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...

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...

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 se...

We have quite a few folks moving here from California, Illinois, New York and New Jersey, plus a few other states.  I don't blame them a bit, there are lots of incentives.  However, some of those incentives are disappearing fast, and if, for example, you move here to escape a two-hour commute to work, I hope a 90-minute commute is good enough for you. The job market is good, but by Texas standards .  We have lots of companies here, but not as many as in the Bay Area, Seattle, LA, NYC or Chicago.  I put a list of the top employers here .  A small, non-comprehensive list of some interesting companies is here. The business climate is relatively friendly, but be advised that the job market for high tech workers is beginning to thin, partially due to the Cloud revolution , partially due to established outfits changing their hiring practices to cut costs.  While I expect the Austin job market will be one of the last to experience major job shortages, the writi...

The Step-By-Step Guide To Quitting Your Job Just the beginning. Make sure you can pay your bills!

I have to reluctantly admire Jeff Bezos.  Talk about a guy who took some serious risks, ran Amazon without profit for 11 years or so, and built a super-behemoth, Godzilla, economic Tsar Bomba, and lived to tell about it, that is Mr. Bezos.  He is totally kicking butt and taking names. This lovely article just appeared on my LinkedIn feed.  I suggest to all of you that your drink deep.  Here is the current state of the Cloud, in a single article . This chart shows how painful the shift to cloud computing is for IBM and Oracle Clues for you abound! Happy re-treading!

You are in your fifties.  Your income from your job plateaued years ago. You have a house full of junk you don't use and don't need, kids growing up, mortgage, bills. You have had an uneasy feeling about your job for some time.  Now, you are almost certain your job is going away, and sooner than you expected.  You know for certain that employers won't pay what you are getting now, and you won't have the flexibility you have enjoyed for the last several years.  The hounds are baying outside your window.  Your options are limited. This post is for you.  I'm in exactly the same boat. Forget about ageism.  It's everywhere.  You think it is bad in the workplace, try looking at the devastating effects of age in the dating / marriage marketplace.  Lots of lonely older folks out there.  Ranting and raving about ageism will do you approximately the same good as other folks get out of their particular favorite flavor of identity politics....

I read a post by a gentleman who had bad luck with his latest job search and was contemplating leaving LinkedIn as one result.  Amazingly, one reader of the feed replied that he might have something for him, and so, perhaps LinkedIn was a positive contribution after all. I've been on LinkedIn for years, and for the most part started with low expectations.  It has been my observation that the hit rate for jobs is pretty low.  I get approached several times a week on average, and the fit for such jobs is usually quite low. LinkedIn is more of a communication tool, and has a learning curve.  There is some aspect of broadcasting a particular business need - recruiters use it to announce open positions all the time.  I agree with the poster that there is too much pop psychology, but that is what I call background noise.  What I see as signal , rather than noise, is the giant number and variety of posts about Cloud Computing.  That was one of the factors...

Many people in the workplace work under a system called kanban .  It literally means "billboard" and looks a bit like this: Lots of people really like it. There is nothing wrong with it, it can simplify things a lot. I happen to be one of those people who feel it is not a very great idea by itself, but instead needs policy and practical support to work right.  I will explain why below. First of all, a company that does not have a single , well-designed, universally accessible workflow system is at elevated risk .  I don't care which flavor of work-flow system is used, I just care that there is exactly one  system of record .  If that system is designed along kanban lines (to do, doing, done), that is fine. It may not capture the real complexities of the workplace, but it does give managers a chance to use an at-a-glance dashboard.  Most managers are perpetually overwhelmed these days, and really need a way to have visibility into what their repor...

This series of posts, story here , analysis here , and conclusion in the current post, together describe an ongoing problem in the high-tech industry .  Since I've been a contractor for many, many years , I've seen quite a bit, and I know in particular how companies can benefit hugely from contractors , and how they consistently get it wrong .  The contractors are almost always the losers, receive the blame, and are almost always manifestly not the real problem . For those readers who feel I am setting up a straw man , I would caution you that I'm not.  The straw man fallacy is different, and here is an exact description of what it really means .  There are legal and tax consequences for treating contractors as employees. First, understand what a contractor role really means.  You, the principal company, the hiring company, are proposing to pay top dollar to some smaller company to find you a Magic Unicorn TM . This person or persons will be expected, by...

Disclosure :  Something very much like this happened to me .  The account I wrote was fictionalized, the names were changed to keep me from getting sued by the bad guys, and I engineered the narrative to include as much complexity as I could stuff in a single, longish post. This type of situation happens all too often in the high-tech world, and contractors are best advised to understand the situation thoroughly , before they post ill-advised and off-the-mark rants about recruiters, and before they wind up in the situation experienced by Carol, Ted and Alice . Give Buzz Turnip and / or InterGalactic Consulting a bad review on Glass Door?  OK, maybe they might have that coming, but who, exactly, is the correct target of a complaint, and what exactly is the complaint?  Are the losers in this drama going to profit from complaining about the companies that hurt them? This narrative of mine is an example of a Charlie Foxtrot .  All the players involved have...

A recent post by someone else highlighted that most recruiters are not bad people nor are bad businesspersons.  This post will elaborate on a few examples I've seen. Any narrative that demonizes a whole class of people should be looked upon with extreme suspicion.  The person peddling the narrative should prove it, and that's not easy to do.  I routinely reject such broad narratives, and I think others should, too. Here is the story (and it's just that, folks, nothing more, a story I made up to illustrate some important points ): Manager Jen at start-up company Buzz Turnip is a newly minted manager with a merit promotion.  She is conscientious, hard-working, intelligent.  She has been handed a few developers and a massive amount of work with an extremely aggressive schedule.  Within days, she has figured out her crew will not be able to meet the deadlines, so she talks to her boss about it.  Jen is getting anxious. Darl, her boss, is not quite...