Austin Employment Web Log

This is the very last post I will make as a resident of Austin, TX. It wasn't so long ago that Austin, TX was the best place in the USA to be a high-tech worker. There were (and still are) plenty of jobs, great music, lots to do, and a good, central location in the best State in the Union. Now, however, there are mounting clouds on the horizon. I now have four days left here, and I wanted to share my perspective and give some hopefully valuable advice to people moving to Austin. People considering a move to the area might want to think very carefully, do a lot of research, and perhaps choose one of the exurbs surrounding Austin (Hutto, Bastrop, San Marcos, etc.) since the cost of living is much lower and there are fewer of the irritants and dangers described below. IMHO, urban Austin and its suburbs are poor bets, especially for family-oriented people, and I voted with my feet - I just sold my home, and leave forever next week. I lived in Austin for 40 years, and saw quite a bit o...

We abhor the temporary IT staffing model common today; the prospective staff are sought on a last-minute basis filtered by misconfigured, mindless Applicant Tracking Systems hired by recruiters largely innocent of IT knowledge treated as virtual slaves by client companies frequently dismissed when they cannot conjure miracles frequently dismissed on a whim, or by mismanagement discarded, often with little or no notice, after the assignment treated with no regard for their well-being This cruel system corrupts clients makes the hapless staffers cynical and mistrustful provides poor matches between jobs and prospects incentivises dishonesty on all sides clouds and confuses the market wastes tremendous amounts of money and time .  This pernicious, awful system is slowly breaking down with time, and is sustained only because of power imbalances , inertia and indolence. Granted, there are still a few conscientious companies and people working in the staf...

If you, either in the role of a technology job-seeker or a hiring manager, were to design the perfect contracting / staffing / augmentation / solution provider / consultant company, what would it look like? For example, would you want, in the staffing company you choose, any of the following qualities? Young, ill-trained, inexperienced, poorly-paid recruiting staff with extremely high turnover rates Zero commitment to the well-being of their contractors, beyond paying them after successfully billing the customer Zero commitment to the well-being of their customers, beyond closing the deals and getting money for warm bodies, even if just for a month or two Zero knowledge of the high-tech domain, nor what any of the terminology, job descriptions, responsibilities actually mean Zero knowledge of the job market, either from the buyers' or sellers' point of view Zero knowledge of the hiring companies in the market Zero knowledge of, and no accumulation of, available, p...

I read a nice set of posts by a lovely UK recruiter with advice for job-hunters while on the hunt. Long story short: keep your sanity, be organized, methodical and thorough. Although she is correct and all of her tips are useful, I would boil things down even further. The following appears to get the best results, which is the whole point of job-hunting. 1. An excellent, achievement-centered LinkedIn profile is by far the most important tool for job hunting.   Here are some links to get you started . Be sure to include all the important key words ( not buzzwords ) so the searches can find you. I threw out numbers 2 and 3.  They are obvious. Jobs lined up this way, where the employer goes to the effort of finding you, have a far higher chance of closing  (yielding a job offer) than sending your resume out to tons of ATS black holes . These employers are serious . These employers are interested in you . These employers are ready to hire now. Tab...

Fifty years after the original series was cancelled, STAR TREK continues to supply deeply embedded, powerful, cultural, practical and philosophical memes, and continuing, interesting and relevant dramatic content (if the reader didn’t know, there is a new, refreshing and quite challenging STAR TREK series, Discovery . I watched several episodes on a long plane trip – it is well worth a try). Amazingly, there are many obvious parallels between STAR TREK and high tech companies. Clearly, high tech is leading the (productive) future of humanity, at least for the present, and the analogies are right to the point. Let’s take a quick look: Captain (later Admiral) Kirk – sometimes impulsive, often inspiring, always charming, winning leadership. He can take huge risks when he has to, and somehow always seems to come out on top, and credibly so. Engineer Scott – Boss of the technical, master of the warp drive engines, phasers and photon torpedoes, provides the Captain wit...

This report on the Texas Economic Outlook June 2019 from Texas A&M is recent, full of data and appears both objective and complete. Here's a very brief 2019 outlook for the United States. Wage growth in Austin appears to be accelerating  due to the tight labor market. In a genuinely red-hot labor market, wages go up noticeably . I'm not seeing it myself . Neither are other reporters.   There are reasons for this . Lots of reasons . Take-aways : The tight labor market is a mixed blessing. Some economic reporters don't buy it . For most, it's easy to get a job , relatively speaking, but it is harder for your company to hire needed people. Good times for individuals are bad times for employers. It's complicated . Not everyone benefits. Overall economic growth is slowing . The trade war with China is one of several reasons . There are more and more recession warnings . Some believe these are false alarms . Other opinions are mixed . This is proba...

My last post here was more than a year ago. In the meantime, I found a wonderful life partner, and a good job.  Both fit what I need closely . In short, I've been busy with better things than blogging . Things are looking up in my neck of the woods, big-time. It's how I got the job that I am going to describe here. I got it the old-fashioned, non-technological way. I was approached by a company, submitted my resume, and was promptly rejected. However, the company kept my resume, made me wait, then re-approached me about a different, better-fitting job about a month later. They had actually read my resume and understood it . Since then, I have been happily automating the dickens out of that company. They actually wanted large amounts of exactly what they knew I could do. Amazing! Lest any of you think I managed a miracle, that place goes (too) fast, has a fairly high degree of chaos, and is definitely not for beginners nor the faint of heart. In all honesty, I can thank m...

I love it when I hear or read the phrase "hit the ground running".  I know what it is supposed to mean: (contractor version): "We don't have the time to train you.  You must get meaningful work done your first day on the job, figure out where we hid everything that you need, don't back-talk, and have ten times the productivity of our lazy and entitled employees, who we can't fire because they have legal rights. You will be fired, with no notice, at the earliest available opportunity." (employee version):  "We don't have the time to train you.  You must get meaningful work done your first week on the job, all while plowing through our tiresome and enormous stack of access requests for the resources you need to use, interminable meetings which are little more than talk-fests for our manager wannabees, badly designed and poorly configured workflow systems, and terribly written requirements / user stories to describe the work you are suppose...

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 cal...

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...

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...

" 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...

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 so...

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 ...