Austin Employment Web Log

" 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...