'Dumb & Dumber' Seeks 'Best & Brightest'

[Roy S. Rapoport]

Dear God, Richard.  Having a slow Friday night? :)

Firstly, a little about my background because I think it might prove to be
relevant to the discussion at hand.

Two jobs ago, I entered a Fortune-1000 company as a Senior UNIX/Network
engineer and left it a Director of IT/Engineering; at a 2000 person
company, this was 'senior management' -- I had managers working for me
doing technical things.  Political things happen and I got laid off, which
suited me fine and allowed me to pursue an opportunity working for a tiny
IT consulting/outsourcing company as a Partner; that business didn't do too
well and I started searching in earnest for a job about six months ago.  I
sent out many, many resumes with nary a peep; toward the end of June, I
suddenly heard from three different companies.  I ended up with two offer
letters in my hands (the third company, told they had to give me an offer
letter in two days or give me up, chose to give up), and I'm starting a
real, honest-to-goodness 8-5 (no, really.  In IT) job next Wednesday as the
generalist who'll tie together a whole bunch of specialists in an IT
organization.  I'll be making (not including bonuses which weren't
specified in the offer letter and aren't guaranteed, of course) exactly 50%
of what I made as the Director of IT/Engineering.  

On to what you wrote:
On Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 10:55:48AM -0700, richard childers / kg6hac wrote:
> Has anyone else noticed a loss of competency amongst placement agencies 
> and human resources personnel, recently?

No.  I've found placement agencies and HR personnel to, in general, not be
very good at dealing with IT.  That perception has not radically changed.

What has changed have been the numerous (IMHO) stupid hurdles one has to
jump through these days to apply for a position.  It makes sense from the
"it doesn't hurt the company none" perspective, but it sure is painful.

The issue I'm discussing has to do with how much individualized labor you
have to invest in order to apply for a position at a company; at one
extreme is the "send a resume and a cover letter you've tailored to the
position;" at another is the "create an account on our HR system, enter all
your experience and education by hand."  It's not directly related to how
hot the company is -- Google and Yahoo, for example, both practice the
"send us your resume and a cover letter" approach, and I know I'm not the
only person out there who would have killed (or at least maimed someone) in
order to work for Google.  

> - People who are unable to find my name and address in the resume 
> because it is in the header rather than the body of the Microsoft Word 
> document, and they cannot see it. (Solution: put your contact 
> information in the header, the footer, and the body of each page.)

Exactly.

Here's the problem from the flip side:  I helped a small firm find an IT
person.  I looked at the resumes.  For this not-particularly-glorious
oppportunity, they received something on the order of 500 resumes the first
day after they posted it on Craigslist.  

How do you weed out the chaff from the wheat at those numbers (assuming you
don't have one of those nifty OCR & keyword recognition HR resume systems)?
You start spending less and less time on each resume and rejecting resumes
for reasons that end up being fairly trivial.  Hey, I rejected someone for
an inappropriate use of "it's" when they should have used "its."  I can
still argue in support of that decision, but you can see how trivial it can
be.

> - People who do not know what a systems administrator does and think 
> that if you know how to type that maybe you can do shorthand and work on 
> their web page for them, too. (This is like a person who assumes that 

Lame.

> but if you type 'uname -a', it will say "SunOS 5.8". All three are valid 
> names ... but the person you are speaking to might not know that, and 
> definitely isn't inclined to believe you.)

Hint:  Arguing with people who may give you a job is a Bad Idea.

Now, for the record, I don't necessarily practice what I preach (though I
do try).  One of the six people interviewing me for the position I finally
took made a comment about layer-3 switches that I took issue with and we
argued for about 10 minutes.  Apparently, this was not enough to rule me
out, but I could see a different outcome...

> - People who think that if you are a UNIX systems administrator that you 
> should also be able to install, design and administer their databases 
> ... maintain and change web content, as well as rewrite the backend code 
> that handles financial transactions ...  configure their routers and 
> firewalls ... handle their telephone exchange ...  support their 

Welcome to the "we only have money for one" economy.  It's one of the
reasons the IT firm I joined had such high hopes -- we billed ourselves as
"you can't afford to have one person who does all these things well, but we
cost less than one full-time person" (for the size companies we typically
dealt with).

FWIW, putting aside the telephone switches, I can do that -- I think the
vast majority of us here are old-style sysadmins.  We've done it all.  I
know that, in general, I have.

Amusingly (in that "it makes me want to cry" way), this ended up harming
me.  Sure, I can manage UNIX systems (have for 13 years), and manage MySQL
(have for about three years) and manage networks (9 years) and do
automation and monitoring (Jumpstart? MRTG? Nagios? SNMP? Hell, I've got my
own enterprise number).  Oh, and Bourne? Csh? Perl? Python? PHP? Apache?
DNS? SMTP? Sendmail or Postfix? Bring'em on.  

And then I go to compete in a position that wants someone who does Linux,
or a position for a DBA, and people look at my resume and go "Oh, he
doesn't have in-depth Linux knowledge."  No shit, I'm a generalist.
Specialists in any one of these fields will clean my clock -- but wait
until they need to figure out how their stuff works with the other group's
systems.

[As an aside, this ended up being a serious win in the company where I will
work -- the CIO emailed me with a "hey, I don't have any open positions,
but I'd love to talk to you."  A two hour conversation later, and he went
away with a mission to craft a position for me, precisely because he had
kickass specialists, but nobody to translate from the application
development people to the server people to the helpdesk people ... ]

> desktops as well as all their external customers ... provide first, 
> second and third tier technical support (an oxymoron, there, each of 
> those tiers is supposed to relieve the one before it; without relief and 
> handoff, there are no tiers of support, just tiers of management) ... 

Though technically, I can come up with a scenario where this is possible --
you do first level support of Foo, second-level support of Bar, and
third-level support of Baz.  

> and have been certified in the latest, greatest release of their 
> operating system, but, no, they don't have money to actually pay someone 
> to go, they want to steal this valuable training from someone else ... 

Well, sure -- they're cheap.  Or desperate for money.

You know, this position that I'm technically leaving (though I haven't
done any work for my company for close to a year) cost me dearly -- the
vast majority of a pretty nice .com nest egg that I got when I left the
Fortune-1000 company -- but one thing it really showed me is how IT can fit
into the day-to-day business environment of a company, especially an
unhealthy and desperately poor company.

Coming from the environment where the general feeling was "if you aren't
giving us the $100,000 for equipment we're telling you we need, it's not
because you can't afford it but because you're stupid" and into the
environment where we made conscious business decisions along the lines of
"Sure, it's a $50 that would be well-spent, but we just don't have that
right now," I tend to be a little more ... compassionate, or perhaps naive,
when it comes to dealing with people who want excellent labor, cheap.  Hey,
at least they haven't hired someone in India.  Yet.  :)

> separate positions, for one half to one third of the pay your 
> predecessors received.

Different time.

The three technical managers who worked for me at the -1 company are all
making something on the order of $50,000 more than I'll be making.  You can
argue that this company is raping me (though in my case, given that it's a
new position, you can't strictly say that they're paying me less than my
predecessors), but bottom line is, nobody's who's switched jobs is getting
paid what they were getting paid five years ago.  That's not necessarily
because we were getting paid a fair amount then and are not now; it's
probably more correct to say either that we were somewhat overpaid back
then (though God damn, the hours I worked) or that as a ratio of the
overall amount of money the company either brought in or spent in IT, maybe
our salaries haven't changed all that much.  I mean, it seems appropriate,
now that people are buying their Sun and Cisco equipment from eBay for
$.20 on the dollar, that the IT staff is also somewhat discounted.  Happy
about it? Sure ain't.  

(Side note:  If you're one of the people who haven't been laid off in the
last five years and are still making bubble pay, please don't bitch about
your aweful working conditions)

> - Placement companies that keep on publishing the same basic, vague, ad, 
> for month, after month, after month, after month, after month, but never 
> reply to your email or return your calls.

Lame.  Understandable -- throw a hook in the water, catch the fish you want
up to your fishing limit (number of open positions), ignore the rest.
Doesn't harm them at all.

> customer in need; indeed, it has been my commitment to my customers, 
> rather than my managers, that has usually led to disagreements, as I 
> stood up for my customers, and suffered for it. So it goes.

The ethics game is a, umm, fun one.  I know -- Primary reason I got laid
off was because management knew I wasn't going to be up to screwing the
staff like they wanted me to.  Didn't work too well -- my group went from
being the sort of people who I'd have to kick out at 8pm (yes, I know it's
an interesting problem.  Go home.  I don't want your wife bitching at me
again.  She's mean) to being the sort of people who'd leave work at 4:30pm.
Of course, the fact the guy who replaced me was non-local helped :)

> But I am getting a little impatient. Any one of us could do a better job 
> than some of the people I have spoken with; they are Klueless with a 
> capital 'K'.

How do you know this? How do you define 'a better job'?  I'm guessing their
definition is "make the people who pay us continue to pay us."  some of
these things don't necessarily help them provide quality talent, but do
they hurt them?

If there are 1000 resumes for an open position that requires Solaris ((2|5).)9
and they rule out 300 people who put "2.9" instead of "9," and still manage
to find someone good, who's harmed, other than the applicants? And who
cares about the applicants?

> decade, saw their management slowly being replaced - technically savvy 
> managers gradually being replaced with politically savvy managers, 
> attracted by the lucrative salaries and perks (what I refer to as 
> "perception managers"), infiltrating the company, from the top down, 
> until there was nothing left but tier after tier of MBA-flavored 
> management, and a thin layer of technical competence carrying the entire 
> burden of delivering the company's products and services.

Alternatively, I think what a lot of companies found out was that good
geeks very often make horrendous managers and that when it comes to
management and leadership, a good leader who's less technically competent
is better than a technically competent person who's a horrible leader.

(Possibly-relevant context:  The other offer letter I had was from a
company who's owner/CEO was a programmer/ex-programmer who was EXTREMELY
technically competent; he also happened to have a leadership style which
... I would have interacted poorly with)

> The same thing happened to service industries, except in this case 
> technicians were safer because they delivered the services that the 
> company depended upon for revenue. Here, the best and brightest 
> technicians were let go; it was assumed that perception management would 
> be sufficient to fill the gap between the quality of service promised, 
> and that delivered; again, that's the way it had always worked before. 
> Because they had no inventory, and their only stock in trade was 
> technicians, these technicians have been gradually replaced, one by one, 
> with less expensive (less competent) technicians.

That's really interesting.

One of the things that have been baffling me is that I'm talking to my
ex cohorts at my previous company about the service they've been getting
from their VARs.  Now, having been the person who managed and negotiated
probably a total of around $50M in capital acquisitions in the two years I
managed there, I was intimately tied into the vendor relations, and
overall, the vendors we had kicked ass.  These same vendors these days
apparently really, really suck.  This shocked me because it seemed totally
counter-intuitive -- in this sort of economy, if you find customers that
are still buying $100,000 servers, I'm thinking you would come over to
their house every night to wash their car -- not drop the levels of service
(especially given, again, eBay).  

> (When I tell people that a lot of engineering decisions were made 
> according to financial and political criteria, experienced engineers nod 

You say that as though it's a bad thing.

I'm not sure there is such a thing as a pure engineering decision --
there's always a financial and political context.  I fear that the biggest
problem insanely great engineers often have is understanding this reality
and working within it (great swaths of the BayLISA audience now mentally
cross me off the 'competent' list and put me in the 'management wanker'
category).

> concerned. I have heard suggestions of kickbacks, as well; and it was 
> around this period that Cisco purchased a yacht and started giving 
> prospects rides around the San Francisco Bay, which, it would seem, was 
> an effective way to seal million-dollar deals. I'm not saying Cisco's 
> equipment is inadequate to the job; but for them to need to resort to 
> such tactics certainly raises the question, and for an executive to 
> ignore this question seems, to me, to be somewhat irresponsible.)

I'm sure that when my company chose Exodus as a hosting provider, it was
not because my management got tickets to the US Open.

No, hold on a second, I'm sorry -- I'm not at all sure.

I do know, however, that when I (personally) spearheaded the decision to
move away from Cisco as our sole network provider and start sourcing some
of our routing/switching gear from Foundry, I found that Cisco played
INCREDIBLY hard ball, all from having their partners call me and tell me
"Oh, the person who works for me who said that Cisco sucks was ...
confused, or on crack or on something" to badmouthing me to my boss.  

With some exceptions, the Cisco sales organization was the most evil and
wretched organization I had to work with -- miles worse than Sun's, or HP's
(and a far, far cry from the superhuman feats of service we were getting
from Foundry once we switched to them.  The stories I could tell ... ).

But hell, man -- I got to stay at a seaside resort for two days for some
sort of Pacific Bell 'conference.'  I would have gotten to fly to Memphis
and eat steak on a vendor's tab (if it wasn't for a damn exploding tooth
issue).  These sorts of kickcustomer relationship management tools
were just a part of the business.  I'd like to believe I didn't make my
decisions based on how many perks I got (and hell, if I did give a company
a million dollar deal for a boat tour, I'd feel like an awefully cheap
whore), but I do know that I made decisions at least partially on how I saw
the sales organization servicing us (get your mind out of the gutter) and I
don't know that I could swear that the number of dinners I ate at Gary
Danko's could be clearly differentiated in my mind from the technically
relevant parts of the servicing.

> One of the worst decisions was where to invest educational dollars. I 
> frequently saw a week of classes, offsite, being used as a reward, given 
> to those who were, in retrospect, least inclined to share what they had 
> learned with the rest of their peers, as well as least capable of 
> absorbing enough useful information from the class to apply it 
> effectively enough to even pay back the company for the cost of the 
> class, as well as their absence from work.

This still happens, though differently -- what the hell are all these
offers for a free XBox if you sign up for training, if not kickbacks,
albeit to the engineers who take this training?

> There are signs of this in the job market - previously unapproachable 
> positions that required six different incompatible disciplines in one 

Well, given that as I mentioned above, I spent six months without a single
reply and then had three companies go after me in two weeks, I have to
agree (and seriously, for those of you still searching -- good luck.  My
best wishes.  I know how much it absolutely sucks).

> Silicon Valley is not dead; but it is close to brain-dead, if I may be 
> permitted an insulting but clinically applicable term. The 'brains' are 
> not gone ... but the gap between them and the people making the hiring 
> decisions at the companies seems to be too vast to bridge easily.

Explains something about the successful route to finding a job -- ignore
the HR people.  Go around them.

Everyone knows, and everyone will tell you, that connections are what
matters.  References are what counts.  Be a lot more chummy with the people
who still have jobs.  Think you know networking? Use it.  Of the four
opportunities I had in the last six months, two were extremely low-level
positions from Craigslist; the two actually interesting positions were
positions where the only reason I got anywhere in the organization was
because I knew someone in there who could make sure my resume made it to
the technical person who'd do the hiring, not the HR person (and again, in
the company where I'll be working, HR would have been worse than useless
because they had no positions).

> This is a great time to start a new business, if you don't mind starting 
> small. There are thousands of small customers roaming around, looking 
> for the best deal; and some big ones, too. A lot of people have 
> independently come to that conclusion; they have skills, they see 
> opportunities, and they are making the best of them.

It sure seemed that way to us.  There are some guesses I could make as to
why this IT consulting company is on the verge of death (mostly focused on
our non-great Sales and Marketing organization -- because technically, we
kicked ass), but, uhh, I'm not sure I agree with you that this is a great
time to start this sort of business.  More than previously, I'd argue the
only real place where you're sure to make money is on-line matchmaking,
maybe porn, and definitely business liquidations.

> their visions into tangibles. The engineers amongst us are still 
> creating; but now we are back in our garages and workshops and 
> basements, working on -our- visions, working for ourselves, unpaid, 
> while waiting for the phone to ring.

Bingo.

Contribute to an open-source project.  Build that app you've always wanted
that either doesn't exist or costs too much.  Learn Python.  You'd be
surprised how this can help.

A year ago, I decided to learn PHP.  In order to do so, I wrote an on-line
inventory management system of my DVDs and books
(www.inorganic.org/~rsr/dvd) that tied into barcode scanning with a CueCat.  

The clincher that made that CIO call me in for an interview? He browsed my
book collection and went "hey, cool, he has seven Terry Pratchett books."

Go figure ...

> When all is said and done, I think the lesson of the past five years is 
> this: that it is simpler for an engineer to learn business, than it is 
> for a businessman to learn engineering. For this reason, businessmen 
> would do well to beware.

Playing "businessmen vs. engineers" gets you in the same zero-sum hostility
game that sinks many IT organizations.  One of the primary reasons I chose
the company I'll work for is because that guy I'll be working for does one
thing that I've never seen any other IT organization do so well --
integrate IT into the business and make it an absolutely indispensible
day-to-day partner for every decision.  

It's not us against the businessmen.  It's "excellence against mediocrity."
When excellent engineers get together with excellent business people, magic
happens.  You put mediocre people in place and you'll suffer, be they
engineers or business people.

> It's not impossible that this collapse may provide the seed for a great 
> number of new, small, aggressive companies to get their toehold on new 
> markets;

Are you kidding? have you seen what's been happening in the OSS space
lately?

Maybe it's because OSCon is this week, but I've been thinking a lot about
OSS lately.  It's really exploded in the last year or two and while I think
part of that is just the development cycle -- good engineering finally
coming home to roost -- I think you'd be pressed to argue that the fact
that there are a whole bunch of unemployed brilliant people, coupled with
companies that are pressed for money, has nothing to do with it.

> Keep an eye out for a garage to live in, for the short term, though.    /-:

Speaking as someone who six months ago dropped his rent by 40%, I concur.
While purchasing a home in the bay area has not become significantly
cheaper, *RENTING* has.

> PS: Yes, I know, this will aggravate a lot of headhunters. But it will 
> cause others to nod their head in agreement, and maybe smile in 
> amusement, too, and it is for those people that I write.

FWIW, I know some kick-ass headhunters.  They're few and far between.

-roy