Quote of the Day
The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.
Chinese proverb
Remember Tax Cuts to Provide Incentives for Hiring the Unemployed?
I want to make a few relevant points on this topic. As someone who has has multiple changes in career, not to mention making my living at shorter-length gigs for most of the last decade, and as a libertarian conservative, I see both sides of these issues. I have not had many managerial positions (mostly because I served in a technical niche as the lead DBA and/or tech lead in projects or organizations with smaller technical teams). I've been on both sides of tech screens (typically a first-stage event in the hiring process).
As someone with an extensive background in the art of test construction and validation, I do an outstanding job at the thankless task of screening. I remember when I was the project lead DBA on a Chicago city project with three other DBA slots, I had been pressed to screen this one candidate. He was grossly incompetent and failed the interview; I tried to be polite and said that someone would be in touch with him as to the next step (if any) in the process. The applicant said that he would see me next Monday. It turned out the project manager, without briefing me or waiting for the results of my screen, had already signed him to a guaranteed 2-week contract. (The new guy was working with another DBA on a side deliverable, and was let go after 2 weeks.)
In a second case, the reader has to understand I have some very creative ways of asking the same question in a variety of ways; one student in the very first class I taught at UH literally compared my tests to "lobotomies". So anyway I'm describing to the applicant the Oracle concept of rollback segments in functional terms (without using the key terms) and asked him if there was a way in Oracle to accomplish this. I'm listening to him intently while I distinctly heard frantic page turning going on in the background. (I'm suppressing my laughter and thinking, "Cheating on a tech screen? Not a good impression...") At the end of the interview, the applicant had figured out it hadn't gone well, but he begged for me to tell him what the answer was to the above question, because otherwise he wasn't going to be able to get to sleep that night... He genuinely thanked me for the experience... It was never my intent to screen out all applicants; at the time, several developers were trying to pass themselves off as DBA's because they had installed Oracle on a home PC and had paid a professional writer to fluff up their resume.
I think the worst war story I ever had was when I worked for CSC Consulting. A well-known Rhode Island-based computer accessories manufacturer had attempted to contact me about a full-time position as an Oracle Apps (EBS) DBA. I took a pass after CSC made the offer. After my first assignment was over, CSC had failed to win several expected project bids, and so I was looking for available assignments. It turned out the RI company was one of our customers. I'm telling my practice manager down in Alabama, "You've got to assign me to this project; they were trying to hire me for exactly this work. It's as sure a gimme as there is in consulting." For some odd reason, my boss wanted to also present another new hire as well, but eventually I got a call, just before the Fourth of July. I was told by my project contact that they were about two weeks behind schedule because the client DBA hadn't done necessary Apps patching.
After I got there, I was put into a CSC team meeting where everyone was happy to see me on board. The team lead motions we have to leave for what I expected to be a courtesy call with the client DBA/manager. He quickly tells me no, this was actually going to be an interview, but not to worry about it; it was just a formality. When I got in there, it was clear I had been completely swerved and put into an ambush interview. He asked me a list of maybe a dozen Oracle technologies (platforms, operating systems, etc.--standard stuff discussed in detail on the resume). Each question was literally a direct question about something NOT in the resume. He then turns to my project contact and says, "Look, we are not in the business of paying you guys to do training of your people." I object, noting that I had been briefed there was a backlog of about 20 hours of patching. He turned back to me, snapping, "That's a lie! That patching was finished 2 days ago!" I'm searching for some kind of moral support from my colleague, whom had been repeating to me what I had just said, and he's telling the client, "We are so sorry for introducing you to the wrong person for this assignment. You, of course, won't be charged a dime for his time or expenses. We are so sorry for this inconvenience on your part, and we'll work at getting the right person in..." (I'm surprised nobody noticed the bus tracks over my clothes on the way back home...) [I don't mind so much that he tried to mollify the customer, but to do it in front of me lacked class.] I had to cancel my arrangements and arrange for a SWA flight back to BWI, 5 hours in a sweltering, stuffy Providence airport.
There is a brief follow-up on this story. When CSC Consulting laid me off soon thereafter without a single DBA consulting assignment for me or the two DBA's my manager hired after me, the reader will never guess what company tried to recruit me, literally within days of my availability. I made it very clear they had burned bridges with me.
In a different context, to discuss examples of unfair actions, many faithful readers know I turned down a belated job offer from Grambling State in 1994. I had finally attracted my first multi-year Oracle DBA job a few weeks earlier. I had gone through a terrible transition period; professional recruiters had treated my 8 years in academia as the equivalent of being unemployed with any preexisting work skills probably eroded. After a number of years (probably around 1999 or so), I started considering a return to academia; the last serious attempt was a few years later (still in Chicago) when a Catholic college in the DC area suburbs contacted me. Everything was going well; the chairperson all but made me an offer. I remember at one point in our phone conversation she mentioned having met some good people from Illinois State (and listed certain people, including a married couple in the department, whom I knew).
For the occasional reader, I've occasionally mentioned I had a one-year teaching contract as a visiting professor at ISU. The department chair did something unethical during the fall semester; after the beginning of the spring semester, he made an unsolicited visit to my office and told me if I filed a complaint over what he did in the fall, he would immediately relieve me of my teaching duties. The fact of the matter was that until that point of time, I had never said or implied I would take any action against him; I was focused on trying to land my next academic position and finishing out my class assignments. In fact, the ISU business school had a tenure-track MIS position and were interested in talking to me--when all of a sudden they refused to acknowledge further inquiries (I'm sure just a "coincidence"). I immediately filed a complaint with the administration, and the administration made it clear to the chair that any adverse managerial decision would be reviewed for due process. The chairman was furious, saying they had no right to interfere with his internal affairs and managerial discretion. I then filed a complaint about the events of last fall. My motive was more about trying to ensure that other junior or visiting faculty would not have the same thing happen to them; I didn't get any financial award for filing the complaint, and I certainly wasn't going to get a contract extension if I won. I also repeated the chairperson's threat. They interviewed the chairman whom essentially confessed to what happened in the fall but he denied ever threatening me. So they found in my favor of the academic freedom charge but they denied the fact of his threat. That was my word versus his, and no doubt if I realized he was going to threaten me and thus secretly tape-recorded the conversation, they would have accused me of violating his privacy and excluded the evidence. The salient point is, why did I wait as long as I did on filing a complaint unless some later event triggered the action? Why did the department chair furiously complain over the administration's response if, in fact, there had been no threat? It's a matter of common sense. But the core complaint was more important, so if they gave him some face-saving finding, it doesn't bother me. The unethical man has to live with his conscience; he knows what he did and said.
I didn't really associate or befriend with the senior faculty there; I think I went to a department Christmas party, and I met the other faculty members at faculty meetings. For the most part, I had befriended an African junior faculty member, and we discussed possibly doing some research projects together; when I left the university, I specifically told him I didn't want my name listed on any relevant articles, if applicable. So, going back to my discussion with the MIS chairperson of the DC area department, when she rattled off the names of senior faculty (in fact, I do know from the subcommittee's findings that some senior faculty had pressed the chairman to act) that she had met at meetings and had befriended, I really didn't want to bring up what had happened at ISU. Complaining about a prior employer is a double-edged sword, so I had to rely on her professional integrity.
The next thing I knew I ended up getting a written notice from the HR department that the college had looked at the existing pool of applicants and had made a decision not to make an offer. They would be reopening the position during the regular faculty recruitment process that fall, and I was "encouraged" to apply then. I dashed off an email to the department chair, cynically asking if she wasn't sure I was the right candidate that summer, why I should bother resubmitting that fall. She curtly responded that she was trying to be nice and spare my feelings.
As a Catholic, I'm morally outraged that a Catholic college would allow such an unjust thing to happen. But you know, the fact that this woman never had the integrity to discuss the situation with me speaks volumes. But I know the facts. Is it worth fighting to teach at a university where your prospective department chair isn't going to be fair-minded from the start? Life isn't fair; move on. I really do believe the college lost out; the fact is, I would never have interviewed with them in 1985-1986. I would have brought instant credibility to their program.
So let's go to the decision of employers to make whatever decisions they want, including a decision not to hire currently employed people. First of all, in many cases, employers face a huge number of applicants and quite often it's a matter of judgment. Usually lawyers tell them not to leave a paper trail and filter whatever they say to applicants. So the burden of proof is on the applicant. All I can do is state my qualifications. If some HR recruiter thinks that an 18-year DBA with 3 advanced degrees can't pick up Oracle RAC skills, despite have mastered several Oracle technologies on multiple platforms, or am "overqualified" for other billing assignments, or unnecessarily worry that I'll jump employers at the hint of a raise, I don't think it's intelligent. The way I look at it, you have the opportunity to get a former senior principal from Oracle Consulting at a fraction of the rate Oracle would charge (or any of the major consulting companies).
It's really somewhat amusing to hear HR professionals talk about ivory-tower professors whom can't function in a real-world environment (in fact, for years, I had to hide the fact I had a PhD). I wrote in an earlier post that my last assignment for FutureNext, I worked at an east LA sugar vendor. The IT manager extended my stay there (initially 2 or 3 days), which forced FutureNext to delay my (unknown) layoff (FutureNext had just replaced the CEO from a venture capitalist manager brought in to cut costs). He told FutureNext that he had learned more from me in 2 days than in 6 months of other FutureNext DBA's. Usually there's a no-compete period after leaving a consulting company; he then chased me, with FutureNext's blessings, to do multiple short-term assignments for him. I saved him thousands of dollars in unnecessary Oracle software licenses custom-designing a module to coordinate certain data points from his different plants. I've done things in days it takes other DBA's literally months to do.
In my profession, DBA's are generally not alerted if they are about to lose their job (the fear is that DBA's might booby-trap the databases); chances are, you have to reenter the market and it can take a few days or weeks to find a gig. I've talked to Indian H1B's whom have worked 14 gigs a year. If you put a 2-week gig here, a 4-month project there: a lot of traditional HR recruiters will view you as a job-hopper. In fact, I literally once worked at 4 different customers in one week while at FutureNext. It has more to do with the nature of the gig.
Now, if and when I've been between jobs or gigs, it is possible that employers or recruiters may read something in that, e.g., if he was good, why would he be between gigs? Or maybe he's impossible to work with...
It's not my job to educate HR recruiters. I have seen other DBA's fired on their second day of work. Many more in less than 3 weeks. I'll work there for several weeks or months. I've worked on a diverse set of projects for different sizes and types of databases in different industries on different platforms. I've solved problems most customers weren't even aware they had. Working for a single employer in some contexts may be seen in terms of stability; to someone like me, that DBA may not have the exposure of how things are done elsewhere and developed a fuller set of knowledges and skills. The bottom line is, I've made my living at doing this for 18 years. I have worked at Coopers & Lybrand, Oracle Consulting, IBM, or CSC Consulting after going through their own filtering processes.
So if an employer or client wants to say they won't hire me between gigs, well, I don't answer recruiter calls when I'm working on an upgrade at 3:45AM.
I don't mean this to be a rant against a short-sighted company, but I can honestly say when I'm doing a tech screen, it doesn't matter what the applicant has done the last few weeks or months. I know, for example, a DBA who took a sabbatical when his father died, with an operational family business in need of management.
Dems vs. GOP on Federal Budget Budget Cuts
Are you kidding me? With a $3.7T spending budget, all that the Dems can find is roughly $5B in cuts? And the GOP is fighting for a mere $61B, with the Democrats crying Chicken Little, that the GOP has found the Holy Grail of federal spending--the rare spending that actually adds to the economy, which is why pro-business Republicans are pushing to shoot themselves in the foot? GIVE ME A BREAK! (Sorry, John Stossel, for stealing your catch phrase. Kudos to Senator Manchin (D-WV) for chastising President Obama for offering little leadership beyond lip service for fiscal discipline!
Political Humor
"Texas Gov. Rick Perry referred to the Mexican city of Juarez as the most dangerous city in America. In his defense, he probably just thought it was an American city because there were so many Mexicans there." - Jay Leno
[Governor Perry was speaking in terms President Obama can understand. Juarez is the capital of Obama's 57th state.]
"Mexican President Calderon told President Obama that the United States must do more to reduce the demand for drugs. Obama said, 'We got Charlie Sheen off cocaine. What more do you want us to do?'" –Jay Leno
[Jay, meet Charlie Sheen's third Goddess: Mary Jane...]
Tiger Dad Doesn't Like the Results of the Blood Test...
Jerry O'Connell Auditions For Charlie Sheen's Role in "2 and a Half Men"
Exclusive Charlie Sheen/Qaddafi Interview
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Bee Gees, "You Should Be Dancing"
