Quote of the Day
To get your ideas across use small words, big ideas, and short sentences.
John Henry Patterson
Job Markets: An Anecdotal Experience
From Academia and the IT World
One of the things you'll frequently hear reference to is the robust job market in high technology, high technology companies insisting they need more H1B's because they can't find qualified workers. There's a degree of truth in that, but quite often it's deliberately misleading rhetoric to government officials whom don't have a clue.
I'll just write a few general anecdotes from my own experience. I hold an MBA and PhD in MIS (I also hold a Master's in math); I was a full-time professor for 5 years before a severe recession ended my academic career in 1991. That in itself was an interesting experience; in my field, there had been a robust job environment, in part due to business school accreditation requirements. In my program, I was the fourth graduate (the third defended her dissertation a week before mine). I leapfrogged over several ABD's (all but dissertation's): usually there's something like a 5-year limit to complete your dissertation after passing your doctoral written and oral exams. If you do not do so, you may be required to start at ground zero with your qualification exams. A lot of ABD's after completing required residency periods (where, say, you teach a couple of classes for a few hundred dollars a month) like me had been full-time IT professionals earning multiples of residency income, and so many of them, particularly the ones with families (unlike me), went back to full-time employment, thinking they could work on the dissertation on a part-time basis or at least get a couple of years of decent income before getting back to the dissertation full-time. (In my opinion, you can't really do that in a legitimate program.)
So a couple of things happened. There was a scarcity, when I first entered the market in the mid-1980's, of ABD's with defended dissertation proposals. At the sake of oversimplification, a successfully defended proposal serves as an informal contract with the members on your committee: completion of the work in the proposal as specified, properly reported, should eventually result in a successful defense and hence the degree. I was one of 2 or 3 people to win places at two prominent doctoral consortia in my discipline (ICIS and DSI) preceding the annual conference. (I think the other guy was from the University of Georgia.) (The concurrent placements were enough to get an unsolicited phone call from an impressed faculty recruiter at Dartmouth.) Here's the point: at the conferences themselves, about two or 3 days long, there were in-person interview slots with potential faculty placements. I didn't even have to proactively contact universities; I was getting flooded with calls for interviews to the point all my half-hour interview slots were full within a few days at most. I probably got called by twice as many more whom I couldn't fit in during the conference.
A lot of schools, many of them smaller state branch universities, not land grant, e.g., the University of Texas at [anything but Austin], were recruiting and probably hoped they could land a dozen candidate interviews and narrow them down to 2 or 3 for campus visits, i.e., expenses-paid trips where faculty candidates normally give a presentation on your research and meet with a number of faculty and/or administrators.
I can already think what a liberal arts doctoral student thinks reading this experience. My first love was and continues to be philosophy. However, I was told by many people by the time I earned my first philosophy degree (I was a double-major) that the only way I could get a job in the field was as a professor, and relevant faculty openings occurred when professors either retired or died.
In any event, MIS courses were "hot" in business schools at the time; I used to joke at the time that if we created an MIS course for basket weaving, we could have enrolled 40 or 50 students in a class session.
A number of things (my informal analysis here) happened over the next 5 years, my tenure as a full-time university professor (the first 4 were tenure-track, the last was a temp appointment at ISU). First, a number of schools griped about problems in recruiting, and some mechanisms were established to retrain people from other disciplines (e.g., quantitative methods, production/logistics, etc.). One such program was established by Milt Jenkins at Indiana University. Second, there was a softening of enrollment in MIS courses; it was still robust compared to other disciplines, but I remember around my second year at UWM I unexpectedly saw something like 27 students registered in a class, considerably below the enrollment cap; this contrasted to typical wait lists for a number of classes I had been experiencing. Third, a number of universities, including my alma mater, were cracking down on ABD's in MIS. Probably most of the dozen or so ABD's I leapfrogged to my successful defense probably graduated over the next 2 to 3 years. Fourth, a number of other faculty candidates, e.g., from computer science departments which traditionally viewed business school programs with contempt, started entering the MIS faculty pool.
Now of course by the early 1990's we were in a recession (the principal reason that GHW Bush lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton), and state universities, the principal target schools on the market, had hiring cutbacks. The market reversed from a seller's market (i.e., faculty applicant) to a buyer's market. The reason I mention that here is because it's particularly noteworthy to note how the strategy changed.
I had taught several courses on both the undergraduate and graduate levels; I had an unusually high number of peer-reviewed papers, national conference papers and book chapters for someone not employed at a land grant or elite institution, and I had my degree in hand. I knew and/or worked with people whom were ABD's on faculty (highly undesirable); in fact, my best friend at UWM didn't finish his PhD all 3 years I was there. (He also told me at the time he hadn't finished an article that had already been accepted in advance for publication in MISQ, a well-regarded journal in my discipline--expletive deleted. If those who don't understand, you normally don't get accepted until a finished article has gone through peer review. I never submitted to MISQ myself, although I served as a reviewer.)
In any event, the schools hoping to get, say, a dozen resumes, were suddenly getting over 80 resumes. When you start getting 80 resumes for a position, you may alter your hiring pattern. You come up the rules for reducing the number of resumes. And, this is a critical note, you no longer are necessarily looking for the best applicant out there, but someone whom best fits your filtering process.
There were a variety of different filtering strategies. Quite a few schools decided that their existing faculties consisted of too many men and they wanted to hire a woman; on the other hand, one particular hot topic was networking and they wanted to hire someone doing research in the field. (MIS focuses more on organizational issues involving the deployment of technology than the underlying technology itself.)
The job market was so bad I'll never forget one of the schools was holding interviews in their own suite--and concurrent interviews in the same hotel room!
I think I did get shortlisted at 2 or 3 schools, but no offers. One of them is a small well-regarded Catholic college in San Diego where one of my best friends, still a misguided progressive, has been on faculty. They probably would have paid peanuts, but even though it's located in the armpit of progressive politics, i.e., California, I would have still accepted. Good guy; he still remembers when I used to be a liberal Democrat. He and I had a major falling out after the college rejected me. There are two very good friends (not in contact recently) whom I knew at UH, and both of them stood by the women in their lives during difficult times (like serious illnesses or accidents). I would like to think I would do the same.
In any event, I had a very difficult time after leaving academia; nobody was hiring researchers; many, if not most IT organizations are very anti-intellectual: there is a prejudice that academics can't function in the real world (never mind I had been an IT professional before earning my credentials); a lot of recruiters consider academic knowledge/experience irrelevant--I was treated as though the 8 years I spent in academic as effectively 8 years without a job, and whatever skills I had before that eroded to nothing marketable; other recruiters that that I was using IT professional work as a temporary safe haven; as soon as the academic job market improved, I would jump back it, taking whatever experience and training I got there with me
Long story short, after struggling to find professional work, I got my foot in the door as an Oracle DBA (I had first worked with a very early version of Oracle at UH a decade earlier) at a bargain basement salary. Literally the second day on the job, my employer lost the re-compete bid on the contract work extension. Several weeks later losing my job, I was looking for a follow-up assignment.
I'll never forget this one case: it was a convoluted job description, probably required for the H1B they had in the position to retain it but they were required to post the job description. To people not used to the IT world, almost any shop or place of work used probably a distinctive combination of vendors, hardware, and software. The chance that you will exactly fit the combination is next to zero. Say, for instance, you have 2 years experience with XYZ version 3. They will argue something like, well, you don't have 2.5 years of XYZ version 3 or we wanted 2 years with version 2 or 2 years with version 4. All you really need to know is this is all nonsense. All it serves is to disingenuously argue to know-nothing government personnel that they can't find local talent, so they can keep the H1B they have in the position--whom, of course, never had XYZ exposure until he or she was hired there.
This happens ALL the time. But I have an interesting anecdote about one of those positions. I was living in the Chicago area at the time and there was one of the phony write-ups in the Michigan area. So I put in for the position. At some point, I filed a statement with whatever Michigan agency, saying the employer never followed up. Here's the funny thing: the agency in question mailed a query to the employer, whom told the agency THEY HAD SPOKEN TO ME. The agency accepted what they were told and essentially closed the complaint, even after I specifically insisted in response the employer was never in contact with me.
My experience over the past couple of years: there's been some filtering going on with a boutique version of Oracle database software and/or having a government clearance in hand (you can't buy one: you have to be sponsored). You see it is quite expensive to get a clearance, and if and when a vacancy occurs, the need is now--not months later when the clearance is finally granted. Unless you lucked into a position where you already have an active clearance (e.g., a recently separated veteran), you are essentially filtered. That lowers the number of DBA's that can qualify for an assignment, which means the government pays more for DBA's than they should. Think that the government would expedite the clearance process? Forget it! This is the probably the worst of it: I've had to get public trust clearance THREE TIMES over the past 7 years. Why? Because none of the agencies accepts the other's public trust clearance. A while back I tried to get a gig at DHS. It required submitting paperwork for a FOURTH public trust clearance. And you have to fill in tediously detailed summaries and contact information, much of it already obsolete, going back 7 years. Say, for instance, you have a 2-week gig here, an 8-month gig there, a former employer is no longer in business here or there, the company has merged, past contacts are no longer at the company, etc: it becomes the paperwork from hell. Even if you last had that clearance 2 years ago, and they already investigated the prior 5 years, they'll still require all 7 years filled out (which can literally take several hours), even if behind the scenes they really only will check out the last two. Even the methods can differ: in some circumstances they maintain the records online and other times they insisted on paper. (I think the last time was a few months ago for a subcontract with the social security administration with a well-known defense subcontractor which required paperwok for a FIFTH public trust clearance. That never got anywhere when, after the fact, the defense contractor demanded, because that's just how how they roll, that's the level of voluntary due diligence they give their clients, the same level of detail going back 18 years, for the resume they would submit to the government. The recruiter had told me earlier that it would require only minor tweaking of my resume (false); I wasn't going to spend days rewriting my resume, even if I even had that level of detail; the defense contractor hadn't even guaranteed an interview.) All of this had absolutely nothing to do with the core job and one's qualifications. It was all about feeding the bureaucracy. And when you finally break through, you find that your predecessors had been doing amateurish work. This is the kind of dysfunctional stuff that goes on in the world of federal services subcontracting.
Of course, you find instances of incompetence all over the place. My favorite is how one of the standard database security scripts from a well-regarded organization was checking the existence and/or values for so-called "hidden parameters" using a certain DBA view. Hidden parameters were not accessible from the view in question, which meant by design the test would never flag the targeted hidden parameter, i.e., if there was a legitimate security interest in knowing the value of the parameter, the script the auditors were using would never detect it. Hello, the emperor is wearing no clothes! I told my federal contractor clients to alert the government client. I never bothered holding my breath.
The reader shouldn't assume that incompetence is restricted to the public sector. Let me give another example. I was working for a consultancy after the Nasdaq meltdown based near San Jose. They were using me to service some smaller customers whom wouldn't bill out 40 hours a week--maybe one or 2 days a week. I remember one week I went to 4 different client sites. The real target for my company was getting their foot in the door for bigger, e.g., upgrade projects. One of my clients was a television station in San Francisco. They had been using this boutique consultancy near Oracle's headquarters in Redwood City. Certain notification processes hadn't been working in their ERP system for months, and no one knew why. I fixed the problem, finding the core reason probably within 10 minutes of getting access to the system. I did a routine check of the database and found that a key database table hadn't been able to access readily available disk storage to accommodate new records. There were pages of relevant messages in the log going back for months. Verifying the table issue was related to the notification problem and I had fixed the core problem was more complicated, but in the end as usual, I had happy clients. This is DBA 101 stuff. I have no idea what this boutique company had been billing for, but thank God the customer decided on the need for a change. (Let's hope that American voters do the same next year...)
Unfortunately for my employers, the television station had been bought out by a conglomerate running on a rival ERP system, so that upgrade project was never going to happen; the TV station needed to keep the current ERP system in operation until they were folded into the parent system.
Political Humor
"President Obama plans to create thousands of new jobs by replacing all automobile GPS systems with real people who sit in the back seat with a map." - Jimmy Kimmel
[Unfortunately, they're all former Obama Administration economists; the cars are all still headed in the wrong direction.]
"Republicans actually decided not to give a rebuttal to President Obama’s jobs speech tonight. I guess they figured there’s already a rebuttal to his jobs speech: No jobs." - Jimmy Fallon
[President Obama knew it was the start of the NFL season. His opening kick was a punt of bills to the next generation. The receivers were already so deep in debt, they figured they didn't try to run it out of the end zone. The President's bill had a provision to pay receivers not to run it out of the end zone. They get the ball at midfield and $5 from the pocket of each job creator.]
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Air Supply, "Two Less Lonely People in the World".
