Coronavirus Fears Even Touch Local Clinics
My personal physician works out of a local urgent-care facility, about 2 miles from home; a large hospital where I've been treated is maybe 15 miles away. There are issues living in a blue state like MD, but generally health care is better than I've experienced elsewhere. Dealing with bills, the insurance company, hospital bureaucracies, long wait periods after in-processing, etc. are normal irritants.I'm sure many readers can identify with my disdain for the ubiquitous voicemail "Please listen to the following because our voicemail options have changed..." In usability, we generally don't want to violate user expectations. So at the clinic I'm fairly used to the touchscreen registration screens, asking for name, DOB, patient status (new?), etc. Well, the prompts were changed in my first visit since November: there was an introductory screen dealing with whether you've been exposed to potentially life-threatening coronavirus (the latest China-based pandemic/candidate). Supposedly 15 or so known cases in the US from among recent travelers to China; prudence of course is wise, but the average American is not at risk. (I would think we've been tracking recent visitors to China.)
Indian Recruiters. Again.
I've mentioned my issues in past posts. I don't really care in this PC culture whether expressing such views could be regarded as "racist". I've worked with a diverse group of people from the start of my IT career in the late 70's, e.g., I as a government contractor worked with a Bangladesh immigrant at NASA (yes, Clear Lake City). What I particularly remember is his family practically disowned him for having stopped his academic studies with "merely" a Master's degree.But it's all but impossible to work in IT today without running into Indian immigrants or Indian-Americans. I've been in meetings of 15 people, 10 of which were of Indian descent. I've worked for at least 3 IT companies owned and/or managed by Indian-Americans. I worked for an IBM subsidiary for an Indian-American, and our operations were supported by an off-peak hours center in Bangalore. One of my best friends is an Indian immigrant who I met on the West Coast while he was working on getting his green card; at the time he was a systems analyst transitioning to a project manager role. Today he is the company CIO.
Although most Indians (at least the ones I've known) are fluent in English, there are issues of nuance, context and culture, never mind an often difficult accent (exacerbated by poor phone connections). There is an Indian obsession with saving face; they often say what they think you want to hear and avoid saying things that might reflect poorly on them or their capabilities, knowledge, etc. I sometimes have to rephrase things 3 or 4 different ways to get the reply I expect. I sometimes analogize it to threading a needle.
I'll quickly reprise a few real life examples of relevant issues:
- I was migrating an EBS installation for a well-known tax services client between IBM operating subsidiaries. It was particularly difficult because the prior consultants used an unsupported (by Oracle) configuration and hadn't done any patching over 18 months. Our business model presupposed a standard, patched configuration. We planned a weekend cutover. I dealt with cartoonishly absurd issues one after another (like a tape drive operator only managed to offload MB vs. GB of storage overnight and not escalating the issue). Now what I did was bust my ass getting the migrated database ready for my Indian techno-functional colleague to test by noon Saturday. He had planned to work from home; I personally asked him 3 or 4 times if he had tested his connections from home over the prior week, no response. So I deliver the migrated, patched database to him on schedule--and he discovers he can't connect. Also IBM has a skeleton crew operating, and they can't figure it out until next week. I tell my colleague to go to the client site. He refuses, saying he's not on the weekend list and he doesn't want the client supervisor called to get him on site. He says, "It'll wait until Monday." Are you freaking kidding me? This gave me no time to resolve any testing issues. I couldn't believe that a professional would not have had a contingency plan, say, if there were networking issues.
- Later, same project, the Indian manager at the Bangalore facility refused to sign off on accepting the client install, bitching that I hadn't spun off enough cookie cutter tasks for his DBA trainees to do so he "lacked confidence" in my installation. What I was doing was non-standard tasks; to this day, I've never met another DBA capable of doing what I had to do. I didn't have time to sit there and create tasks for the sake of creating tasks. This was an IBM management problem.
- A couple of years earlier, on a National Archives project, an Indian developer was serving as my backup. The government has policies of changing passwords on a timely basis; I routinely personally made sure those privileged account passwords were directly communicated and encouraged my colleagues to report any connection issues to me. So one day he comes to me with a spreadsheet of passwords and demands me to double-check them. Dude! Do I look like your secretary? "You need to test these on your own; if I get hit by a truck tomorrow, it's a hell of a time to figure out your passwords are invalid." [By the way, it's fairly standard practice for backups to check passwords.] The jerk expedited his complaint with both the client manager and our managers.
I could go on with more examples, but I've made my point. What about Indian/American owners/managers? Some examples of issues:
- I negotiated with an Indian-American consultancy out of the SW Chicago suburbs. They had an Apps reference upgrade project in trouble in the Milwaukee suburbs. Example 1: The president negotiated a lower base salary, arguing I would be getting a project bonus. Long story short and countless unpaid overtime hours later, HR argued the employee handbook excluded bonuses on fixed-bid contracts, like the one I was working on. This was fraud, pure and simple.
- The same company had demanded I relocate within a month (at their expense), unwilling to pay expenses for longer. So literally 2 days before my flying home to move out of California, the Indian PM, with no warning, demands that I do a test upgrade by the end of the month. The only way that I can do is to cancel my trip home. The landlord has a new tenant lined up for my apartment, etc. It's not only that: I don't have any hotel arrangements, and the county is booked up over a county fair. And this test database wasn't a contractual requirement; he just wanted to look good in front of the clients next meeting. In hindsight, I should have quit.
- Third example: The company that employed me for the National Archives project had promised to reimburse my moving expenses (which were something like $3500). First, they tried to argue an after-the-fact reimbursement cap, significantly below the amount. Second, they later refused to reimburse even a penny, claiming my expenses had to be submitted by some early date. This was breach of contract, but a lawyer's fees would be more than I could recover.
Now all of these examples don't deal with the hassles of dealing with certain recruiters. I've dealt with probably hundreds of recruiters over the years. And let's be clear, there are some bad actors across the board. I'll get more than my fair share of listings which clearly aren't compatible to mine. I've worked hard to make my 20-odd years of experience, primarily as an Oracle DBA, as explicit and accessible as possible. Now really I'm a polymath, with diverse skills and ancillary responsibilities (developer, Unix administrator, etc.) Quite frankly some positions are written in such detail, there may be less than a handful of people on the planet, if that, who could hit all the desired attributes. And some are ludicrous. I remember when Oracle's EBS version R12 came out, some clients wanted 5 years of experience with R12--and it wasn't even in release that long. Maybe if you were working at one of the company's beta-testing clients. Clients often have distinct combinations of platforms, products, versions, etc. And any gap will be seen as the "critical" one. For example, I have worked with 4 different commercial variants of Unix as well as Linux. There are some minor nuances (e.g., how to mount a certain magnetic tape) but from a practical standpoint there's little real difference. The problem is you are often dealing with HR people, not the hiring manager, and the HR folks will think minor differences are "significant".
Let me give an actual example of dealing with company recruiters. I was living in the NW Chicago suburbs. I saw a position being posted (around 2003) for an Apps DBA in the Milwaukee area. I was a good fit, but the recruiter insisted the candidate must be currently living in the Milwaukee area and rejected my candidacy (I was prepared to move if I got the offer). Weeks later I got a call from an IT consulting company manager who had gotten my resume from an Indian agency, looking to fill some slot on a Chicago project; he was openly flirting with hiring me perm. (I was worried because I have never tried to work around an agency, and this was unsolicited.) He told me he had been trying to hire someone like me for literally months--long story short, it was the same company who turned me down for not already living near Milwaukee. The manager scoffed at that. "I don't give a damn where you live so long as it's near an airport." The problem, though, is we had to work an offer through HR. She was furious that I "had worked around her" and still managed to sabotage the offer, issuing a second rejection without the knowledge or consent of the hiring manager. I did some subcontract work for them, but the manager couldn't get the FTE hire done for other political reasons.
I've had exposure to lots of different technologies, e.g., Manugistics here, Maximo there, Banner here, Informatica there, etc. Now my resume is quite clear about the nature and extent of my relevant exposure. Let's take, for instance, my work as a SAP BASIS administrator (a fusion of Oracle DBA and Unix system administrator roles). (Note: SAP also supports non-Oracle databases.) I did work as such in the SW Chicago suburbs in 1996; however, I moved on to Coopers & Lybrand in 1997, which had started an Oracle EBS practice (EBS is the biggest rival to SAP in the ERP space). I did interview for Basis positions over the next few years, but in time my experience wasn't considered long or recent enough to qualify for most positions. Here's the point: I'll still get a dozen or more emails a year for SAP positions, not even restricted to DBA/Basis positions for positions requiring 10 or more years with more current experience and a raft of newer products. I don't know if they're simply doing a string search for "SAP" and blasting emails to everyone, but really any recruiter with passing knowledge of my background knows it's not a match.
Those who have read my past rants on Indian recruiters is probably familiar with the general structure. I have literally seen an email hit gmail and my cellphone rings. It's almost always unsolicited. They'll almost immediately check for status (that's not bad), I almost always have to ask where the position is (there are certain US regions I exclude, including the Left Coast, Illinois and the Northeast).
But I prefer to operate by email; they don't. They want to control the conversation; they want to go over their listing in detail, and quite often it's like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole--gold-plated wish lists. Quite often these calls come at inconvenient times, and I'll tell them to send an email. (They'll, of course, complain they did email.) Sometimes their emails are caught in spam or other filters; if you or your company is annoying enough, I'll filter you to trash, block your number, etc. Their little recipes try to manipulate me into getting closure on when I'll get back to them. I can show email threads of up to 2 or 3 dozen, not to mention a maddening number of follow-up phone calls over trivial details. The dickering over rates is beyond exasperating; you'll negotiate something and they'll come back and tell you they can't make the rate work. They'll never be up front about the rate (maybe hoping you'll ask below their best rate). They'll usually ask you to submit some generic form with your name, part of your social security number, visa status/USC, college graduation, contact information, expected start date, Skype number, linked_in id, etc. They'll ask you to submit an exclusive right to represent--and then someone higher up the chain will give you another call going over details before you're finally submitted. And then after that, you'll never get the courtesy of a followup call or email on position status 75% of the time, and I can't recall ever getting a gig from doing all this nonsense. It's a sinkhole of time, even when you're in the market.
It gets to the point of exasperation I may hang up at the first hint of an Indian accent--never mind fight through the typically shitty phone connections. The latest example over the past week of a "great fit" position was basically an electrical engineering position. Dude, I've been in IT in academics or the profession my whole work career; I don't hold an engineering degree. It took a long time to get the listing for this position which required a call and multiple texts to get.
Indian recruiters aren't the only bad actors in this market. There are also the for-profit training center sales reps who basically pose as recruiters but really hyping alleged jobs available after their training. I was trying to figure out why a recruiter was discussing a prominent Internet ERP brand position with me when that name is never mentioned in my resume. I mean I was discussing which of a number of cities I might relocate to; at some point she sent me a URL, and I finally figured out what was going on. I confronted the representative who tried to rationalize her deception.
If you listen to some economists and Trumpkins, you almost have try not to land a job in this economy. Over the past year, I had one contingency offer fall through when the government bid fell through. I was initially told the award was made, but the money hadn't flowed to the position. In another case there was a piece of government paperwork where a bureaucrat didn't waive some arbitrary paperwork item that hadn't affected an interim gig. (Trying to trace through that is like playing a game of Whac-a-Mole with the government.) In another case, the hiring manager was initially willing to consider a certain classification level (which I held), then decided to demand a higher level; it seems he failed to get candidates and may reconsider my classification. It's difficult to say. It's a game of numbers.
Let me give an actual example of dealing with company recruiters. I was living in the NW Chicago suburbs. I saw a position being posted (around 2003) for an Apps DBA in the Milwaukee area. I was a good fit, but the recruiter insisted the candidate must be currently living in the Milwaukee area and rejected my candidacy (I was prepared to move if I got the offer). Weeks later I got a call from an IT consulting company manager who had gotten my resume from an Indian agency, looking to fill some slot on a Chicago project; he was openly flirting with hiring me perm. (I was worried because I have never tried to work around an agency, and this was unsolicited.) He told me he had been trying to hire someone like me for literally months--long story short, it was the same company who turned me down for not already living near Milwaukee. The manager scoffed at that. "I don't give a damn where you live so long as it's near an airport." The problem, though, is we had to work an offer through HR. She was furious that I "had worked around her" and still managed to sabotage the offer, issuing a second rejection without the knowledge or consent of the hiring manager. I did some subcontract work for them, but the manager couldn't get the FTE hire done for other political reasons.
I've had exposure to lots of different technologies, e.g., Manugistics here, Maximo there, Banner here, Informatica there, etc. Now my resume is quite clear about the nature and extent of my relevant exposure. Let's take, for instance, my work as a SAP BASIS administrator (a fusion of Oracle DBA and Unix system administrator roles). (Note: SAP also supports non-Oracle databases.) I did work as such in the SW Chicago suburbs in 1996; however, I moved on to Coopers & Lybrand in 1997, which had started an Oracle EBS practice (EBS is the biggest rival to SAP in the ERP space). I did interview for Basis positions over the next few years, but in time my experience wasn't considered long or recent enough to qualify for most positions. Here's the point: I'll still get a dozen or more emails a year for SAP positions, not even restricted to DBA/Basis positions for positions requiring 10 or more years with more current experience and a raft of newer products. I don't know if they're simply doing a string search for "SAP" and blasting emails to everyone, but really any recruiter with passing knowledge of my background knows it's not a match.
Those who have read my past rants on Indian recruiters is probably familiar with the general structure. I have literally seen an email hit gmail and my cellphone rings. It's almost always unsolicited. They'll almost immediately check for status (that's not bad), I almost always have to ask where the position is (there are certain US regions I exclude, including the Left Coast, Illinois and the Northeast).
But I prefer to operate by email; they don't. They want to control the conversation; they want to go over their listing in detail, and quite often it's like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole--gold-plated wish lists. Quite often these calls come at inconvenient times, and I'll tell them to send an email. (They'll, of course, complain they did email.) Sometimes their emails are caught in spam or other filters; if you or your company is annoying enough, I'll filter you to trash, block your number, etc. Their little recipes try to manipulate me into getting closure on when I'll get back to them. I can show email threads of up to 2 or 3 dozen, not to mention a maddening number of follow-up phone calls over trivial details. The dickering over rates is beyond exasperating; you'll negotiate something and they'll come back and tell you they can't make the rate work. They'll never be up front about the rate (maybe hoping you'll ask below their best rate). They'll usually ask you to submit some generic form with your name, part of your social security number, visa status/USC, college graduation, contact information, expected start date, Skype number, linked_in id, etc. They'll ask you to submit an exclusive right to represent--and then someone higher up the chain will give you another call going over details before you're finally submitted. And then after that, you'll never get the courtesy of a followup call or email on position status 75% of the time, and I can't recall ever getting a gig from doing all this nonsense. It's a sinkhole of time, even when you're in the market.
It gets to the point of exasperation I may hang up at the first hint of an Indian accent--never mind fight through the typically shitty phone connections. The latest example over the past week of a "great fit" position was basically an electrical engineering position. Dude, I've been in IT in academics or the profession my whole work career; I don't hold an engineering degree. It took a long time to get the listing for this position which required a call and multiple texts to get.
Indian recruiters aren't the only bad actors in this market. There are also the for-profit training center sales reps who basically pose as recruiters but really hyping alleged jobs available after their training. I was trying to figure out why a recruiter was discussing a prominent Internet ERP brand position with me when that name is never mentioned in my resume. I mean I was discussing which of a number of cities I might relocate to; at some point she sent me a URL, and I finally figured out what was going on. I confronted the representative who tried to rationalize her deception.
If you listen to some economists and Trumpkins, you almost have try not to land a job in this economy. Over the past year, I had one contingency offer fall through when the government bid fell through. I was initially told the award was made, but the money hadn't flowed to the position. In another case there was a piece of government paperwork where a bureaucrat didn't waive some arbitrary paperwork item that hadn't affected an interim gig. (Trying to trace through that is like playing a game of Whac-a-Mole with the government.) In another case, the hiring manager was initially willing to consider a certain classification level (which I held), then decided to demand a higher level; it seems he failed to get candidates and may reconsider my classification. It's difficult to say. It's a game of numbers.
