Job hunt metrics

When a friend contacts me and says they're looking for a job, they generally have a sense of despair. I guess the notion is that they in particular are unemployable or under qualified for anything they actually want to do. My response is that it is a metrics game.

I have sent out eighteen resumes, via email, since I returned home on Wednesday night. This doesn't count the sort of internal-submission thing that Monster does; if I listed that, I suspect the number would more than double.

Employers, for whatever reason, have a hard time finding employees. So they use headhunters and sites like Monster and Dice. If you're not using all your available bandwidth to send out resumes on these and other sites, chances are employers are missing you.

Talk to your friends. They know people who are hiring. Sometimes it is they who are hiring.

And, don't be afraid to apply for a position that's just a hair outside your skillset. If somebody wants you to do Solaris administration for systems that control aerostats, and you know Solaris and RF and RS-422, why not give it a go? The worst they can do is ignore your resume, and that's what you're expecting them to do anyways.







All that having been said, I have no small amount of depression and resentment for about three people at Lockheed Martin MS2 in San Diego. But, they'll get theirs. They always do.

Those "Y" people

I hate generational names ("boomers", "gen x", etc). But this woman has it spot-on. Her original source has a lot to say, but what I found most interesting was the following snippet:

6 Principles of Millennial Management

So how do you translate what you’ve read so far into your day-to-day life on the job? What do today’s young employees want? If we’re designing recruiting programs and management systems based on their values and needs, how do we proceed? What kind of work environments attract, retain, and motivate Millennial coworkers?
Here are their six most frequent requests:

1. You be the leader. This generation has grown up with structure and supervision, with parents who were role models. The “You be the parent” TV commercials are right on. Millennials are looking for leaders with honesty and integrity. It’s not that they don’t want to be leaders themselves, they’d just like some great role models first.
2. Challenge me. Millennials want learning opportunities. They want to be assigned to projects they can learn from. A recent Randstad employee survey found that “trying new things” was the most popular item. They’re looking for growth, development, a career path.
3. Let me work with friends. Millennials say they want to work with people they click with. They like being friends with coworkers. Employers who provide for the social aspects of work will find those efforts well rewarded by this newest cohort. Some companies are even interviewing and hiring groups of friends.
4. Let’s have fun. A little humor, a bit of silliness, even a little irreverence will make your work environment more attractive.
5. Respect me. “Treat our ideas respectfully,” they ask, “even though we haven’t been around a long time.”
6. Be flexible. The busiest generation ever isn’t going to give up its activities just because of jobs. A rigid schedule is a sure-fire way to lose your Millennial employees.

It's uncanny how she describes these requirements. I frequently tell employers "hey, I'm not really happy unless I'm dodging a bullet. I work very well that way. So in other words, I'm looking for a challenge. Is that what we're talking about?"

That question scares off maybe 80% of recruiters/HR people. The remaining ones tend to be defense contractors. Go figure.

And once more it is appropriate to quote RKM

The personal, as everyone's so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here -- it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous, marks the difference -- the only difference in their eyes -- between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people, they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it's just business, it's politics, it's the way of the world, it's a tough life, and that it's nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.

Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon

The price of stupidity

I don't need to name names, but let me name some figures:

• Cost of outbound flight: $300
• Rescheduling return flight three times: $300
• Cost of return flight: $400
• Cost of Hertz rental for 3.5 weeks: $750
• Cost of four tanks of gas: $240
  
• Cost of hotel stay for 3.5 weeks: $4500
• Cost, in (not me) man hours, of my trip: 50 (~ $2500)
• Cost, in man hours, of my trip (me): 178 (~ $8000)
• Time from initial interview to badged employee: 2.5 years
• Time from offer letter to badged employee: 8 weeks

Total, dollars: $16,990


And that doesn't include, you know, the whole two years of emails and phone calls about getting shit done. I have learned to go with my gut when I meet Lance Horne types (my boss at LMT could have been Lance's twin), I should just quit and save myself the trouble. I'm going to be looking for work anyways, why not just plan for it ahead of time?

1. Oh, I see you're an asshole and you're above me on the org chart.
2. Whatever you say. (return to cube)
1. Talk to previous colleagues, explain the situation, they'll ask for resumes.
1. resumes must be sent over HTTPS folks...
3. Deal with boss for another week or two or three or whatever, but you've got something lined up so that when he sends you that email, "come see me," you can give him the finger as he's telling you he is unhappy with your performance, appearance, whatever.
4. New job lines up.
5. Profit. Or return to step 1.

We've actually developed a proper noun for this process. It's the "Lance Transition". When I came back from Maui I was way ready to quit. But instead, I hung around, doing my job, thinking maybe things would be salvageable. No such luck. Instead, Lance gets the upper hand and he decides when I get my last check and he decides when I have to start looking for work.

I'm getting better at managing the LT, but clearly I still need to work on it.

Extending my stay in the US

After about a month in a hotel, a paperwork fuckup (I don't want to go into details) has precluded my traveling to the SPAWAR sites in Taiwan, thus making me useless to Lockheed, who hastily removed me from their employ.

Most of you know what I do, but for the spiders I'll leave a recap here.

• Unix, Linux, and about every derivation of either.
• I can give a 1-hour lecture on the differences between SysV and BSD.
• Perl. It's hard to say I'm an expert perl programmer, because I know some pretty fucking good perl programmers. On the other hand, 95% of the perl I see in the wild is hideous. Mine is clean and sparkly.
• Shell. csh and sh and their cousins and aunts and uncles. Approximately the same skill level as perl.
• The Defense Department. Been working for/with/near them on and off for a decade.
• I can tell you what the differences between C2 and C4I and C4ISR and C4ISR&T are.
• I wrote a perl module that speaks TDMA/Link16/JTIDS. Sure, it's not practical, but it at least demonstrates knowledge.
• Databases. They seem to follow me wherever I go. I've worked with DB2, Oracle (8, 9, and 10), Informix, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
• Teaching. I've done a lot of this recently. I like it.

Anyways, those with ears to ground, listening for competent people to come along please feel free to mail me (avriette@gmail.com) for a formal CV.

Net::TDMA is "finished"

I think it's going to be uploaded to CPAN as Net::TDMA. I'm going to add licensing information, tests, and the standard makemaker garbage to it tomorrow.

There's a problem, though. It doesn't fit into two gigs of ram. I will ruminate on this and perhaps make it possible to make an epoch that lives in a hypothetical day or a frame that lives in a hypothetical epoch. And so on. The POD is written.

Behold:

TDMA
TDMA/Constants.pm
TDMA/Day
TDMA/Day/Epoch
TDMA/Day/Epoch/Frame
TDMA/Day/Epoch/Frame/Slot.pm
TDMA/Day/Epoch/Frame.pm
TDMA/Day/Epoch.pm
TDMA/Day.pm
TDMA/TDMA.pm

I can't think of anything missing, except perhaps examples. But somebody else is going to have to write those examples.

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
#  Created by Alex J. Avriette on 2007-06-14.
#  Copyright (c) 2007. All rights reserved.

use warnings;
use strict;

use lib qw{ . TDMA };

use TDMA;
use TDMA::Day;
use TDMA::Day::Epoch;
use TDMA::Day::Epoch::Frame;
use TDMA::Day::Epoch::Frame::Slot;

use Data::Dumper;

my $day = TDMA::Day->new();

print Dumper \$day;

So, really, not especially complicated. You can then access any piece of the day and feed it data. This makes it more interestin for listening, but because of the data structures, it's a "leg up" if you need to actually speak TDMA.