'Dumb & Dumber' Seeks 'Best & Brightest'

Fri Jul 11 10:55:48 PDT 2003

(The following is an unsolicited social observation.)

Has anyone else noticed a loss of competency amongst placement agencies 
and human resources personnel, recently?

I have been encountering some remarkably incompetent behavior recently; 
I have some theories as to where it's coming from ... and where this is 
going, as well.

What do I mean by incompetent?

- 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.)

- 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 
because a stenographer, a medical secretary, and a legal secretary all 
use typewriters, that their jobs are fundamentally identical.)

- People who think version numbers and product names are handed down 
from On High and are not to be questioned or discussed. (For instance, 
Solaris 2.8 is now referred to, by Sun salespeople, as "Solaris 8" ... 
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.)

- 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 
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) ... 
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 ... 
but they don't want to say it so bluntly, any more than they want to 
discuss the fact that you are, by working for them, filling four to six 
separate positions, for one half to one third of the pay your 
predecessors received.

- 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.

I'm not disgruntled; I have no problem with doing good work that doesn't 
need to be redone. No one has ever accused me of walking away from a 
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.

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'.

Where do I think this is coming from?

It's pretty simple. A lot of high technology companies, over the past 
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.

When the bubble collapsed, the first to go, at the OEMs and VARs, were 
the technical people. The more they made, they faster they were let go; 
the theory was that they would be there when the market needed them 
back, that's the way it had always worked before. Soon there was nothing 
left but a trimmed-down sales, shipping, and administration department; 
entire engineering organizations were pruned, and the company coasted, 
carried by its inventories.

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.

Which brings us to recruiting agencies - which provide a service to OEMs 
and VARs, trying to help these large organizations find and contact the 
brilliant people who brought their products and services to life, in the 
first place, ten years ago.

These agencies gutted their talent just like every other service 
organization. Oh, sure, there are exceptions here and there; but the 
perception is that, like every other organization in Silicon Valley, 
most recruiting organizations voluntarily lobotomized themselves, in the 
naive belief that when things got better, everyone would be waiting 
patiently to return to work, just like all the other industries. They 
all read the same magazines ('CIO', 'CFO', etc); how were they to know 
any better?

(Hey, I read some of those magazines myself. No better way to make sure 
you understand your, uh, management.)

That's how we got to where we are today. How do we get back to where we 
were?

Again, I have some ideas on where this is going.

The fact is that a lot of bad decisions were made by these previously 
mentioned "perception managers".

(When I tell people that a lot of engineering decisions were made 
according to financial and political criteria, experienced engineers nod 
their head in agreement; no one has any trouble recalling executives 
overriding engineering decisions, particularly where vendors were 
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.)

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.

The fact is, now, that all that knowledge is gone; distributed to the 
four winds. Those people came here to the Bay Area to get jobs, and when 
the jobs disappeared, they returned to where they came from - the 
central United States in some cases, outside the United States entirely 
in many cases.

At first, many people, when laid off, filed for unemployment, figuring 
it wouldn't last. As their dollars got tight, a lot of people started 
leaving. Another bunch of them left after their unemployment ran out, 
here in California. Real estate prices haven't been dropping and the 
high price of real estate exacerbated the situation, by consuming 
whatever savings people had, far more quickly than might have otherwise 
been the case. Wages falling to level of ten or more years ago have not 
helped.

There are signs of this in the job market - previously unapproachable 
positions that required six different incompatible disciplines in one 
skull plus a willingness to work Sundays are loosening up, and the 
version numbers don't matter so much any more. Some of this, of course, 
is also a consequence of a new generation of recruiters gradually 
learning the relevant details of their new jobs, while earning far 
smaller commissions than their predecessors did; which has had its own 
influence on the world of placement agencies, not necessarily for the 
better.

Relearning, and rebuilding, are the key words here.

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.

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.

(Sure, a lot of the hiring managers will sneer, when offered a 
contractor; but just keep in mind that these are probably the same 
hiring managers who, five or ten years ago, were outsourcing every 
single job in the building to temporary employees. Understand that you 
are dealing with an individual whose commitment to self-honesty is 
negligible, and that you probably would not enjoy working with them, 
anyway, and keep moving.)

Perhaps it is significant, this time around, that startups are requiring 
early employees to work, for nothing, in exchange for their stock. More 
likely is that this is an overreaction by the venture capitalists, 
trying to shift responsibility for their losses onto the engineers of 
new ideas, instead of onto the MBAs that were slipped in to run the 
engineering organizations. Whatever the case, it suggests that there is 
not a lack of people with new ideas and the motivation to translate 
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.

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.

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; hopefully, this time around the engineers will have learned 
enough of the lessons of Machiavelli to remain in the driver's seat.

So stay tuned for further developments; and don't lose hope yet.

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

-- richard

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.