'Dumb & Dumber' Seeks 'Best & Brightest'

Fri Jul 11 19:25:05 PDT 2003

Rereading what I wrote earlier today, I left out one important detail.

The scariest aspect of this whole situation is that the current crop of 
recruiting agents are taking all of their instructions from the 
customers, who are, of course, footing the bill ... but that their 
customers - the least technical, least expensive, least competent 
employees left behind, frequently totally devoid of technical expertise 
and understanding - are relying on these same placement firms to provide 
the expertise that they, themselves, are missing, internally ... yet, 
they, the customers, are too technically challenged to realize that the 
recruiters they are working with are from the exact same mold that they, 
themselves stepped from.

Hence the title, 'Dumb & Dumber'; neither of these two parties has a 
clue as to the dynamics of the situation in which they are involved, 
they both keep looking to one another for guidance, and they keep going 
around, and around, and around, ad infinitum, while the rest of us watch 
and wonder when they are going to get dizzy and fall down.

'Nuff sed.

-- richard

richard childers / kg6hac wrote:

> (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.
>
>
>
>
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