Slashdot Mirror
Internet Speed Applied to Careers
Johnny Mnemonic writes: "The Washington Post is running an story about a one-day Internet career. The guy quit his previous job, started a new job at 9:00--and was laid off by 5. Not sure whether to laugh or cry, but he probably holds the record for Internet flameouts. Isn't this how "Secret of My Success" started?"
This is amusing, to be sure, but it underlines just how much people are letting the internet change their economic outlooks and their entire careers. Four years ago, the internet was going to change the world. Today, the world is much the same as it was twenty years ago, though with neater toys and perhaps fewer suits.
If you're changing how you're going about getting a new job, then you're crazy. You should be asking the same questions and demanding the same benefits/compensation today that you would've twenty years ago (adjusted for inflation, of course). Gone are the days of microserfdom with an eye to fabulous options. If they're not paying you cash and good dental, then look elsewhere.
I'm happy to say I rode the internet wave by staying by the sidelines. I had a lot less excitement than some of my buddies, but now I can say I'm the better for it. I'm several years further along in my career than they were, and now they have to scramble to make up for lost time. I don't envy them at all.
You should always have a Plan B. You never know what is going to happen. If I lose my job today I know at least three companies where I can get a job at. This is why you always prepare for the worst.
For a while there, a lot of people seemed to be under the impression that working in IT made them bulletproof. The economy was doing well, companies were hiring left and right, hiring bonuses were high, stock options were even higher.
Then came the problems. When the bubble burst, everyone thought "My job is safe. They'll just cut the {new | overpaid | deadwood} employees first. This was mostly true; the problem was, most people could be fit into any of these categories in the eyes of management. People were dropped during the first week, the first day, hell, even just before starting (which doesn't necessarily come with the luxury of severance pay, even though you've just left your old job and relocated). The people who were hit the hardest were the H1-B resident workers . . . you lose your job, you got 30 days to find another sponsor or it's back to your homeland with you. Jobs are still abundant, but it's not quite as easy as the media would have you believe to get rehired in an instant (especially if you just got laid off from your first job on Day 1).
So, everyone learned that the IT industry is, after all, no different from any other, and you should always cover your ass. The end.
An employee of mine that was working part time with me while finishing up his college degree was hired in August at a new company in San Jose, California, including signing bonus and all that stuff. He was going to be finished with his degree in December and was scheduled to start in January. Well this was last August, so you can guess what happened. He was laid off in early December, -27 days before he was going to start!!
He now works for a company involved in the Internet but actually making products, so it worked out in the end, but -27 days, now that's a story! :)
Also, he had very marketable skills so his only real question was does he have to give back his bonus? Last I heard, I think he got to keep it.
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Oh bother.
Two other factors:
Companies want to see some experience. There's a lot of junk fed to people in school, so there's a lot to UNlearn - starting with the attituds that you know what you're doing, that if it wasn't taught to you in school it's not important, etc. (This is especially true in software.)
You need to prove that you're over the hump and can do real work in the real world. That you can work with a team, rather than try to out-score the other team members. That you can handle a project with multiple solutions and not go for the "best" one over an "adequate and quick" or "easy to get right" one. That you can handle something longer, tougher, and more unknown than a class assignment, something without a canned solution. That you'll read the manual. That you'll pull a stock design for a wheel FROM a manual rather than trying to reinvent it.
Of course this gives you a chicken-and-egg problem: You need a job to get experience. You need experience to get a job. That's part of why work-study and unpaid internships can be a carreer win.
Most jobs are obtained through contacts. A recommend from somebody in or associated with the company is trusted much more than one that a candidate brought with him. A worker or administrator may know someone he's already worked with - and thus that he CAN work with - who has a necessary skill. And a contact will know of the jobs before HR does, and can help you prepare to fit in. And he probably won't try to get you into something he knows you can't handle.
At one time in many companies the HR department exists primarily to give nice brush-offs to the flood of unsolicited resumes while creating plausable excuses for hiring those recommended by insiders. Nowdays (or at least until the recent crash) they're more like a search firm. But even so an inside recommend is worth more than ten from outside.
It's called "networking".
And that's ANOTHER reason that work-study, internships, summer jobs, and the like are very valuable.
You notice the one offer you got was from someone you worked with while in school. Is that more understandable now?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I think there is a theme building in this and several other Slashdot articles lately: you need to have common sense about your career choices.
Just like the guy last week who complained that his employer actually had the gall to try to enforce the intellectual property agreement that he signed, this guy didn't do his due diligence before hand.
It's a big nasty world out there. The last car dealer we went to in the bay area (Bob Lewis Volkswagon) tried to give us a starting price of $3,000.00 over MSRP. Abdominizers and other crappy products get sold to people like you and me, not just wrassin' watching folks in trailer parks. One of the good and bad things about the USA is that you can largely make your own mistakes.
I've made similar mistakes to this one. My 2nd job out of college was for a company that was taking over the regional office of another computer reseller. The deal got held up, and I spent two weeks in Cincinnati in a new apartment with no job. I take responsiblity for that mistake.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an incredible essay on self-reliance. (I also mirrored the Project Gutenburg free text version on my site here.) I carry it on my Palm Pilot and refer to it often when I'm feeling ripped off, used, or abused. There are two attitudes you can take when something happens to you, either it happened to you and you were powerless to prevent it, or it happend to you because you created it. The latter position is a more powerful one, since it gives you control of the situation and the power to change it.
Here's the last paragraph of Emerson's essay, I think it's a good summary of what I'm trying to say.
"So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."
- Twid
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
I'm happy to say I rode the internet wave by staying by the sidelines.
:)
I do not understand this attitude. About a year and a half ago I started a company with my buddies. We got initial funding, things were getting along, then times got tough, funding was cut off, the company died. I still think the idea was great (simply because I would be a happily paying user of our product), but that's beyond the point.
We got burnt - true. But do we regret it? Well, I don't know about the other guys, but I definitely don't. Why should I? I got absolutely amazing experience with more stuff than I could've imagined (from configuring Linux/Apache/MySQL/Oracle/NT network/you_name_it to writing code and designing databases and XML specs to writing business plans and estimating costs/prices to bullshitting to clients and VCs to listening to bullshit from potential suppliers), I worked with great people, I got to see for myself how hard (but doable!) it is to actually create something on your own, I had fun, for god's sake!
If I had to choose again, would I do the same thing again? Absolutely!!! Well... maybe not - I would've probably joined my friend's start-up, which was bought by a stable public company a few days ago
I think that this is becoming true - at least for skilled workers, who can reasonably expect, at the moment, to move onto a new job without much difficulty.
Are we being short sighted though? What happens during the next depression? Skilled workers without any real job security or long term contract will be on the scrapheap without any hope of reprieve. Unskilled workers are having these new working practises foisted upon them, and they do not like it - it is not so easy for them to move on.
My worry is that this environment is reducing the quality of life in our society by removing stability and certainty. At the moment, while the economy booms, this is okay, but what of the future? There will be a bust, sooner or later. What about the unskilled, who will suffer from the easy come easy go working practises we have forced them to accept? What about the skilled workers, who will find that their taking their employment destiny into their own hands has blown up in their faces?
I can't help but think we are digging our own grave.
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Enrollments in computer science are steadily declining because no-one wants to be a half-baked engineering student who isn't guaranteed a steady job out of college! So sign up today! We have small but over-enrolled classes with non-English speaking professors ready to teach you things that would make most human beings cry! Learn obscure languages and methodologies, cause who wants to learn Cold Fusion? Assembly language and Lisp are the future! Pay $80,000 to spend 4 years with society's worst alcoholics and drug abusers clad in Abercrombie and Fitch! Earn no marketable career skills! Prepare for a future in a turbulent industry where 90% of the companies are a joke and the rest of them will have you in a cubicle until the end of eternity! Learn to cry when the NASDAQ plummets! Regret not being a Journalism major! Make your 1450 on the SAT's totally meaningless! Become a real life Dilbert! And best of all, keep a straight face when your MBA idiot CEO asks you to keep working for the next month for no pay... so you can make marketing calls and schmooze gullible VC's.
What are you waiting for!?!
This is a mischaracterization of the Post article. The company hired/fired this guy because one sector of the company did not know the plans of another sector. He probably came in on a hiring effort based on the last thing the company was doing before the buyout.
;)
He was used to an orderly and slow process based on the regulations a government contractor must follow. Then he went to a pure private firm which had an unclear focus due to the fact that someone had let out a rumor about an impending buyout.
Such a rumor makes everyone go haywire. People put on a show of how efficient at their jobs they are so they dont get laid off. Whoever hired this guy probably wanted to show they could make that decision fast, so they wouldn't get cut themselves. They didn't care about the guy they hired.
This can happen with any company, tech or not, especially an ill managed company.
Of course, in my experience tech companies tend to be ill-managed.
Global warming is good for you!
If I didn't know first-hand from my time there what incredible retards the people in IT at GS were, I would be more surprised that they suddenly cut off funding to a company like that. But, in fact, they are retards of the first order, and their sudden urgency in cutting costs is not really remarkable.
Their IT budget for this year was projected to be $1.8 billion - quite a large number. Except that it was being entirely mismanaged and misspent - the place was being run like some crazy Silicon Valley dot-com. 3 consultants were being hired for 1 spot, people in field offices were leaving problems unresolved for days, half of the staff was stuck in planning meetings all day and the other half of the staff spent the day surfing the web for stocks and news on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And they were heaving a great time heaving money out the window - nothing was ever repaired, simply replaced. They even lost a Sun E450 server - lost it! They were pretty sure it wouldn't have made it out of the building past security, but they had no idea where the $150,000 machine was. So what did they do - they ordered another one!
I have more stories like that - like trying to update ntp.conf entries on 2,000 machines because one server went down instead of updating the DNS entries, but in general, the place was a zoo. And then the market crashed, and management in the other business units got pissed. As one exec said, "$1.8 billion, and all I got was a Palm Pilot!" So their budget was slashed, heads started rolling, and now things are a little bit more austere than last year.
Not surprising, not even one bit.
Michael laid them all off.
alternate answer-Andover laid off everybody *except* Michael, told him that computers and automation would make it possible for him to do the work of many.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
This is a good point. Last year, my senior year as a comp sci major, I recall going through the hiring practices and wondering when, exactly, the employers were supposed to start throwing money at me. I mean, I'm not a fool. I was graduating cum laude, from the honors program (that sounds sort of redundant if you know what cum laude means...), with two degrees to boot (applied math and comp sci), having done a co-op, etc. Never happened. I interviewed with maybe a dozen companies over about a 4 month period and got precisely one job offer: from the people I co-oped with (and I already knew about that one before it came).
The media made it seem like you just knock on employers' doors, tell them you're a programmer, and *bam*, money, stock options, prostitutes, ferraris, etc. No industry works like that. Not one. HR departments of big companies are AWLAYS going to go through their motions to weed out duds (legitimate or otherwise) and match buzzwords from your resume and your interview with buzzwords from the job description and "desired qualifications" description, and small companies have always got to worry how you'll fit into their particular, quirky environment, whether or not they can afford to continue to pay you until you finish whatever it was they hired you to work on, etc.
And, of course, if your company has to fire you because the VC cut the funding, take that as a sign that the company was not paying its own bills anyway, and couldn't afford to hire you in the first place. You don't want to work for companies like that in any industry, it's just plain stupid.
--- I've been in school *way* too long....