Comic relief

I applied to a job posting for a (software) product management consulting company last week. As near as I can tell, their product managers swoop in on clients, develop requirements documents and hand off to developers to build and install.

Rinse and repeat.

I like consulting and I really enjoy collecting, writing and prioritizing requirements, because it involves developing a deep understanding the business problem and the people who use the system, and then advocating on their behalf. So I thought this was worth a shot.

As part of this company’s “talent acquisition” system, I have to complete a short questionnaire that includes such issues as:

·         What do you love about requirements? Why?

·         Have you worked with use cases?

·         What is the point of using use cases?

I was a little disconcerted when one of their questions began, “On a scale of 1-10, where 1 is the best”, and another started, “On a scale of 1-10, where 10 is the best”. You’d have thought that a group of people who want detail-oriented employees would have settled on one convention. In a single document. Five questions apart.

Plus, they sent a document for me to complete, instead of directing me to an online system, which seems weird for a company specializing in software requirements. Why would they use what’s essentially a manual input device?

But as I was squinting to read the questions, I realized that the questions and answer spaces are set in 10-point Comic Sans.

They just lost about 30 points on the competitive scale of 1-100, with 100 being best.

Workers of the world strike back

Well—this is timely. In my post Tuesday about how companies turn to crowdsourcing for creative work, particularly design and what they call “content” (meaning, you know, words that tell their story), I did not touch on one dirty little fact.

Well, perhaps dirtier, seeing as to how it’s dirty enough that corporations (and, actually, federal agencies) go to great lengths to extract the lowest possible price from their creative vendors.

(In the case of the feds, they actually have the chutzpah to open “design contests”, inviting designers to spend scores of hours designing departmental logos for risible “prize money” and the glory of being able to say that you designed the logo. E.g., Department of Interior last year put out the call for a new logo; total available: $1000. You should have heard the discussions on my various tech downloads on that when some woman posted the “great opportunity” to the list. Professional design guilds estimated that the job was worth $20K-$50K, approximately the amount of money the GSA paid for one breakfast at their recent taxpayer-funded Vegas bacchanal. One large wouldn’t even have bought cocktail napkins for one of their many team-building activities.)

Okay, so as if expecting people with years of training and experience, not to mention God-given talent to provide you with highly creative, professional branding material, that’s going to tell your corporate story at a single glance, for a fee that amounts to an hourly rate below minimum wage isn’t enough of a Scrooge for you, client companies often…just don’t even pay the niggardly amount they agreed to.

It’s appallingly easy to screw designers, developers and “content” creators. Take their work and just stop replying to their emails or taking their calls. And as for writing a check—fuggedaboutit.

For most of us, the only recourse is bad client ratings on the crowdsourcing site and small claims court. But here’s a designer who took the street-justice route. Here's what you see if you go to the offending website:

Evidently the client is in financial straits and there’s no one around to try to take back the site. Their difficulties are so great that perhaps they never will.

But it’s a lovely site to see someone from the corporate “job creators” class named and shamed.

Power to the people!

The subject is TV

So, it seems that the Military/History Channels don't have a lock on dysfunctional communications. You can't tell from this pic, but here's a bit from a promo for USA's In Plain Sight series, which is ending on Friday:

Apologies for the blur. But trust me: this is what USA Network thought appropriate in terms of subject-verb agreement.

But, back at the Military Channel, we have yet another disconnect in terms of where Mickey's hands are and what constitutes an hour:

I wonder if any of their execs ever watch their own programming?

I wonder if any of their execs can tell time?

Workers of the world

Today being International Labor Day, I’m going to tell you about a recent experience trying to get a logo designed for an organization I’m helping out.

It’s a really great group, dedicated to helping the unemployed find jobs by connecting them with people who know people in companies all over the Bay Area. I volunteered to be product manager and to lead the revamping of their website, because—although they call their connections concept Networking 3.0—their website harkens back to Web 0.5.

Maybe even Web 0.25.

I won’t even tell you their URL. It’s that bad.

(The current functionality isn’t much better, either, although the executive director keeps referring to the features as “apps”. They’re not “apps”; they’re lists of members, of companies and jobs, with some links you can click on.)

But I digress.

As part of actually making this outfit look what I call “web real”—like a viable, professional entity that has both gravitas and technological credibility—I created a full-on design specification, with positioning, organizational background, use cases, etc. I also finally persuaded the ED that we need a logo. We can’t get the site actually designed & built until we have some sort of brand around which to, you know, design it.

This being a non-profit, our original email blast for a pro bono designer didn’t net anyone. And we have two events to attend this weekend, so the production of a logo became a priority. The ED therefore opened an account on elance, posted an excerpt from my design spec and then handed it over to me to deal with.

Within 12 hours we had 16 proposals, and here’s where the issue of international labor came in.

I already had issues with the idea of crowdsourcing, because it essentially reduces every commission to a freefall to the lowest bid. For a while I was part of Guru, a similar site; but I realized that if I put forth a bid that was fair compensation for the talent and level of expertise I bring to the job, I’d always be underbid.  I wasn’t being outrageous, either; I was estimating the amount of time a job would take and what I would get if I worked at an agency to do it.

Sites like these pit creative vendors against competitors in third-world countries who will always underbid. And for many, many “clients”, getting something for next-to-nothing is the most important consideration. (Like people buying air travel tickets who’ll go with the carrier that’s $5 less. The result being that airlines compete for the lowest airfare and the lousiest service. Or the entire Wal-Mart business model.)

Keep in mind that, by my estimate, designing a logo will take a minimum of four hours of work: absorbing what the client’s business is all about, their market, their ethos, their competitors, etc., developing appropriate colors (in our case, since we don’t already have them), designing several possibilities; getting client feedback; editing the designs; and finalizing. It took me eight hours to go through the 16 vendors’ listings, look at the work they’ve done before, start sifting them out and supplying the winners with information about our organization.

We got bids from designers in the US, Pakistan, Mexico, Yemen, Colombia, Argentina, Trinidad/Tobago, Bulgaria and the UK. The highest was $383.56; the lowest, $45.

This is our global economy in a nutshell—corporations are doing this on a grand scale, offshoring jobs (and tax payments) to places where they can pay workers a pittance and not worry their heads about safe working conditions and extraneous stuff like that. And I was essentially being asked to participate in this in a very personal way.

Made me very, very uneasy. And not just because on something like this I prefer to sit down across a table from someone to tell the story and answer questions.

In the end, I chose two designers, one with a bid of $170 and the other at $80. Both from the USA. I filled out detailed questionnaires about our organization Friday morning; both replied that they had enough information to produce designs. I’ll get initial output from one today, from the other tomorrow.

I worry, though. I worry that without the actual human contact (not even a phone call—strenglich verboten in the elance model) my questionnaire answers don’t give the full idea of what this organization does so it can be represented in a logo. I worry that I’ve helped support a system that turns everything into a sweatshop. I worry that I’ll get useless designs back and we won’t have anything for the two job fairs this weekend—so I’ll have a crappy web site and no logo to give job seekers any confidence in our ability to help them.

I worry that the Internet, instead of opening real opportunity, just reduces everything to the lowest common denominator.

Theory of relativity

If you’re looking for something to put your life into perspective, I give you this site where it’s all laid out for you.

I have to say that your ordinary laptop display isn’t really adequate for the visuals, so if you’ve got a real monitor, definitely make use of it.