Ah, romance...

A Facebook friend recently reported that a (male) work colleague posted this notice to the company “marketplace” email alias: “I am looking for an empty ring box. Preferably one from a high end jeweler such as Tiffany’s. Willing to trade for it or purchase it for the right cost.”

Well, whaddaya gonna say? Oh, shoot, let me take a swag at it.

First, If I had such a brand-name box that I wanted to offload, I don’t think I’d “trade” for it with a guy who clearly thinks nothing of passing off mutton dressed as lamb. I’d insist on cash, and I’d run any bills through a counterfeit-checking process.

Plus, does "trade" mean he thinks you'll swap Cartier for Kay? Who would want to do that, and why?

I also wonder what the “right” cost would be to such a person?

If I were management in this company, I’d start taking inventory of capital equipment. He obviously has an extremely well-developed sense of entitlement, as well as an ingrained belief that he’s one really slick fellow. Just sayin’.

Moreover, I’m sorry for the woman who’s been in a relationship with him long enough to prompt him to pop the question using a ring of falsified provenance. What kinds of nickel-plated lies has he been feeding her?

Finally, let me just point out: nothing says true love like a cheap ring in a Fred box.

Not.

Hey there, lonely girl

As if dealing with recruiter-morons who drive you crazy with their gabbling ignorance and incompetency isn’t enough tsuris in the World o’ Tech, now I have Google passing judgment on my life. And finding it wanting.

I was trying rather lackadaisically to build out a Google+ profile for the account associated with this blog. (Oh, like you don’t have multiple Gmail accounts? I’ve got one for each one of my personalities. At least, all the ones I know about. So far.) Really, the only reason I was doing it was to see if I could then determine who gives a post a +1, because the blogging platform tells you someone has, but not who.

Well, to set up your Google+ frisnic, Google demands that you tell them about everyone you could possibly connect with electronically, so they can bombard them with invitations to join [person] on Google+! Which I ignored.

  

Then it insists on you plugging into a bunch of interests, so it can bombard you with “suggestions similar to left-handed quilters of copper pipe-warmers using only blue star-shaped patchwork” opportunities.

I ignored that, too.

Thereupon Google+ informed me that I must be lonely, because I wasn’t ratting out anyone to join the cult. No, seriously—they said, “You might be lonely”.

And you can see which way they want you to turn by which button looks greyed out and which is bright blue with bold type.

Look—subtlety obviously doesn’t pay off in this game.

Well, I clicked on the sad little lonely choice, whereupon they gave me one last chance to “be awesome”.

(Like, how are you supposed to be awesome after they've already branded you as lame?)

That was where I cancelled out of the operation.

And as for using the “L” word, Google: Harsh, dudes. Way harsh.

Recruiters 38

I may have found a way of stemming the tsunami of spamming from Indian contract recruiters. They find your CV on a job board and send you “excellent opportunity with our direct client”, for underpaid contract jobs that are not “in your wheelhouse” (as they say here in the Valley they call Silicon), and frequently are in other states.

For example:

Or:

(I am not a software developer, systems engineer or program manager. And I reside in a specific part of California.)

Apparently there are no maps of the United States in South Asia.

Now, what is frequently absent from these emails is an option to be removed from their database. As:

In fact, I have received multiple emails in the same day for the same contract job from this Somasoft crowd. Even multiple emails in the same day for the same contract job from the same recruiter.

You’ll notice, by the way, that this particular recruiter shows a San José phone number. But he’s actually located in Bangalore; they almost always are. They use IP phones.

Anyway, I tried replying asking to be removed from their data base, whereupon Ram resent the solicitation, but this time with the unsubscribe link. However, two days later I was getting multiple emails in the same day for the same contract job; some from the same recruiter.

So I dug a little on their website. And—in addition to the usual claptrap about how great they are (an Elite Oracle Global Partner), there were two people listed in their “management” page. One, the CEO, is in India (quelle surprise); the other, their director of business development, lists both his email address and a phone number.

So I forwarded him all four emails I got that second time around and said I did not appreciate being spammed by his recruiters after I’d used their unsubscribe function.

(Although I’ve noticed that a lot of the unsubscribe or remove links on these South Asian emails resolve to the same URL, so I wonder whether it has any use at all.)

The pattern seems to be that the emails stop for a while, but then start up again. Evidently these people have the attention span of a goldfish. So I just keep sending them to the business development guy. However, now that I found the CEO's address, he's getting them, too. Maybe that'll work.

Put your lips together...and blow

Wow—Lauren Bacall has died, aged 89. And it’s the end of the era of the class act.

Bacall was one of the most commanding presences you’ll ever see on the screen. I’m frankly not all that wild about To Have and Have Not, but there’s no question at all about her holding her own against Bogie, even with their age difference and his screen experience. And, of course, they carried that chemistry through The Big Sleep, which is about as noir as you get.

But maybe my favorite Bacall film is How to Marry a Millionaire. It’s one of those movies I can watch over and over, not least because Marilyn Monroe in glasses is a hoot and a half. But Bacall’s Schatze, the model behind the grand strategy to marry really big money, really runs the show.

That sultry demeanor, piercing gaze and husky voice went with her throughout her career. She made a wildly despicable matriarch in Appointment with Death, and was a fine Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler in the film of one of my favorite children’s books.

Look, I even sat through The Mirror Has Two Faces because of her. Even though I didn’t believe for a New York minute that she could have produced a daughter like Barbra Streisand.

Perhaps more than anything, Bacall was a classy broad, and you just can’t say that about many women today, either on or off the screen. The Beyond just got much more interesting.

Recruiters 37

When you’re engaged in a job search in the technology field, you face a particular set of obstacles: the never-ending waves of job-shops who work the industry like locusts sweeping across fields of wheat.

There are a number of factors at work here: first off, the client companies—which include Yahoo, Cisco, Microsoft and a lot of other big names—can save money short-term by laying off full-time employees (FTEs), with their attendant benefit expense, and replacing them with contract workers who can be hired and fired interchangeably.

(It’s not that you have much security as a FTE—most corporations hire you at-will, which means they can let you go pretty quickly if they need to show some cost savings to balance out their executive bonuses. Think of the difference this way: FTE is indentured servitude; contracting is chattel slavery. You never make enough to get ahead, much less build financial security.)

It used to be that contractors were hired essentially on a project basis: a company needed extra help to complete a specific project by a certain date, so it brought on extra staff to get the job done. When mission was accomplished, the contractors left. These days, however, contractors are brought on board to do ongoing jobs, like software testing, network engineering, administrative support, etc. All jobs that should be fully integrated with an organization’s long-term goals and corporate ethos. But you’re treated as “other”, while expected to display all the enthusiasm of someone fully vested in the outcome.

Another factor is that the client companies put out their requirements to multiple vendors, who compete with one another to grab up the same talent pool, but also to do the job at the lowest cost to the client, and therefore to the lowest pay for the actual worker. Cisco, Adobe, Google—they don’t really care so much about the quality of the contractor as they do about filling the slot at the lowest hourly rate.

(They also limit the number of hours the contractor can bill for—40 hours per week at whatever miniscule hourly rate is agreed; but, like Walmart, they expect the contractors to work off the clock and are outraged if you explain to them that they themselves placed the limit on your hours and once that limit is reached they have the choice of paying you for the excess or wait to talk to you next week when the clock resets.)

For example, I’ve received multiple vendor come-ons for a couple of product marketing positions at Adobe (some of them multiple emails from the same recruiter at the same company; they’re not big on attention to detail). Their cookie-cutter emails all instruct you to state your rate, but that’s pointless, because they’re going to pay some percentage of the rate they’ve negotiated with the client company, so I always just ask what they’re paying. On the Adobe job their rates varied by $12 per hour. I’m pretty sure Adobe was offering them a single rate—so whoever supplied the selected candidate was going to get $X. But some of them were obviously going to keep more of that rate than others.

The vast preponderance of these vendors are run and staffed by South Asians. The emails have US addresses, and the caller ID shows various US area codes. But the recruiters are in India or Pakistan, and they’re using IP phones. One way you can confirm this is that the “excellent opportunity with our direct client” is frequently in another state—I’ve been solicited for contract jobs in Michigan, Kentucky, Texas, Minnesota, New York and North Carolina. Evidently there are no maps of the US available in Bangalore.

(I’d comment on the fact that the “excellent opportunities” are also often for developer, QA, systems engineer and other completely inappropriate positions, but the home-grown varieties of recruiters also data mine résumés for key words and blast out their emails without thought to the fact that having the words “project” and “manager” somewhere in your CV does not mean you’re a hardcore implementation program manager. But at least they know the difference between California and New York.)

As for meeting the requirements of the client company’s job description—actually, these Indian recruiters would put forward a plate of succotash if it somehow passed the interview with the customer. (Which, in some cases, is entirely possible.) And they’d offer it help getting an H1b visa to get the job.

Oh—and many of these companies are 8A-certified by the Federal government. Those who’ve ever worked in the Federal contracting space know what that means: they get to jump to the front of the queue when it comes to consideration, on account of them being “socially and economically disadvantaged” businesses.

So welcome to the world of opportunity and innovation here in the Valley they call Silicon. Good luck.

Good night, Robin

The world got a little less funny today; Robin Williams died at his Tiburon home, age 63. It was an apparent suicide; I don’t want to think about the asphyxia part.

As anyone who’s been at all sentient during the past few decades knows, Williams was manically hysterical. At times he sounded like he’d ingested helium, although it might well have been cocaine. Williams was pretty open about his problems with drugs and alcohol.

To tell you the truth, I found Williams’ humor a tad overwhelming; he was better in small doses. But it turned out that his dramatic acting was extraordinary. I can watch him in Good Will Hunting again and again. Every single time, I find something more to know about his character, Sean Maguire.

Okay—I liked him in Hook, too. He was great as the forever-boy who somehow grew up and had to recover that childlike and childish capability. And he made a great Teddy Roosevelt in the Night at the Museum franchise. And he was a completely convincing killer in Insomnia.

Williams was much more than an actor and comedian. He, Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg pioneered the idea of telethons for charity that focused entirely on humor. And he supported and funded many other charitable organizations.

  

I expect we’ll learn more about Williams’ demons in the days to come. Must have been some massive load of pain in him to lead him to find a permanent solution to it.

Damn.

Gratitude Monday: Blooming summer

One of the benefits of being a Leo baby—to offset the flop-on-the-floor hot weather that afflicts the world north of the Equator—is that, if you live in the right places, you get a month-long festive environment, courtesy of crape myrtle trees.

When Lagerstroemia is really strutting its stuff, it produces great fluffy clouds of intense colors. The flowers appear in clusters, which makes them different from, say, cherry or dogwood.

  

But a tree in full bloom blurs the distinct clusters and gives the impression of an integrated explosion of color.

And—unlike cherry and dogwood—the flowers last for several weeks.

Crape myrtle blooms come in white, pale pink, fuchsia, red and a kind of pale bluish-purple. Around the Valley they call Silicon, no one seems to have used the white ones.

Where I grew up in LA, crape myrtle was obviously a popular landscaping element; the trees would start to bloom around the beginning of August. In Virginia, where they compete with both dogwood and cherry, it began earlier in July, but there was still a lot of color left for early August. Here in NorCal, where it’s also found all over the Valley they call Silicon, we’re back on the August schedule, which makes my neighborhood walks enjoyable.

You find them in front yards, in commercial parking lots (plenty of them in the Sunnyvale Public Library parking lot), parks. Not in the wild—they’ve obviously been introduced as some kind of welcome-to-paradise statement.

But however they got here, I’m grateful they are, and in such abundance.