Killing Mind

June 29, 2008

Journalistic responsibilities

Ok, I get it. There's a target market for a news feed that is a stones throw from Today Tonight's trashy tabloid material. Ten News are welcome to sprinkle their television news show with updates on who has had a baby lately, or how many firefighters it took to get Snoogles down from the tree this time. There's a significant audience who enjoy their news service delivered that way.

There's a chance however, that there would be some in this audience that would be easily misled. If you're watching trash, then there's some expectation that truths may be bent in the pursuit of sensationalism. In the nightly news bulletin however, I think there is some expectation of integrity.

Which is why, after catching a story on Ten's late news one night, I'm very concerned about the blithe approach to informing the world that is being demonstrated. I faxed the following complaint through:

Towards the end of the news segment was a story about two men who have created a device, attached to their car, which when filled with water, would use the separated hydrogen and oxygen gases to improve fuel efficiency by 20%. Mention was made about their offer to install the device for some fee.

The device and associated installation business is quite clearly, to anyone familiar with physics, chemistry, car mechanics, current scams, or enough common sense, a con. The two men features in the article are without any doubt in my mind, contributors to a global scam to convince people to pay them for a product which simply cannot work (specifically, extraction of hydrogen and oxygen from water requires more energy than it makes available).

I fear, by broadcasting the story, Channel Ten is validating their scam and exposing many people to deception. Further, by promoting provably false statements, Channel Ten are promoting ignorance in their audience.

Apparently, by my faxing the complaint by the official channels and referring to the relevant Code of Conduct, the station is required to respond.

Sure enough, a few days later a letter arrived in the post:

Thank you for your recent letter regarding TEN Late News with Sports Tonight.

As your complaint relates to programming broadcast on a Network Ten affiliate station run by Southern Cross Broadcasting, I have forwarded your letter to their representative, Mr Barry Daley, who will respond to you directly.

That letter was dated 13th June, 2008. I'm yet to hear from Southern Cross and suspect they'd be keen to ignore it. A retraction now would be embarrassing and untimely, so I can only hope some extra thought is given to the integrity of the news stories that make it to broadcast news. It's bad enough that people are so deluded by the petrol price conspiracies that I get 50 copies of that ridiculous email about boycotting a particular petrol vendor forwarded to me, but if seemingly reputable outlets start backing the "car running on water" nonsense, it wont be long before there's a thousand emails and campaigns doing the rounds about beating the oil companies with a water device.

Some people aren't predisposed to doing their own thinking. That gives those that are a lot of work to do. Further, anytime one in a position of influence abuses their position, the pain for the rest increases.

Posted by LightYear at 12:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 8, 2008

Rain rain go away

I'd estimate there's about 60 hours of painting left to do on my house. Given that it is dark or dewy before and after work, I need approximately 5 weekends worth of painting to get it finished. When you take out soccer on Saturday and Sunday, it starts to become painfully clear why a rainy day puts an awful spanner in the works. A rainy Saturday can easily spoil the weekend, setting back the painting task by a week. And there's no guarantee the following week will be available for painting.

In the theme of the good work over at GraphJam the following relationship occurred to me as I find myself recovering after another week of rain.

It's also my first chance to play with iWork Numbers!

Posted by LightYear at 12:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 6, 2008

Hail to the Chinese

What did you do to celebrate the impending Olympic games back in 2000? Fly a flag? Paint yourself green and yellow? Nothing at all? Aussies aren't known for their outward patriotism, but if it were an event, I think the Americans would have some stiff competition.

Check out this fella, who's demonstrating his excitement for the Chinese games by sticking pins in his head. More than a few though. More like 2008 of them. In the Olympic colours no less. Beats Syd, Olly and Shithead any day, methinks.

The Americans however, will not be out done in creating new entries for Guinness and his big book. This shy lass would probably serve well as a mascot representing dedication and plentifulness. Though, sporting a pair of 9kg breasts might mean "Ms Mounds" is not the best icon of good health and agility.

Praise be to the boundary pushers, whatever their motivation may be.

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May 30, 2008

The Wacky World of Recruiters (Part 2)

This is part two of a two part series starting here. This post will actually address the content I intended to write about, before I got side-tracked by some weird bread roll story.

Here are some of the examples of the kind of out-of-touch arrogance I've seen in my recent experience with recruiters. Keep in mind that I have applied with these particular recruiters because employers of interest to me have decided to do their recruiting through their services:

Example One

Gemteq have decided that two chest baring female models are indicative of the service they provide. What better way to illustrative that you're all show and no substance? Gemteq are also superficial enough to adopt the title "Executive" while clearly "specialising" in a wide variety of generic, decidedly non-executive "temp" positions in call centres, retail and sales. Their "specialist" divisions in "IT&T Technical" have not however, managed to design a homepage without a massive ERROR frame in prime focus position.

Example Two

Every recruiter has their own version of the spiel about why their particular questionnaire is original and important, and how it better enables them to understand the candidate. After the third or fourth, it becomes clear that the questionnaires allow recruiters with zero specific domain knowledge of the technical aptitude indicators in a particular industry to perform vague pattern matching and check-boxing of hand-waving attitudes to work. I felt like a brain-dead monkey answering questions such as:

List your Australian Standards knowledge.
I've worked hard to memorise AS 2697-1990. Can I have a job manufacturing car jumper leads, over and over?

Internet skill and experience (include email).
What? You want to know my emailing experience?

Software development skills (for each language show competency level, use while studying or commercially and duration of part-time and full-time usage).
Well, for the C language there was 2.5 hours per night at a mediocre level but then 3 hours per day part-time at an excellent level, and then 2.5 years of use while studying, then full time for 6 months at a professional level. Then there's C++, Pascal, Objective-C, C#, Java...

What motivates you in your present position?
Nothing! I've resigned!

Describe some external factors that had a major impact on your career to date?
The price of coal has risen so my career has serviced a lot of coal mines? A friend suggested that perhaps the intention was to extract an admission that personal matters would cause me to skip work or something. Who really knows?

Power systems experience (please indicate voltage worked with)
Lots of 650 volt stuff but there's no way I'll ever understand that crazy 660 volt world.

PLC programming (include PLC brands)
Siemens. Please don't put me somewhere where they use Mitsubishi, my head will surely explode with the differences.

List application programs that you have strong commercial experience using
That's going to take some listing...

Example Three

A representative from AllStaff invited me in for an interview not, as he explained, to take up much of my time but just to get to know me to better present me to clients. This might have been a commendable aim, had he he allowed me to get a word in edgeways between him repeating how special his recruitment service was, how exclusive their clients are, and how since 1978 he's never not been given a position he has interviewed for. His success he explained, was regardless of the number of candidates going for the position, because he had taught himself how to sell himself. I wondered briefly what dimwits would employ such a shallow, technically vacuous, arrogant and time-wasting buffoon, and then simply resolved to never pursue a career where he had influence.

Example Four

Sometimes I wonder whether recruiters are finding me a job, or selling me penis enlargement pills.

Did you know that over 70% of vacancies are not advertised!?

This is the hidden job market, where if the right
person came along the employer would hire them.
With a few minutes of typing now, MACRO can help
you tap into this hidden market - for free!

Did you know that 78% of statistics are made up? Macro were full of this scammy sales pitch crap.

Example Five

Living in Newcastle, I applied for a job situated in Newcastle, and the recruiter, a representative from Manpower Professional, who have an office in Newcastle, called to confirm that I could meet him for a pre-application meeting at 8:30am on Monday morning in Woy Woy, over an hour's drive away. He succumbed to my hesitation, admitting that he could use my 6 page Manpower questionnaire to put my case forward for the position to gauge interest before requiring that I travel to Woy Woy.

This went nowhere until a couple of weeks later he called again to say that the company had put the process on hold temporarily, but were now keen to proceed. He again asked that I suggest a time for our meeting, and even offered to meet almost 10 minutes closer (still an hour away). I hesitated again, saying I'd contacted the company a while back and never heard anything, and that I had all but accepted a role already. He immediately changed tack, asking what my chosen company were offering. I indicated the rough salary on offer and he let out a little chortle, explaining that that was far too low and what he has to offer is far greater. The figure he suggested was indeed, far above anything I'd come across in some three months of investigation. So I asked him to send the job description through for me to review.

The requirements stipulated that "Tertiary Engineering Qualifications are desirable", "Minimum 3 years experience in project related disciplines" is necessary and that "Electrical design experience" is desirable. In other words, Mr Manpower is suggesting that the company is willing to pay far more than other roles I'm going for, for someone who is far less qualified than me. After months of dealing with recruiters, my bullshit detector was well and truly primed and I politely told Manpower man that things didn't quite add up. I'm yet to hear back.

Epilogue

Ultimately I am glad to be done actively communicating with recruiters. Most interaction events left me feeling dirty. There were exceptions - I met some genuine people who went out of their way for me.

Additionally, I think there is a very real, very specific need for a recruiting service: if a company is on the lookout for new talent, but is not in the position to maintain an active human resources search for a unspecified role, then employing the services of the right recruiter could well be a very smart move. It is the recruiter's role then to scan the field of job seekers, keeping an eye out for good matches on motivation, background, general ability and desires. Rather than matching on specific skills or experience, which can be completely satisfied by a plain old job advertisement, a recruiter can bring to a company's attention the kind of talent that may simply "fit". That sort of job placement is much harder to do with a traditional job advertisement, and seems to me to be the real role of a recruiting service.

Posted by LightYear at 12:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 25, 2008

The Wacky World of Recruiters (Part 1)

In applying for engineering jobs over the last couple of months I've given my details to no less than 20 recruiters[1]. I've never dealt with recruiters before, and the experience has been eye opening.

To understand the motivation of a recruiter, it is worth considering how their role casts employees and employers into positions they are not used to. It has come to my attention that it is more illustrative to consider a recruiter as a provisioner of goods rather than a service provider. A recruiter provides a service only in the same sense that a bakery provides specialist access to bread. In the tricky world of recruiting however, the good is people like me. A recruiter works to sell me to an employer, who pays the recruiter for the acquisition.

It's not hard to see why an employer would shop at a recruiter - acquiring humans goods is a really tough task. Attracting talent a hit and miss affair, interviews are notoriously ineffectual at evaluating suitability, and vacancy advertising is expensive. Given that companies only function if people do good work, it is clear why sensible employers would consider going to the expert suppliers of human goods.

That leaves the relationship between recruiters and employees like me. Evidently I understand the need for recruiters. In fact, for me, the recruiter is providing a service for free! I only need to present my case for employability to a recruiter and then kick up the hells and relax, while the recruiter scans the job market, evaluates their network and finds a great match for me.

Except that's not how it works at all.

Fundamentally I am a bread roll at a bakery. If the bakery has a thousand customers who pay x dollars for looking for a hearty white roll, they are going to sell the hearty white rolls that have the 5 ticks of approval and are cheap to store. If the bakery has another roll also worth x dollars, that tends to be picky about who consumes it, it makes no business sense at all to work to sell that roll when there's a stack of hearty white rolls that sell for the same price. Even if the bakery finds a customer looking for that other roll, the one with the sesame seeds on top, there's only a certain amount of bending over backwards the baker is going to do to sell the roll. If that roll digs its crusty feet in, the baker has easier and more lucrative hearty white rolls to go on and sell.

So what's a person like me - a crusty sesame seed roll - to do? I want to get sold, and being of able mind and body, I put myself on the market. As already established, the consumers shop at bakeries, and it is to bakeries I go. Not every bakery knows the specifics of the sesame seeds on my roll, so for them to be able to sell me they need me to enter the poly-unsaturated fat content breakdown, or my seed chewability, or my resistance to oat bacteria, into their product register.

Up to this point the market forces are working - I'm a crusty, picky roll presenting myself on the shelves of the bakeries that the discerning customers shop at. Imagine however, that there are about equal number bakeries to customers. Suddenly each bakery is jealously protective of its customers. Suddenly the possibility of a crusty sesame seed roll being sold relies entirely on being available at the right bakery. Further, that roll needs to make sure it is completely devoted to offering itself to every bakery, has low on-going costs, and is easy to sell. Otherwise, if the bakery wants to make money, it will work hard at selling that which is modestly suitable and easy to move.

The analogy provides the background to my process of realisation in visiting recruiters. In recruiters we have a business selling a good. Their expertise lies in the selling of that good, not in the way that good is constructed. Recruiters are faced with a good that talks, that knows about its target market, that could in fact, communicate on a practical level with its customers. And therein lies my frustration with recruiters - in general I have found that they:

• Jealously guard their clients
• • Sure, without that exclusive relationship I'd be less motivated to sign up with recruiters, but the secrecy means I'm wasting time signing up with recruiters that may well have nothing that interests me.
• Have no expertise (or have tried and failed) in the work their candidates do.
• • I think the ideal role for recruiter would be as a mediator between me as an engineer and the human resource elements of the employer. The general lack of appreciation for the work an engineer does however, means most recruiters are entirely committed to salesmanship, rather than mediation.
• Push clients and candidates to make a sale rather than satisfy both.
• • Every recruiter had their own spiel about how special they were for working to satisfy employer and employee. Every recruiter that found a company willing to see me also bugged and pestered me to pursue that course without consideration of my own desires. The recruiter only gets paid if they place me, and that is therefore their primary concern.
• Consider themselves special for having contact with employers that any in-touch employee is already aware of.
• • Given their were maybe 10 high potential employers on my radar, and many more recruiters, I quickly become sick of each recruiter telling me how special they were to have direct links to company X. Despite how special that recruiter feels, I still need to sign up with every one just to get my resume in front of a wide variety of companies.
• Consider that their own particular generic, lengthy candidate questionnaire warrants full attention.
• • These questionnaires take time. A lot of time. That would be a mild frustration if it weren't for the fact that I'd already spent considerable time on my own resume and cover letters, and that the questionnaires invariably are vague and unintelligent.

Typically enough, this post has taken a path I did not plan. I'l save the original impetus for part two of this post, and conclude by saying that from meetings with 20-something recruiters, I had about 8 job interviews. 5 of those I set up myself through contacts in the industry. During this time my referees have been contacted zero times.

[1] While I'm doing a recap, it's worthwhile actually listing the recruiters I can find details of:

• Hays
• Hayden Recruitment
• Hudson
• EMA
• WorkPac
• Hunter Industrial Recruitment
• Davidson
• Macro Recruitment
• BSI People
• Personnel Concept
• Calibrate Recruitment
• Nizza
• AllStaff
• Manpower Professional
• Agile Consulting
• Forsythes
• Gemteq
• Executive Talent International
• Avantia
• Connect Personnel
• Interlogic

Posted by LightYear at 9:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

May 22, 2008

This is what I aim for

By some cosmically coincidental path, I recently stumbled across the blog of Marieke Hardy. The particulars of my journey there are lost amongst the feverish information consumption I partake in after my evening scotch, but the point is I've found a voice that engages me and a personality that somehow, I feel I identify with. Marieke can be heard regularly on JJJ radio, the radio station that also happens to represent a voice I cling to as a rare, consistent, genuine and intelligent beacon in amongst the petty clichés of mainstream media. I think that strangely appropriate combination of interests is the reason I'm not afraid to say, at 26 years of age, that I have a 14 year-old crush on Marieke.

I compare it to the crush of 14 year old not because I think it is immature, but because I think it is based entirely on ideals and not on personal connection. I've never met the lady, she's never heard of me, but I'm attracted to the way that she lays bare her identity to be consumed by those that are willing. Her candid, funny, unashamedly nerdy writing captures me in a unique way. Ultimately, this is the kind of writing I aspire to.

I see Marieke blithely lay out phrases like "You may even come a little in your pants", and surround it by considered expressions such as "Why not pick up a novel and ... become so engrossed in Carson McCullers' searingly dry prose" and compare it to my own stunted, emotionless efforts. When I write "the particulars of my journey there are lost amongst the feverish information consumption I partake in after my evening scotch" I feel it is conceited and contrived.

This blog is creative outlet I enjoy (it's contrasts well with the rigour of my primary passion, engineering), but I especially like that I get to look up to the unpolished writing of others and learn. Have a go at this gem:

Breaking a sweat is boring as fuck, but good for the brain. If you're able to balance William Boyd on the LED display thing or whatever the hell it is trying to convince you you're cycling through the Parisian streets, you are doubling the awesomeness pulsating through your receptors. That's right, cerebrovascular affairs are my specialty subject.

PS. Marieke's blog is anonymous, so just imagine that I said "Ms Fits" every time you thought you saw "Marieke".
PPS. I've been on a rather inspiring date tonight, hence the embarrassingly romantic post tonight.

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May 21, 2008

Ambiguity had had no master

Natural languages evolve without much consideration giving to logical consistency. Really, it's surprisingly that there are not more situations where the language we use corners us into lexical traps. Perhaps as we've grown with a developing language, we subconsciously accept that there is ambiguity in everything we say and that is why communication usually generates and relies on a relationship between deliverer and receiver.

Ambiguity had had no master however, until this gem came to light:

James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher

That it has existed as a Wikipedia page for six months so far, with many edits along the way, leads me to believe that it is a phrase with some persistence, assumably in linguistics circles. Those linguists ay? Had they had other pursuits, we'd all be had. Hadn't we?

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May 19, 2008

Stay humble

The more I learn about the world, the more I realise I have yet to learn. I came across this today, and the owner's comments immediately impressed upon me as my thought of the day.

The tattoo is an illustration of the Gestalt Law of Closure, and reminds it's owner that you should:

"stay humble, because you never know how much of the world you're making up as you go along"

I think a tattoo of an incomplete triangle is a radical way of remembering your maxims, but it certainly does help give the quote some authority.

Original link.

Posted by LightYear at 6:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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