EppsNet

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Jobless workers in Silicon Valley are giving up on the region’s dominant technology industry and trying to switch to other fields, as the area’s unemployment rate spikes above the national and state average.

Silicon Valley’s unemployment rate — which was below California’s average and largely tracked the national average last year — has soared, surpassing the state average in May. By June, the area’s unadjusted unemployment rate was 11.8%, worse than California’s 11.6% and the national rate of 9.7%, according to the latest figures from California’s Employment Development Department.

Many of the jobless techies are targeting new gigs in the clean-energy or health-care industries . . . Some are shifting even further afield, looking for jobs in teaching or financial consulting. People are leaving tech as “more tech companies are offshoring and some are shrinking, plus people are burned out and tired from having been there and done that.”

— Silicon Valley’s Jobless Unplug From Tech – WSJ.com

We’re discussing whether our organization will use a popup user survey on our web site . . .

“I propose doing the survey without the popups,” I say. “That’s why browsers have popup blockers, because people don’t like popups. A popup is like a poke in the eye. I don’t like it when things pop up unexpectedly and poke me in the eye. Whenever that happens, I make sure not to go back to that place anymore.”

Unfortunately, no one picks up on the “popped up and poked me in the eye” motif because I was then going to chide them for their junior high school mentality.

“I had a teacher who used to say that,” a young woman says. “‘It’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.’”

I say, “I used to work with a guy who said, ‘You can’t beat that with a sharp stick.’ Why would the stick have to be sharp if you’re going to beat someone with it? You’re really just looking for something with a little heft to it.”

The same woman says, “I had a boyfriend who used to say, ‘You’re not going to hold that over my shoulder, are you?’”

“You have abysmal taste in men.”

I wasn’t able to persuade the team to abandon the popups. The argument in favor was that a lot of web sites use popup surveys so how bad can they be?

I worked for a dot-com consulting company during the boom and bust of that industry. The whole thing was based on the notion that everyone else is doing it so it must be a good idea.

The subsequent implosion of the entire industry disproved that theory rather dramatically.

Since then, I try to stay open to the possibility that even though a lot of people are doing something, it still may not be a good idea . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

After three months on the dole, I got a job offer from the IT director of a local non-profit healthcare association here in Orange County. I start next week. As Gerald Ford used to say, “Our long national nightmare is over.”

It’s a small IT group — 8 people, including the director. I’ve got to admit I’m a little burned out on big corporate IT shops.

I got out of hands-on programming and into leadership roles because I thought I could do a better job than the people I saw doing it. I wanted to develop teams that got things done using their skills and their collective intelligence, but in practice, you typically get locked into some corporate process standard.

A process may be good for delivering consistent results, but they may not be consistently good results. Like at McDonald’s, every Big Mac is just like every other Big Mac because they have a process for making Big Macs. But is a Big Mac a high-quality dining experience? Not really . . .

A friend and former colleague, who was also recently let go by a local mortgage company, emails to say

I’m doing well… still spending a lot of time in Bakersfield, spending time with my parents. I’ve been looking for jobs, but haven’t applied for anything. I guess I actually need to apply.

She’s single, she can afford to be sanguine.

I was in contact with at least 100 companies in one way or another – sent a resume, called, phone interviews, in-person interviews – and got two job offers. So the upside with her approach is that I could have avoided 98 rejections.

Did I mention the job is with a healthcare organization? I was laid off from my last job, with a mortgage bank, when the mortgage industry tanked. Prior to that, I was laid off from a dot-com consulting company when that industry imploded.

I’ve got a knack for getting into industries at their absolute zenith, then riding them down the drain.

But healthcare — it’s recession-proof! Isn’t it? You can’t say, “I’m going to put off getting critically ill until I have a better read on the economy.”

My first 10 years in the software business, I had great managers. They did the management thing and I did the programming thing and we got great results together.

Then, after the dot-com boom torpedoed industry hiring standards, I got tired of working for managers who should not have been allowed anywhere near a software project, people who were not fit to direct a professional software developer to a table at the Olive Garden, much less direct their activities on a complex project.

I couldn’t possibly have continued to work for people like that — it just made a mockery of all the work I’d done over the years to actually learn something — but I still miss being a developer . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

Warren Buffett published his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders this week:

Our gain in net worth during 2003 was $13.6 billion, which increased the per-share book value of both our Class A and Class B stock by 21%. Over the last 39 years (that is, since present management took over) per-share book value has grown from $19 to $50,498, a rate of 22.2% compounded annually.

Continue reading Warren Buffett Gets the Last Laugh

I guess I should have seen this coming when they eliminated free bagels on Fridays. Or when we stopped printing things on plotter paper because the paper vendor stopped coming around shortly after we stopped paying him.

The retention list was heavily weighted toward young women with big tits and the managers’ poker buddies. Two of the laid-off developers had to be hired back within 30 minutes of being let go, when someone in authority belatedly realized they were working on the company’s only billable project.

None of us will be retiring on our severance package, since there wasn’t one. We’re now faced with the one thing we all feared enough to stay with this company so long in the first place: trying to find another job in the worst tech market in 20 years.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

Best one-sentence explanation of how the dot-com boom killed professional practice in the software business:

Improving operational efficiency is not a priority during gold rushes.

— Steve McConnell

I was a big fan of the original vision of this company . . .

• ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up
• Diary of a Start-Up
• Goodbye ArsDigita
• The Dot-com Deadpool: ArsDigita

This is a story about customer satisfaction in the Internet age.

Today’s Good Morning Silicon Valley brings this provocative item:

Problems with Webvan? Mercury News reporter Joelle Tessler would like to talk to former Webvan customers dissatisfied with the company’s service. If that’s you, please drop her an e-mail at jtessler@sjmercury.com

Is this for real?! Well, there’s one way to find out . . .

From: Paul Epps
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 2:35 PM
To: jtessler@sjmercury.com
Subject: webvan

Are you preparing an article on dissatisfied Webvan customers? How do you know they're dissatisfied before you've talked to them? Who can the *satisfied* Webvan customers talk to? I'm in no way affiliated with Webvan, nor was I a customer, but this doesn't seem fair.

Apologies in advance if I've misread your intentions.

From: Tessler, Joelle
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 2:39 PM
To: Paul Epps
Subject: RE: webvan

I have been working on a story about Webvan for about 6-7 weeks now (have spoken with more than 40 people who worked there) and I am learning that they had some pretty serious problems in the Oakland warehouse. Because it was so highly automated, things would break and everything would come to a halt. I keep hearing about orders that never made it out the door, orders that were hours late or cancelled altogether, orders in which half the totes were missing and so on. This is all coming from the couriers, customer service representatives, warehouse workers, etc. But just about every customer I have ever spoken to loved Webvan and I can't figure it out... If I can't find dissatisfied customers, I will say that in the story.

From: Paul Epps
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 2:54 PM
To: Tessler, Joelle
Subject: RE: webvan

Wow, what a quick response! Here's a theory for you: It doesn't take perfection to satisfy people where Web technology is concerned. They still have such low expectations that they're amazed when it works at all.

From: Tessler, Joelle
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 3:11 PM
To: Paul Epps
Subject: RE: webvan

Well, some of that was cut and pasted since I've had to explain this over and over... You're probably right. A lot of customers have written back to say they did have some problems, but still loved the service.