I walked into Starbucks at 5:30 this morning, ordered a drink . . . the Starbucks guy asked my name and wrote it on the cup, despite the fact that I was the only customer in the store.

Whether that would be considered a training success or failure depends on whether Starbucks trains its people to always ask for the customer’s name, or to use situational judgment.

I was hoping the barista would call my name when the drink was ready so I could do a comical “who, me?” take, but she just set it on the counter . . .

If you don’t have something that is overwhelmingly important to do, then you probably don’t have anything that you’d absolutely rather be doing than getting up and going to work every day. So just start doing that. In any field. And stop deluding yourself that you have so many interests that you can’t choose. Really what you have is no clear interest and only a bunch of things you would consider if you had nothing to do.

— Penelope Trunk, “Steps to figuring out your next career move”

We may work more hours at our jobs without realizing that the childhood of our sons and daughters is slipping away. Sometimes these doors close too slowly for us to see them vanishing.

— Dan Ariely

Sometimes it’s hard to tell if boxes, etc., sitting around the office are supposed to go out with the trash. In Southern California, you’ll often see BASURA written on these things because the probability that a Spanish-speaking person will be taking out the trash is high.

We couldn’t seem to get this box removed by writing BASURA on it, so one of our tech support people came up with this sign . . .

If . . .

• you are able to get important things done
• you are seen learning things on your own
• you are seen trying to do things even if you aren’t sure how
• you share freely the things that you know
• you don’t hide your ignorance, but also don’t rest on it
• you honor what other people know
• you know more often than not how to find out what you don’t know
• you know how to ask for help
• you offer to help people on their own terms

Then . . .

• no one will care whether you succeed by learning or succeed by already knowing
• no one will care if you mess up occasionally because they assume you learn from it
• no one will mind if you forget (or don’t know) any given fact or method at any given time
• you will be treated as if you’re smart and useful, even though everyone knows you have a lot to learn

— Jonathan Bach, “Playing the Expert Game”

A fat woman at the office, sitting at her desk finger-fondling a frosted gingerbread man, whether because it was “male” or because it was edible, I’m not sure. It’s no less disturbing either way.

Parenthetically: I don’t think she knew anyone could see her . . .

One of the HR reps at my new company is explaining Accidental Death and Dismemberment insurance.

“What if someone intentionally dismembers me?” I ask. “Could happen.”

“Do you work in IT?” she asks.

“Do a lot of people in IT get intentionally dismembered?”

“Just something about your line of questioning . . .”

John F. Kennedy, in 1961, proposed to put an American on the moon in a decade. That idea stuck. It motivated thousands of people across dozens of organizations, public and private. It was an unexpected idea: it got people’s attention because it was so surprising–the moon is a long way up. It appealed to our emotions: we were in the Cold War and the Russians had launched the Sputnik space satellite four years earlier. It was concrete: everybody could picture what success would look like in the same way. How many goals in your organization are pictured in exactly the same way by everyone involved?

My father worked for IBM during that period. He did some of the programming on the original Gemini space missions. And he didn’t think of himself as working for IBM–he thought of himself as helping to put an American on the moon. An accountant who lived down the street from us, who worked for a defense contractor, also thought of himself as helping to put an American on the moon. When you inspire the accountants you know you’re onto something.

— “Crafting a message that sticks: An interview with Chip Heath,” The McKinsey Quarterly, 24 November 2007

I’m thankful that I have a job! A lot of people don’t!

I lost my last job a few months ago, along with 9,499 other people in the Orange County real estate/finance industry over the past year. We all got to compete against each other to find another one.

The Orange County Register ran a story yesterday on how some of these folks are doing . . .

Delia DeYulia, a grandmother, was recently forced to take her first retail job.

For the holiday shopping season, DeYulia, 53, is working part-time at Kohl’s, placing clothes on racks and cleaning dressing rooms. She resorted to taking the temporary work after not finding other employment. After 15 years with Fremont Investment and Loan, she lost her mortgage job in Anaheim Hills in March.

“I’m used to sitting in an office,” said DeYulia, who audited loans at Fremont, a firm from which she expected to retire. “Now, I’m on my feet all day. I’m carrying a lot of stuff and my body has to get used to it. It’s hard work for a minimum-wage job.”

The extra money will help pay the mortgage and car payment. Her husband can’t work because he’s disabled.

“I had always felt comfortable financially,” said the grandmother of two. “Now, I’m worried about the future.”

[Robert] Harrington, 31, of Tustin, was let go in September from Bankers Mortgage in Santa Ana. As its loan originator, he made about $75,000 last year. More than half of that was from commissions.

That’s why he thinks his best bet is to find a commission-based job at a luxury retailer or a store that sells big-ticket items.

So he has zeroed in on several shops at South Coast Plaza. He recently applied to Movado, Bloomingdale’s, Sony Style, Porsche Design and Allen Edmonds.

“I hope one of them calls me back this week,” he said.

He needs to help supplement the income from his wife, who is a waitress. They have a three-year-old son.

Corinna Vickers, 35, was let go a year ago from Secured Funding in Costa Mesa. Then two months ago, her husband Shad Vickers, 35, lost his job at Lending Tree in Irvine.

Combined, they had been making $200,000 a year.

Now they’re both unemployed and have been hunting for work to pay their bills and help them save for retirement and college tuitions for their four daughters. They have not had any luck and now the Vickers are both willing to take on holiday retail work.

Rhonda Struman of Laguna Niguel is not waiting around to get hired full time. Last month, she began working as a part-time salesperson at Nordstrom at The Shops at Mission Viejo. It pays $8 an hour. Before she was laid off in August from her underwriting position at Paul Financial in Irvine, she was making more than four times that hourly rate, or about $70,000 a year.

Her husband also got laid off from the mortgage industry. He was pulling in about $130,000 a year. Now, he’s working for $11 an hour at a Costco in San Juan Capistrano.

Because of their huge pay cuts, they’re having a hard time paying their $3,400 monthly mortgage. They sold off their boat to get rid of the monthly payments. They will soon sell their furniture.

“I cry all the time and I’m stressed all the time,” Rhonda Struman said.

By February, she and her husband will leave Orange County for Colorado to look for mortgage jobs or work that pays better than their current employers. They’ll rent out their Laguna Niguel house to help pay the mortgage and then rent in Colorado.

“We have no choice,” said Struman, who’s in her 40s. “There’s too much competition in Orange County. “There are too many people out of jobs” who are looking for new work.

Whew, tell me about it! I was this close to taking a job parking cars for $12 an hour . . .

Related Links

Nor does the immediate future look bright for the local real estate market. Here are some of this week’s headlines from the OC Register real estate blog:

• Calif. had biggest U.S. home-price drops in Sept.
• Fed sees ‘deepened’ housing downturn
• Equity’s gone for 35% of recent SoCal homebuyers
• Early Nov. O.C. home sales off 43.5%

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! You can’t say, “I’m going to put off getting critically ill until I have a better read on the economy.” Well, you can say it, but you can’t do it.

As I arrived for an interview today, the hiring manager asked me, “Did you have any trouble finding the place?”

As it happens, I did not have any trouble finding the place and said so. I had printed out a map from one of the numerous online map sites and the building was right where it was supposed to be.

But even if I had had trouble finding it, my answer would have been the same.

“Some people have trouble finding it,” he told me.

Interesting. As an IT person, I consider myself a problem-solver — actually, I could make a case that any person in any job is hired as a problem solver — so I wouldn’t start out an interview by admitting that I got lost on my way over.

“Don’t hire anyone who can’t find the building,” I said.

My days of unemployment may be over:

No, wait . . . I just read the rest of the story and it turns out not to be a job advertisement . . .

You might wonder whether the Linux operating system provides evidence that offshoring can pay off. I had often wondered about this point myself, so I put the question to Linus Torvalds, founder of the Linux project. Torvalds replied that the two models of software development aren’t comparable:

I don’t think the Linux model works for offshoring in the commercial sense, or really ends up even being very relevant. The problem ends up being communication and the mental model pretty inherent in offshoring.

My belief is that when you say “offshoring,” you very much mean “control the project on one shore, work on the other.” That is, the implication of the offshore work being “subservient” is very much there in the notion of offshoring.

In contrast, the Linux model (and open-source in general) is that there’s no one-sided control, and that when work gets done overseas, it gets done because it makes sense to them, not to “us.” There’s no control of one end over the other–both shores do what they want to do. The fact that makes it all work out is that, in the end, everybody tends to have somewhat overlapping goals.

— Norman Matloff, “Offshoring: What Can Go Wrong?,” IT Professional, vol. 07, no. 4, pp. 39-45, Jul/Aug, 2005

Since I’m currently unemployed, my friend GL asked me to write something about the job interview process. The problem is, there’s already so much written about the job interview process, it’s hard to think of anything to add.

Which brings me to my point: It’s easy to overprepare for interviews.

For example, we have a book here that my wife bought called Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions.

Two problems:

1. Who has time to prepare answers for 201 interview questions?
2. What if the interviewer asks a question that’s not on the list? Where is your God now?

But wait! It gets worse! If you go to Amazon and look up this book, you’ll find a list of similar titles like

• More Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions
• The 250 Job Interview Questions You’ll Most Likely Be Asked
• 301 Smart Answers to Tough Interview Questions
• 101 Great Answers to the Toughest Interview Questions
• Etc., etc., etc.

Clearly this notion of preparing answers to all possible interview questions in advance quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns.

Here’s what I’d suggest instead: Write up a list of the key points you want to make about yourself in the interview, the unique contributions you’ll make to the job and the company. Brush up on a few stories that show you at your best in the workplace.

Then — no matter what the interviewer asks — respond with your points and stories. We’re in the midst of a political season, so it’s easy to observe this technique in action. Politicians are not out there to think up answers to every stupid question someone throws at them. They have a list of points they want to make. So do you!

This list is mostly for your own reference, but you may want to go ahead and put together a nicely formatted version, print out a few copies and bring them to the interview. That way, if the interviewer asks — and they often do — “What makes you the best person for the job?,” you hand them a copy of your list.

Bonus: Most of what’s said in an interview is quickly forgotten. What remains is a general impression and of course — documents!

Related Links

• epoWiki: Interview Questions
• Four Questions to Ask a Hiring Manager

No hard feelings, but I’m looking at the company president’s new employment agreement on EDGAR . . . the stock’s down 50 percent, the bond rating’s been lowered to junk, you laid off 400 people end of July and announced plans to lay off 1,000 more, and yet shareholders will still be paying for a really fabulous set of benefits for this lout: luxury automobiles, first-class air travel, $35,000 a year for financial planning services, and not one, but two, country club memberships.

The rest of the peasants — er, employees — have to pay for their own cars, green fees, financial planners, etc., which is even tougher when you’ve been laid off thanks to my man’s (lack of) stewardship at the mortgage bank.

Let them eat cake!

I challenge you post a link to the employment agreement on the company web site and see if he isn’t guillotined within the fortnight.

The notion of meaning as a guiding principle for happiness explains some interesting facts about what actually compensates workers in their jobs. . . . For example, people who think their work allows them to be productive are about five times more likely to be very satisfied with their jobs than people who do not feel they can be productive. And those who are proud to work for their employers are more than ten times as likely to be very satisfied with their jobs as those who are not proud. In contrast, money matters relatively little, and the amount of leisure time a job allows has no significant effect on satisfaction at all.

— Arthur C. Brooks, “I Love My Work” (emphasis added)

I was laid off recently by a mortgage bank here in Southern California. Times are tough in the mortgage business, as you may have heard.

First, some tips on how not to do a layoff:

1. Call the layoff a “rightsizing,” which suggests that there was something “wrong” with the people who were let go. (Actually, the company I worked for has already announced another “rightsizing” in which 1,000 more people will be laid off over the next few months. They just can’t get these “rightsizings” right.)

2. Overnight a layoff information packet, including a 20-page severance agreement, to the home of laid-off employees, asking them to sign and return it via the enclosed UPS envelope.

3. Don’t enclose the UPS envelope.

4. The next day, overnight a second packet to employees’ homes, containing the UPS envelope and a letter correcting phone numbers, email addresses and other misinformation in the previous day’s packet.

5. Include an obvious misspelling or two in the letter — ideally, something that would slip past a spell checker but be caught easily by anyone who bothered to proofread it. Suggestion: “If you have nay questions . . .”

Unemployed people like to see the kind of flamboyant incompetence that still draws a paycheck.

Want to hire me?

Here’s what I’m good at:

• Software development
• Project management
• Writing
• Training, coaching and mentoring

Looking for 10 reasons to hire me?

Here they are.

My friend PE was laid off recently. He’s leasing out his house and renting a smaller place in an effort to keep his finances under control.

This should be a good lesson for that boy of his: Work hard all your life, try to do the right things, and you too can wind up with no house, no job and a wife who hates you . . .

The California Employment Development Department — aka the unemployment office — scheduled a meeting for me this morning at the Orange County One-Stop job center.

I thought it was going to be a one-on-one meeting to discuss appropriate employment opportunities for someone with my outstanding qualifications as a technologist.

Instead, I found myself placed in a room full of misfits and losers, none in professional attire, and many of them dressed for a day at the beach — shorts, sandals, Hooters T-shirts — while we listened to a presentation on how to make $50,000 a year selling cars.

(”Sounds pretty good,” my son says, and for someone with a junior high school education like him, it probably is.)

In the course of the meeting, three people asked to borrow my pen because they didn’t think to bring one.

Of course, I was wearing a shirt and tie, so I could very easily carry a pen in my shirt pocket. If I’d been wearing a Hooters T-shirt, I wouldn’t have been able to do that . . .

I hobbled into a job interview today like a man whose shoes were too small for his feet.

No, wait, let me back up a little bit . . .

I can never find anything around the house because people keep moving my stuff. Why everyone can’t keep their hands to themselves, I don’t know, but I don’t even try to keep track of things anymore. I just look for something in the last place I put it, and when it’s not there, I ask someone.

“Don’t ask me. I didn’t touch it.”

So I look some more and it always turns out that my camera is in my son’s room, or my keys are in my wife’s purse, or the important document is in the trash, and everyone still maintains that they have no idea how it got there.

Living with people is a mixed blessing, I’ll tell you.

So I was leaving the house for a job interview, nobody else was home, and I couldn’t find my black oxfords.

I was able to find my son’s black oxfords, but his feet are a little bit smaller than mine . . .