I’ve always said if I were ever in trouble and if I were guilty, especially if I were guilty, I would want Bill Clinton there to defend me. Nobody does it better. He’s the most talented politician I ever covered and the most charming man I’ve ever met. And no one in my view can mount an argument more effectively than he can.
Overheard
Everyone in America Can Go to College
This morning I heard President Obama call for universities to lower their tuition rates so that “everybody in America can go to college.”
I am virtually certain that the President is not stupid enough to think that if tuition rates fell to zero, there would magically be enough room in the colleges for everybody in America. So I’ve got to believe that he’s purposely saying stupid things in order to appeal to stupid voters — the sort of voters, in other words, who probably don’t belong in college.
How to Lose Your Job : A Fictional Memoir (Part I)
Because of the huge productivity differences between good programmers and bad programmers — 10x? 28x? More? — my biggest leverage point as a development manager is my ability to hire people.
At my last job, we had an HR Director named Lucy. In every one of our annual Employee Satisfaction Surveys, Lucy’s group had the lowest scores in the entire organization. Nobody liked or respected her.
She was, however, close with the CEO, which made that irrelevant.
Lucy’s friend Kathy Slauson runs the Slauson and Slauson recruiting agency, so that’s where we got our programming candidates, who were mostly terrible.
The Slauson agency doesn’t specialize in IT candidates, although they do have a “technical recruiter,” who unfortunately knows nothing about technology.
They don’t bring candidates in for in-person interviews. They take whatever candidates give them in the form of a résumé and they pass the résumés along to clients like me in hopes of being paid a fee.
- Candidates send résumés to Slauson.
- Slauson sends them to me.
What value does this add over candidates sending résumés directly to me? None.
Slauson doesn’t qualify candidates. They don’t map abilities and skills against the requirements of a position. They add no value to the process, and I had to screen all the résumés myself, the same as if I’d just bought them from a job board.
When I saw that Slauson was just going to throw résumés at me, I asked them to please add a short write-up, indicating why they thought each candidate was a good fit for the job.
What I got was write-ups like “Candidate is good with Technology X,” where Technology X is something I indicated as a job requirement.
When I asked “How did you assess that the candidate is good with Technology X?” they would tell me “We asked him.” Or “It’s on his résumé.”
In other words, “Candidate is good with Technology X” meant “Candidate states that he’s good with Technology X. Unverified.”
(If you’re wondering at this point why an HR department would funnel good money to a recruiting agency for doing nothing, go back and reread the part where I mention that Kathy Slauson is a personal friend of Lucy the HR Director.)
I said earlier that Slauson has a “technical recruiter.” She was in the office one afternoon and handed me a résumé.
“He doesn’t look like an ASP.NET programmer,” I said after looking it over, “which is what we’re looking for. For example, I don’t see any C# experience.”
“It’s right here,” she said, pointing at the résumé where it said this: C++.
If you’re not a programmer, you might say, well, easy mistake to make. C# (pronounced C-sharp, like a musical note) and C++ (pronounced C-plus-plus) are both programming languages containing the letter C followed by one or more symbols.
But whereas C# is the primary programming language for web development on the Microsoft platform, C++ is a lower-level language used for system development. Nobody does web development in C++.
Not surprisingly, a high percentage of Slauson’s candidates bit the dust in the initial phone screen with me, because the phone screen was their first encounter with someone whose programming knowledge was non-zero and could possibly tell a good programmer from a bad programmer.
According to Kathy Slauson, that was totally unacceptable. She thought that because she had an in with the HR department, we should be hiring every candidate she sent over, qualified or not, and paying her for the privilege, which is the way it worked before I arrived on the scene and screwed up the process.
She was always very polite to me in person, assuring me that she was doing her best to improve the quality of candidates, but behind the scenes, she was telling Lucy the HR Director that I shouldn’t be allowed to interview candidates anymore.
(That information was never supposed to reach me but it did.)
Think about that: we had a recruiter telling our HR Director that a manager shouldn’t be allowed to interview their candidates. (The fact that I no longer work there tells you which side of the issue Lucy came down on.)
Kathy also told Lucy that the candidates I was rejecting were perfectly good candidates because after I turned them down, they were being hired at other companies.
Imagine that!
Of course they were being hired at other companies. They were being hired by companies with lower hiring standards for programmers. The best thing that could happen with some of those candidates is for them to be hired by competing organizations.
Do you think Amazon or Google worry that candidates they turn down get hired somewhere else?
(No, I wasn’t trying to match hiring standards with Amazon or Google. I’m just saying that it wasn’t my goal to be the employer of last resort, or to be able to say, “If we don’t hire ’em, nobody’s gonna hire ’em!”)
Everyone I hired was an order of magnitude improvement over the people they replaced.
I like to work with talented people. I’m not trying to get rich and I don’t have a career path. I’m trying to learn and get better and contribute to my profession.
If you give me a job where I’m responsible for hiring people, I’m going to hire the best people available, and decline to be force-fed unqualified candidates by a friend of the HR Director.
To be continued . . .
Aside
Fortune: Inside Stanford’s creativity factory
Accurate Self-Perceptions Considered Harmful
Consider a survey of nearly one million high school seniors. When asked to judge their ability to get along with others, 100 percent rated themselves as at least average, 60 percent rated themselves in the top 10 percent, and 25 percent considered themselves in the top 1 percent. And when asked about their leadership skills, only 2 percent assessed themselves as below average. Teachers aren’t any more realistic: 94 percent of college professors say they do above-average work.
The human brain is a better lawyer than scientist. A scientific brain would form hypotheses, test them against the evidence and reject the ones that don’t pass. The lawyer brain starts with a conclusion that it wants to be true, formulates supporting arguments and discounts evidence to the contrary.
Studies show that people with the most accurate self-perceptions tend to be moderately depressed, suffer from low self-esteem or both. An overly positive self-evaluation, on the other hand, helps our minds defend us against unhappiness and inspires us to become what we think we are.
Misperceptions About Teamwork
What is Rick Neuheisel Doing on the Pac-12 Network?
What is this simpleton Rick Neuheisel doing as a studio analyst on the Pac-12 Network? How many Pac-12 football programs has Rick Neuheisel destroyed?
Let’s review . . .
You wouldn’t know it from watching them lose at home today to Colorado State, but the University of Colorado was an elite program, a national championship winner, when Neuheisel inherited the program from Bill McCartney. Colorado football has never recovered from Rick Neuheisel.
Washington Husky football, thanks to Steve Sarkisian, is just starting to recover from Rick Neuheisel.
I can’t say that Neuheisel wrecked the UCLA football program because there wasn’t much to wreck, but he was at least as bad and probably worse than his abysmal predecessor, Karl Dorrell. Neuheisel’s last game at the helm was a 50-0 dismantling by USC, the worst loss in the rivalry in 70 years.
Neuheisel is a stupido. He looks stupid. He sounds stupid. He’s killing my enjoyment of the games and he’s killing the credibility of the network.
Nevada 31, Cal 24
How does Jeff Tedford have a $5 million house?!
Cal opened their new stadium with a 31-24 loss to Nevada. The Bears looked sloppy, more like a high school team.
FIRE TEDFORD!
That said, time to switch over to Fox and watch some REAL football at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum as the top-ranked Men of Troy take care of some Unfinished Business!
FIGHT ON!
It’s a Seller’s Job Market in IT Right Now, Especially for Agile
I recently concluded a 3-month job search. As part of my networking, I met a number of unemployed people in other fields who were having trouble not only getting jobs, but even getting interviews.
I talked to a lot of people and averaged about an interview a day, including phone interviews, mostly for development manager jobs. For every development manager job, there are multiple development jobs, so if you’re a developer, your situation is even better than mine was.
I live in Southern California, but the demand is not just local. I had multiple contacts from companies outside the SoCal area that can’t find qualified candidates.
I’ve been working again for over two months, I no longer have an active résumé on job boards, and I still get emails and calls every day from recruiters all over the country.
Agile and Scrum are in demand
The situation with Agile and Scrum right now seems to be that a lot of people are putting it on their résumé but most of them are bluffing.
One hiring manager told me that he’d talked to three dozen candidates who claimed to know Scrum and only one (me) who actually knew it.
Another hiring manager asked me to describe the Scrum process, beginning with a product owner with an idea through the end of the first sprint. It’s a basic question, and when I finished, he thanked me for my answer. “You’d be surprised how many people I ask that question and the answer is a yard sale.”
Actually, you’d be surprised how little I’d be surprised by that.
One recruiter contacted me about a 3-month Scrum Master contract in Toledo, Ohio. A glance at my résumé will tell you that I’ve never worked outside Southern California, so on a list of people likely to take a 3-month contract in Toledo, Ohio, my name would be far, far from the top, but the difficulty of finding a qualified candidate to fill that job is such that the recruiter contacted me anyway.
If you really know Agile and/or Scrum right now, it’s a seller’s market.
Rand Paul at the RNC
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXjKGQm9yeY]
Highlights
When I heard the current president say, “You didn’t build that,” I was first insulted, then I was angered, and then I was saddened that anyone in our country, much less the president of the United States, believes that roads create business success and not the other way around.
Anyone who is so fundamentally misunderstanding of American greatness is uniquely unqualified to lead this great nation.
In Bowling Green, Kentucky, the Tang family owns The Great American Doughnut Shop. Their family fled war-torn Cambodia to come to this country. My kids and I love doughnuts, so we go there frequently. The Tangs work long hours. Mrs. Tang told us they work through the night to make the doughnuts. The Tang family have become valedictorians and National Merit Scholars. The Tangs from Cambodia are an American success story, so Mr. President, don’t go telling the Tang family that they didn’t build that.
When you say they don’t build it, you insult each and every American who ever got up at the crack of dawn. You insult any American who ever put on overalls or a suit. You insult any American who ever studied late into the night to become a doctor or a lawyer. You insult the dishwasher, the cook, the waitress. You insult anyone who has ever dragged themselves out of bed to try — to strive for something better for themselves and their children.
To overcome the current crisis, we must appreciate and applaud American success. We must step forward, unabashedly and proclaim, you did build that. You earned that. You worked hard. You studied. You labored. You did build that.
And you deserve America’s undying gratitude, for you, the individual, are the engine of America’s greatness.
Condoleezza Rice at the RNC
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukfS2bfP738]
Highlights
You see, the essence of America, what really unites us, is not nationality or ethnicity or religion. It is an idea. And what an idea it is. That you can come from humble circumstances and you can do great things, that it does not matter where you came from, it matters where you are going.
My fellow Americans, ours has never been a narrative of grievance and entitlement. We have never believed that I am doing poorly because you are doing well. We have never been jealous of one another and never envious of each others’ successes.
And on a personal note, a little girl grows up in Jim Crow Birmingham. The segregated city of the south where her parents cannot take her to a movie theater or to restaurants, but they have convinced her that even if she cannot have a hamburger at Woolworths, she can be the president of the United States if she wanted to be, and she becomes the secretary of state.
Aside
David Anderson: What Kanban Coaches Do and Don’t Do
The Name on the Back
Penn State announced that its uniforms will feature player names on the back of its jerseys for the first time in school history. Once the Nittany Lions run out on the field this weekend, USC football will be the only FBS school never to have had surnames on the back of its jerseys.
By being traditional, USC football has become unique…
We don’t play for the name on the back of the jersey because there is no name on the back of the jersey.
We only have numbers so our moms can recognize us from the stands.
Clint Eastwood at the RNC
That was hard to watch but he did point out one important fact: We own the country. That’s often overlooked, especially by elected officials themselves.
Politicians are employees. We hire them, we pay them, we give them unimaginable sums of money to spend as they see fit, and we hold them to such ridiculously low standards . . .
Occupy Tampa
Residents and merchants here have grown weary of the Occupy Tampa movement’s 6-month presence in their midst, and some of them aim to take action.
On Thursday they plan to take a petition to the Tampa City Council. It maintains that the movement has turned a privately owned park on Main Street into an impromptu squatters’ village that is unsightly and, at times, unruly.
Since adult nightclub owner Joe Redner made his Voice of Freedom Park available to the movement in December, it has filled with pup tents, and has become an eyesore that is unclean, disorderly and unsafe due to people using drugs and drinking alcohol, the residents say.
What we have here, then, is a dispute between a rich man asserting his right to use his property in any way he sees fit and the residents of a lower- to lower-middle-class community who are suffering the externalities of his unregulated actions. The Occupy clowns, natch, are on the side of the rich guy.
Rara Avis: Female Republicans and Tax-Paying Democrats
Here’s a headline from NBC News coverage of the RNC:
Women share their reasons for being at the Republican National Convention
NBC does a lot of editorializing in their “news” coverage.
I propose the following headline for next week’s DNC:
Taxpayers share their reasons for being at the Democratic National Convention
Intimations of Mortality
Medical office visits are intimations of mortality . . .
I had an appointment this morning to have blood drawn. Of the patients who went ahead of me, none of them left the office without elaborately thanking the receptionist.
“Thank you,” they all said with immense politeness.
Everyone is superstitious in the face of death. I’m a good person. I’m going to show what a good person I am by graciously thanking a humble receptionist and maybe they won’t find anything bad in my blood test and maybe I won’t die . . .
Mac Wilkins: What The Discus Can Teach You About Life
Deadspin has an excellent “as told to” story on former Olympic discus thrower Mac Wilkins (What The Discus Can Teach You About Life: Lessons From One Of America’s Greatest Throwers)
Wilkins made four straight U.S. Olympic teams, winning a gold medal in 1976, a silver in 1984, and finishing fifth in 1988. He was also the first man to throw the discus more than 70 meters, and he held the world record for over two years, bettering his own mark three times between April 1976 and August 1978.
Some excerpts:
So one day I go out to train and I say, Oh, what the heck. Let’s just give it a little extra effort today. And I did, and I got better and it went farther. And I thought that was kind of fun. What if I could that again tomorrow? And so pretty soon, I’m hooked on, Can I do it better today? And it was fun. I knew I could get better and I enjoyed it.
It was all about, There are no limits. There are no limits. I have no restrictions. I have no inhibitions. And you can achieve anything that you set your mind to. There are no limits.
I thought that the [1980 Olympic] boycott was a stupid thing to do. We continued to sell wheat to Russia. We continued to sell Pepsi to Russia. We bought vodka from Russia. It was business as usual except for the Olympic Games. And, of course, we only boycotted after we won the ice hockey game in Lake Placid that year. So I thought it was very naïve, and I was very disappointed because I really liked Jimmy Carter. And there’s still a war in Afghanistan, even to this day. So it didn’t do anything.
Is there a moral to the story? Well, probably.
I have so many, so many times when I would fall down or fail. Being a teacher/coach, I have to be … well, it’s exactly like being a parent. You have to be a better person than you really are.
Cutest Photo Ever of a Pug in a Bunny Suit
