Tonight, there was more proof that Planet Rock is the coolest radio station in the world, even slightly cooler than BBC Radio 4: they played the theme tune to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!
I had, up until now, no idea that it was by the Eagles and called Journey of the Sorcerer.
What a great way to end the weekend
C, C++ and C# are all the same if you're a recruitment consultant, it would seem.
Auto Test has gone to India. There have been Indians learning about Auto Test for a few (3?) months and work being started off-shore in parallel. At the daily scrum one morning last week our Auto Test folks were told that they weren't doing auto test any more and not to do any when they got back to their desks. They were to be reassigned to other existing projects.
Within a day or so they were not working on anything different, but were responding to a barrage of "how to" questions from the Indian staff who had taken over...
My project is allegedly getting an Indian soon. He will be with us for 3 months. It usually takes a new person about a year to become productive on our project, let alone an expert. But, hey, these guys are empowered and motivated.
I still haven't found a new job yet. I did have another telephone interview on Friday for a job in London with a company that does security software - allegedly cross-platform software - who were looking for a Linux developer.
I heard today that they don't want to proceed to a face-to-face interview. That's fair enough.
First of all, the interviewer got the time wrong by 15 minutes and he was a bit exasperated when I eventually answered the phone but I explained that I had a printed copy of the email with the correct time and date on it.
On with the questions, so I went backwards through my CV. The poor soul couldn't fathom how I'd got from nuclear physics to software engineering without any training. I explained that I'd been writing code all my life and had largely taught myself etc. This didn't seem to impress him, but I explained about some of the highly-technical OS internals courses etc. that employers had sent me on.
Then came all the Windows questions. I thought this was a Linux and pre-boot environment job and I explained that I knew about real mode and the memory lay out and that when I was 16 I'd worked on a DOS TSR in 8086 assembly language, looked at LILO code and put a protected mode boot loader on a system I used to work on. Not very impressed.
It actually turns out that most of their stuff is for Windows: i.e. disk encryption and protection against malware. As he said, Linux already has disk encryption (which we all know anyway). The "cross-platform" claims come from the fact that they have a product that sits on a network (and runs on Windows) that clients of all kinds can access in some fashion, presumably for authentication and virus checking (but he didn't explain further).
To add insult to injury, this was a fairly senior position and the top of the salary range on offer was £5k lower than most other company's low end offers for that sort of work in London.
I've been trapped in Application land for a long time now. A few years back I got to to everything from the boot loader, initialisation scripts, device driver modification, demons up to the web UI and packaging of binaries.
My value proposition is that I have all of that experience plus in recent years I've been doing Scrum, Agile and TDD. And I'm pretety darned good at C and bash.
And patience, competence, attention span, rationality...
However, when getting dressed the other day, little Turgid announced that he'd like to have "blue legs."
We put on his jeans.
Soon, Zigziglar from the 5th Dimension will materialise on planet Earth to grace us with his Cosmic Presence, imparting a message of goodwill and hope, sparking a spiritual awakening and to engender transdimensional harmony amongst all sentient beings of the universe: be excellent to each other!
The BBC reports that two people have been taken to hospital following the "world's hottest chilli" competition at an Edinburgh Indian restaurant.
Yummy!
Interview number 4 yesterday was my worst ever, and I wasted half a day of annual leave humiliating myself in front of some very learned and accomplished people.
I'm mainly a C guy, but I do a bit of C++ at work. I taught myself from books and frobbed with it a little at home but I don't use it on any of my own fun projects because it isn't fun and it's a dead end. My semi-current employer sent me on an embedded real-time C++ course a few years back which was very good. It really explained the lunacy of the language in great detail. The instructor even advised us to avoid iostream (i.e. cout and such nonsense) and used the good old-fashioned C stdio functions
So yesterday I ill-advisedly went to an interview for a very senior C++ position. Originally I'd applied for an intermediate one, but that one got filled by an internal transfer. They liked me from the telephone interview (I knew what a page table was and about exception handlers) so they invited me to this one.
I'm afraid I didn't do very well. I was presented with a technical test first in a room with a glass wall. They knew I'm a Linux guy but they gave me a Windows PC with Visual Studio and a new project with a main() function (with a funny Windows name) ready to go. I had 45 minutes.
The test looked very easy. It was about some fairly elementary data structures, and hubris got the better of me. Instead of going for a simple, hard-coded solution I went to town thinking I'd get it done in the 45 minutes. Whoops.
There were two people. The one I'd spoken to before made little attempt to hide his disappointment at what I'd done. I'd tried my best to do things the "right way" for C++ but I'd forgotten the special baroque and silly syntax for initialising member variables in a class, so I put the initialisation in the constructor. I made sure I brought that up before they did.
We had a good chat about things, about the merits and downsides of various solutions, why exceptions are bad in an embedded system etc. etc.
They let me out to go to the toilet.
When I came back, another one had joined in and they were talking about me in the glass-walled room. They came out and left me to sit there.
Five minutes later, the first one came back, eyes looking down at the floor to tell me that they'd decided there was "no point in doing the second part of the interview because, well, you failed the technical part."
Computer people are not known for their tact and diplomacy.
He did say that they needed someone who was up to a particular standard who could start straight away, that they couldn't take someone on and wait 6 months for them to learn. He said that I should practice these things at home, which was nice of him. He didn't say "you're completely useless." Although he was clearly thinking it.
But he might as well.
I knew the job was way above me. The lower end of the salary range was 30% above what I'm on just now.
I'm not sure how interesting I'd have found the work anyway.... and C++
So I'm going to take his advice and write a bunch of noddy C++ programs to demonstrate various algorithms, data structures and techniques, including different ways of implementing things.
Although C++ isn't great and there are better languages about now, it's pretty pervasive in this industry and will be with us for decades to come, like FORTRAN and COBOL. It would be very silly to avoid learning it for ideological or emotional reasons. (I've learned it mostly on my own in my own time.) The thing is, I haven't used it enough in my day job to be good enough to impress at an interview. And everyone, every company, has different opinions on how C++ should be used...
I want to learn D and Scala, but I'll have to concentrate on C++ just now because that is what pays the bills these days.
We are about to be got by the cloud. They want to throw away all of our working servers and put everything on "the cloud."
"The cloud" will be on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean at the end of a 2Mbit/s link (with lots of latency). Several hundred people will have to get their work (developing software) done this way.
Today I went to speak to my line manager about my career path. He told me that my project is being sent to India.
First we were told that nothing would change. Then we were told that we might get some off-shore help and now everything is being taken from us and sent away.
Guess what, though? They're going to need our help to bring the off-shore people up to speed! And these off-shore people are so confident of their own abilities that they reckon they'll be fully productive in a matter of weeks.
The great thing is, this will free us up. When we are freed up, the company will be able to bring in new business for us. It can't bring in new business while all of the staff are fully committed or something...
Several other projects are being sent off shore too. Aren't we lucky? That's so much opportunity for doing new and exciting work!
I still haven't managed to escape, so I got TUPE'd this month to the Indian outsourcing company.
They gave us a lovely welcome presentation where we were told that we'd have to adopt new, more efficient ways of working since we'd have to be doing more to be worth it to our new customer (our old employer).
Someone asked how Lean Six Sigma fits in. The reply was that we will only do the things that the customer wants (pays) us to do (the implication if the customer wants to pay for Lean Six Sigma, we'll be doing it).
Oh dear. This brave new world of more efficient, empowered working doesn't know what Lean Six Sigma is.
Let's keep an open mind, otherwise we will fail at the new company.
We will, in future (allegedly and if we're not booted out for being more expensive than the people in India) be working for multiple customers. Therefore we will have to make personal judgments as to which customer's project to work on and that might mean dropping one temporarily and making that customer wait a bit longer...
That's OK, this is business and we're empowered and responsible and doing things with the highest quality and attention to detail. These things go on and it's OK really.
We were introduced to the wonderful, cutting edge, hyper-efficient and empowering web-based administration, form filling and corporate brainwashing system.
This is a super-duper, modern, cutting edge system for filling in holiday requests and timesheets and raising service desk tickets etc. and finding out the latest pronouncements from the Great Leaders.
It only works in Internet Explorer (6.1 and above). OK, so it doesnj't even work in Internet Explorer. Many people have spent several hours wrestling with it to make sure that their work and home addresses are correct and that they can book their annual leave. Within 20 minutes, I had already filed two bug reports on it. I was blamed on user error.
This thing is bat-guano insane. It's slow. They UI is completely loony. It looks like it was put together by 13-year-olds. It's about as usable and reliable. There are drop-down boxes for mandatory fields on many forms which are empty! That's right, there is nothing to choose! You can't complete the form and submit it! And the only way out is to kill the browser.
Still keeping an open mind, several people from this company have already been contributing to existing projects. They are so fast, efficient and empowered that they don't need to do Test Driven Development. Heck, they don't even need to run the unit tests before delivering! Sometimes it's not even worth their while seeing if it compiles. And as for design, that just slows you down and gets in the way of delivering lines of code. After all, it's lines of code that the customer is paying for.
I'm still keeping an open mind, and trying to compare them with the opportunities in the market place.
Oh, and the timesheets are insane. There are prescriptive boxes to be filled in. You have to say how long you spent frobbing with PowerPoint (I use LibreOffice HA HA!), in meetings, reading email, updating the cutting-edge, futuristic web-based thngymabob and all kinds of rot.
And if you don't fill in you timesheet within 7 days, it defaults to leave without pay. Nice. But you can argue about it with managers the following month after you haven't been paid.
Gee, it's great to be empowered.
And I didn't opt out of the European Working Time Directive.
All of a sudden, I've been getting inundated with phone calls from recruiters asking me to apply for jobs. None have been completely crazy apart from the one that was in the West Country.
The rescheduled telephone interview went well, and I've been invited for a face-to-face interview. It sounds like interesting work, but the company is in flux. The man who I spoke to sounded genuine and was very friendly and positive.
There is the possibility of an interview somewhere else, and I've got another telephone interview later in the week.
After two or three weeks of nothing, it's getting really busy
My employer decided that my colleagues and I were too expensive so is selling us to an outsourcing company where we'll be transferring our knowledge to the cheaper people in India before being "let go" maybe towards the middle of next year, or maybe before Christmas depending on how unlucky we are. (They've given us some vague promises about new and exciting work for other clients in the future but the story keeps changing).
They were going to let me loose on some other projects for career development before all this happened but that's all gone away. I was also getting to learn Design Patterns (from the Head First book) in an informal reading group. I'm getting bored and I don't want to hang around waiting to be downsized. I did get seconded to an automated test project as the SME for my platform which meant I got to play with Ruby and Fitnesse for a few weeks, which was cool.
I've had my CV out for a couple of months now. The market has been pretty quiet, but I did get a telephone interview for a company that does IP TV/STB stuff and an invitation to their assessment day. That was a lot of hard work, but they didn't offer me a position. They invited me in for an additional interview at the end of the day for Integration work and I made it very clear I was not enthusiastic about that sort of thing. I did it many years ago and I want to stay in Development. They said in their feedback that I was very strong technically but that they felt I wasn't a candidate for Integration and didn't offer me a job. So that obviously worked then!
I didn't like them. They were a bit arrogant and they bring staff in at weekends to work since they can't plan their projects properly. I've worked for places like that before, and it usually ends in tears (theirs).
It's summer holiday season, so things were a bit quiet, but they're picking up again. I'm seriously considering commuting up to Cambridge now since it's so buoyant up there, but it's an arduous trek. I was hopping not to waste my life commuting, but it looks like I might have too. Also, I don't know if I've got the brains and self-confidence to survive in Cambridge. There are all those bright, young, eager public-school confident people up there graduating from the University willing to work for a pittance.
I keep getting calls from recruitment agents asking me to apply for Automated Test positions. I can think of nothing more soul-destroying, unless I really was destitute. The problem is I obviously haven't made a good enough job of my CV.
I've spent the last four years learning Agile techniques and doing Scrum. I do Test-Driven Development in C and C++ in a multi-threaded real-time Linux system, I'm very good at shell scripting, I can do Perl, a small amount of Ruby and Java and I have played with many other languages in the past. I'm interested in learning Scala and D now.
The recruiters see "Test-Driven Development," "Unit Testing" and "Automated Test Project" on my CV and think, "Aha! Someone who wants to write test cases for a Windows app. in C#" D'oh!
I Don't Do Windows(TM). Life's to short. I've spent 15 years learning Linux with a foray into Solaris. Going to Windows and writing cookie-cutter C# in Visual Studio would be a huge step backwards.
I have a friend who is a senior developer at an all-Windows shop that does geological software. It's a different world. There are people with 5 year's C# experience who don't know what polymorphism is. He's being interviewing candidates and their lack of ability is shocking. It would appear that a lot of them only know about Microsoft technologies and
Last week I was supposed to have a telephone interview for a company near Cambridge. I left work early (flexitime) and made sure the house was empty of noisy children. I made a polite "do not disturb" notice for the front door, had my CV to hand, a list of my key strengths which I'd been over many times, some information about the company and some questions.
They didn't call.
After 20 minutes I phoned the agent who called me back after another 20 minutes with a wishy-washy excuse about the hiring manager being unavoidably detained on something more important.
After a couple of days I reluctantly agreed to reschedule. Now they're getting me on a crackly mobile phone during my lunch break. They don't sound like a great bunch of people to work for.
Rant over for now. That feels much better!
I work for an American company in the UK. I've had a very happy 4 years there so far but now they're selling us and many of our American and European colleagues to an Indian outsourcing company to cut costs.
This isn't IT outsourcing - we're Engineers: software, and mechanical, physicists, chemists and technicians. Yes, there are some IT support people involved too.
They're calling it a "partnership" rather than "outsourcing." That's to make us feel better. Our new employer is going to get new business for us with other companies, allegedly, so we will have lots of opportunities to work on cool, new stuff.
As I previously said, we lucky people in the UK are protected by laws called TUPE which are supposed to ensure that we keep the same terms and conditions of employment under our new employer. In theory, all that should change is the company name on the pay cheque.
However,. as you can imagine, these things are complex and European and UK laws tend to get set by precedent i.e. arguing things out in court. Being in the computery-type electronics-thingymabob industry very few people are in a union so there is no union representation.
I am (a hangover from my nuclear days) but they can't represent me officially because there needs to be a certain proportion of the workforce at a site for union representation to be legally enforced...
I've been taking some private advice on my personal circumstances from my union (prospect.org.uk). It was the Engineers and Managers Association when I joined 15 years ago. I've kept up my payments.
Our new Ts&Cs are not as good as our current ones. The new employer has weaseled out of everything it can to get us as cheaply as possible. We're losing out most significantly on pensions.
I was pleasantly surprised to hear one piece of advice from my professional association regarding potential redundancies, though.
During a TUPE transfer, "they" are allowed to make redundancies for "economic, technical or organisational reasons" (ETO). The thing is, they also have to be seen to be "consulting" before the transfer by law. That means that the existing employers have to make sure that their affected staff elect (or have appointed) representatives from their own ranks to engage in negotiations with the existing employer and the prospective employer. As part of the consultation process, the employers involved have to state up front whether people will be made redundant (or if the possibility exists) for ETO reasons as part of the transfer. Strictly speaking, positions are made redundant, not people. Any dismissal not for ETO reasons is automatically deemed "unfair" in law and the dismissed employee can take the employer to an Industrial Tribunal. (In the UK you have to be employed for at least one year for this to apply - under a year you can get the boot for no reason at all and have no redress).
What this means is that , if they didn't warn of the possibility of redundancies during the consultation period, and if they then go on to make redundancies, they are "unfair" and the staff affected can take them to court.
We have not been informed of the possibility of redundancies after the transfer. No one is being made redundant before the transfer.
Maybe things aren't that bad after all...
You might want to think about joining a union. They're not all foaming-at-the-mouth raving commies like the Arthur Scargill ones of the 70s and early 80s. Even if they can't officially represent you, they can offer a great deal of good, accurate advice.
I'm British, working in the UK for a large American company. I've been with them for four years now and survived the annual Reductions in Force so far. However, this year, the company has decided to sell several hundred Engineers (mostly in Software) to an Indian outsourcing company. They're trying to call it a "partnership" and they tell us that there will be fabulous new opportunities for us to develop our skills and work on exciting new projects in the future. Mainly, this exercise is to do more engineering with less cost by "leveraging" the skills base/talent pool of the outsourcing company. They have tens of thousands of young, eager Engineers in India who cost a tenth of what we do to employ.
I'm trying to keep the names of the companies quiet just now since I don't want to cause any undue trouble or ruin the deal etc.
I'd be very interested to hear anyone's experiences of such deals. In the UK our employment terms and conditions are protected by a law called TUPE. However, this doesn't guarantee any length of employment term following the transfer, only that you get the same pay and conditions when you're there.
The new employer has told us that it will be monitoring and assessing everyone for the first 2-3 months to figure out what we all do, and it will be looking to offshore as much work as possible to take the cost out of the site.
I'm not really sure how this deal is going to work. There are so many unanswered questions.
The BrewDog brewery of Fraserburgh (Aberdeenshire, Scotland) , no stranger to controversy, has unveiled a new beer called Tactical Nuclear Penguin which is 32% alcohol by volume, and has further vexed Alcohol Concern Scotland according to the BBC.
From the news story:A warning on the label states: "This is an extremely strong beer; it should be enjoyed in small servings and with an air of aristocratic nonchalance. In exactly the same manner that you would enjoy a fine whisky, a Frank Zappa album or a visit from a friendly yet anxious ghost."
The optimum committee has no members. -- Norman Augustine
