The world in the air

Watch it in high quality*. You can see the great-circle paths, especially over the South Pacific from Australia to Buenos Aires.

* Hmmm. Can't flip to high quality when embedded. Look to the right below the player on YouTube's version.

suckedcess

noun: an unpleasant experience that nonetheless yields a positive outcome.

VP debate expectations

In the VP debate previews (example, they talk about ways the VP candidates can screw up. For Joseph Biden, they talk about him making trivial gaffes. He might say something that offends some people. He might ramble on, and be a little smug. On the other hand, what they talk about Sarah Palin is that she won't answer with specifics, and that she needs to talk about how she's Jane Six Pack rather than get bogged down in complex political issues.

The way they talk about the two candidates implies that these are roughly equivalent in significance. Biden's pitfall? He often expresses himself poorly, so he needs to exercise some discipline in his answers. Palin's pitfall? She doesn't know what the hell she's talking about, so she's has to throw up a smoke screen of folksy crap in order to escape with any dignity. How are those at all on the same level?

Getting a Good Job in Software, Part II: Beginning the Process

As night follows day, so Part II follows Part I (eventually). So you've decided you want a new job, huh? By this time, you should have a rough idea of what you're looking for and what's out there. The first thing you should do is update your list. Your list might have entries on it a year old. Companies go out of business, get acquired, shift markets, etc. Make sure you have current information.

The next step is to filter your list of candidates more rigorously. I said before that you shouldn't be selective when getting your list of names. Well, now is the time to be picky. Now you're looking for reasons to take a company off your list. Map them to find out how far they are. Try to find out how big they are.

Go through that list. See who's hiring. Research their business. Look for news articles about your target company. Try your local newspaper, your local Business Journal, national newspapers, Infoworld, CNet, and the like. Look especially for information about deals, funding, product launches, and hiring. You want to get a feel for the company, and how it is running.

Find out not just how much money they make, but how they do it. Do they get a recurring fee for service? Do they get money from people who aren't their primary users, like in advertising? Do they get a big check up front for shelfware? These models have a pervasive effect on the culture and incentives in a company. Don't expect to find out all these things. You can't get a complete picture of the company, so don't try. What you're doing is trying to save yourself effort later on. If a company is a bad match, you want to find out sooner rather than later.

Look at the job listings they have. Are there jobs you want to do? Would anyone realistically hire you for them? Don't waste employers' time by applying to a job you're not qualified for, even if you're a fast learner. Maybe you can do the job. They have no way of distinguishing between you and someone who is just blowing smoke. If there's a must-have skill that you don't have, forget it and move on. If you can't offer evidence on your resume that you can do the job, skip it.

Contact the independent recruiters that you know. See what they have, what they're working on. Ask them about the companies on your target list. They're probably not working for any of them, but they might be. They'll also often be privy to industry gossip, and can tell you things you wouldn't learn otherwise. If you've been keeping in touch with them, they'll be happy to talk to you, especially if you're willing to talk about one of their prospects.

Use Linkedin to find out if you know anyone at your target. That's good for research, such as when a friend of mine vouched for two of the people at one company. It's also good for making contact, as when I discovered that an acquaintance of mine from years back had become a recruiter for one of my target companies. It's useful even when you don't know anyone there. By looking at the histories and profiles of people who work there, you can get a good idea for their styles and skills.

All of this should be used to narrow down your list. Your goal is to end up with 5-10 currently open positions at your target companies. If you can only come up with a couple, maybe you need to loosen your standards. Or maybe your current situation is tolerable, and you can stick with it. If you have more than 10, you need to prune your list, or at least prioritize it. Go ahead and be as frivolous as you have to in order to get that number down. A good job is not a commodity; different jobs will fit you in different ways, so you should focus on finding a good match.

Once you've narrowed down your list, you need to start thinking about specific openings. You were looking at companies before; now you're ready to take action on specific jobs. Work on your resume. There are lots of guides out there on how to write a resume; I'm not sure they're good, but I'm also not sure I'd be any better. I can just point to what seems to have worked for me.

Come up with a canonical, complete resume that describes every significant aspect of your work experience. Ignore the standard advice about length; you are not going to send this version to anyone. List your experience, skills, education, portfolio of work, and so forth. Leave out hobbies and side interests unless you can directly connect them to the job, or if your read of the company suggests they like that kind of thing (very fuzzy, I know). Spell check, grammar check, etc. Have someone else read it. You don't want to let any stupid errors slip through.

Once you have this resume, shaping it for specific jobs becomes easy. Remove or minimize the less relevant things. The travel web site won't care about your experience with card processors. Remove that section, or at least condense it. The programming tools vendor has no interest in your database experience. The company writing software for Windows won't care that you're a whiz at shell scripting. Use boldface to emphasize points of alignment; if the job posting says "Spring," and you have Spring on your resume, put it in bold. That can apply to inexact matches, too; if the job wants TopLink, and you know Hibernate, emphasis that.

Some job postings emphasize business skills, so leave in the section about how you worked with product marketing to develop business requirements. Put that in bold, too. Other jobs are more about heads-down coding, so you can leave that out. If you can't find a number of places where your job overlaps with the opening, maybe the job isn't for you. This isn't just an exercise in adapting your resume; it's also about double-checking the match. Make sure you save the job posting you're applying to; you'll want that for later so you can confirm what you're getting into, and you can't cont on it to remain where you found it.

This should go without saying, but your resume must be completely true and accurate. Besides being the right thing to do, anything and everything on your resume is fair game for questions in an interview. If it's been a while since you worked with a particular tool, and your skills are rusty, you can leave it in the experience section, but exclude it from the current skills section.

Once you've got a resume customized to a particular job, figure out how you're going to make contact. It's always good to go through someone you know, but I've had surprisingly good results just contacting them cold. I figure if a company is posting a job on their web site, they probably have someone paying attention. In my recent experience, I contacted 6 companies. I knew the recruiter at one of them. Another one came up due to a recruiter contacting me. The rest of them were cold contacts. Two were via their web site, one was via a Craig's List posting, and the last was directly to a specific recruiter whose contact information I'd gotten from a third party. I heard back from all of them.

I'm assuming your contact is via email. Does anyone do anything else these days, at least in software? You must include a message with your resume. It doesn't have to be anything elaborate. Aim for something between 1 and 4 paragraphs. The basic points to cover are who you are, where you heard about the company, what job you're applying for, why you like the job, and a brief justification for why they should consider you. You can often do that in 100 well-chosen words. Sometimes that's all you need. If you are particularly interested in this job or company, you should say that. That indicates you've done your research. A company would rather hire someone particularly interested in them than someone who's looking for a generic job.

Your resume should be an attachment. Don't include it in the main part of the message because your introductory message serves a distinct purpose. Use whatever file format that the ad calls for. If it doesn't say, you'll have to pick one. Word files are common, but there's a proliferation of versions. Text always works, but it's ugly. On my recent search, I sent out all my resumes as PDF. That seemed like the safest attractive option, and it seemed to work.

Once you contact a company, you should expect it to take up to 2 weeks for them to get back to you. It's unfortunate, but it's true; for a number of reasons beyond your control, companies can be slow. There's nothing you can do about it. Often, companies don't even acknowledge that you've contacted them. It's rude, but again, there's nothing you can do about it. It is acceptable to send a single follow-up message if you don't hear anything, but I would only do that if you have reason to believe that your email was lost. Otherwise, give up on them and move on.

It is perfectly acceptable to talk to multiple companies at once. In fact, it's desirable. It gives you better perspective on your options, while also mitigating the frustration of the glacial pace of the process. Let's not forget that this is a financial transaction. You want to establish a positive relationship built on trust and mutual respect, but you're also looking out for number one. Balancing those can be tricky, but nobody worth working for should question you examining all of your options.

Assuming you get a positive response you should expect the process to take at least 3 weeks from initial contact to an offer, unless of course you or the company declines to continue. Usually it will take 4-6 weeks, though in some cases it may be as much as 12 weeks. 3 months is totally not cool, but it can happen. It can be a frustrating experience because you'll have bursts of activity where you're making rapid progress, followed by days or weeks of stasis. That's where it can help to be talking to multiple companies at once. Hopefully, you'll be making progress with at least one company every couple of days. There's a lot that's outside your control, though, so you should know what to expect. These are important decisions, so you should expect it to take a while.

Next time I'll write about what to do when they respond.

Test Your Knowledge: Napoleon

When and where was Napoleon's final battlefield defeat?

Sarah Palin is just like someone you know

The thing I find fascinating is that Sarah Palin was originally popular because people could relate to her as someone they knew from their everyday lives: the bubbly, over-achiever hockey mom who really gets involved in the community. Why she's fallen, hard, is that people realized she was in fact another person they knew from their everyday lives: that crazy mom who turns even the PTA into an insane obsessive power-play and forms weird hostile rivalries she executes through byzantine yet childish plots, seasoned with a dash of Fear of Anything Different.

source

Last week's oil spike

You remember how last week the price of oil spiked $25 on September 22 (closing up $15)? Don't read too much into that. When the media report on the price of oil, they seem to report on the spot price of the futures contracts with the soonest delivery dates. Contracts are for delivery on the first of the month. There are October contracts, November contracts, December contracts, etc.

September 22 was the last day to trade October contracts. Anyone who wanted an oil delivery for October had to buy that day. That magnified the normal market movement on that day. The contract for November went up by $6.62, which was a lot, but much less than the October one.

The price of oil isn't smooth because the market isn't smooth. There is a basic structure to the contracts to make them regular and consistent, and thus easier to trade. The down side of that is it introduces variables other than plain old supply and demand that have to do with the mechanics of trading and delivery. The oil market isn't the only market where such things happen, but that's where this phenomenon most recently manifested.

Credit to The Economist.

Tech company benefits

Employers can be short-sighted and stingy with benefits. In the back of my mind, I've always kept the ambition that some day I would start my own software business. I'd like to think I'd be more enlightened. It's not about generosity in and of itself; I think that generous benefits can be a significant competitive advantage in the marketplace for talent. That makes it easier to get the best people and make sure they stick around. So far, I've come up with a list of ideal benefits I'd like to see:

• 4 weeks of vacation per year at start, with 6 weeks available for those who have been around for a while.


• 2 weeks of personal/sick time per year.


• Fully paid health insurance premiums for employee and spouse.


• 401(k) contribution of 5% no matter what the employee does, with matching of another 5%


• A severance fund created the moment an employee starts. This fund would have 2 months of salary in it. If the employee is terminated without cause, such as in a layoff, they get the whole thing. If the employee is terminated with cause, they get 2 weeks. I don't know what to do in the case of the employee leaving by choice; I'm wavering between giving half and giving nothing. The important thing is that the money would be funded (using, say, TIPS) as soon as the employee started. That way, no matter what happened to the company, the employee wouldn't be left in the lurch.


• 3 months fully paid paternity leave - it would be half pay for 3 months, with the balance paid out after the employee has been back on the job for a while, perhaps 9-12 months. If the employee quits before then, he doesn't get it. I've seen too many people take excessive advantage of this kind of benefit.


• 4 months fully paid maternity leave - same conditions.


• 4 day work weeks (maybe)

I have only a rough idea what this would cost. I think the vacation, sick time, and shortened work week would be free. People would be at work less, but more effective when they were around. The severance fund is less pricey than it looks; severance is normal, and this only differs in the quantity and the timing of the funding. The parental benefits would be expensive, but would only apply to some of the employees some of the time. I expect this would add 25%-40% to payroll costs on an annual basis. My hope is that these benefits would drastically reduce turnover and make hiring much easier. Vacancies are expensive, as is filling them. I haven't run the numbers, but my gut says it's the right thing to do. Hopefully, one day I'll get the chance to test this, and I'll end up being right.

Does the housing bust mean Osama Bin Laden is winning?

One of Osama Bin Laden's goals was to plunge the United States into economic chaos. Well, there's chaos now, and it can be traced back indirectly to September 11th. In 2001, the Federal Reserve lowered rates to compensate for a slowing economy after the dot-com bust. Then September 11th hit, and what looked like a painful but manageable slowdown suddenly looked a lot more dangerous. The Fed slashed rates even further. Interest rates would have been low anyway, but not this low.

This was the fuel for the housing boom. With so much cheap money available, house prices got pushed much higher than was justified. With so much potential profit, fraud, recklessness, and negligence allowed people to borrow money when no sane person should have lent them any. That was the genesis of the housing boom and bust, and the trigger event for this credit crunch.

It's quite likely there would have been a housing boom without September 11th. After all, interest rates were going down as it was. They wouldn't have gone down so much, though, and that makes all the difference. This economic crisis is a non-linear, chaotic event. A difference of 0.5% in the federal funds rate, or a more rapid raising of rates leading into the recovery might have made all the difference.

Osama Bin Laden wanted a war with the United States in Afghanistan, where he thought he could win and bloody the nose of the infidel imperialists. He was wrong, but then we served up Iraq. He provoked the war he wanted, but he lost it. And then we invaded Iraq, in response to September 11th, and gave him the war between Islam and infidel that he wanted. He didn't make us do it, but he provoked us into doing it to ourselves.

The same applies to the credit crunch. Osama Bin Laden did not cause the bust. It's something he wanted to happen, but he didn't cause it. It's worse than that. He caused us to do it to ourselves. The chain of causality is different, but the result is the same.

Oxymoron?

 

Hint: it's what's next to the logo on the main label.

Trusting the bailout

That there is a crisis is something that basically 99% of the country is taking on trust. We have no direct knowledge of it. We have no indicators. The stock and bond markets don't count, as they are feeding off the same indicators. What we have here is a potential crisis that only a few people in the banking industry and regulatory system can directly perceive. I don't claim it's a fiction, only noting the phenomenon. It's a good (I think) that Bernanke and Paulson are convincing with respect to the existence of the problem, if not its solution. Otherwise, how would we know until it was too late?

The experience double standard

With Barack Obama, a lack of high-level political experience is a drawback. With Sarah Palin, it's a deal-breaker*. Why the double standard? Simple. The voters chose Obama. That doesn't necessarily reflect well on their judgment, but it is nonetheless their choice. Sarah Palin was chosen by no voters. Her selection also reflects less than ideal judgment, but in this case, it's John McCain's. You could make the argument that her potential election as Vice President counts as the voters choosing her, but it's at best an indirect choice. If the voters want to chose poorly with Obama, that's their right. However, they shouldn't be expected or even asked to endorse John McCain's poor choice.

* One of many.

Doesn't look very open

 

I guess they're waiting for the Citi sign.

Who says romance is dead?

Whoever said it is right: it's a fake. But still...

Test Your Knowledge: the Sun and the Moon

Within 10%, in the units of your choice (but not AU), how far away are the sun and the moon?

Test Your Knowledge: Population of the Permanent Five

What are the populations (within 10%) of the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council?

Really, it's two questions, but the first one should be trivial.

All the news that's fit to print, after some consideration

I want to see a news publication that only covers events at least a week or a month old. There's too much noise in the news. It's distracting. A news organization that waited a week or a month before it even started writing would have the perspective to tell what mattered and what was just the vacuous jabbering of attention-seeking idiots (not that it's necessarily hard to tell the latter). They'd save massive amounts just on printing costs. And my head wouldn't be filled with so much junk.

Can't stop the talk

It's only 40 days until the election. They haven't had a single debate yet. They can't postpone. There just isn't time.

All 2008 presidential candidates are lacking

John McCain 2008 is not McCain 2000, and even McCain 2000 wasn't someone I'd vote for. He's the most likely to start a war, has been kissing up to the religious right, and, most fatally, does not appear to understand economics.

It doesn't matter how many times Barack Obama says the word "change." His policies are the same tired clichéed Democratic policies. His ability to deliver a speech is overrated, and the importance of such a skill vastly over-estimated. The man hasn't done anything.

I can't even make a protest vote this year. I might feel differently if Ron Paul was still running, but he's not. The alternative candidates in the 2008 election make me think maybe a 2-party system isn't as completely awful as I thought.

Bob Barr of the Libertarian? He found his "libertarian principles" at a convenient time, and his biggest issue is gun rights, which on a tolerant day I'm ambivalent about.

Then there's the Green Party. Cynthia McKinney? SRSLY? The woman who says George W. Bush knew about September 11th in advance? I guess the Green Party is happy with its place as a joke on the sidelines of American politics.

Constitution Party? Haha. I'd rather vote for McPalin than that reactionary fundamentalist they nominated. I don't know what Ron Paul was thinking when he endorsed him.

Ralph Nader? Flawed as he is, I guess he's all I have left.

Bush redux

The religious right's embrace of Sarah Palin demonstrates they have learned nothing from the lesson of George W. Bush. With Bush, they chose rapture over reason, ignoring obvious flaws because he shared their "values." Never mind that his abilities and record were weak at best. Now, while many of them have become disenchanted with Bush, they haven't figured out that the problem wasn't with Bush, but with them. You can't second-guess a result without second-guessing the process. Well, you can, but that would be stupid.