Rants and Revelations

I’ve been yelled at by English teachers, co-op work term report markers, and Microsoft Word for overuse of passive voice. Mostly I look at the sentence or paragraph they’re yelling about and say “what? I don’t see what’s wrong with it”. But even I recognize this as too much.

From a job ad on Monster.com:

System design, based on the requirements and the development of diagrams along with implementation of the computer language will be part of this Software Development position. Determining testing requirements followed by unit and regression testing will be performed in this role.

The culture here is in most ways much more stolid and constrained that at any other place I’ve worked at. The dress code is strict, the hours you can work are tightly controlled, etc. Maybe it’s the lack of other outlets, but one thing that’s curious here are how it seems like every day there is some excuse to have a pot-luck pile of food at somebody’s cubicle. Usually it’s a birthday, today it’s some student finishing his work-term and going back to school. It’s very odd. And fattening.

For reasons I probably can’t go into in public, I’ve decided to take the Paychex offer after all. Oh well, at least I’ll get to learn about Hibernate and JBoss.

A guy moved into a nearby cube a few weeks ago. Just now I had to go over to tell him to “keep the humming down a bit”, because it was getting increasingly loud and atonal. So now he’s started drumming.

How long do you think it will be before he starts using his speaker phone to talk to somebody two cubes over?

I’m getting flashbacks to Blue Lobster and Global Crossing.

Update After posting an angry late-at-night email to the recruiter at Global Crossing, he dug up the original information on the position that they’d sent to Adecco. That, unlike the description that Adecco forwarded to me, did mention that the applicant had to be a US citizen.

I got my offer package from Global Crossing, and filled in the paperwork and mailed it back, and now they call my recruiter up to inform me that the position is only open to US citizens. I guess it was just too fucking much bother for them to mention that in the job ad, or tell that to the recruiter, or tell it to me in the phone screen, or two interviews or the offer letter. I quit my existing job, and turned down another offer from another company for this, and now I’m going to be out in the cold. The whole reason I was changing jobs was to get more stability in my life, not less.

Words cannot express how mad I am right now.

Update: To answer some of the questions in the comments, yes, they know I have a green card. It’s not good enough. And no, the offer letter has such legaleze as to make it impossible for me to have any legal recourse.

I feel like writing the hiring manager to congratulate him on his masterful use of an offer letter that actually offers nothing, because that means that at least he will know how he’s going to feed his family next month.

It’s always been said about me that I can irmprove a workplace by leaving it.

Several years ago I worked at a small start-up called “Blue Lobster Software”. I’d accepted a salary about $15K less than I should have, along with stock options, thinking I was going to make it big on the stock options like so many people were doing at that time. After a year and a half or so, they got bought by SAGA Software, a former division of “Software AG”, a German company (SAGA originally was an acryonym for Sofware AG America). “Finally”, I thought, “it’s going to pay off”. Well, the first disappointment was that the stock options ended up only being worth about $2K. The second disappointment was that the new owners immediately made us sign new contracts with them, at exactly the same salary as we’d been making before (but no stock options this time). I said “that’s bullshit”, and immediately left, getting a job at Global Crossing within a few weeks.

As soon as I left, SAGA sent out a memo to all the remaining employees saying that the initial contract we’d signed was just to tide us over until they could review salaries, and within a week or two they’d given everybody who stayed big raises. Nice of them to tell them that *after* I’d jumped ship, eh? A couple of the developers thanked me for pushing them to give the raises sooner rather than later.

So flash forward to the present, where there are 4 or 5 of us on contract here at Kodak who’ve been getting jerked around over getting permanent offers, and getting our contracts renewed month to month at the last possible minute. And I’m about to jump ship, coincidentally to Global Crossing again. Who wants to bet that before my notice period is up, they find a way to make permanent offers to the other people who are in this boat?

I bet there aren’t very many other people out there who have turned in a resignation letter at their job the day they went to pick up a new car. Well, I’ve just done the resignation letter, and I pick up the car in a few hours.

Update I forgot to mention: as well as the offer from Global Crossing, I have another offer from Paychex. The Paychex one surprised me, because I’d only had a phone interview with them and I’m not used to getting a real offer without having a chance to meet people face to face, look around the facilities, etc. Because I was expecting it to lead to a face to face interview instead of an offer, I didn’t ask enough detailed questions about unimportant things like “where are you located?” and “what will I be doing?”

I’ve been here at Kodak for over 6 years as an hourly wage contractor. No benefits, no vacation, and no 401(K). And while I’ve bitched about it here many times, overall it’s been a damn good job. Good money, the respect of my peers, an active role in design, interesting technology, etc. But several months ago, they told me that they couldn’t renew my contract any more, and that they’d convert me to a full time employee. And that was all going ahead nicely when the head of our division suddenly left. No warning, no explanation, just “Heck of a job, Brownie” one day and “We can neither confirm nor deny he ever worked here” the next. Something fishy happened. But the new person came in, and of course the first thing she did was put a freeze on hiring.

So since that time, they’ve been renewing my contract one month at a time, and usually waiting until the last week of the month before confirming it. So needless to say, I’ve been “exploring my options”, spreading my resume around, registering at Monster and Dice, talking to headhunters, and going on some intervews. And now I’ve got an offer from Global Crossing. It doesn’t look hugely exciting, but it might be mildly interesting and a chance to get some experience in some technologies I’ve been interrested in, like Hibernate and EJBs. It’s contract-to-hire, which is a bummer, and it pays way less than I’m making now (which I expected) and probably a little less than what Kodak would come up with if they ever get around to making an offer. On the other hand, it’s in a new building, rather than a clapped out industrial building where the ceiling tiles are older than I am and the asbestos warning stickers confront you at every doorway.

So now it comes down to: do I take the nearly sure thing at Global Crossing, or sit here waiting while Kodak jerks me around for another week, another month, another quarter, or whatever?

In my career I’ve always played it by ear, but I’ve also made a habit of getting out when the going is good. I swore I wouldn’t do that here, because the pay is so much better than what I’d make elsewhere that it would be worth it to stick it out to the bitter end and maybe lose a month’s pay while looking for a new job. But this constant worry if they’re going to renew my contract this month is driving me batty.

My contract is up at the end of this month, and they’re not renewing it. They have an open position for a direct hire, but I applied for it and I haven’t heard anything back. So I thought for self-preservation purposes, I’d better start looking to see what else is out there.

First step is to see if my pimp has anything. Ok, enter http://www.[pimpname].com/ into a browser, and get “Safari can’t find the server”, but first there is a weird little flash as if it is getting redirected. So I try curl on that address, and get:

<head><title>Document Moved</title></head>
<body><h1>Object Moved</h1>This document may be found <a HREF="http://spusitinf0
02/Pages/index.aspx">here</a></body>

And I repeat the experiment with a telnet to port 80, and find they made the exact same damn stupid mistake in the Location: header in the 302 message.

Do I really want to entrust my career to people who make mistakes like this? I don’t think so.

As predicted in Rants and Revelations » I have seen the future, and it sucks, they’ve hired a new Flash guy to write the new user interface. It really sucks to find out that your contributions are going to be even more marginalized just as you’re also finding out that they want you to become a full time employee at a significant pay cut.

I guess it’s time to stop antagonizing recruiters and start finding out seriously what’s out there. Either that or find out if the bank account would survive me taking off however long it would take me to get a masters in user inferace design.

Update: Oh, it gets better. New Guy has never even heard of source code control. In other words, he’s used to toy projects on toy operating systems.

…really, really suck.

Can you believe I got called by a recruiter who hadn’t even bothered to look at a map to figure out where Rochester is in relation to NYC? She seemed shocked when I said it would be a 6-8 hour drive for me to “commute”. She kept referring to NYC as “the city”, as if none of the other centers of population in New York (or indeed, probably the world) count as cities in her world view.

Feh.

I’ve ranted about the impromptu meetings that break out outside my cube in the past, right? Well, today it reached a new pinnacle of annoying: there were three separate groups talking, and because they were so noisy, each group was getting progressively louder and louder as they struggled to be heard over the other two groups.

After a minute or two of this, I went out and said very loudly “Excuse me, I’m not working too loud for you, am I?” One person laughed, but nobody stopped talking. About two minutes later, two of the groups went away but the one group stayed for another 5 minutes or so.

Next time I’m plugging my iPod into my speakers and blasting “Mao Tse Tung Said” at them.

This office has never been particularly well airconditioned. Mostly it’s too hot in both winter and summer, although a few years ago it was the opposite, so that I kept a sweater in my desk for the days when it was too over airconditioned in the summer. But in the last couple of years, we keep getting “emergency power reduction program in effect”, which means that they’ve turned off at least one of the building’s chillers, usually because one of the (formerly belonging to the company, now sold off to some other organization) power generators is off-line.

Today it’s bloody hot in the office, and of course this is a day when I chose to wear a long sleeve shirt.

Wow, never thought I’d utter that sentence.

Every two years, I have to re-take the Health Safety and Environment Orientation for contract employees. In the past, that’s always required me to show up at the HSE office at 7am, sit with a bunch of the type of contractors who do actual work (you know, with tools and stuff instead of computers), and be lectured on the proper way to dispose of dirt or what to do if your backhoe (or computer, in my case) accidentally ruptures a line carrying something nasty. Usually the lecturer is some grumpy old guy who reminds me of Jasper in that Simpson’s episode where he ends up teaching a class in the school. “Using a camera? That’s a paddling. Smoking on the property? Immediate firing, then a paddling. Improperly disposing of construction garbage? First we fine your employer, then fire you, then a paddling.” And of course, I can’t tell you how useful it is to know that I’m not allowed to use $EMPLOYER ladders or oxygen lines in my line of work.

This year, however, they’ve got on-line training. And not only that, but they have different training for outside workers and office workers. So I clicked the link, and got a stupid animated guy pointing at a button on the side menu saying “Start by clicking this button”. “Fuck that”, I thought, and clicked on the button marked “Final Assessment”. I took the test, got 10 out of 10, and got the certificate, all in way less time than I’m wasting on writing this blog post. So hooray for on-line training where you skip the boring bits (ie. all of it) and go straight to the incredibly obvious test questions.

BTW, the test questions were all on the order of “Where do you dispose of waste? A) toss it over the fence onto non-$EMPLOYER property, B) make a big pile and set fire to it C) put it in designated containers or D) Your contract will have instructions on proper waste disposal” And I’m not kidding, that is pretty much verbatim. (BTW: The correct answer is D - sometimes the contract will require you to remove the waste yourself.)

I’ve got an idea: When you’re trying to motivate people, don’t try to promote the concept of “Teamwork” by showing something that was built by slaves at the whim of a despot, which killed millions of the people involved in its construction, and which failed miserably at its design goal. Just sayin’.