Recently in Work Category

I ambled into the lobby of my company's building in Glendale this morning, with all my riding gear on. The building has a first-rate security staff - friendly, competent, helpful — just about everything you could want.

So, I'm walking past the guard station, and the guy asks me "Hey - what kind of bike do you ride?" We'd been exchanging hellos for months and have had a few chats, so the informality was cool. I stopped, and told him I rode a Yamaha FJR1300. He says with a smile "so that's your big blue bike down on B2?" We chatted a little more, then I left to go upstairs, with both of us smiling.

Now, I'm left to wonder if this was just your normal, friendly chat, or if it was some subtle way of letting me know that they know that I'm parking on B2 when I shouldn't. If it's just friendly conversation, that's great. But if it was meant to be a friendly warning, then I'd have to say "impressive; most impressive."

The guys at work were talking about the upcoming changes to the daylight savings time rules. I looked them up in Wikipedia to avoid confusion.

Carole needed a supplier for engraved wine glasses.

Crystal Galleries, your online source for crystal corporate gifts, corporate awards, lead crystal gifts, and crystal golf awards

I was sitting in my office at my computer around 10:45am this morning when I heard a horrendously loud noise. I turned around to look out the window of my office, and saw a big rig on it's right side sliding down the Colorado Blvd. off-ramp from the westbound CA-134 freeway. I was a weird site, to say the least.

Cory and I quickly decided that I would call 911. The initial operator transferred me to the paramedic dispatcher, who took the information and said units were on their way. Some workers in orange vests were working further down the off-ramp on the landscaping, and came up quickly to check on the driver. They pulled him out, along with a 7-10 year old girl who appeared to be his daughter. (I can only imagine him trying to explain this to her mom.) Neither the driver nor the girl seemed any worse for wear - the miracles of seat belts.

After a while the fire trucks arrived, followed a few minutes later by some CHP units. Things are pretty stable right now. The offramp is an elevated roadway less than two lanes wide, so we're all wondering how they're going to get the truck right side up.

Here's the CHP event log off the web site:

16-2-36

25-11-5

When you come in to work at 10:30am, it's because you had urgent personal business that had to be attended to. When the other guy comes to work at 10:30am, it's because he's a lazy, shiftless leech.

I spoke with a principal at Reprise today about their new license manager. It has some definite possibilities.

From 1981 through 1985, I worked at a small appraisal research company named Marshall & Swift, in a building on Beverly Blvd. At the time I worked there, the third-generation Marshall was taking over, and running the place into the ground, despite the best efforts of Frank Swift, who's misfortune was to be an honorable man.

I left in September of 1985 to go to my current job, which has played out nicely.

This afternoon, I had a Girls Soccer Playoff game at Belmont High School, across the street from the old Marshall & Swift building. Here's a current picture - the building has been divided into what looks to be four or five smaller businesses.

Marshall & Swift moved in the early 90's to a downtown high-rise on Wilshire.

From CNN:

So, you're experienced? Before you advertise this in your resume, be sure you can prove it.

Often, when job seekers try to sell themselves to potential employers, they load their resumes with vague claims that are transparent to hiring managers, according to Scott Bennett, author of "The Elements of Resume Style" (AMACOM).

By contrast, the most successful job seekers avoid these vague phrases on their resumes in favor of accomplishments.

Instead of making empty claims to demonstrate your work ethic, use brief, specific examples to demonstrate your skills.

In other words, show, don't tell.

Bennett offers these examples:

Instead of... "Experience working in fast-paced environment"

Try... "Registered 120+ third-shift emergency patients per night"

Instead of... "Excellent written communication skills"

Try... "Wrote jargon-free User Guide for 11,000 users"

Instead of... "Team player with cross-functional awareness"

Try... "Collaborated with clients, A/R and Sales to increase speed of receivables and prevent interruption of service to clients."

Instead of... "Demonstrated success in analyzing client needs"

Try... "Created and implemented comprehensive needs assessment mechanism to help forecast demand for services and staffing."

The worst offenders

It's good to be hard-working and ambitious, right? The hiring manager won't be convinced if you can't provide solid examples to back up your claims.

Bennett suggests being extra-careful before putting these nice-sounding but empty words in your resume.

• Aggressive
• Ambitious
• Competent
• Creative
• Detail-oriented
• Determined
• Efficient
• Experienced
• Flexible
• Goal-oriented
• Hard-working
• Independent
• Innovative
• Knowledgeable
• Logical
• Motivated
• Meticulous
• People person
• Professional
• Reliable
• Resourceful
• Self-motivated
• Successful
• Team player
• Well-organized

From TekMonkey:

"A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build."
    - Fred Brooks

    When interviewing candidates for programming jobs, one of my favorite interview questions is, "How would you describe your approach to software development?" I give them examples such as carpenter, fire fighter, architect, artist, author, explorer, scientist, and archeologist, and I invite them to come up with their own answers. Some candidates try to second-guess what I want to hear; they usually tell me they see themselves as "scientists." Hot-shot coders tell me they see themselves as commandos or swat-team members. My favorite answer came from a candidate who said, "During software design, I'm an architect. When I'm designing the user interface, I'm an artist. During construction, I'm a craftsman. And during unit testing, I'm one mean son of a bitch!"

    I like to pose this question because it gets at a fundamental issue in our field: What is the best way to think of software development? Is it science? Is it art? Is it craft? Is it something else entirely?

The bus just left to take everyone down to Orange County for the company Christmas party, and I'm not on the bus. Why? Yesterday, the company layed off about 15 people, including long-term employees on my floor who I've been working with for years.

We all understand that people must be laid off from time-to-time. Sometimes I agree with the reasoning behind the layoffs, and sometimes I don't, but it's understood that layoffs are a fact of modern corporate life.

But that doesn't excuse the timing of these layoffs. No well-established company, unless it is on the edge of imminent bankruptcy, should layoff long-term employees during the month of December.

The way a company handles layoffs is not so much for those being laid off — it's for the employees left behind. The timing and method of the layoffs, and the package offered to the departing employees, is an indication to remaining employees about how the company feels about them - whether the company values their continuing loyalty. If a company breaches the implied rules of layoffs — such as greatly reducing the value of the exit package, or laying off long-term employees on December 15th — it's hard to not feel that the company has lost its ethical compass somewhere along the way. How can the company expect an employee to give that extra effort, to show loyalty, when that employee knows that that loyalty will likely be abused? That the company might let them go at any time, for any reason - even a week before Christmas?

I hope everyone has a good time at today's Christmas party, but I will not be there, and won't miss it.

My webcam caught a bird flying past my office window, at 8:41 this morning:

The camera face north-northwest so I don't get the best of the sunset pictures, but last night's view was pretty nice:

I went to get coffee and noticed something wierd - a pot of slightly tinted water under the filter basket. On further examination, it looks like someone made a pot of coffee, but forgot to actually put coffee into the filter.

When I check e-mail from home, I leave it on the server, so when I got in to work this morning I had 16 days of e-mail to download. If you add the 22 messages on the Xoption account which downloaded before the other accounts were displayed, I count a total of 12,266 e-mails. Based on past experience, I expect to find 25 personal e-mails, 250 e-mails from various mailing lists I've joined, and the rest will be junk, of which 90% will be automatically discarded by the various spam filters (SAProxy and specific filters in Eudora). It took two hours to download it all.

My friend Cory, who works in the office next to mine, made his claim to fame at the end of this morning's TJ Simers' column in the LA Times Sports Section:

T.J. Simers:
McCourts Trying to Be Good Club Members

After 14 years at MSC, my friend Connie was laid off on Wednesday. She's taking it as well as could be expected - better than some of the people she works with, who are genuinely bewildered.

It seems she got caught in some petty bureaucratic dust-up. For many years she was an Admin Assistant in the Development organization, when the bulk of the company was based in Los Angeles. A few years back the new CEO decided he wanted to work in Orange County, so most of the staff in LA was transferred to a new building in Santa Ana. (The company euphemistically refers to the location as South Coast Metro, SCM for short, because Santa Ana isn't hoity-toity enough.) The LA office was only left open to accommodate some very valuable long-term staff that apparently made it clear they would retire before commuting to Santa Ana; the rest of us got to stay to occupy the remaining offices.

A nice man named Jim Schulz worked in the LA office as head of the company's Sales Department. As the highest ranking manager in the office, he needed his own personal assistant, and Connie was the logical choice (since most of the senior management staff had moved to SCM). This arrangement lasted for six months or so.

Jim made the fatal mistake of holding his staff accountable for their duties, and was forced out in one of those boardroom purges that occur from time to time. With Jim gone, Connie was transferred to another Sales Manager based in the SCM office, but her duties reverted to supporting the Development staff in the LA office. Over time, she was assigned other duties, and lately was spending most of her time managing the company's growing portfolio of contract employees.

As you've guessed, none of these valuable tasks had anything to do with Sales, and ultimately the head of the Sales department was forced to cut-back. He offered to cover half of her salary if the head of Development would cover the other half (which seemed reasonable, given that she was working 80% on Development projects), but the head of Development refused. With the amount of money Development spends on worthless projects and boondoggles, you'd think they could cover half of an Admin's salary. This is the kind of thing that happens with management doesn't understand the day-to-day operations of the groups under them.

The reaction from everyone who knows Connie is disbelief. She's been getting good wishes from everyone, from managers to the DHL guy.

I will miss Connie very much. Over the last few years we've become good friends. I offered to help her get her resume in order, and pointed her to the Cal Tech employment web site. With any luck, she'll have a new, better job before her 3-month package runs out.

I'm near the end of a long project at work on license usage reporting.

Currently, MSC's customers can only get accurate reports of their license usage by paying Macrovision an exhorbitant amount of money to buy a report tool called SAMreport. On top of the expense, SAMreport doesn't work well with MSC's MasterKey system, requiring costly customization to report on the underlying feature that caused the CAMPUS checkout.

The new system I've built has two components: an updated vendor daemon that outputs accurate usage records, and a Perl application that collects the data, rolls it up into usable chunks, and then creates web pages on monthly, weekly, and daily use by feature (and sub-feature for CAMPUS checkouts). It's really pretty slick.

One of the nice items in the web reports is a usage graph, showing usage as a percentage of total available licenses for various periods: 10 minutes for the daily pages, 1 hour for the weekly pages, and 6 hours for the monthly pages. I played around with different approaches for producing the graphs, but always hit a snag with IE's CSS incompatabilities. Finally, I came up with a way to use cascading tables that works well in both IE and Firefox. The div that contains the usage graph has a background-image with the graph layout - this works very well.

The basic setup is in place now, and I'm working on cleaning up some less-than-ideal code, adding some enhancements, and fixing up the user documentation.

95% of it is junk - another 3% is from mailing lists.

I'll admit it - it was tough coming back to work after a 16-day layoff. I did remember how to get here, though.