Posts Tagged ‘unemployment’

“Gazelles” eat hay, not grass

On Good.is the popular posts today include “15 Percent of Americans Are Now on Food Stamps”. I’ve visited the site twice this Monday, once just after the New York Stock Exchange started trading this morning, and now after the market close, as the story of our dismal economy’s enduring lifelessness makes headlines everywhere. In today’s more optimistic forenoon, I read Tim Fernholz’s “Hunting Gazelles: Figuring Out What Makes Companies—and Jobs—Grow”. Some of the points in that article bugged me then. They really irritate me now.

The post is an interview with scholar Tim Kane, who proposes that new jobs in the U.S. economy come from “gazelles,” quick-moving, fast-growing, young businesses. I don’t quibble with this entirely; I’ve seen how many Bay Area tech businesses seem desperate to hire enough people to support their rapid expansion (though–ahem–not desperate enough to modernize their hiring practices). Yet just after sharing convincing data about the remarkable contribution “gazelles” make to the employment rate, Kane veers into territory more familiar to subscribers to Reason than to Good.is:

Photo by Swamibu

There are real structural impediments to starting a firm…Labor regulations can make it difficult for entrepreneurs to even leave, and difficult for firms to hire more people.

The [Sarbanes-Oxley accounting law] is particularly galling because it seems like its[sic] killing off our IPO industry. Without an IPO or the promise of an IPO on the horizon, why start a tech company?

Alright, where to begin?

Let’s start here: one man’s regulation is another’s unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, and minimum wage law. Your “structural impediment” is my workplace safety standard, whistleblower protection, and equal opportunity legislation. Think Sarbanes-Oxley is galling? Try having your retirement savings wiped out overnight by corporate fraud.

There’s a stubborn belief in the startup world that it’s 100% self-made, boot-strapped, that the “gazelles” broke away from the encumbrances of the herd and now thrive on the nourishing wild grasses of the entrepreneurial savannah. If this were so, why are there so few, if any, gazelles in places with fewer regulations? Why do tech bubbles form again and again here in the Bay Area?

You could re-read Richard Florida, or you could remember this:

“Gazelles” eat hay, not grass.

Meaning: “gazelles” rely on the infrastructure all of us provide. This isn’t just WiFi, Blue Bottle Coffee, and a spot on the CalTrain bike car. It’s also those “structural impediments” like environmental regulation (can you drink the water out of the tap?), public health initiatives (when’s the last time you worried about polio?), and anti-corruption laws (do you have to bribe someone to launch your product?).

Yes, it’s admirable to watch gazelles leap gracefully to such heights. But let’s not forget the haystacks we shore up to feed them.

What bugs me about third-party recruiters

Here at last, the summer doldrums. I’m in between vacations–back from the U.K., planning to go to Arizona–and just completed a project. I need work! Yet I’ve turned off InMail on LinkedIn, haven’t tweeted about looking for a new gig, and don’t have my résumé or telephone number on my Web site. Why? Because I hate dealing with third-party recruiters.

Barce really hit a nerve with his post on the SF Ruby Meetup mailing list yesterday summarizing his recent job search experience. He’d uploaded his profile to Dice, Monster, and CareerBuilder, sites notorious for generating spam from bots or unscrupulous jerks posing as staffing professionals. As expected, he received a great deal of unwanted attention from desperate salespeople rather than authentic employers. On the mailing list, our responses to Barce’s amusing account have ranged from “+1″ to pondering how to teach recruiters better pattern matching. Clearly, many of us consider recruiters, especially third-party ones, bothersome. Here are my reasons:

What bugs me about third -party recruiters

  • They don’t bother to find out anything about me before they pitch something.
    I have this Web site, my LinkedIn profile, my Meetup profiles, my Quora profile, my Twitter account, my GitHub account, and more about me quickly retrieved in a Google search. Like many tech professionals, I make it pretty easy to find out what I do for a living, how I do it, where I do it, how long I’ve done it, and who pays me to do it. So it doesn’t just bug me, but enrages me when some huckster cold calls about some completely inappropriate “opportunity.”

My response: 1) block that person’s telephone number from calling me again; and 2) block that person’s e-mail as spam. I don’t waste my time with a personal response anymore, since I’ve learned that only results in more annoying cold calls.

The ultimate in recruiting!
photo by johanohrling

  • They don’t represent projects I want to join.
    I’m a freelancer, so I’m only looking for contracts–that makes me disinterested in about 93% of the positions both legitimate and fake recruiters are seeking to fill. So stop sending me e-mails about “full time opportunities” already!

More profoundly, I admit to holding a bias against projects which can’t be staffed without third-party recruiting. I can understand how a startup or corporate unit would retain a recruiter to find and vet suitable candidates, but can’t fathom why a tech business worth joining can’t broadcast its need for developers through mailing lists, meetups, or Twitter.

One of the more irritating constants of third-party recruiter spam is a lengthy description of a job which doesn’t actually exist. Searching on some of the phrases in the “job description” usually results in an archived view of a months-old posting on Craigslist.

Not getting a response to your cold calls? Stop cutting and pasting. We know about that one.

  • And my biggest complaint: They do massive harm to the good recruiters.
    There are staffing professionals–emphasis on “professional”–out there who I would never block from calling or e-mailing me. I will always give them my attention. I might not be able to help them myself, but I will always try to think of someone who can. I’ve been meaning to write a blog post about annoying recruiter behaviors for ages, but hesitated when I recalled how well these good recruiters have treated me. I didn’t want them to think I was unmindful of that.

Mention recruiters on the typical developer forum, and you’ll get a round of caustic, negative, exasperated responses–and at least one person piping up with something to the effect of, “But So-and-so is a good recruiter!” This is the result of So-and-so working competently and ethically. So-and-so ingratiated him- or herself with the development community by participating in it, asked what job seekers were looking for–then listened–and didn’t antagonize employers by sending a blizzard of unsuitable resumes. So-and-so acted more like a talent agent than a shill.

Meanwhile, there’s this mass of clowns ruining it for everyone else. Company job postings end with the stern warning “NO RECRUITERS!” and job seekers refuse to deal with recruiters, bad or good.

My proposal: let’s keep this unregulated term “recruiter.” But let’s apply it only to the sleazy spammers. For the rest, anyone acting like a professional, someone who does the more difficult job of caring? Some other term–matchmaker. Agent. Mensch.

5 Things I’m Doing Nowadays Instead of Working

So, you might’ve been spending the last year or so snoozing under a stalactite in Mammoth Cave, and completely missed the near-hourly utterance of the word “recession,” and now you’re a trite confused that so many millions of Americans with good educations, impressive experience, and opposable thumbs are unemployed. In fact, you could’ve surfaced a few months ago and been confronted with the same puzzler, even the same zombie battalion of former job holders. But not all of us are weathering the economic downturn with Red Vines and Snuggies. Some of us are keeping busy; almost too busy to work.

5 Things I’m Doing Nowadays Instead of Working

  1. Getting my command of JavaScript from 30 to 60. I can write state-of-the-art scripts—for 1998. Rather than continuing to embarrass myself with inline onclick handlers and overdependence on alert() for debugging, I’m devoting extra time to reading everything and anything written by Chris Heilmann and Peter-Paul Koch.
  2. Playing with all those advanced techniques customers never request. To date none of my clients have paid me to use any of the goodies from GitHub or Google Code or the multitude of promising APIs; instead, my workdays are devoted to treating float drops in IE 6 and the like. Now, with only myself to please, I can spend time on more challenging tasks at the keyboard.
  3. Thinking of going back to school. I spend much of my time reading about the built environment, and all of my time using it. I’ve been interested in architecture for many years, yet have no training in it; haven’t worked in the field at all. So what better time to seek retraining than the unbillable present?
  4. Avoiding the news. I stopped my hourly visits to the Web sites for the New York Times and the San Francisco papers because I suspected I was getting too distressed by the dismal stories I read there. I was right —my mood brightened once removed from the daily downbeat. I’m still informed of the things really important to me, and free from concern about those which aren’t.
  5. Going outside. One of the biggest stressors for me when I’m fully employed is that I’m not able to go outside very much during the daytime. Now, with no hypertensive project managers or overdemanding clients to rebuke me, I’m spending a lot of mid-days running, bicycling, or hiking. It’s a pity that work (unless you’re a bike messenger or park ranger) is so often structured to be incompatible with these activities, which are probably the easiest way to regain your enthusiasm for life.

What are you doing instead of working?