Песец

My membership card arrived today!  I am now a "card-carrying Liberal".  And I still have my membership card for the Free Software Foundation, so I remain a "card-carrying Communist".

At this month's meeting of the riding association, they voted me onto the board of directors!  Since we're now in the off-season for Canadian elections, becoming a director is simply a matter of showing up repeatedly for meetings.  Problem: now I'm supposed to help them raise money for the 2019 election!  I have no experience whatsoever in fund-raising, but I guess I have to do it to get some cred with this Old-Boy Network that I'm still hoping will someday get me a cushy job as a part-time software engineer, hopefully before all my remaining cash runs out.

Next problem: modern fund-raising requires a smartphone, which I don't have (and don't particularly want to get because the fonts are so damn small).  Everyone is supposed to be running an app called MiniVAN to record the results of the voter-contacts.  Maybe I can borrow Wifey's tablet and run it on that?  Or maybe use WebVAN on my laptop?  I'll find out at the upcoming fund-raising training workshop at the riding-president's house.

Another problem: who am I raising this money for?  Some of it is for the national party, which needs it to support the riding associations, buy TV ads, and fly the Prime Minister around on a private jet.  But much of it is supposed to go to the 2019 election fund.  Who will the candidate be?  If nothing changes between now and then, the riding association intends to nominate the same guy as last time (who didn't win).  He seems like a nice and hard-working fellow.

But something is *supposed* to change.  Justin Trudeau promised that 2015 would be the last time that Canada used a first-past-the-post winner-take-all election like the Americans.  Switching over to a proportional-representation system will require either making Parliament 30% bigger or making the electoral districts 30% bigger, which seems to be the preferred option.  Suppose the new district boundaries are drawn so that our candidate is in one riding and the money we raised for him is in a different one.  What happens then?  My guess is that no one really knows yet.

Well, you *knew* I wouldn't let this "warmest Christmas Eve in recorded history" go by without a comment, right?  Every place I've been over the last ten years is in the part of this map that's been described as "the molten inside of a Hot Pocket", which represents temperatures 18°F to 36°F above normal for the day.

Some people claim that Global Warming will kill a billion people, or 14% of the planet's human population.  That's almost big a reduction as the 17% that the planet got from the Black Death.  And, you know, after the Black Death the relative power of Labour vs Capital was improved considerably!  So if you think that people have no power and corporations own everything, just wait until you're negotiating your next raise while all your co-workers' bodies are rotting in the streets!  (Disclaimer: this refers specifically to Europe, where half the people died of plague; fatalities from Global Warming are expected to vary widely across the planet, affecting outsourced programmers in Bangladesh much more than those in Ukraine).

Recently I heard that jobs for computer programmers in the USA are expected to drop by 8% over the next decade, while jobs for software developers (previously called "Programmer/Analysts") will grow by 17%.  Of course, these estimates assume that current off-shoring trends will continue unchanged, but the one thing you can be certain of about trends is that they eventually change.

Happy ChristmaHanuKwanzaakah!  We celebrated our tradition with a Christmas Eve visit to a Chinese restaurant, like all the other Jews.

Did you know that "kwanza" is the unit of currency in Angola?

I didn't do much today.  The wind-chill was nasty all day, but most of the things I was supposed to have done were on the telephone.  One item: I was supposed to call one of the local "Chamber of Commerce" type places to ask if they know of any other Job Fairs like the one they held a month ago.  (They had 55 vendors, I handed out 5 résumés, went home thinking there were actually two companies I'd like to work at, but later found out that one doesn't need a software guy right now and the other has run into funding issues and can't hire anyone.)

I was also thinking of asking them where I could find a part-time semi-retired salesman for a "Linux system administration outsourcing" company, because it seems that I could actually form such a venture but none of us wants to be the guy who goes out and hawks the product to potential customers.  One of the nice things about sysadmin is that you really can create virtual full-time people by packaging up a bunch of part-timers (as long as work-documentation standards are strictly adhered to).  Two half-time contractors get paid less than one full-timer, so there's "margin" and "value-add" and all that lovely business stuff.  But I didn't call.

Today, PZ Myers wrote about the first time he asked out his future wife, which reminded me of my difficulties in picking up the phone to ask those two companies from the Job Fair why they hadn't called me back.  (You never know — I once got a job several months after a different job I had interviewed for had funding difficulties, because the interviewer remembered me.  And *that* job led to Company ℱ where I worked for 17 years.)  Professor Myers writes, "She was the brave one when she said yes."  Yeah, if any salesman were to agree to take on this gig, he would have to be a brave one.  Right now I have only one customer (that I would like to replace, or at least augment) and the method I used to acquire that one probably wouldn't work again.  I have no idea how to sell such a service, or how to determine what price the customers would pay for it, or how to find people who should buy it.  If you know that you're not good with sysadmin, then you don't think about sysadmin approaches to solving your problems, so you don't "feel the lack" of a sysadmin on your staff and don't realize that you could benefit from hiring an outsourcing firm.

I had a much easier time asking out my future wife than Dr. Myers did.  I just posted a "mating call" to a University BBS.  She was the only female respondent, so — years later — I married her.  Now if only I had some income to put food on the table for our children...

It was about Emacs!  And stock-trading!  And the people I was speaking to didn't like any of it!  And I sort of knew that would happen before I even started!  I guess I'm just a glutton for punishment, because I keep trying to tell people things I know they don't want to hear.

Anyway, here is a transcript for my talk, which you should definitely click on if your preferred reading material contains text such as "Um, oh, okay, so there we go.  All right, so, perhaps if".  Clearly, I am not one of the world's best public speakers.

The timestamps in the transcript do not correspond to the original talk, but to this version (which you probably shouldn't bother clicking on).  I used audacity to reduce the tempo by 40%, which — due to the magic of mathematics — had the effect of increasing the size of the recording by 70%.

In other news, my Panasonic CF-Y5 laptop's LCD died again, so I got a Dell D620 to replace it.  So I had to give this talk using a computer that I had just bought, with an operating system (Mint 15!) that I barely knew how to use.  Considering that, things actually went reasonably well.

I had hoped that the guy from OpenText would be there again, but no such luck.  So, after my talk, I gave my résumé to the Company ℙ guy, but I guess there's no reason to expect any employment interest from him any time soon.

Ruralsourcing!

That is all.

The subject above is a surprisingly-popular answer for the poll at the bottom of this diary over at DailyKos.  I had originally sent it to TorFur, but the initial response was rather poor (I had been warned that job postings to furry lists usually don't get much of a response), so I reposted it to DailyKos.

In case you're wondering (and who wouldn't?), the [CENSORED] items are

• Dogbiscuit crumbs and Nutella
• Wear a diaper and not bathe
• Cute foxboi

As of today, I'm still talking to one of the TorFur respondents and one of the dK respondents, but so far no one has actually signed up for the job.  So my unblemished record of "always a programmer, never a manager" continues!  I expect that becoming a manager will cause my headfur to go grey overnight, because management is one of those "life passage" things that causes your body to think that you need to start looking older and more distinguished.

From:	[me]
To:	[recruiter]
Date:	August 9, 2006
Subject:	Interview

[Name] Industries is a squat building in an industrial area outside of [Town] PA.  The building's entrance leads to a small waiting area containing four plush chairs, a plant, a receptionist behind a glass window, a stairway leading up, and a door with a digital combination lock.  On the walls are framed pictures of the company's products.  In the plant pot there is a diagram showing the layout of the building from the alarm system's point of view.  There is no other reading material.

While I am waiting, a young woman in jeans exits from the locked door and greets the receptionist on her way out of the building  Along with another fellow-employee greeting later, it is the only idle conversation overheard during my two hours at the company.  Either everyone at [Name] uses email for *everything*, or this is a company of taciturn people.

[VP-HR] lets me in through the locked door.  The contrast is extreme: the inside hallways have not been refurbished in quite some time.  I pass by some cubicles, including one that appears to be the official shingle for a one-desk company residing within [Name]'s offices.  The cafeteria has some of [Name]'s machines in it and employees are playing with their own products.

[VP-HR] takes me to [VP-Software], then returns to his own office.  [VP-Software] gives me the "five cent tour".  The QA department seems reasonable enough.  The software development area is extremely dark, with table lamps on some desks; something about the mood in that area brings a smile to my face.  There is no talking.  The production area is not air-conditioned.  There is little or no talking.  There is a ramp leading up to the second floor, but I am told it is "just for storage" and the tour does not include any of the various stairways to the upper floor.

[VP-Software] gets [Director-Software] and we find a conference room.  [VP-Software] is quite talkative, while [Director-Software] says almost nothing.  [VP-Software] repeats some questions from the phone interview.  It seems the job basically involves refactoring some software that has been patched to death over the last five years.  [Director-Software] asks about my first refactoring job back in 1983, and about [a Company ℱ product] (which unfortunately is an engine to help people take tests, not a method of automated QA that he was looking for).

For the "whiteboard" part of the interview, I was supposed to talk about software encapsulation.  I chose [another Company ℱ product], which I haven't worked on for six years.  And it was written in C and [VP-Software] believes C is obsolete and everyone should use C++.  So I'm not sure how well this part went.

[VP-Software] has strongly-held beliefs about software methodology which are more aligned with academic thought than with what the world's leading sofrware engineers actually do.  It is not clear how much a VP's opinion on such things really matters, but [Director-Software] neither supports nor opposes what [VP-Software] says.  After the interview, [Director-Software] can't wait to take his leave and run back to his desk.  It seems he has real work to do.

[VP-Software] brings me back to [VP-HR], who asks typical HR questions ("What do you like in a manager?  What do you dislike in a fellow employee?")  [VP-HR] is proud that people who leave [Name] often come back to their jobs, but the same thing used to happen at [Company ℱ] — I think it indicates a workplace with many minor irritations that are never resolved.  The company's core hours are 10-4, but [VP-HR] disagrees with his own company's policies and believes there is no reason why every employee can't get to work at 9 AM.  (In college I got poor grades in every class that met before 10.)  He also contradicts what [VP-Software] said in the phone interview about [Name's owner] being a conglomerate of troubled companies.  No no, [Name] isn't troubled!  [Conglomerate] bought [Name] as a cash cow!  He downplays the declining-industry aspect of tavern gaming by eliding the differences between [Name] and its sister company [Other name].  I would not want to take this job if it involved frequent contact with [VP-HR], but it probably doesn't.

Useful nugget from [VP-HR]: the refactoring project is [VP-Software]'s baby; he went to [Conglomerate] and got them to authorize it.  Since [VP-Software] is so new, I suspect that [Conglomerate] brought him in as a turnaround specialist.

Overall, the two main demerits I see are the lighting in the software development area (which strongly suggests that no one ever sits back to read a printout) and the VP-HR's attitude towards work hours.  Neither seems a strong enough reason to reject a job offer.  I think the main demerit that I presented to the company is that I am not the strong advocate of C++ design patterns that [VP-Software] seems to be looking for.  I prefer to do what works, what can be maintained, what scales well to large projects.  I expect that I would work well with [Director-Software], if that is what the day-to-day job actually entails.

In my previous email to [Recruiter], I forgot to give as a reference my current employer, [Company 𝔾] of [Town] California [Telephone number].  He recently wrote: "I am really enjoying the rapid pace of progress working with you".