Categories
Photography Stuff

State of Geek Postponed

I’m postponing releasing the rest of the State of Geek essays. The timing puts them too close to other events that have happened around the immediate weblogging vicinity, and I really want them to stand alone as what they are – expressions of my thoughts and offerings of my writing.

I didn’t write them to jab at or otherwise egg on some people who are seeing these as nothing more than a reflection of them and what they’ve done. They aren’t. They are a reflection of me, and what I’m doing. And thinking.

Anyway, I apologize if you’ve been waiting for the second essay. I’ll republish the first and the rest in a week or two.

Not publishing that long essay saves room for….another rock photo! This one’s Aquamarine, and is one of my finer pieces. A big one, too, larger than my hand formed into a fist.

Aquamarine has an ancient history, including being the stone worn by sailors to protect them on the seas. It symbolizes youth and happiness, and in ancient times, people used Aquamarine to protect them from wickedness. Not evil, surprisingly, but wickedness.

The Medieval era was a time rich in emotional nuance, and every act was seen as a battle between good and evil. Since these acts varied in commonality and impact – from the devastation of the plague to everyday sneezing – the emotional context associated with each was finely defined and detailed. Wickedness was ‘bad’, but it wasn’t evil.

Oddly enough, this subtle difference has lasted to this day, right along with saying “Bless you” when someone sneezes. Except now, wicked has a good facet, as well as a bad one.

Have a wicked night.

Categories
Technology

The State of Geek: Part 1 — Temp Job, No Health

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

This week a rising tide of optimism is beginning to fuel hopes that that the the United States is finally on the rebound economically. The GDP was at a staggering 7.2% and for the first time in 18 months, jobs were added in September rather than lost.

Yet the only people popping champagne corks were among the senior White House staff, declaring a victory for President Bush’s policy of tax cuts. The rest of us see these statistics and we think, and hope, that times are better; but then the majority of us know at least one person who is unemployed and we ask ourselves, “How can bad times be over when (Sally|Mark|Joanne|Tom) is still unemployed?”

Jobs are returning, as the figures show in September; but they’re not the jobs we used to have. If you’ve lost your job because your plant was closed, you’re a technology worker and your company has downsized, or you were part of a call center that’s no longer in operation, chances are you can kiss that job good-bye permanently. According to the folks who know these things, the number of jobs in these industries in this country will never recover to pre-recession levels. As reported in the Daily Gazette in Massachusetts, a state that’s a major center for both tech and manufacturing jobs:

The state’s job market has just started to stabilize and should begin some job growth by the end of this year, said Michael Goodman, director of economic and public policy research at the University of Massachusetts.

Still, even by the end of 2005, the state is likely to recover less than two-thirds of the 150,000 jobs lost during the recession, he said. Many of those new jobs will be in sectors other than high-tech and manufacturing, those hardest hit during the recession.

But this doom and gloom doesn’t take into account how inflated the economy was before the recession; how tough it was to find workers to fill jobs created by bloated expectations –particularly in the high-tech fields, when companies used to give BWM cars to tech workers signing on. In addition, states like Massachusetts and California and Oregon that had a higher than average percentage of high-tech jobs are going to feel the tech downturn more acutely than other states with a more balanced job market. Based on this, adding up all the factors, if the job market for high-tech recovers to even 90% of its pre-recession boom-time across the country, then we should still be looking at a relatively stable employment situation. Shouldn’t we?

We should. But the dot-com explosion fueled a lot of changes that are going to continue to negatively impact on technology jobs in this country, and the rest of the world, for years to come. This impact is going to be significant enough that if people were to ask geeks like me whether we would recommend that their little Bobby or Susan study computer science in college, we would have to honestly say, “No”; an answer that has serious consequences to the state of geek.*

Temp Job, no Health

Recently the grocery workers at the one of the three major chains went on strike, and workers for the other two were locked out because the same union covered the employees of all three stores. There were over 10,000 workers out of the job and on the picket lines, a scenario repeated in other parts of the country including California, Utah, and on the East Coast.

I expected the stores to severely limit their hours and services, and was consequently amazed at how quickly the stores returned to something approximating their state before the strike occurred. In less than a week, nine thousand workers had been hired, trained, and put into service at the stores in St. Louis alone. This may not seem like much in a city of 370,000 people — nine thousand is barely 3 percent of the populace — but that’s nine thousand people willing and able to cross picket lines, to be labeled scab labor, an epitaph abhorred in this country even with the loss of union power over the years.

I have no doubt that if the companies continued hiring after the first week or two, the number of applications for the jobs would have doubled. Perhaps even tripled.

A vote ending the strike was taken yesterday and the workers will be returning to their jobs — an awkward time as the regular employees come on and the ’scab’ labor gets pushed out the door. The irony of the situation is that the contract the workers voted on yesterday is virtually no different than the one they rejected four weeks ago. According to the St. Louis Today:

In the end, union workers voted on two contracts that were identical in cost, supermarket executives said.

But several workers said they wanted to strike to make a point with their employers.

Shenika Bishop, a bagger at Schnucks in Cool Valley, said the strike taught her that workers should “stand up for what they need and deserve.”

Yes, but they didn’t.

Union officials say this strike, as with so many others among the grocery workers in the rest of the country, was about one thing — the lack of a National Health Care system. According to weblogger Joe Kenehan:

A semi-national strike by grocery store workers in California, Missouri, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia in defense of health benefits is pushing a broader American anxiety over the cost and accessibility of health care for regular people into the open.

It would seem that restaurant workers in New York may strike for the same reasons — just in time for the holidays. However, as with the grocery workers, I don’t think there will be much delay in bringing in ’scab’ labor.

What does this have to do with the state of geek, you ask? Because these strikes are a sign of the times: two few jobs, too many workers willing to work temp jobs with no security, and a growing national obsession with health insurance.

If there’s one label I could attach to the jobs I’m seeing out on the market for tech workers now, it would be “Temp Job, no Health”: temporary or contract job, no health insurance or other benefits provided. I’m not sure the state of the rest of the country but the job market in St. Louis consists primarily of contracting jobs; many of them for far less money then the good old days, and none of them with health insurance. Where before we could hope for a car, now we hope for a temp job that will last at least a couple of months and give us enough money so we can buy our own health insurance and still pay rent.

Economists say …

(Wait a sec. Who are these ‘economists’? Have you ever met an economist? Do economists really exist, or are they figures that publications invent so that they can provide their own predictions without having to back up their statements? “The economy is improving by a 15%”, the report says. We look around and don’t see an improvement and ask, who says the economy is improving by 15% and the report answes back, “The economists say so”, and well go, oh, well, if the economists say so. But I digress…)

Economists say that contract work is the harbinger of an upswing in permanent jobs as companies expand their labor pool cautiously in advance of better times. Where contracts go, permanent jobs are soon to follow. According to an WebTalkGuys Radio Show interview with techies.com president, Paul Cronin, increased numbers of contract jobs are a Good Thing:

The tech worker should see this as a great opportunity. One of the best ways of finding permanent work is through networking. When you’re out there talking to people and building relationships, it just seems to me that if someone offers you a project that is going to last 30-60-90 days and it’s a project that you’re qualified for and may even challenge you, it would make a lot of sense to take that project. The opportunity of staying with that company is increased by the fact that you worked with them already.

A few years back I wouldn’t have contemplated a permanent job, preferring the adventure and change that contract jobs provided. In most cases, my gigs would start out at the traditional 3 months, but in actuality they were usually extended indefinitely. I never worried about finding work because I received calls constantly from headhunters, always on the look out for new talent. I have to admit, I wasn’t always good about calling them back.

However, people who used to like contracting in good times are now looking for permanent work because the freedom of contracting is countered by the increased level of anxiety in jumping from short-term gig to short-term gig in an economy where reports are regularly published about the number of jobs permanently lost in high-tech. Today’s contract market is tighter, with more competition for jobs; today’s buyer, the employer, can offer less money and still get the same level of talent.

If you’re not a tech worker, you’re probably going, so what? The tech workers are a small job market compared to other jobs. We’re hit, but the rest of the country is doing okay. Right?

Wrong. If tech workers had money, we also spent money, especially on high ticket items that eventually ended up fueling entire industries. Once the first domino fell — the death of the dot-coms — other dominos fell in a display of cause and effect to bring down the house. This isn’t guesswork, you can see the impact in the record record number of bankruptcies filed this year. According to the Contra Costa Times:

Many Americans are struggling to pay their bills, and those out of work find job opportunities bleak. Research by the Federal Reserve indicates that household debt has risen to a record 14 percent of disposable income. Personal bankruptcies are on track this year to surpass last year’s all-time high of 1.5 million, says the American Bankruptcy Institute.

This country has pushed people to buy, buy, buy, and they bought, bought, bought. Now that times are tough, they’re no longer buying, which is impacting on both service and manufacturing communities and leading to yet more loss of jobs. Pity the poor American geek who can no longer shop at Disney and Warner Brothers, you think. But you don’t pity us because, as you see it, our own greed has caught up with us.

So the mighty have fallen and we log on to monster.com and hotjobs.com and we send resumes out and network, and we network; hungry flocks of birds all looking for the last worm. We’ll be thankful for what we get.

In the Sacramento Bee an article (featuring among others, weblogger Ross Mayfield) talks about the downturn in the Silicon Valley, and people being happy to get work:

At the Calvary Church in Los Gatos the other night, the weekly Need a Job Support Group drew its regular crowd of more than 60 unemployed tech workers.

They mingled over cookies and coffee, many wearing name tags spelling out their technical field: Hardware. Software. Marketing. It was mostly a male crowd, middle aged, casually dressed, folks like Kent Conrad.

A 41-year-old engineer from San Jose, he has started a handyman business after six months of unemployment.

“There’s more than one way to pay the rent,” Conrad said. “That whole dot-com bust, boom and bust, has damaged the whole industry. Companies are real cautious about hiring people.”

On this night, technical writer Milt Brewster was a star of sorts: He just got a job after 32 months of unemployment.

The job will last only six months and represents a 30 percent pay cut, but he wasn’t griping: “I consider that a stroke of luck — it’s only 30 percent.”

Times are getting better, we tell ourselves. And when the headhunters call us, we pretend we don’t hear the satisfaction in their voices when they tell us thanks for the resume, they’ll add it to the pile.

Perhaps we need a Union.

*And as I was writing this part of the essay, Meg wrote a comment to my previous post:

Globalization is here and I change my mind a few times a day about what we should be doing about it, especially in the IT industry. For the most part I think it is not wise to enter the IT field in the US right now, while others think that women should be encouraged more to enter into this ever-changing industry.

“Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be IT workers..”

Categories
Diversity

Bitches Club

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I swear I’m going to start a Bitches Club. And it’s not going to be for women only.

I’ve been researching the extent of offshoring in this country in the last week; I’m appalled by what I’m finding, especially offshoring as related to the technology field. The more I read, the more I find myself siding with the protectionists who believe we should penalize companies for moving jobs offshore, or for bringing in workers from other countries. But then I remember the great people I’ve worked with who were in this country on H1Bs from India, Russia, Vietnam, Australia, and other countries. I think about how much richer my life is, how much more open my understanding is, thanks to these people who learned a new language and stepped into a country and a culture where not everyone welcomed them.

I look around and see unemployed tech workers and I say to myself, we need to keep our jobs here, in this country; take care of our own. But then there are the webloggers from other countries who have forced me to think beyond my borders; who have screwed around with my vision and hearing, leaving me irreversibly damaged beyond Patriotic repair. People who just won’t let me think within the box.

Globalization is happening, and I’m not sure there’s anything we can do to fight against it. Or that we should. But too often corporations and countries invoke globalization and we don’t understand the implications – either the possible benefits or the potential for abuse.

It’s like technology: too many people just go with the technical flow without understanding what’s happening. Then something like a DDoS happens, and words like packet and SYN get thrown around and they haven’t a clue if something positive is being done to help them, or if someone is just yanking their non-tech chains.

I think that’s what defines a bitch to me. It’s not that you fight all the time; it’s that, at a minimum, you don’t accept what’s happening around you without at least trying to understand what that ‘acceptance’ means in the long run.

Tough decisions need tough talk and even tough actions at times . When the going gets bitchy, the bitches get going.

(I am going to die at a relatively young age from stress, aren’t I?)

Speaking of bitchy folk, Sheila Lennon introduces a new radio broadcast called Outrage Radio. What happens if you put Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Ann Coulter* through the Looking Glass? You get a new sport called Extreme Liberal Radio.

Sheila interviews the Outrage gang, and the responses show that amidst the passion, there might also be vestiges of humor. My favorite response back to one of her questions: “If you want a nanny, move to Sweden.” I hope this humor, and its associated perspective, continue because if I can’t handle conservatives who take themselves too seriously, liberals with flecks of foam at the corners of their mouth and a demonic gleam in their eyes also turn me off.

I hesitate when I see something like ‘liberal radio’, because I don’t think we can use labels like ‘liberal’, ‘conservative’, or even ‘libertarian’, the same again. I know so-called warbloggers who are extremely liberal when it comes to social issues and internal politics. I know fiscal conservatives who are pro-choice. And there’s even a few libertarians who believe that maybe machine guns aren’t really necessary for deer hunting.

Today is a rich and complex time. It’s not the same black and white hat, good guy/bad buy world, and cookie cutter labels just don’t work. I hope that Outrage Radio goes beyond just being ‘liberal radio’, or why listen? We’ll already know what they’ll be saying.

*Speaking of Ann Coulter, where’s the Ann Coulter of Liberal Radio, guys?

Categories
Art Photography

The illusion of perfection

My last rock story. Today if only the sun would cooperate I could finish the photos of the mineral collection and finally put this show on the road. There’s a metallic taste in my mouth and I find looking at the last broken and browned leaves of Fall outside to be a soothing counter-point to immersion in such vivid greens and blues and pinks and purples, oranges and golds and clears.

I measured my pyrite cube and found that it’s not a perfect square that it appears. Still, it’s close enough that when I showed it to my brother years ago, he didn’t believe it was natural – how can anything in nature follow such perfect lines? Today through an understanding and study of fractals we know that there is more of a pattern to nature than is apparent to the naked eye.

In fact, crystals of a specific mineral usually grow in precise patterns that are known as the crystal’s habit, a primary identifier of the mineral. For instance, Vanadinite has a very distinctive habit and color that make it quite easy to identify.

However, the appearance of consistency and pattern in nature is really an illusion; a trick to make us think we have the answers. Just when we think we’ve found the key to understanding it, nature changes. We’re then left grasping at our tattered assumptions, gazing in bewilderment at our math where two plus two does not equal four. We learned a lesson about this from the sun this week – if something so primal to our lives can suddenly change behavior, what can we depend on? Do you feel your world rocked?

Barite can be clear and precise and ordered, and there is serenity in its clean, uncluttered lines:

But it can also be yellow and chaotic, with growth in every direction. Look at the following photo – how can we believe that the mineral that formed the elegant bit of clarity above is the same mineral that formed into the messy and inconsistent crystal shown below?

Still, if a crystal can have many forms and colors and shapes and textures, there is a finite limit to its variety. Dioptase will never be red, and molybdenite will always be metallic. It is this limit that now leads me to believe that one of my samples, a lovely bit of orange-red and clear crystals, may be a fake. I cannot find a mineral that matches the color, the weight, and the shape – all three.

By color it could be realgar, but the shape is wrong; by luster it could be spinel, but the shape is wrong; and by weight it could be rhodonite – but the shape and size doesn’t fit any of these.

It is driving me mad.

It’s a pity my pretty orange rock refuses to be classified, to fall into neat little patterns of mineral behavior: this color and this luster and this crystal shape and gravity. There’s no room in the collection for mystery.

Categories
Diversity

But young women don’t want role models

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Halley Suitt wrote at misbehaving.net about .NET developer Julie Lerman and her attending the PDC (Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference). Halley mentions the usual bad ratio of men attendees to women, which is not a surprise to any of us.

I wasn’t going to respond to Halley’s post, which was fine. But I could not let a comment Julie Lerman made go without response. First, to set the scene as to the skewed demographics of the conference (white/male, as usual) , Werner Vogels’ wrote:

The demographics are skewed not only for gender but also race and age. To dominant type: geeky white guy in the 20-30 year range and balding slighty heavyset white guys between 40-50. Hardly any African or Asian Americans. The presenters are almost all fit this stereotype.

I can agree with this assessment – it fits the conferences I’ve been to, and I’ve written about this in the past. To which Julie responds with:

Werner is right about the race demographics. You do have to discount the fact that it’s difficult for people from far away to get there. We know through INETA that there are huge .NET developer communities all over the world including places like Latin America, India, Malaysia, etc. As far as the age demographics, right again. But man, this stuff is exhausting and the older you get the harder it is to do. It is amazing to me how young so many of the “stars” of our little world are

(I did write a fairly scathing comment about this when I originally posted but I decided to remove it. I don’t think any comment is necessary. )

I am writing a very extensive essay on the technology profession, sparked in part by a thought provoking comment that Dori Smith wrote in comments at misbehaving.net:

Okay, I guess I’ll be the devil’s advocate and ask, what’s so special about getting women into tech?

I’ve been working with computers for over 25 years, and I’m at the point now where I don’t recommend that anyone go into this field, and particularly not women. The analogy I usually use is that of pro sports–if you’re going to get into the field, do it for love or for money, but don’t plan on it lasting as a lifetime career.

For love: it’s all you want to do, and it’s okay that either it’ll be a short-term paid gig or a long-term free gig. You do it because you feel driven to do it, and nobody better stand in your way. These folks (both male & female) don’t need any encouragement.

For money: you know it’s not a long-term proposition, but you’re okay with getting in, trying to grab the brass ring and make some serious dollars, and then getting out. These folks (both male & female) are going to pick tech or some other field based on how much money they think they can make in a short-time, and I (personally) don’t really care whether they decide that tech’s the answer for them or not.

But if you’re going to encourage women to go into tech, you need to make sure that they know that it’s a field just like, say, sports or modeling, where youth is always going to be more important than talent. They need to know that they’re picking a career where they’ll be unhirable once they turn 35 or have kids, or even worse, turn 35 *and* have kids.

This isn’t changed by getting more women into the field. This isn’t changed by a hot job market making employees more valuable (the Internet bubble made things worse, if anything). This is (imo) changed by getting rid of the self-destructive ways in which the field compensates employees, and producing more women graduates doesn’t touch that.

So, what’s so good about encouraging women to go into tech?

I apologize to Dori for copying the entire comment, but I thought it was a fascinating statement to make, and one worth discussion. I know that it stopped me cold and made me question a lot of my assumptions. More on this later.

I’m also writing several new essays for my For Poets sites on DDoS and weblogging’s impact on the openness of the Internet (and vice versa), which I hope to put out this weekend. Too bad it lacks the sexy shininess of all that way cool .NET stuff. *giggle*

Also almost finished with the rock show. Today. But first, I’m going on a hike. Have to keep these old bones moving, or they get brittle, you know.