A long time ago, I was saddled with very, very bad Internet. It was unreliable, but even when it was working, so much of the bandwidth was reserved for downloading that my ability to upload anything was severely compromised. My lady friend at the time didn’t have broadband, but rather dial-up. At some point, I discovered that it was actually faster to save what I wanted to upload on a disk, get in my car, drive 15 minutes to her apartment (I had a key), dial into the Internet, upload the file, and then get back in my car and drive home.

Recently I was at a coffee place in Redstone and I got flashbacks to those bad old days. Downloading was fine, but if I wanted so much as to upload the text involved in leaving a comment, it would time out. Sometimes quickly, sometimes taking a while. I tried different browsers, I tried different desktop environments (the laptop was running Linux). I tried emailing the text of the comment to my phone (which itself was struggling, since not much was spent by Verizon on Redstone infrastructure). Finally, I got it through by way of saving it to a text file, emailing it to my phone*, and copying and pasting it onto the browser. It was about two and a half hours after I initially tried to leave the comment.

I could have driven over fifty miles from Redstone to Callie, uploaded it from home, and then driven back to Redstone in the amount of time it took me to get the comment posted.

Now that I know what has to be done, and why it’s not going to work when I try to leave a comment, it doesn’t take me nearly as long. Even so, I think I need to just resign myself to Starbucks, where I can leave comments on blogs without incident. And use the bathroom, too.

* - I actually don’t understand why this worked. This should count against uploading bandwidth as well. But it worked.

When discussing the nature of at-will employment (which a lot of people don’t understand), I often use the example “You can be legally fired for wearing the color purple” as an example of the lack of legitimate pretext needed to fire someone. In the future, I will have to use orange, instead:

In an interview with the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, several of the fired workers say they wore the matching colors so they would be identified as a group when heading out for a happy hour event after work. They say the executive who fired them initially accused them of wearing the matching color as a form of protest against management.

Orange is widely considered to be one of the most visible colors to the human eye. Orange vests are worn by most hunters as a safety precaution and by school crossing guards. Most prisoners are required to wear orange jump suits.

The color orange is arguably Florida’s defining color. The self-described “Sunshine State” is widely known for its orange juice exports.

The law offices of Elizabeth R. Wellborn, P.A. offered “no comment” to Sun-Sentinel reporter Doreen Hemlock, but four ex-employees tell the paper they were simply wearing their orange shirts to celebrate “pay day” and the upcoming Friday group happy hour.

Outside The Beltway has a post on the subject. Joyner thought that it might be related to St. Paddy’s day, with orange being the color of the unionists. It was, however, unrelated. More than a couple of people have suggested that a company that would do this is probably not a company one should be excited about working for. One rumor making its way around is that it wasn’t actually a lunch thing, but rather a bunch of employees making fun of an executive’s fake tan. I have no knowledge that this is true, but I am going to pretend that it is. That would make it a little more understandable, I guess, but it is still indicative of a problem.

I have the distinction of having worked for one of the ten worst employers in the nation, a company I will call Bregna. I worked the overnight shift. This was a terrible, terrible company to work for and it, as a coworker put it, “breeds contempt.” The overnight shift had a custom of urinating on the side of the building during our nightly round (we worked the server room, but doubled as “security guards.”). Leaving aside the immaturity of urinating on the side of the building, when you have a bunch of white collar employees feeling compelled to go out of their way to do so, you have a problem. And it’s not dried urine on the building when everyone walks in to work in the morning.

The same applies to a law firm where you can get over a dozen employees to wear orange to make fun of somebody there. Given the response, one can assume it was not “all in good fun.” And if this was a light-hearted place where it was taken too far, we should be able to assume a lighter punishment than this.

I broadly support employment-at-will, even if it does lead to circumstances like this on occasion. Forcing a company to get its paperwork in order to be able to fire someone they want to get rid of doesn’t negate the overall power imbalance. It simply turns termination-without-cause into termination-with-cause a couple months later. I don’t actually extend this to various other protections, many of which I do support. At least in part because such laws are more enforceable, because it’s easier to establish a pattern of coming down too hard minorities, women, gays, the disabled or whatnot than it is to establish a pattern of firing people who wear the color orange or, for whatever reason, the employe doesn’t want to keep around.

Dave Schuler wonders if tablets in the workplace are new status symbols:

When I see this I can’t help but wonder if we’re not going to experience something similar to what happened when PCs hit the market nearly 30 years ago. When PCs first hit the market they were status symbols. The less likely you were to use them the more likely you were to have them. As the prices went down (which they did for a while) they became increasingly common and ultimately ubiquitous. However, despite the investment well into the billions companies really had very little to show for it.

He goes on to note that the computers did eventually earn their keep, so to speak.

When the Internet became the Internet, I was still in school. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why all of these employers were so ready and willing give their employees a tool by which they would be able to distract themselves from ever doing work. The deadweight loss had to outstrip any efficiency gains. I actually stand by that assessment, at the time. But as with computers, and the Internet, I think that you have to take on that loss before the real productivity gains are really seen. I remember when a company I worked for went paperless for our day-to-day activities. It was an unbelievable waste of time. I hated it. But it was a necessary intermediate step before we could get used to it, get the lay of the land, and then suddenly see all of the potential gains that came from not having to print everything out repeatedly. It takes time to speed up.

My wife’s work laptop denies her access to the Internet. Her work PC is so heavily filtered as to be a hindrance (note: a lot of legitimate things that doctors are going to look up are going to have “sexual content” or keywords that suggest violence). Somehow, with the Internet, we went from it being a glorious waste of time to something that hinders our ability to do our job without it.

Which brings me back to tablets. My wife doesn’t have a tablet to do her job. I suspect that if she got one, it would actually be helpful rather quickly. Just as soon as the software to do her job better is in place. For other doctors, I think it would take longer or it would sit unused the same way that the Pocket PC they gave her at one of her jobs was never so much as powered on. Over time, however, it will become increasingly incorporated into every day functions and a real productivity gain. Schuler isn’t denying this. But I think that you have to make the investment now and experience the loss for the gains to come later. Doctors need to get used to using them. Then, when they are, they will start saying “Hey, you know what would be helpful? If I could do… this… on the tablet.”

To hold back on tablets until everything is in place for it to be a substantial gain means that all of the things put in place are going to be done so by software designers and IT people that have no idea how the product will be used. They may sign on some doctors to ask, but even the doctors won’t know until they’ve incorporated it into their practice. It’s trial and error, and the trial part is costly.

I haven’t made the complete transition to Windows 7 yet. All of my secondary computers are still on XP (or, in two cases, Vista). When you do a search on XP, there’s a little dog that appears in the lower left-hand corner. You can make it to tricks. The problem with this digital dog is that it makes noise (some scratching sound). I don’t mind the dog, but the noise is irritating. But to get rid of the noise, you have to get rid of the dog. Right-click and tell it to take a hike and it trots away.

I feel the slightest bit bad about telling a digital dog to take a hike.

I feel ridiculously dumb for that sentiment.

—

Many years ago - maybe it’s till around - there was an application you could buy to raise a digital dog on your computer. My then-girlfriend Julianne had some. If you didn’t play with it often enough, it’d get droopy and sad. Sometimes it’d leave a dump on your screen. Julie bought me the program. I played with it a little bit, but it got old and only served to remind me that I didn’t have a real dog (mine had died not too long before). And I hated the notion that a digital dog required my attention or it would get pouty.

This is, of course, Zynga’s business model. Making you feel bad for letting pointless digital things languish. I guess, despite the stupid little feel-bad for telling the searchdog to leave, I am relatively immune.

My real dog would say that I am too immune to letting her languish.

—

Once upon a time, it was part of my job description to keep the office’s network up and running. It was an irritating part of my job. Not the least of which because I was having to look after the computing habits of a bunch of post-middle aged women who didn’t know the first thing about computers. One of them would say “Hey, Will. You need to see this!” so that she could show me something cute that the Office Help paperclip did. That was the second most annoying of all.

(The most annoying was conflating “I can’t find the database” (which I accidentally deleted the shortcut to) to “The database has been deleted.”)

Though I am suspicious of the notion that “preventative medicine will save money,” I did get a kick out of this story:

Gawande talked to one of these health consulting companies, Verisk Health, which sorts through the medical data of over 15 million employees. One of their clients includes a “big information-technology company on the East Coast” with over seven thousand folks in its insurance plan. It hoped to reduce its $40 million in health care spending by raising its employees’ insurance co-payments, hoping that would make them rethink unnecessary doctor’s visits (Sniffly nose just needs a visit to the cold aisle of the pharmacy), think twice before getting frivolous tests (I’m sure that itch is just temporary!), and not treat prescription medicine like candy (Mother doesn’t need her little helper three times a day).

Instead of falling, the company’s medical spending increased, by 10 percent yearly. When Verisk analyzed the data, they discovered that the employers’ plan had back-fired. Medical costs for the majority of employees had been capped, but there was a flair-up coming from early retirees who were the “sickest links” in the insurance plan. They cut back on their medical costs by visiting doctors less and taking their prescription medicine less frequently after the co-payment increase, due in part to their fixed incomes. That made them sicker. One retiree wound up having a heart attack that “necessitated emergency surgery and left him disabled with chronic heart failure.”

The preventative medicine thing *may* be more true when it comes to some patients (like older ones). In any event, who doesn’t love a story when a greedy corporation gets bitten in the arse (in such a direct manner) for trying to cut corners?

A little while ago I wrote about sticky wages and how employers might be responsible for it. I concluded:

My personal experience doesn’t really bear out the notion that it’s on the employer’s side. I got my first 9-5 job essentially by offering to work for substantially less than the job advertised for. The interview was not going well and it was a sort of hail mary. But it worked. And a number of jobs I have gotten since I have been overqualified for. Which is not exactly the same thing, but you’re confronting the same obstacle: I am worth x, but am asking for less than x. Only once have I been turned down for a job that I was overqualified for, as near as I can recall. It’s a little different, though, when you’re taking industry wages for a lesser job. There’s always the dangle of advancement. Getting raises for doing the same job seems to almost never happen anymore. Even before the recession.

According to a new paper, it may actually be the unemployeds’ decision:

[T]oday’s job seekers seem more picky. According to an analysis of surveys of 6,000 job seekers, the minimum wages that the unemployed are willing to accept are very close to their previous salary and drop little over time, says Mr. Mueller. That could help explain in part why they have so much trouble finding work, he says.

Of course, part of the issue is that people are overleveraged and household incomes don’t allow for a whole lot of flexibility. One of the problems with home ownership is that it fixes your housing costs at a particular rate. And if you’ve been living close to the edge, taking a pay-cut can hurt pretty deeply. The same applies to people who take 5-year car payment obligations. My inlaws paid cash for the houses that they bought. With housing costs being what they are, though, that’s a pretty difficult thing to do. But our tax laws reward home ownership, our regulatory laws may be making buying a house and renting it out less desirable, and so if you want to live somewhere larger than an apartment, it can be quite hard to get what you want without buying.

Of course, these things would be less of an issue if people were to live more within their means. You could afford to take the financial hit on the mortgage by cutting back elsewhere. That’s easier to do in some parts of the country than others, naturally. But even among those with comparatively low fixed expenses (no children, for example, and no mortgage), the degree to which a lot of my peers live on the edge doesn’t cease to surprise me.

Megan McArdle has a post about wage stickiness. I’m pondering a post on the subject myself, but it’ll probably end up in the backlog file. So with something better than nothing (and maybe a more complete post to come later, some thoughts.

When I was working at Mindstorm, all employees were required to take 10% pay cuts. I much, much preferred this over the alternative. I wish it is something that our culture could do more of rather than layoffs. It is a mixed bag, though. If you lay off 8%, then of course 90% are fine. I mean, they may have to work more hours to cover for the lost people, but they will still be able to meet their bills. On the other hand, if you give everybody a 10% pay cut (I’m making there be a difference because it’s cheaper to have fewer employees that you pay more than more employees that you pay less), and if half of those people are living hand-to-mouth, then you now have 50% of people that are missing payments and such because they were counting on $x rather than $.9x in income. A part of me says that it’s their own fault for living hand to mouth (unless we’re talking about near-poverty wages, in which case the wage cut isn’t exactly the problem), but people will live how they live.

Given the increased labor flexibility (it’s easier to find work near minimum wage than if you’re in the professional class), maybe layoffs are better for the poor and wage-cutting is better for those above a certain threshold?

McArdle also talks about wage stickiness among the unemployed. apparently at least part of the reason for it is on the employers’ side: there is a degree of signalling in the wages you ask for. She closes with the following:

Come up with a good story about why you’re willing to accept lower wages. When I was interviewing for my first job at The Economist, they asked me flat out why an MBA would be willing to take a job that paid $40,000. Part of the answer was, of course, that I needed a job. But that’s not what I said. What I said was also true: “I’m only going to be on the planet for a few short years. I want to do something that’s a lot more important to me than making money.”

My personal experience doesn’t really bear out the notion that it’s on the employer’s side. I got my first 9-5 job essentially by offering to work for substantially less than the job advertised for. The interview was not going well and it was a sort of hail mary. But it worked. And a number of jobs I have gotten since I have been overqualified for. Which is not exactly the same thing, but you’re confronting the same obstacle: I am worth x, but am asking for less than x. Only once have I been turned down for a job that I was overqualified for, as near as I can recall. It’s a little different, though, when you’re taking industry wages for a lesser job. There’s always the dangle of advancement. Getting raises for doing the same job seems to almost never happen anymore. Even before the recession.

Brief refresher: I work for a company called Escalon, where my services are contracted out to IT behemoth Commodus. I finished my first official project two weeks ago. Working from 7/26 to 8/1.

Commodus, however, has seen fit to deny us (Escalon) payment. Apparently, their contract with our client, the University of Allegheny, had a start date of 8/1, which is the date that I finished.

Leaving aside for the moment that I was told to start as soon as the appropriate input files were in place, who the heck penalizes contractors for getting work done early? Especially when dealing with a client that is impatient because it took three months to hammer out the contract?

I would be able to understand it better if due to the early start we had to go back and re-do something. I can even see saying “Thanks for getting this to us early, but in the future you need to wait for the start-date for such-and-such reasons” because something could go wrong in the future. But to flat out say “We won’t pay you” because we delivered on the start date and two weeks before the delivery date is just retarded. Especially when it’s part of an ongoing business relationship.

Hopefully the fact that we have documentation telling us to start as soon as possible will straighten this out.

I mentioned the job opportunity at Escalon/Commodus a while back, then went radio silent on it for a while. That’s because the entire thing got really quiet for a while.

It’s rare that I actually take the sort of chance on an employer that I did here. I was working, essentially, without a contract over a three month period with both the contract and “more work” being “right around the corner” most of the time. By the end, I was just reading over training material I had already read in other training material. The theoretical money was good, but it was like pulling teeth.

Then Cloancy got word at work that they were looking for another IT person. Alvin, one of the IT guys there, was encouraging me to apply. I looked over the job description and determined that it was not a job that I particularly wanted. It would have been the lowest-tier job I’d had since graduating from college.

Ordinarily, I would dismiss these thoughts on two bases. First, it’s a job and I am unemp0loyed and beggers can’t be choosers. Second, it’s a foot in the door. However, I kind of sort of did have a job at that point, and the “foot in the door” means less when it involves somewhere I don’t think we’re going to stay, long-term.

Even so, I couldn’t say definitively that I didn’t want the job. I didn’t know how my boss at Escalon would respond to my interviewing for another position. Would it make him work harder towards getting things moving, or would he figure it’s the perfect opportunity to cut his losses (and screw me out of pay for the hours I’d already worked). I also didn’t know what my ethical responsibilities were to the hospital and to Escalon (the contracting company).

Ultimately, I decided to let Duke at Escalon know what was going on. It was apparently just the kick in the pants that he (and Commodus) needed. Within a week I had a contract retroactive to March (and thus, I would be receiving my full hourly rate) and a personal call and apology from the project manager at Commodus.

It is looking like it’s going to be a less full-time gig than I had initially supposed, but that’s not a bad thing. There are things around the house that it is better if I have time to do and it should be conducive to being a stay-at-home-dad.

Besides, at the rate I am getting, what I made on a full day of substitute teaching, I make in the amount of time it took to drive to Redstone and back. And if I work two weeks a month, I’ll be making more than with the full-time job at the hospital. And this won’t look like fifteen steps back on my resume.

I only wish that I had turned the screws earlier. About six weeks before I was asked to go down to Deseret and interview for a job down there. The pay was low and the commute would have been four hours, round trip, so I declined. But I wish I’d told Duke about it.

I believe that, in the aggregate, men are more suited for some tasks and women more suited for others. I think that some of it is hardwired, some of it superficial socialization, and some of it deeply-ingrained socialization. I am skeptical of attempts to “get more women in technology careers” by only attacking the middle factor. The first factor is hard to account for. The third factor could involve changes that we don’t want to make. A lot of the attempts to get women more involved in science, technology, and related careers leave the first and third out of the equation. They strike me as superficial. While I may push a future daughter in this direction and away from a liberal arts one, I’m not likely to assume that if she doesn’t go for it that it’s some nefarious patriarchal plot or failure on my part.

The third factor, in my mind, would involve a lot more than superficial measures like Math Geek Barbie dolls, problematic affirmative action approaches, or a potentially damaging rearranging of geek culture on the hope that if we chase out the capable people currently doing it then by-gawd we can get women into the professions. Without demonstrating that the first factor is mythical, and without tackling the third factor, the end result is that girls that are uncertain or at least unexcited about technology will go that route simply because they get to go to the front of the line. The notion that it doesn’t matter because “women can do the job just as well as men” ignores more than innate differences that exist, but the motivations of the people doing the work. There may be some fields where you can just replace Person A with Person B and everything will go on normally, but science and technology are not among those.

If we assume that the first factor is mythical and the second can be successfully addressed, what exactly do we do about the third? But before we ask that question, we should first ask whether we want to do the third. My main disagreement with feminists in the area of technology is that they think that making IT environments (for example) more female-friendly is a second-factor issue, when in fact it’s more of a third-factor. Stripping technology from the culture that birthed it is a huge undertaking and one with more than a few potentially bad side effects. It would require more than just changing the way men operate. You’d have to change women, too. I often become exasperated at “female culture”, but the world is a better place than it would be if it consisted of men with and without penises (the inverse also being true). So if it were even possible, it’s not clear that it would even be desirable. As women have become more like men over the last forty years, their happiness rates have declined. But they remain happier, in the overall, from what I understand (until their late forties).

Of course, this is all easy for me to say. “Let men have the jobs in the relatively well-paying IT sector! Let them have the accolades in the more respected fields!” But it is genuinely unclear to me that this sort of upheaval is necessarily beneficial for men and women. But even if you disagree with me on that and want women to become more like men and vice-versa, how do you do it? A certain strain of thought is that you can do it with superficial, second-factor stuff. But it’s been tried and it isn’t happening. The response is to bring us to the third-factor stuff. And so the answer to the question is to attack the male culture that is currently holding the reins.

Incidentally, none of this should be considered justification for actual discrimination, wherever it occurs. Even if men are more adept at these things in the aggregate, you’re still going to have a whole lot of women better than a whole lot of men. This certainly applies to the wife and me. They should be welcomed into the circle. If they want to be there. But it remains far from clear to me that the status quo isn’t working. And in an environment where it’s men rather than women that are struggling to find work, fiddling with this seems not to be particularly more worthwhile than fiddling with female dominance of other professions.

Having said all that, I have recently picked up on an area where the above lead me to one conclusion, but my classroom experience has lead me to another. A post on that coming up later this week.

Jezebel Anna North argues that women aren’t entering engineering because engineering is mean to women:

In Stemming The Tide: Why Women Leave Engineering, two University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors report on their survey of over 3,700 women with engineering degrees. They found that just one in four women who had left the field reported doing so to spend more time with family. One third left “because they did not like the workplace climate, their boss or the culture,” while almost half departed due to “working conditions, too much travel, lack of advancement or low salary” (respondents were allowed to check more than one reason). The researchers also found that among women who got engineering degrees but never entered the field, a third made that decision “because of their perceptions of engineering as being inflexible or the engineering workplace culture as being non-supportive of women.” And, unsurprisingly, “Women engineers who were treated in a condescending, patronizing manner, and were belittled and undermined by their supervisors and co-workers were most likely to want to leave their organizations.” Writes study author Dr. Nadya Fouad, “Bottom line — it’s not all about family for most of the women who left engineering.”

North argues that this puts an end to the myth of “the underrepresentation of women in engineering fields is entirely due to the choices they make about family time. ”

But does it, though? For one fourth, it’s directly cited as an issue. And half cite a slew of factors including two, travel and (to a lesser extent) working conditions, that can be related to, if not family specifically, a work-life balance that women (in the aggregate) put a higher priority on than men. Ditto for engineering being “inflexible”, if that’s related to inflexible work hours. Low salary is not a gender-specific complaint, nor is (necessarily) advancement opportunities. It could be gender-specific if women within the field (working the same hours, etc) are making less money than their male counterparts or if they are less likely to see advancement. But these are boilerplate reasons.

Now, on to the guts of it. Women are less likely to work in environments where they feel harassed or have issues with their coworkers and engineering is more likely to be one of these environments. This may or may not be gender-specific, and if they are it might be directly or indirectly so. I mean, if it’s “oooh, girl in the server room, let’s harass her!” then that’s pretty unforgiveable. But I suspect that, as often as not, when women are communicated to the same way that men are communicated with in engineering and techie environments, they are more likely to find it off-putting. Which brings us around to the question of whether men should change their work environment to accommodate women that don’t presently work there.

Matthew Yglesias thinks so:

Not that shocking, but important nonetheless. Dysfunctional social norms that drive talent out of key fields are a real burden on the country, as well as on the individual women impacted.

Women are not the arbiters of what is and is not dysfunctional. That they don’t like an environment does not make that environment “wrong”. I say this as an only guy that has sat in teacher’s lounges while the women talk about the hot black dude from CSI and feel pretty uncomfortable in the process. I’m not wrong for being uncomfortable, but they’re not wrong for relating to one another the way that they relate to one another. Different business environments have different cultures. If there’s actual harassment going on, that’s one thing. If it’s just “not for me”, that’s another.

And, as I mentioned in my Geek Flag post, it’s not as though there are no tradeoffs. The same environment that some women don’t like, the men who work there thrive on. People that could have done a lot of thing go into IT specifically because the culture is there. The culture guided them into it. The culture makes workplace tolerable (for a lot of people that, ahem, don’t find a whole lot of social environments tolerable). It’s not exactly great that women are leaving the field, but it is good that a lot of people are really happy with it. You may not be able to address the former without negating the latter.

And to tie this all up, the notion that the women don’t like the men does not make the men jerks. As I say, they are not arbiters of what is or is not functional. And it could just as easily be that the women simply don’t like the men then that the men are doing anything wrong. It could be that you wouldn’t just have to get rid of the irritating things that the men do, but rather would have to get rid of the men themselves (the irritating things being signals more than anything else). So you’re getting rid of the men that like what they do and are good at it, for the sake of women that might or might not be the same. Forgive this former geek for being a little incredulous of the notion that if geeks can reform their image just by being nicer to girls as if the only problem is that we’re jerks. I think that on an individual level this is true, but on a group level, well, it’s as much culture clash as anything (and that does not make our culture “wrong”).

Again, none of this is to say that sexual harassment is okay. Women should not be condescended to (nor should men, of course). But not liking “the workplace climate, their boss or the culture” is not necessarily indicative of something being wrong with the workplace climate, the boss, or the culture.

This cannot stand.

Another stat shows that 80 percent of babies and toddlers know how to use the internet.

OH MY GOD TODDLERS AND BABIES ARE LEARNING TO USE ONE OF THE ESSENTIAL TOOLS OUR TIME! THIS IS POSITIVELY DISASTROUS!

Okay, actually, I find that statistic more puzzling than disastrous. How is “use the internet” defined? Learning to click on a link? Playing an Adobe Flash game? However you define it, being a toddler is a time for children to develop motor skills and language skills. Assuming that they can’t read, figuring out that clicking the button thingie when the pointer thingie will consistently cause such-and-such to happen strikes me as kind of useful. Granted, the spacial skills that come with playing with blocks are moreso, but are we really worried that kids aren’t playing with blocks?

Okay, setting that one sentence and my unreasonable response to it aside, let’s go back to the beginning:

• Text messages sent per day in the U.S.: nearly 5 billion
• Number of emails sent per second in the world: 2.8 million
• Average professional/work related meetings attended per month: 61

Sounds positively ominous… or does it? The first statistical set is the United States, the second set is the world, and the third is… what? Not the world. I doubt it’s even a company. I assume it’s an individual, in which case that’s actually kind of horrifying for a different reason. Does the average person really go to almost three meetings a day? I guess since I’ve only rarely been in management, that sounds awfully high to me. But I guess while I attended only one or two a week, there are others who just go from meeting to meeting and so it balances out to that. And maybe they define meeting liberally (though not so liberally, I would assume, that any time you stop by a boss’s office, that counts).

So is this a rallying call for more meetings? Why settle something with the convenience of an email when you can disrupt everyone’s schedule and have them drop what they’re doing for more “face time”?

My response may be somewhat intemperate, but with the exception of the part about Blackberries during family time (which I agree can be problematic), I am having difficulty what I am supposed to be pulling from this article other than “Be scared” and/or “You may not realize it, but you feel isolated.”

Except… I don’t. At least not in any of the ways that the article mentions. I have historically worked in the IT sector. We are not exactly luddites when it comes to electronic communication. We’re also not known for being the most sociable people. But, if anything, the places I have worked have involved us spending too much time talking to one another face-to-face. Often just chewing the fat. It’s a product of the Cubicle Age. I’m an introvert, but even I start up conversations with the guy sitting next to me. The only time I really avoided facetime was when everyone around me spoke through heavily accented English that I had difficulty understanding. And the only times I was really anti-social to my coworkers involved heavily accented English or an office full of people that were twenty years older than me or the fundamentalist father of triplets. I mean, am I alone in this? Due to geek-cultural solidarity and employers too cheap to spring for separate offices?

And Facebook? For every friendship it has created problems with (I can think of maybe one), it’s reignited friendships with dozens of others. I went to college at the dawn of Instant Messaging. ICQ came around my second year. My best friend Clint and I barely talked that first year. The second year and beyond, he was coordinating to see me every time he came to town and I was taking trips out there to see him. And of course this doesn’t even touch on BBSes, which provided me more friends than high school ever did. I don’t mean cyberfriends. I mean people that I met. People that I am still in touch with. And, of course, it provided me a course-correcting social education that my schools did not. But this is all kind of beside the point. The point is that unless you live in Callie, Arapaho, or some place similarly small, the only way you’re not making friends from cyber-communication is if that’s what you want. And if it isn’t bolstering your friendships, you’re likely not doing it right.

Which is not to say that there aren’t pitfalls to avoid. And in fact, I may be in one of those pitfalls now. Spending too much time online and not enough time around town making local friends which I might be forced to do in an earlier era. But a lot of that is circumstantial. I had a number of ideas on ways to meet people, but they sort of fell apart. And most of the ideas that occur to me are ideas that involve making friends way out in Redstone. And really, I was lousy with meeting people before the Internet (and BBSes), so it’s not like I can blame it on the wire. You can call it a crutch, but my ankle is sort of sprained.

So yeah, on the part about being able to put the Blackberry away at the dinner table, I’m kind of sympathetic. But complaining about the Internet getting in the way of “real communication” is like complaining that bicycles are problematic because they don’t give you the same workout as running.

Why do married men earn more?:

Theories about why employers pay married men more center-even in 2011-on a spouse at home who frees a husband from domestic tasks that sap his productivity at work. Of course, the same might be said of women at work whose husbands run households. But the available evidence does not show that men capitalize on extra time.

Is there a basic bias going on? Are married men getting the proverbial free lunch? Sidestepping a loaded question, maybe in a world where rules are fair and family expenses soar through the roof we should get more automatically. But the world is not fair, so I find it odd that life appears to bestow a free lunch on anyone, married or single.

I suspect that there are a lot of reasons, some of which mentioned in the article. No doubt that some of it is simply favoritism. I know that in places I’ve worked, hiring/firing decisions were implicitly made due to someone having a family to support or not. Never on that basis alone or anything, but I think that people who had families to support were given more chances.

The article also touches on another reason. Married men tend to be more well-adjusted than unmarried men. This isn’t uniform, of course, but I think it’s true in the aggregate. Further, more responsible men and men with more earning potential are probably more likely to find mates.

I think that there really is something to the productivity angle, though. The author doesn’t even attempt to answer the question of why married men would be more productive (except for the adjustment angle) or at least overlooks the most likely angle: when you’re married with children, you can’t afford to lose your job. Young and single, you can go on a Ramen diet. It’s harder to put your kids on one. Particularly when supporting one’s family is an integral part of the male ego for a lot of men. And even if there are no children involved, when you’re married, you have someone to answer to. The whole dramatic exit dynamic becomes a lot less attractive when you have to explain to your wife why you just nixed half the family income. So, when you can’t quit, and you can’t afford to get fired, you take your job more seriously and you work harder. Though I am without children (and not even the breadwinner), I found that the responsibilities that come with age alone and scraping by when she was pulling in a resident’s salary was enough to motivate me to work considerably harder than I did when i was 24, before I’d met her.

It’s actually along these lines that I reject NickS’s contention that older workers are overpaid. Yes, young people may have more neurons firing, but older workers have two bigger things going for them: First, the experience of age really does matter. Young people are often intelligent, but often cocky. Older employees are likely to have more experiences with problem-solving and the like to draw on that more than compensates for their diminishing neuron activity. But also, older people become less flexible and I think, generally speaking, have less tolerance for being poor. They have more responsibilities, often a mortgage, and more often families to help support.

Back to the original article, it goes on to cite a study on married and unmarried Major League Baseball players. With the exception of the adjustment angle, though, I think that example falls apart pretty quickly. First, since all baseball players make a lot of money, the notion that “I should work harder to support my family” becomes far less significant. So you might actually see a bigger difference in performance among married men in the everywhere else sector. Baseball players may be under a lot of pressure, but not nearly as much financial pressure. There could be an element of “I want to do well so that my kids will look up to me” involved, but if you play professional baseball, your kids will look up to you, I’d imagine. You can quit and retire at any point and you’re more likely to be financially okay than someone doing just about anything else. In fact, those that are married with kids are more likely to have a nest-egg to retire on, so they actually need the job less. It’s just a different world.

Addendum: Bakadesuyo furthers my point:

It is further shown that married men feel less satisfied with their financial situation as compared to their single counterparts. These results indicate that a lower level of pay satisfaction induce married men to put more effort into their work, which leads to higher wages.

Suzanne Lucas thinks workplace bullying should be legal:

Anti bullying legislation has been under consideration in several states since California first introduced a proposal in 2003. None has passed such legislation, but, the Los Angeles Times reports, New York is likely to make bullying illegal this year. Maryland is holding hearings and other states are considering proposals.

This is all noble and good and completely the wrong thing to do.

She gives five reasons why: It will make it even harder to find new jobs, legislation won’t solve the problem, bullying is impossible to define, managers need to manage (and this can come across as bullying), and protection against bullying often protects the bullies.

She makes a reasonably compelling case. She seems to be in conflict with herself as it pertains to sexual harassment, using it as an example of how ineffectual such laws are while suggesting that the (continued) enforcement of such rules would contribute to a bully-free workplace. To some extent, each of her arguments apply just as much to sexual harassment as they do to any other sort of bullying. There is a major difference between general anti-bullying laws and victim-specific laws, though. Namely, if someone that is part of a “privileged” group is harassed at one place for some stupid reason, that is less likely to be the case if they go somewhere else. The sexual harassment laws were founded in part because discrimination against women was perceived to be so common as to be hard to escape (at least in sectors of the economy generally dominated by men). Anti-discrimination laws were a response to the perception that certain races faced the strong possibility of discriminated against with enough frequency to constitute a real problem and something more than just “well find a new job!”

As an Anglo-Saxon male, the only time I have ever worried about discrimination is when I was living in Deseret. Despite the fact that they are not supposed to, there were employers that were known to ask you which ward (an LDS precinct) you belonged to as a part of the interview. When I interviewed anywhere, I made absolute sure that I did not smoke a cigarette at all that day. Not because I worried that they would not hire me if they knew I was a smoker, but that they would know by the fact that I was a smoker that I was not a member of the Brethren. In the end I found two jobs while I was there and a third that would have hired me had the position not been eliminated instead, so I can’t complain too much. But it was nonetheless stressful and if there weren’t rules in place to prevent blatant discrimination, I am less sure that the job market there would have been as kind.

But given the ambiguous nature of things like the hiring process and bullying, what all can you do about it, really? The legal counsel of my Deseret employer was fired because he was outed. Would it have been better if they had simply found some other reason to fire him other than coming out and saying that he didn’t want abominations of the lord working for him? In one sense, the answer is “no” because he would still be out of the job and quite possibly blackballed in the community. In another sense, though, the world is a better place when people aren’t calling one another epithets. Better enough to constitute a law? Not sure. On the one hand, people are people and decisions and behaviors are ambiguous. On the other hand, such laws at least provide well-meaning employers cover if people want to know why they have a fag as their legal counsel. “Well, you know, the law is the law and he does his job well.” And uncomfortably, people do often take cues as to what is acceptable behavior based on the law. And based on the perception of peers who take cues from the law. Laws can’t change human nature, but they can be a part of affecting it.

I am not a markedly proud person, professionally speaking, but bullying really is one of those things that I would not put up with. I made $10/hr working at Falstaff, but the times when I was so frustrated that I was actively seeking other opportunities, it had more to do with the work environment than the pay. And when the work environment improved, I still resented the low pay, but I was still happy with my job. There are people who are toxic to the workplace and workplaces would do well to root them out. Unless you have a very specific concern about somebody - through no fault of their own - getting a hostile work environment wherever they work, I have trouble with the law trying to step in here.

Last summer I went on a fact-finding mission to Estacado. In this case, the fact-finding mission wasn’t actually anything embarrassing so much as it was something that I just don’t like to advertise for superstitious reasons. I had a job interview. It actually wasn’t for a specific job so much as it was a contracting company looking to expand and wanting the talent of the QA variety to do so. I didn’t hear back from them, leading me to believe I either fouled up the interview or the expansion did not occur (or both). Flash forward six months or so and I got a call.

It’s been a remarkably slow process. I wasn’t going to mention it until the contract was signed, but there are some real paperwork issues on that. However, given that they are paying me to undergo training and they special-ordered a laptop just for me, I am starting to feel more confident that they have every intention of hiring me once things calm down from the chaos of the corporate merger/acquisition that got the ball rolling on a lot of this. Commodus, a very large corporation that all of you are familiar with, has purchased a smaller company of which you have not (WAF Associates), with the intention of expanding its operations significantly. To further complicate things, Commodus/WAF outsourced their expansion to an Indian company, which then outsourced at least some of it right back to the United States and Estalon, the company that is hiring me. Welcome to the Global Economy.

As for the job itself, it’s the deployment of systems geared towards Waste-Abuse-Fraud prevention, or Fraud Analysis. Most of the clients are governments, health care providers, insurance companies, and banks. The goal is to track down people that are giving out false information. Identity thieves, people trying to establish new identities because they are wanted by the police somewhere, people trying to get credit cards with erroneous information, and so on. I would not actually be a fraud analyst, but rather will be providing them the tools to do their job.

Best off for me, it’s almost entirely telecommuting. I would have to take a trip to Estacado, Delosa, Deseret (oddly enough, these are three places they have a corporate presence — small world), or a large city in the midwest for further training. There are a lot of details to hammer out, and, I have to keep reminding myself, my employment could easily fall through the cracks. But right now, things are looking good.

The good news for me would be, well, I would be working again. At substantially better pay than I am accustomed to. It’s also another big name that I can put on my resume. It’s also exactly the sort of job I envisioned myself doing when getting out of college before getting sidetracked to Quality Assurance. The bad news is that it’s less time for blogging and other personal pursuits (particularly this week as I train). Oh, and the taxes would be pretty harsh. But transportation would be cheap!

In light of the economy, the New York Times declares, more young people are taking public service jobs:

But she graduated in a deep recession in the spring of 2009 when jobs were scarce. Instead of the merchandising career she had imagined, she landed in public service, working on behalf of America’s sickest children.

Ms. Sadock is part of a cohort of young college graduates who ended up doing good because the economy did them wrong.

As job hunts became tough after the crisis, anecdotal evidence suggested that more young people considered public service. Exactly how big that shift was is now becoming clear: In 2009 alone, 16 percent more young college graduates worked for the federal government than in the previous year and 11 percent more for nonprofit groups, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data from the American Community Survey of the United States Census Bureau. A smaller Labor Department survey showed that the share of educated young people in these jobs continued to rise last year.

I think that this is less notable than the number of young college graduates that are taking customer service jobs.

This doesn’t exactly qualify, but in between marketing jobs, Evangeline worked as a clerk for the county’s version of the mentally handicapped adult variation of the child protective service. If you include benefits, it actually paid better than either of the marketing jobs she had.

I try to go to bed early every night so that I am ready for a 5:30am call. None came this morning, but one did come around 8. I reminded the call-out clerk that I lived in Callie, but she said it wasn’t a problem. It was a little bit of a longer drive than usual (ice on the roads), plus it involved refilling the gas tank and drive-thru breakfast (there was, fortunately, no line) so that I wasn’t dying of hunger throughout the day.

But when I got there, the principal told me that they had cancelled me because it had gotten too late. I told him that I hadn’t gotten the call until 8 and I had to drive over from Callie, but he told me that the clerk said she called at 7:30, making me look like a liar. It didn’t occur to me to look it up on the phone until I had already left, but the actual call-time was 7:54.

It wouldn’t bother me (what’s one school among 8 or so?) except that this is the school I like most. It’s the one that, if we relocated to Redstone, I would want to move into the jurisdiction of. Now I’m a bit worried that I may have burned that bridge. My hope is that the principal remembers that the last time (my first-ever assignment), I showed up quite early.

According to Mike Michalowicz, potential employers shouldn’t look for experience:

In the market to hire someone? If you are like most others in business, you place a high priority on the amount of experience that an applicant has. Everyone looking for their next hire seems to look for the “best” employee, as defined by the applicant’s experience. Obviously, someone with 10 years of experience is better than someone with two years, right? Not so quick.

Realize this — the thing that you can give someone is experience. You can provide all the skills and experience that you want to. But there are other things that you cannot give them, which makes those things far more important than just having experience.

He goes on to list work ethic, attitude, energy, intelligence, and values. I have a few conflicting thoughts on this. The first thing that jumped out at me was that most of the things he is listing are things that are rather difficult to ascertain during an interview and do not go on a resume. You don’t know someone’s work ethic or energy (though you may have a better clue about that) until they’ve started working for you. The others can be faked. Intelligence is dicey territory, from a legal standpoint, though you can take the approach that some employers do and have a sort of “working interview” and sidestep that somewhat.

But it’s these ambiguities that make experience so good. It’s the thing you can ask about, investigate, and appraise. The same goes for education, which is one of the reasons that college degrees have become required for jobs that college degrees probably shouldn’t be necessary for. Unless they’re simply lying, you know that if they have a college degree (particularly from a traditional university) they were able to at least jump through a series of hoops over a period of four of five years. When there’s so much you don’t know about them, that’s… something, at least.

On the other hand, I think that his insights are valuable when it comes to job-specific experience. I’ve complained in the past that it seems like employers everywhere not only want you to have experience, but they want you to have experience doing the exact same things that they want you to do. Exact. And, of course, due to the job market they can often (though not always) demand just that. But even when things were better last decade, it was becoming more and more common. The new “experience requirements” for my job at Falstaff essentially said I was no longer qualified for the job I had held - and done well at - for a year. On the other hand, they did hire me as did my two subsequent employers despite having an imperfect alignment of experience-to-job. But I think Michalowicz does make a good point here.

I would also add to that something else. Employers should also consider that if you have someone that has the above traits, hold on to them. It seems that a lot of employers view their employees as being somewhat interchangeable. If they don’t like their salary, or the working conditions, or whatever, they can just leave. Cause there are more where they came from. And it seems that there always are more. However, new employees (regardless of what their resume says) are a gamble. You’ve had to invest a fair amount in pay and training before you have any idea whether things are really going to work out. Meanwhile, you’ve got this guy where you know all of the intangibles asking for a 10% raise and scoffing. These days employers seem to scoff at cost-of-living increases.

Yet employer heartlessness can end at the oddest places. They’re often unwilling to let employees that aren’t working out go. For all of the talk about how employment at will leaves employees vulnerable, I’ve always worked in EAW states and have seen with a fair amount of frequency employees who aren’t any good, who management knows are not any good, and yet are held on to until the next round of layoffs. In one sense, this quasi-loyalty is admirable. On the other, it’s kind of inefficient and if you know someone isn’t working out then it’s less of a gamble to hire someone new. But I’ve seen employers - the same ones that think a cost-of-living increase (or even in correspondence with an increase of responsibility) is outrageous - bend over backwards to keep mediocrity around. The only real exception I’ve had in my own work history is Wildcat, which was a small company where one (perceived) bad employee could (perceivedly) slow things down for everyone. Beyond that, though, the end result is that you seem to keep mediocrity around while contributing employees with other options pursue them because that’s the only way they’re going to get a raise).

Back when I was in college, my then-girlfriend Julianne’s mother helped me get a job at Orion Technologies. I was hired for the sole purpose of the company being able to tell other insurance folks that they had Y2K under control. All I did was some light clerical work, responding to requests on Y2K compliance and sending out requests to some of our vendors. It was a pretty sweet gig, but it was obviously pretty temporary. However, while I was there, my supervisor Alan started working overnight. When I asked him why, he said it was because the night operator had been fired. He gave me a rundown of the job, asking how the hell anyone could screw up something so easy. It took me a couple of days to work up the gumption to ask my official boss if I could have that job. I could do the “Y2K” stuff in my off-time. Or something. By that time, there really was no Y2K stuff anymore. Everyone was just waiting for the hammer to fall and crossing their fingers hoping that everything worked*.

If one has to work a full-time job while attending class full-time, you couldn’t ask for a better job. Orion was a computer reseller, acting as a middle man between (say) Dell Computers and (say) a local school district. This was not a particularly good field to be in as suddenly it was becoming easier for entities to simply order computers online. The company was struggling and, before long, they sold their computers division and sales division to a company called Providence that was looking to get a foothold in Colosse. It was something of a relief initially, except that without a computers division and a sales division, I didn’t know what the company did anymore.

Orion and Providence worked out a deal where Orion would call dibs a certain percentage of its employees but beyond that Providence was free to try to hire away anyone they wanted. I was not on Orion’s protected list, but Providence tried to hire me. They were offering me a 20% raise. Alan talked me out of it, though, saying that Providence may offer me more money, but they only needed someone for a very short transition period while my position was a part of Orion’s org chart and so I wouldn’t have to lose my job. Staying seemed like the more prudent thing to do, though looking back (even without hindsight), that may have been a mistake. At least I knew what Providence’s business was and if I had proven myself there was a decent chance they would find another position for me.

But, I stayed. Meanwhile, Providence needed their own Night Operator. And as it turned out, my roommate Hubert needed a job very badly (his mother was divorcing his step-father and all of their assets were in limbo). So I recommended Hugh, he got the job, and we were, for a brief time. I trained him on what to do and we argued about who got Ethnack’s Chair. But then Providence’s operations moved over to their own building and I was working solo again. Orion was struggling more and more and there was round after round of layoffs until, lo and behold, I was laid off. Meanwhile, the “six months” after which I had been told by Alan that I would be laid off by Providence had come and gone but Hugh still had a job. It was just as well, though, since he needed the money a heck of a lot more than I did.

Hugh went on to get a job at Bregna. I told him not to do it. I told him that Bregna was one a notoriously bad employer. I didn’t know it at the time because I had never worked there, but as of a couple years ago they stood as the third worst employer in the entire nation according to an employee satisfaction survey. He ignored my advice and went to work for them anyway. For reasons that I cannot recall**, Hugh offered up Karl for the job instead of me.

I was working at Wildcat by that point, but my new roommate Karl needed a job. And so, he recommended Karl and so Karl became Providence’s new Night Operator, a full year and a half after I had been told that the job would expire.

Hugh did not last at Bregna long. Even though Hugh had the kind of personality that would ordinarily cotton to being employed by a very… structured… company, Bregna being the type of place that believes structure includes (no joke) monitoring frequency and duration of bathroom breaks, he was looking for a new job in pretty short order***. This created a bit of conflict when he applied for a job that he knew I was angling for****. But then, out of nowhere, he got a call from someone at Orion that had remembered him and offered him a programming position. Even though I was still unemployed, this did not bother me as the four-asterisk job did since (a) he didn’t find out about it through me, (b) they never posted the job, and (c) it was a job he was obviously more qualified for than I was. So suddenly he was working for my ex-employer.

The axe finally fell at Providence and Karl was unemployed again. He ended up getting a job at… Bregna. Then I lost my job and got a new one at… Bregna. The job at Bregna was every bit as awful as advertised and despite the three-asterisk optimism Karl decided that if this was the kind of job that college dropouts got he needed to go back to college. I hadn’t intended to be there long, but even then I left early because I thought it was unhealthy to work for an employer where the highlight of my evening (it was an overnight job) was urinating on the side of the building while the cameras weren’t looking*****.

Hugh, meanwhile, has made his career at Orion. He’s a VP now. The company has changed its name twice and relocated once since I left (which makes its inclusion on my Work Histories a pain in the rear). I still don’t know what the company does even after visiting the website. Last time I was in town, I asked him and got a string of buzzwords I didn’t care enough to quite make sense of. It’s something cutting edge. And, of course, I am unemployed in Arapaho. Karl went back to school and is now a PhD candidate in physics at a somewhat prestigious midwestern university.

Asterisks below: (more…)

Thursday will (probably) be my first half-day as a substitute teacher. Friday will be my first full day. I would be a little less terrified if there’d been some sort of training program. Or a real orientation. The only orientation I got was a little get together at one of the elementary schools going over basic expectations. Which is certainly better than nothing. Oh, I also got a video about bloodborn diseases. Beyond that, the entire application and hiring process has been paperwork. Sent in your college transcripts. Submit to a fingerprinting and background check. Tuberculosis test. No interview. Congratulations, you’re hired! Call this 1-800 number and leave your name. I don’t even know how much I am going to get paid.

I’m going to spare you the details, but I will be substituting in Redstone (the “big city”, by Arapaho standards). If it goes well, I may try in small-town Callie. Apparently, Redstone has a real need as I have gotten some sort of offer for every day that I have been on their rolls. Due to the commute, however, I haven’t taken them up on it. The first official call came at 5am on Monday morning. I was having terrible sleep and wasn’t in my right frame of mind. It was for kindergarteners and the thought of my first day being with kindergarteners filled me with dread. So I tapped 2 on the robodial to say that I had a conflict. When a human called at 7:30, I told them I had car trouble. More on this in a second. In any event, the unofficial inquiry I had gotten Friday was for first graders. When I later woke up and thought about it, it became apparent that I might have to start small. That afternoon, I got the call for Thursday and Friday - first grade, again.

I got another call at 7:15 this morning, which I didn’t pick up. Remember that car trouble I lied to them about before? Well, it wasn’t a lie. It was prescient. Even overlooking the fact that they called too late for me to get there at the start of the school day, I didn’t have a working car. But I couldn’t tell them that because, in the course of another conversation I had with the call-out lady prior to the car trouble actually emerging, I told them that the car trouble had been fixed. A tangled web. So I didn’t answer. Car troubles fixed (the real troubles, really fixed this time), I will be ready if they call tomorrow morning and so Thursday may become my second day.

Part of me is wondering if I might get called on a daily basis. It’s sure starting to seem that way. This was intended to be a part-time job and as much an effort to get me out of the house as anything. What I suspect they pay me, minus gas and considering that everything I make is going to have nearly 40% taken out in taxes because it’s in our highest tax bracket, money isn’t the big issue here. And doing this day in and day out is simply not what I had in mind. On the other hand, it’s unlikely I will match for any job they call at 7am or later for because I wouldn’t be able to get there on time (would that I had remembered this when I came up with the car story). So we’ll see how that shakes out. At the very least I am hoping not to get a call for tomorrow so that I can start with a half-day to get settled in on a day where I am mentally ready rather than from a 5am call that has me waking up, looking up the school, rushing my arse down there, and a zombie in front of a bunch of hyperactive kids (if, like all the others, it’s a grade school job).

Or maybe I want to put it off because I am terrified. It’s been forever since I have been in first grade. All I remember about it is that the teacher was awesome, I met my future best friend Clint, and… that’s it. I can only partially mentally imagine what a first grader looks like. And of course all of the uncertainties have come back to me. Crap, what if my small bladder needs too much attention? What do first graders do, exactly? The good news is that the teacher knows that she is going to be out. Presumably she doesn’t want a sub taking care of anything important, so hopefully she has filled it with activities from the more frivolous side of the first grade.

Incidentally, one of the things that has me more worried about the Redstone school system is that there are two high schools in Redstone. The public one and a rather prominent Catholic one, St. Matthews. Given that Redstone is a seriously Catholic town, and a pretty poor one, I am hoping that the public high school isn’t filled with the dregs. On the other hand, it’s not like Redstone is full of scary people. Crime rates are very low. The children of a town down on its luck are less daunting a prospect than than the children of actual poverty.