Snapping up talent

I just heard that a certain open-source software company based in downtown Raleigh sometimes takes six months from when it gets a job applicant to actually hire that applicant. That’s crazy. How can a company think that a top job applicant has that kind of time to spend for a potential employer to get their act together? What makes a company think that an applicant is still going to be around six months later?

I spent three months between losing my job and getting a job offer and you know what? It sucked. It was three months of suck. When someone wants to make a move, they often don’t have the luxury of spending half a year for a potential employer to get going. I appreciate being thorough and making sure things are a good fit, of course, but six months is an insult to any job applicant.

I contrast this with my most recent job search, where the HR “talent acquisition team” always responded promptly to my questions and treated me as if I was important to them. That’s the way it should be done. Any company that doesn’t make a priority of hiring good people will soon find itself in trouble.

The visitor nightmare

In March of 2014, I experienced a terrifying nightmare. Nightmares are extremely rare for me, fortunately, so they tend to stand out when they occur.

That day, 28 March 2014, I had watched an entertaining video compilation on YouTube of all the movie scenes in which Christopher Walken was dancing. One of the featured clips was of the movie Communion, in which Walken played alien-abduction experiencer Whitley Strieber. At the end of the video I turned my attention to other things but apparently the video stayed with me.

It was an unseasonably warm night, with nighttime temperatures in the 60s and light rain moving through Raleigh. The comforter was still on the bed and I was feeling hot. I don’t sleep well when it’s warm.

Sometime in the early morning, I dreamed I was seated with my eyes closed in what seemed like a dentist’s chair. Three doctors hovered just above, doing work on me. A pencil-thin rod of some sort was being used to somehow adjust my spine.
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Saffron Technology moving headquarters to Silicon Valley after raising $7 million | Technology | NewsObserver.com

As if to prove my earlier point, the N&O reports local startup Saffron Technology is packing up for the West Coast – not for more favorable taxes but for the West Coast’s “wealth of talent.”

Wrong again, governor.

Saffron Technology, a homegrown big data analytics software company, plans to shift its headquarters from Cary to the Silicon Valley after raising $7 million in new funding.

Despite the move, CEO Gayle Sheppard said she expects the company’s 12-person Cary office to double in size by the end of the year. That would keep pace with the growth of the overall company, which she anticipates swelling from 20 to 40 employees in 2014 thanks to the new round of funding.

“We should not think of this as leaving Cary behind by any means,” Sheppard said. “I see that operation as an important part of our future. Terrific talent there.”

Nonetheless, Sheppard said that moving Saffron’s headquarters to Silicon Valley was designed to help it recruit the “wealth of talent” on the West Coast.

via Saffron Technology moving headquarters to Silicon Valley after raising $7 million | Technology | NewsObserver.com.

Physicists, Generals And CEOs Agree: Ditch The PowerPoint : All Tech Considered : NPR

NPR discusses organizations which have banned PowerPoint presentations. Here’s a pro tip: if your audience is tuning out your presentation, you’re doing it wrong. (Here’s how to do it right.)

About six months ago, a group of physicists in the U.S. working on the Large Hadron Collider addressed a problem they’ve been having for a while: Whenever they had meetings, everyone stuck to the prepared slides and couldn’t really answer questions that weren’t immediately relevant to what was on the screen.The point of the forum is to start discussions, so the physicists — from then on, they could only use a board and a marker.

"The use of the PowerPoint slides was acting as a straitjacket to discussion," says Andrew Askew, an assistant professor of physics at Florida State University and one of the organizers of the forum at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.He says it was as if "we removed the PowerPoint slide, and like a big glass barrier was removed between the speaker and the audience."

The communication became a lot more two-way instead of just the speaker speaking at length for 15, 20 minutes. The audience really started to come alive, to look up from their laptop computers and actually start participating in the discussion, which is what we were really trying to foster."

via Physicists, Generals And CEOs Agree: Ditch The PowerPoint : All Tech Considered : NPR.

Frank Street Sidewalk City Council Petition

FRANK ST. SIDEWALK SAVE THE DATE!

The Raleigh City Council needs to hear from YOU about the Frank Street Sidewalk!

Mark your calendar for Tuesday, April 1st at 7 PM and express your support for a sidewalk along Frank Street from Norris to Brookside!

Don’t know what to say? You don’t have to speak! You can support the sidewalk just by being there!

The meeting will take place in Council Chambers of the Raleigh Municipal Building, 222 W. Hargett Street, Raleigh. Parking is available in the city deck on W. Morgan Street between Dawson Street. and McDowell Street.

Questions? Contact Mark Turner at 919.741.6329

Dinner guest

I caught this fellow helping himself to the cat food on the porch this evening.

Raccoon

Raccoon

Lowering the sights

As I get set to embark on a new journey, I thought it would be good to look back at the job description that attracted me to my last job and compare it to the one advertised for my replacement. Here’s the first one:

Senior Support Engineer — Open Position Description

$COMPANY, a startup software company in Research Triangle Park recognized as a “Cool Vendor” by Gartner, is seeking talented individuals to help grow its expanding Engineering team.

$COMPANY‘s award-winning application management product — $PRODUCT — delivers transaction—based application discovery,
dependency mapping, and performance monitoring & analysis for complex, distributed applications in some of the world‘s largest data centers.

As a growing software business, $COMPANY is expanding our enterprise support team.

Responsibilities

– Quickly understand the dynamics of the $PRODUCT and maintain an extensive knowledge of any revisions and updates to the software
– Coordinate new customer implementations and provide effective and timely training to maximize use of the software by the customer
– Provide end-user application support via phone and email during support hours and on occasion during off hours when warranted
– Troubleshoot issues reported by customers and provide solutions in a timely, accurate, and professional manner
– Facilitate problem-solving between end user and $COMPANY development staff and make verbal and/or written recommendations for change and improvement
– Develop working relationship with $COMPANY sales team members and provide insight to sales reps regarding any current or future product needs as indicated by the customer
– Provide administrative support for the support portal and work flows associated with support tickets
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Blue Cross Blue Shield of NC has great customer service!

After losing my job in December, I signed up for an Affordable Care Act health care plan, a.k.a. Obamacare to cover the family. It could have been cheaper, of course, had our short-sighted state leaders implemented a healthcare marketplace (you know, free market competition and such) but the rate I got was significantly cheaper than a COBRA plan.

Anyhow, I recently submitted paperwork for an automatic bank draft for the policy but the paperwork apparently hasn’t gone through. This necessitated two phone calls to Blue Cross Blue Shield of NC Customer Service this past week. These calls uncovered a technical snafu that’s still being solved but still I have to say that the customer service representatives I spoke with are two of the finest who have ever assisted me with anything. They love their jobs, they love talking to people, and seemed to be willing to spend whatever time it took to get my issue sorted out.
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Nothing spotted by planes searching remote patch of Indian Ocean for missing Malaysian jet | CTV News

The continuing search for signs of Malaysian flight MH370 remind us of two things: it’s a big ocean out there and there is plenty of debris in that ocean.

Search planes scoured a remote patch of the Indian Ocean but came back empty-handed Friday after a 10-hour mission looking for any sign of the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, another disappointing day in one of the world’s biggest aviation mysteries.

Australian officials pledged to continue the search for two large objects spotted by a satellite earlier this week, which had raised hopes that the two-week hunt for the Boeing 777 that disappeared March 8 with 239 people on board was nearing a breakthrough.

But Australia’s acting prime minister, Warren Truss, tamped down expectations.

“Something that was floating on the sea that long ago may no longer be floating — it may have slipped to the bottom,” he said. “It’s also certain that any debris or other material would have moved a significant distance over that time, potentially hundreds of kilometres.”

via Nothing spotted by planes searching remote patch of Indian Ocean for missing Malaysian jet | CTV News.

NSA targets system administrators

The Intercept describes the NSA’s efforts to undermine networks by targeting the system administrators who job it is to keep them secure. If this doesn’t make system administrators angry there’s something seriously wrong.

Across the world, people who work as system administrators keep computer networks in order – and this has turned them into unwitting targets of the National Security Agency for simply doing their jobs. According to a secret document provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the agency tracks down the private email and Facebook accounts of system administrators or sys admins, as they are often called, before hacking their computers to gain access to the networks they control.

The document consists of several posts – one of them is titled “I hunt sys admins” – that were published in 2012 on an internal discussion board hosted on the agency’s classified servers. They were written by an NSA official involved in the agency’s effort to break into foreign network routers, the devices that connect computer networks and transport data across the Internet. By infiltrating the computers of system administrators who work for foreign phone and Internet companies, the NSA can gain access to the calls and emails that flow over their networks.

The classified posts reveal how the NSA official aspired to create a database that would function as an international hit list of sys admins to potentially target. Yet the document makes clear that the admins are not suspected of any criminal activity – they are targeted only because they control access to networks the agency wants to infiltrate. “Who better to target than the person that already has the ‘keys to the kingdom’?” one of the posts says.

via Inside the NSA’s Secret Efforts to Hunt and Hack System Administrators – The Intercept.