Lessons Learned in my Career as an Engineer

Technical stuff

It's easier to do something right the first time than it is to do it over.

When given a choice between creating something, evaluating someone else's creation, or fixing someone else's mistakes, always choose creating. This applies to any engineering discipline.

Saying "no" may harm your career, but it may save your sanity.

Saying "yes," if done wisely, will open unexpected doors for you in the future.

A problem that mysteriously goes away, will mysteriously come back.

Engineers don't have to know everything. They just have to know where to look things up.

When someone asks you for a time estimate, come up with your best estimate, then double it and add one unit. "An hour" becomes "three hours." "Two days" becomes "five days". "Three months" becomes "seven months". Engineers are notorious for underestimating the time budget for a project. This practice will help you avoid that pitfall.

Never trust an engineer who says, "Well, it works on my computer."

On the other hand, if nobody else is having the software or network problem that you're having, the problem is most likely not with the software or the network.

J.R.R. Tolkien understood engineers. He put these words into Bilbo Baggins' mouth: "It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations." That relates to project planning and execution. The things that you overlook are the things that will bite you. Or burn you.

Bilbo and Smaug (copied without asking from https://movie-villains.fandom.com/wiki/Smaug)

Bilbo's "live dragons" maxim can be rendered as a haiku:

It does not do to

leave a live dragon out of

your calculations.

And J. K. Rowling understood both the lure and the dangers of technology. In 1999, she put these prophetic words into Arthur Weasley's mouth: "Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain." As a computer professional, I am warning you: never trust computers, "smart" devices, artificial intelligence, or the Internet.

Manage your time carefully. 

Murphy's Law reigns supreme.

With extremely few exceptions, in an engineering organization, everybody's just trying to do things right. Don't waste time blaming, politicking, or fault-finding. Instead, invest the time in trying to help each other succeed.

When taking notes in a meeting, only take paper notes. Never take notes on a phone, tablet, or computer, because you will, without a doubt, be accused of "playing on your phone" during the meeting. 

Paper will never go obsolete.

Paper doesn't require batteries, spontaneously reboot in mid-sentence, or accidentally and instantly get erased. Some paper documents have lasted hundreds of years. Computers have been around for less than 100 years, and no computer-age storage medium has demonstrated the long-term viability of paper.

... Except for punch cards and punched tape, both of which are made of paper. :-)

Job and Career stuff

Your family is more important than your job. If you ever have to make a choice between the two, choose your family. There's always another job.

When looking for a job, who you know really is more important than what you know. 

The guy who says, "I want to be hired (or promoted) based on my merits," will never get hired (or promoted). Learn to play The Game. And learn to enjoy playing The Game.

Don't believe anything a sales professional says to you.

Never trust a sales professional.

Never work for a company run by a sales professional.

Never work for a narcissist. Learn how to smell out narcissists quickly.

No matter what the CEO, the HR department, and your manager may tell you, you are only an asset to the company. A resource. Raw material. They will use you until you break or wear out, and then they will discard you without thinking twice.

If you were to die on the job today, they would replace you tomorrow.

There's no such thing as "job security."

Your employer doesn't care.

Corporate loyalty is a myth, a relic of the 20th Century.

If you get a nice jacket with the company logo instead of an annual raise, enjoy the jacket, but start warming up your resume.

Sometimes it's better to quit and take your chances than to stay miserable.

Nobody pays you enough to make a miserable job worthwhile.

Nobody, but nobody, pays you enough to yell at you. (I'm looking at you, Brian!)

If you're in a job where someone yells at you, don't take it personally. But do quit. If you cannot quit on the spot, then immediately start a job search, and quit a week or two before you start your new job.

The "two weeks' notice" thing is a courtesy, not a legal requirement. It may or may not be in your contract. Reread your contract to find out. Remember, your employer would not give you two weeks' notice before dumping you.

The only way an employer has of showing how much they value you is money. It can be salary, commissions, or significant cash bonuses. Stock options are just a promise, and they mean nothing. Stock itself is of questionable value. Gift cards and T-shirts are cheap fluff. Promises are worthless -- even if they're on paper. And salary targets (as opposed to actual salary) are an easy way to make a promise and get away with not keeping it. (HP was notorious for that.)

An employer never pays you what you're worth. An employer only pays you what you're willing to settle for, and not a penny more.

But the jackets and gift cards and T-shirts are a nice gesture, and they should be acknowledged graciously.

If you find a better job, and you give your notice, and your employer makes a counteroffer to induce you to stay, don't take the counteroffer. NEVER take the counteroffer. They're two weeks too late -- maybe even six months or a year too late. If you were that valuable to them, they would have fixed things that long ago. Their counteroffer is not a sincere offer -- it's just damage control.

When should you get a new job?

1. When the great company that hired you gets sold, acquired, bought out, or spun off.
2. When the great company that hired you gets a brand-new management team.
3. When that great boss that you loved working for, quits or gets fired.
4. When you start noticing a high attrition rate (lots of people quitting or getting fired).
5. When pay is delayed, or paychecks start bouncing.
6. When you start noticing a pattern of dishonesty, broken promises, or shady dealing among the managers or in the C-suite.
7. When you can get an equivalent position or a promotion, for significantly better wages, benefits, working conditions, and future growth prospects, somewhere else.
8. When you realize that the money you're paid isn't worth the garbage you have to endure.
9. The instant you discover that the job you wanted, or the job you thought you were getting, is not the job you ended up with.
10. The instant you come to the realization that you are in a dead-end position.

Don't think that you owe "three to five years" to your current employer. They would not hesitate to dump you after a month, if they had a business reason.

Having said all that, if you do find an employer who:

• is loyal to you, 
• gives you good compensation and benefits and a good working environment,
• supports you and contributes to your personal development, and 
• truly watches out for you and your loved ones,

then give that employer your loyalty and your best efforts in return, and hold onto them for as long as you can. Employers like that are rare in today's world, and they need to be nurtured and protected.

Retirement stuff

It's never too early to start planning for your retirement.

Always spend less than you earn.

Always contribute to your 401(k). Start contributing to it as soon as you can. 

If you don't have a 401(k), then create and start contributing to an IRA as soon as you get your first job.

Even if you can only contribute a tiny bit, do it. Even $100 a month, through the magic of compound interest, will turn into a huge pile of money in 30 years.

Start contributing the maximum amount you're allowed into the 401(k), as soon as you can. Take advantage of the company matching.

Make sure that the 401(k) funds are not invested into your own employer's stock. That's always a losing bet. Instead, move your retirement funds outside of the company. 

Do not gamble with your retirement funds. Instead, invest in a combination of ETFs (for growth) and long-term bond funds (for stability).

Do not mess with your funds. Once a year, rebalance your investments according to your long-term plans and goals -- but other than that, keep your hands off your money. Let time work its magic.

Don't make your work your life. Don't tie your personal success exclusively to your professional career. Make sure you have hobbies, interests, and friends outside of work.

Do something that doesn't require batteries, an operating system, or a network connection.

Again, remember that your family is infinitely more important than your job.

Your job won't last forever. Start planning and preparing now (whatever age you are) for what you will do with your life when you retire.

Useful books

This is a short list of books that have served me well in my career. Admittedly, it is a rather eclectic list, but all of the books are relevant to an engineering career.

The Organization Guerilla: Playing the Game to Win, by Allen Weiss

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey

In Business as in Life - You Don't Get What You Deserve, Only What You Negotiate, by Chester Karrass

Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

Nudge, by Thaler and Sunstein

The Art of War, by Sun Tzu

The Book of Five Rings, by Miyamoto Musashi

The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon

Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card

The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch

The Art of Electronics, by Horowitz and Hill

Professional Software Development, by Steve McConnell

The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt

The Phoenix Project, by Kim, Behr, and Spafford

The C Programming Language, by Kernighan and Ritchie

Who's Afraid of C++ (now part of Learning to Program in C++), by Steve Heller

Common Lisp: The Language, by Guy Steele

Things I wish had known earlier in my career

I wish I had been less than 30 years into my career when I realized that:

1. Nobody pays you enough to make a miserable job worthwhile.

2. Nobody pays you enough to yell at you.

3. Sometimes it's better to quit and take your chances than to stay miserable.

4. There's no such thing as "job security".

5. Your employer doesn't care.

 

This guy Evan is my hero

Soooo ... this guy, Evan? He's my new hero.

Feeling sorry for myself: what might have been

A recent tickle from a former colleague on LinkedIn dredged up something from my distant past and sent me on a short tailspin into the Land of What Might Have Been. I'm going to feel sorry for myself, then go to bed and sleep it off. In the morning I'll go to my new job, where I am happy and content and working hard.

This former colleague "endorsed" me for a skill on LinkedIn. She hasn't seen me for about 15 years, so the endorsement doesn't mean much. So I ignored it. Then I fell into my tailspin.

In the late 1990s, I was an extremely competent engineer in my department at Hewlett-Packard. In fact, one year I was the top-rated engineer out of a peer group of about 80 engineers. I was sought after for my technical expertise, my problem-solving skills, and my communication skills. Engineers and non-engineers from other departments came to consult with me.

Our department had three engineering groups. One of the engineering group managers got a promotion, leaving his position vacant. My manager suggested I apply for the position. So did his manager.

I hadn't even considered such a move. I was happy being an engineer. But people had told me over the years that I would make a good manager, and many people had even said, "I would work for you if you were a manager." So I did some research, mainly sounding it out with other engineers and managers, even on the production/operations side, all people whose opinion I valued and trusted. I got unequivocal encouragement from all of them, including votes of confidence from all of the managers, and more "I would work for you" responses from my peers.

The managers' opinions were important to me, because some of them would be on the interview team.

So I applied for the job. I prepped for the interviews. And I did a great job in the interviews. And they gave the job to someone else - one of my fellow engineers was promoted.

Well, she turned out not to be a very good manager. In fact, seeing some of what she did as a manager, I wondered how she had ever gotten the job. I ended up sitting in meetings and on committees with her as the years went by, and - really, this is not  sour grapes - she just wasn't very good at management or leadership.

Then HP and Agilent split. We endured wave after wave of layoffs. I never saw any managers get laid off, or any executives. You would think that the Powers That Be would do the math and figure out that they could save more money by firing one incompetent executive than by laying off ten innocent production workers. Or five hard-working engineers. F#$&ing idiots.

Here's the sorry-for-myself "What Might Have Been" part:

Ten years after leaving Agilent, I am still an engineer, but I am making $10,000 a year less than I was back then, and after ten years of struggle, my personal and family financial situation is precarious.

If I had gotten that promotion, I would now be high up in the management ranks at HP or Agilent. I would be a highly respected manager and leader. I would be making $150,000 a year - or more. We would still be living in that big brick house. And my wife would still have the luxury of being a stay-at-home mom, with all the benefits that go with that. My daughters would not have had to scrimp on their weddings. My musical daughter could have gone to Ithaca College instead of the University of Northern Colorado. We would be living free of debt or other financial worries. And we could be using our time and our wealth to help our children and other people, something we have always wanted to do. Instead, we struggle.

That other engineer that got the job? She has changed employers. At least twice. She has changed careers. She has changed husbands. She has changed her last name. She has even changed her first name. And  she has changed her appearance so drastically that I don't even recognize her photo on LinkedIn. And she has parlayed that promotion into a Chief Technology Officer position in another state. I don't really know her anymore.

The Best Temporary Job in the World

My son is currently serving as a Mormon missionary in California. I write to him every week. Most of my life currently revolves around my job search, and I'm sure my  letters get boring. This week's letter was a little different.

It helps if you know ahead of time that we live in a townhome on a dead-end street. All the garages are on the alleys behind the townhomes.

---

Hi Chris,

So, this week I decided I should at least get a temporary job to bring in more money than unemployment insurance does, until the real job works out. I contacted a temp agency I'd worked with before, called 10 Til 2. It's run by a lady named Ginny.

Ginny asked if I would be willing to do data analysis. It required some programming skill, and it would be a lot like editing a book. She said that if I were a good writer, I could certainly be an editor. Basically, I had to write computer programs to look for stuff in computer files. What kinds of computer files? She wouldn't say. I asked how much it paid, and she said $50 an hour if I was any good, or $100 for "hazardous duty." I asked what "hazardous duty" was. She laughed. I figured she was making a joke. $50 is pretty good money.

That was Monday. On Tuesday morning, a guy in a black suit showed up at the house. He looked a lot like the government agent that managed the Incredibles. Well, that's not what he looked like, but that's what he reminded me of. He had an old-fashioned leather briefcase. When I let him into the house, he asked to see my office. Well, it's an Ikea desk in the loft. So I took him upstairs.

I kid you not. He pulled a brand-new Alienware laptop PC out of that old briefcase. This thing had 16 GB of memory, and a water-cooled NVidia graphics card. How do you  fit a WATER-COOLED graphics card into a laptop? I don't know, but that graphics card had serious processing power. He said that I wouldn't be using it for graphics. They'd written a special driver that used the GPUs on the graphics card to do really high-speed numerical computations.

I said I would connect it to our DSL router. His face went white, and he looked shocked. He said that I should NEVER do that. The machine had its own cellular modem, all paid for and everything, and he told me to use that exclusively — never WiFi or ANYTHING else. I must have looked suspicious, because he then patted me on the shoulder — PATTED ME ON THE SHOULDER! — and said that they had a lot of corporate secrets to protect, and the cellular modem was 256-bit encrypted. Ooooooookayyyyyyyyyyy.

He set up my email for me, and told me that all my assignments would come via email. I asked him how I should log my time, and he said, "Don't worry about it. Just complete your assignments. If it takes you less time than we expect, that's cool."

After another hour of training, he left. I logged on and found 3 assignments in my email. They were all more or less the same: an FTP location where I could retrieve a ZIP file containing thousands of files; and a list of things to look for in the files. The list in the first assignment was just a bunch of phone numbers. Well, they looked like phone numbers. They didn't have any dashes, but they were 10-digit strings, and the first 3 digits were obviously area codes.

Python is a cool programming language. It can do just about anything. Whatever I couldn't do in Python, I did in C++. Oh, and this computer ran Linux. I LOVE Linux!

So by about 2:30 on Monday, I finished the first assignment and emailed my results to the address at the bottom of the first email. By 4:30 I finished the second one, and I kept working on the third one until 5:45, when I finally hit Send. Mom kept dinner waiting for me.

On Tuesday, I did about 5 assignments, and then I went to a 7 o'clock meeting. When I came back around 9 p.m., I saw about a dozen police cars in our tiny neighborhood, all with their lights off, but people inside. In the alley behind our house were two black cars. Like what Scott drives. Like Men In Black. I had to blink my lights and honk at one to get him to move, so I could park in the garage.

I asked Mom if she knew what all the cop cars were for. She was asleep in the Chair of Eternal Slumber, and hadn't seen or heard a thing. We figured The Neighbor From Hell was up to something. I took Baggy for a walk, in the single-family homes part of the neighborhood, like I usually do. I saw about 3 cop cars up there, crawling along with all their lights off, in the dark. Baggy and I were on the bike trails, but I think the cars were shadowing us.

I was getting rather bold, and if you'll forgive the expression, pissed, so on my way back in, I stopped by one of the MIB cars and knocked on the driver's side window. When he rolled down the window, I said in as rude a voice as I could, "What the hell are you doing?"

The. Guy. Didn't. Even. Flinch. He pointed at the "3230" over the garage door and said, "Do you live here?" When I said yeah, he asked, "Are you SquirrelBait?" That was the email login the Incredibles guy had given me. I said, even more rudely, "Who's asking?" He just said, "Good night, Mr. Zyz. We're here to make sure you have a good sleep."

Okay, that was weird.

I got up twice in the middle of the night to  go to the bathroom. The black sedans were still in the alley. I counted three cop cars out front the first time. The second time, I saw six cars(!) on our little street. The cops had cuffed two people and were shoving them into one of the cars. You can bet both your tarjetas that I didn't tell Mom.

When I got up at 6, all of the cars were gone, but there were a green Accord and a white utility van across the street. The Accord was parked close to the corner of Crestone and Sneffels, and the utility van was down at the other end of the cul-de-sac. Both cars had guys in them all day long.

I only had one assignment Wednesday. I had to FTP six huge ZIP files. They were like 30 GB each. It should have taken hours. I think it took 10 minutes at most. Weird. Then I had to search everything in the zip files for three particular patterns, and whenever I found one of the patterns I was supposed to send an excerpt of the file in an email, then open a Skype-like connection, call somebody named "Robert," and report it immediately.

The first three times I reported a hit, Robert just said "thank you" and cut the connection. The fourth time, he got really excited, said "Stand by," and ran out of the picture. Does this feel kind of see eye ay / enn ess ay to you? That's what I thought. When Robert came back into the picture, the Incredibles guy was with him. The Incredibles guy asked me to describe all the cars on Crestone Court. I ran downstairs, looked out the front window, and ran back up to tell him. He said "DID YOU OPEN THE FRONT DOOR?!!" And I said, "No, I looked out the window." Moron. Then he asked me who was parked out back. So I looked out the bedroom window and told him.

The only unusual cars out front were the Accord and the white van, and the MIB cars had reappeared out back. He looked relieved when I told him that. I heard a BUNCH of sirens in the distance, which usually means one of the old people living in the houses next to the golf course is having a really bad day. I casually mentioned that to Robert and Incredible. They said, "When you hear a knock on the door, close your computer and take it with you. Answer the door and go with whoever's there."

Honestly? I didn't know what was going on. The sirens were getting louder. I said, "What about my wife? She's out shopping." Incredible said, "Don't worry. She's safe." SAFE??!?!! I thought of calling Ginny, telling her this wasn't funny, and demanding more than $100 an hour. I had NO IDEA what I was getting into.

Finally, Robert had the good sense to ask if my search program had scored any more hits. I looked at the output window and it had about 30 hits. I emailed them to him. He got the email and read it while I was standing there, listening to the sirens getting louder. Just as the doorbell rang, he said to somebody offscreen: "They've landed in Phoenix. Move. NOW!" Then he turned to me, and said, "That's your doorbell. Go."

I know what you're thinking: WTF? That's exactly what I was thinking. One the one hand, this was the coolest temp job I'd ever had. On the other hand, I was scared out of my wits. I didn't know what was happening. I felt like I was the confused guy in a Harrison Ford thriller movie. Or Bruce Willis in Die Hard or something.

Did I mention that Baggy was going crazy? You would have thought that UPS, FedEx, the mailman, and Grandma had all driven up at the same time. I didn't know an 82-year-old dog could move that fast. Or make that much noise.

So I unplugged the computer and closed it, and ran down the stairs with it under my arm. Whoever was outside started doing the ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong thing on the doorbell. I grabbed Baggy and flung open the door and there was the most gorgeous woman I had ever seen.

She was about five-six, wearing an emerald-green business suit — you know, a skirt and jacket. She was built like a ... well, a Miss America winner with an extra 30 pounds of beef on her bones. Solid muscle, though. She had long, wavy, dark-brown hair. Well-turned legs, and heels the same color as her suit. And she was carrying a semi-auto pistol that said "H&K" on it. I've seen enough of your Airsoft guns to know what she was doing. Her finger was beside the trigger, and the safety was on, but she obviously meant business.

I just stood there with my jaw on the tiles, and drool running down my chin. I had the computer under one arm, and Baggy's collar in the other hand. I didn't know what to stare at: her face, her gun, or her chest. I must have been staring at her gun, because she said, "Don't worry, Mr. Zyz. This isn't meant for you. It's meant to protect you. Come with me please. MOVE!"

I don't know if it was the imperative tone in her "MOVE!" or the two guys dressed in black BDUs with M16s, like you when you're playing Airsoft, standing out at the curb, but I MOVED. I shoved Baggy behind the door, stepped out and closed it. The. Lady. Locked. The. Door. (Where did she get the key? I STILL don't know.) The two BDU guys weren't pointing their guns at me, by the way. They had their backs to me, and were pointing 'em everywhere else. We all piled into a crap-brown Pontiac Aztek sitting in front of The Neighbor From Hell's house.

I said, "ARE YOU KIDDING? AN AZTEK? YOU GUYS ARE KIDNAPPING ME IN AN AZTEK?" I think I threw some four-letter words in there for extra effect.

As the driver took the corner at Sneffels on two wheels, and on two wheels again at Tabeguache, he said, "The body is the only Aztek thing in here. The windows are an inch thick. The body panels and floorboards are backed with laminated armor plate, made of cobalt-steel and Kevlar. The suspension is adapted from a Humvee. The wheels are from Big O, but the tires are puncture-proof Big O lookalikes. The engine and tranny are custom-made by Allis-Chalmers. We've got six forward gears, two reverse, and compound low. It can go zero to sixty in 3.5 seconds and it tops out at a hundred and forty."

By the time he finished saying this, we were eastbound on Kennedy Boulevard, going around the lake. The driver kept talking. "The interior was redone by Northrop Grumman. Angel here," pointing to the gorgeous babe, "has her pistol hardmounted in a gunport." (I thought "That's why they call it 'shotgun,'" but I didn't say that out loud) "And her friends have their M-16s hardmounted in gunports behind you." I looked, and the BDU guys really did. They had their M-16s poking out through the fenders above the rear tires.

I thought, "Chris would wet his pants if he could see this. He'd wet them twice!"

"So," said the driver, "good enough for you?"

I wasn't thinking very straight. Like a true redneck, I said, "Yeah, I guess. But WHY A CRAP-BROWN AZTEK?"

I think that this driver and I were hitting it off. By now we were speeding past the high school and the church near the Interstate. I noticed that we had two police cars clearing the way in front of us, a SWAT van tailgating us, and police cars with flashing lights blocking every. Single. Intersection. The driver grinned and said, "Because, who would ever suspect a crap-brown Aztek of this kind of action? Its ugliness makes it invisible!"

I had to admit: he had a point. In the 30 minutes it took us to get to Denver (yeah — 30 minutes — well, actually, more like 25), he and I hit it off pretty well. Angel, the gorgeous babe, didn't say much. The BDU guys were talking into their mikes almost constantly, and every once in a while Angel would say something into her earpiece, too. I think that the driver kept up the conversation with me so that I couldn't hear what they were saying.

About the time we flew past the Brighton exit and the E-470 interchange, Angel told (not asked, TOLD) me to open my laptop and finish running the analysis of those files. I got about 12 more hits from those megafiles, and that was about it. When we got to the carpool lanes, they were closed and empty. The cop cars smashed through the closed gates, and we followed them down the carpool lanes, taking a left at the split and going right past Coors Field. We drove UNDERNEATH one of the big highrises downtown, and pulled up beside an old rusty steel door.

The rusty steel door slammed open and six more BDU guys ran out and surrounded the Aztek, with their guns pointed outward. Angel, the driver and the two BDU guys hustled me out of the Aztek and inside the door, where we went into an elevator. It had two buttons: UP, and DOWN. They pressed UP, the doors closed, and my stomach fell out through the soles of my shoes.

I was alternating between "Oh wow, this is so cool!" and "Holy crap, what did Ginny get me into?" Once in a while I would think "What about Wifey? What about Baggy?" but mostly it was "oh wow" and "holy crap".

When the elevator stopped, my stomach jumped up into my nasal cavities. I didn't feel the urge to vomit, but if I had sneezed I think that my entire breakfast would have come out my nose. We stepped out onto a floor that was completely open and unfinished. Concrete floor, steel pillars, bare ceiling beams, and dirty plastic dropcloths covering all the windows. In the center of the floor were the elevator and restrooms. Oh, and drinking fountains and a tiny break area. It looked like we were on the top floor of the tallest skyscraper in Denver, but I don't know. I couldn't see much out of the windows. There was a patio door on each side, and my driver muttered to me that there were eight sniper teams and two rocket launchers out on the wraparound balcony.

This whole time, I had been thinking, "What am I gonna do when I get to wherever they're taking me?" Now that I was there, I was thinking, "Now what am I gonna do?"

Then Robert and Incredible walked around the corner from the restrooms. They seemed to be in a big hurry. They grabbed me and pulled me out from the middle of the guns, over to a collapsible table with four or five folding chairs in front of it. And three other laptops running other programs. I saw tracking programs, with vehicle or aircraft tracks superimposed on Google Earth-style terrain, satellite tracking programs, running transcripts of phone and radio conversations, a chat program populated by what looked like a SWAT team somewhere. And SOMEBODY had a Phineas and Ferb cartoon running in a tiny window in the corner.

They told me to turn on my laptop and show them what I'd found. They were pretty rude, actually. There was no "please" or "thank you." It was "do this" and "now do that." I was getting kinda ticked off, and I was sure gonna tell Ginny at 10 Til 2 about it.

There were people sitting at other folding tables, too. But they were all government agents, of one flavor or another. I still didn't know who I was working for. They were looking at other laptops and talking or yelling into telephones and headsets. Finally, one kid about 30 years old pounded on his table, jumped up, pointed at a wide-screen TV hanging from the ceiling, and said, "There they are! LOOK!"

I felt like I was in a Tom Clancy novel. Weird. The TV showed what looked like video from a news chopper, but the crosshairs in the middle of the picture meant that it wasn't from a NEWS chopper. The video showed a white Escalade and a black BMW SUV racing across a desert, past mesquite and sagebrush, and suddenly about a dozen black Ford Excursions zeroed in on them from all directions. The BMW tried some crappy Hollywood evasive maneuver and rolled. One Excursion peeled off to follow the BMW, but the rest forced the Escalade to stop. Then a Humvee with a big monster machine gun turret on the roof pulled right up to the Escalade's nose.

The Escalade tried to back up. There was a puff of smoke from the muzzle of the machine gun, and then a  cloud of black smoke from under the Escalade's hood. I thought, "Holy crap, I'm glad the police in Fort Collins just pull you over and ask to see your license." Then I thought "I wonder what the bad guys look like?" Sure enough, the next second they pulled, like, EIGHT bad guys out of the Escalade and made them lie facedown in the desert. They looked like regular old American businessmen, except they had dark, curly hair and tan hands.

And no, I'm not profiling. That's what they looked like.

Everybody cheered, and then they all started talking to each other. But nobody talked to me. Somebody said, "Yeah, they said six flights. Six different airports, six different targets" Somebody else said, "We figure over 100,000 lives saved." Finally Robert came over and said, "Mr. Zyz, your work just helped us stop another nine-eleven incident. We brought you here because we knew your life would be in danger if these guys knew what you were working on, and because we need you to do some more analysis for us."

It wasn't even lunchtime yet! It was, like, 10:30 in the morning. And suddenly I realized that my heart was pounding faster and harder than the engine in my old Mustang.

They made me stay in that unfinished penthouse for two more days. They said Mom was okay and that she had armed bodyguards. I'll bet she was loving that.

I sat at the same table with everybody else, but instead of emailing me the assignments, they would shove a USB stick at me and say, "Here. Analyze this." We ate well. These guys had breakfast burritos, gourmet pizza, Chinese food, and fantastic barbecue takeout, three times a day. Plus awesome munchies and gourmet soda pop. Well, half of them drank Coke nonstop. I slept on a government-issue sleeping bag on the floor, and didn't shower for three days.

On Friday about 4:30, that same crappy brown Aztec pulled up in front of the house and let me out. I didn't get a police escort this time. All the bad guys had been caught. As I walked into the house, Mama was sitting in the Chair of Eternal Slumber, chatting with Angel, who was sitting on the couch wearing VERY tight jeans and a men's white dress shirt. Angel stood up, said goodbye to Mom, shook my hand, and went out the door. She got in the passenger side of the Aztek and waved as the thing drove away.

Then I turned to Mom, and she said, "What was THAT all about?" I gave her the U.S. Government check for $8000. Not bad for one week's work. Especially as a temp. Her eyes bugged out and she looked at me with a big question mark over her head. I said, "Overtime, hazardous duty, and a bonus, because we caught the bad guys."

She said, "What bad guys?"

I said, "You'd never believe it if I told you."

Not one word of this story is true. I wish it were. Wouldn't that be an awesome temp job?

Love
Dad

Hilary Rosen versus Ann Romney

Hilary Rosen (left), Ann Romney (right). Picture swiped from abcnews.com.

You have, no doubt, heard about the hornet's nest that "Democratic strategist and political commentator" (that's what the newspapers call her) Hilary Rosen stirred up, when she had this to say about Ann Romney on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees show:

With respect to economic issues, I think actually that Mitt Romney is right, that ultimately, women care more about the economic well-being of their families and the like. But there's -- but he doesn't connect on that issue either.

What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, "Well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues. And when I listen to my wife, that's what I'm hearing."

Guess what? His wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school, and how do we -- why we worry about their future. 

Yes, she really did say that:  Ann Romney "has actually never worked a day in her life." And I provided the context in the quotation above, so you would know that she meant exactly what she said.

Wow. Hilary Rosen just disenfranchised every single stay-at-home mom in America. Now, I will grant that stay-at-home moms now constitute less than half of the female electorate in this country.  (Let's define a "stay-at-home mom" as a woman who chooses to be a full-time mother and homemaker instead of being a part-time or full-time member of the paid workforce.) But stay-at-home moms haven't been this marginalized since the other famous Democratic Hil(l)ary said, on March 15, 1992, "I suppose I could have stayed at home and baked cookies."

Well, as the son of one stay-at-home mom and the husband of another one, I've been truly pleased to see the reaction Rosen's comment has gotten. High-value Democrats are running over each other in their haste to get away from her. The  president and the first lady have distanced themselves from her, as have national leaders of the Democratic Party and Democratic leaders in Congress. Some of them have even said, "She's not part of the Democratic leadership" - even though she has been called a "Democratic strategist" and, I might add, acted the part in other venues.

Republicans have taken her comment for the free gift it is, and still haven't stopped capitalizing on it.

Perhaps the most interesting thing so far has been Wolf Blitzer scolding her, on the air,  demanding that she apologize to Ann Romney, and scolding her again for her lame non-apology.

(Her apology? She said to Wolf, "Oh, well I sent out an apology this afternoon." First, she insulted this high-profile lady in a high-profile way, and then she either emailed or Tweeted her an apology, twenty-four hours after she made the insult,and now she expects that to be good enough. In this way, Hilary Rosen demonstrates her total lack of class. A handwritten apology, with an original, handwritten signature, in a hand-addressed envelope, either delivered by hand or by express mail: that's what this situation calls for. Maybe even a bouquet of balloons or flowers. But not an email message. That shows no class at all.)

(Update: It turns out she did issue a statement to the press, apologizing to the world in general for her "poor choice of words." In other words, she meant what she said, but she wished she had said it differently. Um, that doesn't count. What we were all waiting for was something like this: "Dear Ms. Romney. I was wrong. I'm truly sorry. To prove it, I'm going to stop talking in public for a while.")

(She tried it again on Blitzer's show:  "I'm sorry if that offended you."  Did you catch the weasel word? "IF." And she wasn't really sorry. What she said was: "If you're thin-skinned, then I apologize for that flaw in your personality." That's not an apology. )

She keeps trying to talk her way out of the situation, but with every word she says, she digs herself deeper and deeper into the pit she dug for herself. The best thing Hilary Rosen could do right now is give Ann Romney a sincere, public apology and then SHUT UP.


Stay tuned for part two: what two national women's organizations have to say about it.


Postscript: This is totally off-topic, but after I wrote that last sentence, I got to thinking. Maybe Rush Limbaugh should have done the same thing, in his recent situation: issue a sincere, public apology and then shut up.

One Small Indicator that the Economy is Improving

Like the first birds of spring, that arrive even before the snow has started melting, I saw an early sign yesterday that the economy is improving.

I got called by a headhunter.

When employers are engaging headhunters to find talent among the ranks of the already employed, that's a harbinger of better times ahead.

End of the Seven Years of Famine: I Got a Job!

After getting laid off seven years ago (exactly seven years ago!), I have worked as an engineering consultant, I have taught school, I have been involved in several abortive startups, and I have taken several temporary jobs. As the economy slowly recovers, I have been chasing a full-time job with a large semiconductor manufacturer. The chase has come to an end, but not in the way I expected. This is the full story.

WARNING! THIS WILL BE VERY BORING TO SOME OF YOU. But it may be useful to some others.

Okay, you have been warned.

In late 2008, I worked for 3 months at a small company in Fort Collins, called RLE Technologies. It was a great place to work: great people, a great management team, and a solid product line and business plan. I was working a temporary contract as a technical writer, but we had several discussions about my ambition to move into to a permanent engineering position.

Then the economy fell apart, and their sales projections for 2009 didn't justify adding another engineer. So I gave them good work until my contract ended, and we parted on good terms. I stayed in touch with the management team.

A year later, around Thanksgiving 2009, I got another temporary contract, this time with Micron Technology in Longmont -- formerly Displaytech, a small, successful company that had recently been acquired by Micron. I was working as a firmware engineer. I came home every evening full of excitement -- I told my family that I didn't know whether it was because "I'm working!" or because the work I was doing was that much fun.

As a large corporation, Micron is a great company to work for. Consciously or not, they are an "excellent company" in the model of Peters and Waterman's 1982 study. They treat their employees well. They seek to excel in every market they enter. They have entered several new markets -- CMOS image sensors, microdisplays, LED illumination and personal computers, among others -- without straying far from the things they do best: memory chips.

As a division, the Longmont office is a great place to work. Displaytech became very successful at making high-resolution, full-color computer displays smaller than a postage stamp. Their next success will be in picoprojectors: high-resolution, battery-powered, full-color projectors that fit inside an iPod or cellphone and project video anywhere. (At a recent conference, Micron used a flour tortilla as a projection screen.)

This division is composed of a group of people who are intelligent, excited about what they are doing, hard-working, easy to get along with, and, umm, well, really smart. Everybody shows up in the morning quietly enthusiastic and ready to go, and they work hard until it's time to go home -- sometimes later. It's not competition, just excitement.

I loved being a part of that. I completed my project ahead of time, and my co-workers were delighted with my work. I had made it clear that I'd like to stay there longer. Management added several extensions to my contract and found me other projects to work on. We were all trying to find a way to keep me there permanently.

They connected me with a manager in Boise who might have a couple of firmware openings. We met briefly one Friday when he was in Longmont, and then traded a few short emails before ... well, let's jump ahead to Thursday, February 18.

At 9 a.m., I had a phone meeting with the manager in Boise. He asked me to email him my resume, and two hours later, I was in a job interview with one of his people who just happened to be in Longmont. The interview went well, things were looking hopeful, and my friends at Micron shared my excitement.

That afternoon, I drove to Fort Collins. The recruiter who had gotten me into Micron also represented RLE Technologies, and RLE had asked him to arrange a meeting with me. The recruiter gave me the impression that it was a job interview. Wow, two interviews in two days.

The "interview" turned out to be a meeting with the management team, but not really an interview. RLE had survived 2009, and as 2010 began, they had found that several of their departments had more work than one person could do, but not enough work for two people. They had decided that they needed someone who was versatile and flexible, an engineer who could wear many hats. They contacted my recruiter, who gave them my name, and ... well, they were offering me a position at RLE Technologies. After an hour of talking with them, I accepted their offer.

Honestly, I could be happy at either place. Both are small, successful entities with good people and bright futures, where I can make a difference. That I ended up at RLE rather than Micron was just a matter of timing. I am content.

My contract with Micron ends on Wednesday, February 24, and I start with RLE Technologies on Monday, March 1.

Lessons I've learned while being unemployed:

• First: Pick a few good recruiters, and stay in regular touch with them. Phone them weekly, just to say hi. This will keep you on the top of their list. I got this advice from Bob Zoller, a friend and former member of NoCoNet. I tip my hat to Rose Marie Studer ("Studer the Recruiter"), Jackie Avitia and Ray Brown (Volt), Angie Joynt and Chris Palm (Aerotek), and all the rest of them.
• Actively involve yourself in multiple networks and professional societies. Be the "rainmaker" who passes job leads back and forth between your networks. Networking isn't a sterile exercise, and it isn't formulaic or algorithmic: it's being a friend and helping your friends to get jobs. Good things happen to you when you do this.
• Follow up!
• Never, EVER burn your bridges.
• Keep in touch with old bosses and co-workers.
• Sitting at home in front of a computer will not get you a job. Get on the telephone. And get out of the house.
• You HAVE TO tap into the hidden job market.
• Don't give up. This won't last forever. Find your anchor and hold on to it tightly, whether it be family, friends, or faith. You WILL make it through.
  

Links that some people may find useful:
"For the Record" - my previous posting about the job hunt
NoCoNet - Northern Colorado's premier network for job-seeking professionals
Micron Technology and Micron's Microdisplay Division
RLE Technologies
One of my startups
Rose Marie Studer - one of the best recruiters in the business
Volt Technical - an excellent recruiting firm for temporary and permanent positions
Aerotek - another excellent recruiting firm for temporary and permanent positions
SOS Staffing - another recruiting firm. They have a rather tough client in the Weld County, so I can't say whether or not they're "excellent." But my sister works for them in another state, so for that reason alone I'd say they're pretty darned good.
Larimer County Workforce Center - a government agency that actually does something useful! (Maybe I should write about them another time.)

For the Record

Okay, let me get the objections and arguments out of the way first, because some of my readers will want to make these points as they read.

1. I'm not whining or complaining. If you read this with a whiny tone, please go back and reread it with a dispassionate tone. I'm still rather upbeat and optimistic. I don't have time to whine.
2. I'm not sitting around, waiting for someone to offer me a job or a pile o' cash. I'm working hard, spending 60 hours a week on the job search.
3. I've heard all the advice. More advice won't fix the situation. Thanks anyway.

Now, for today's posting.

This economic downturn has created a job market different from all the job markets I've ever seen. In the past, when I've been out looking for a job, I have gotten lots of rejection letters, and a few rejection phone calls, that said: "Your qualifications are impressive, but we had lots of applicants for the position you applied for, and we chose one of them instead. Good luck looking elsewhere."

This time around, it's different. This time, what I'm getting in person and over the phone, is "We'd love to hire you. We need someone just like you. Unfortunately, we just got hit with a hiring freeze." Or "... our budget for that position has just been cut." Or "... our sales have dropped to near-zero and we may be closing our doors." Or, in the case of Avago, "... we just finished laying off 240 people instead of hiring anybody."

And nobody's lying about it. I've been able to verify most of their stories by independent means. Things really are tough all over.

The only people making money right now, I think, are the people writing books and articles and giving seminars and speeches with titles like, "How to Set Yourself Apart from Everybody Else and Get a Job in These Tough Times." I'm always wary of the people who write these things: what's their day job, and how did they get it? Did they follow their own advice?

One of the ironies of the current situation is that there are a lot of job openings out there. But those employers all require 3 to 5 years of experience in the specialized area that the job requires, and they're not willing to give a new hire 3 to 6 months -- or even one month -- to retrain and to learn the ropes. Employers used to be willing to take that chance, but not any more. Many of these job openings have been out there for months, some for a couple of years, and employers are still waiting for their Prince Charming to come along. It seems rather stupid to me: an employer could hire a versatile-but-obsolete professional and retrain them in less time than they've been waiting for Prince Charming.

The Northern Colorado Networking Group, http://www.noconet.org/, is a network of professionals who are either unemployed or seeking other employment. They meet every Monday morning in space donated by Faith Evangelical Free Church, in Fort Collins, Colorado. Normally their meetings are attended by about 80 people, and they normally get 3 to 5 new members each week. They consider themselves successful if they have a high turnover rate. For the last 4 to 6 weeks, however, their meetings have been standing-room-only, with between 100 and 200 people, and 20 new members each week. Like I said, things are tough out there.

It would be easy to give in to the discouragement, to fall into depression, and to sit at home all day in my grubby clothes, drinking (root) beer and watching the tube. To combat that tendency, I start each day by giving service to a group of high school students for an hour, running a couple of miles, eating a healthy breakfast, reading from the scriptures, and praying. I shave, I dress in business attire, and I spend the day doing all the things I can do to land a job.

(My wife keeps reminding me of what M. Scott Peck said in The Road Less Traveled, about insanity. He may have been quoting someone else, but it's something like this: insanity is when you keep doing the same thing, over and over, expecting to get a different outcome each time. I think there's a fine line between insanity and persistence, and I intend to stay on the persistence side of the line.)

I set aside some time in the evenings to work on a couple of entrepreneurial projects I'm involved in. But the payoff from those entrepreneurial projects is several months off, and I need a job today. So the job hunt takes priority.