Hate Life, Will Travel

There’s a corporate standard that entirely baffles me. I have an RSS feed set up for Craigslist for program manager jobs back from when I was unemployed way back, and I browse through it once in a while, because it’s interesting: job listings are just that. They’re things spit out of machines, that come out of an HR generation program or something, and they almost all read exactly the same:

Program Manager (IT)
Department: Information Technology
Reports To: Director of Systems and Technology
Location: Bellevue, WA

Primary Function

Exciting opportunity to be part of one of the most innovative companies of the new millennium!!! We offer a dynamic work environment that thrives on creativity, adaptability and passion.

This is what you get if you’re lucky. Many of them start directly with this:

Essential Job Function
• Work with business stakeholders to identify, define and prioritize enhancements
• Assist in defining scope
[...]
• Manage internal and external customer relationships and expectations.
• Prepare timely and appropriate communications for escalations, project status reports, decisions and risk mitigation plans.
• Complete key deliverables as the initiative plan dictates

And then into

Skills, Education and Experience
• 6-8 years experience managing cross-functional teams and software development projects for technology organizations.
• Good understanding of SDLC methodologies
• Experience managing custom “in-house” developed software projects and managing implementations of COTS applications required.
• Bachelors Degree in business or technical field required.

Easily 80% of listings look like some variation of that: requirements, duties.

“We’re hiring a program manager.”
“Here’s what program managers do.”
“Here’s what you need to be.”

This is a huge reason why most jobs are filled through word of mouth and recommendation. I wrote a listing pitch for a dev manager, and I tried to write as if I was personally trying to recruit someone to my team at Expedia. I said

- Here’s why this is a great dev job
- Here’s the kind of cool stuff you’d work on
- Here’s why it might be particularly attractive to some people with dev lead/manager aspirations
- Here’s how good the business customer and the teams you work with are

You never see that. When I’m paging through Google Reader, it’s always the same. “Hmmm, Amazon’s still trying to staff payments… boring, boring, boring, boring, $35k for a senior PgM? Heh. Amazon’s either re-opened that req or they lost the payment PM they hired a month ago…”

Maybe once a month I stop and look at a listing and say “wow, that’s really well-written and interesting.”

Companies spend so much money recruiting and training new employees, and yet the way they try to attract candidates is not to put people who already work there on it, or to even have their best employees help make the listings more attractive. It’s baffling, totally baffling.

“File not found.”

Found at Got Futurama

“Azure” which really needs a rename. I love the story but it’s way long, which kills the tension and is generally bad news. So.

V1: 8500 words
V2, edited for length: 8900 words (that’s not a joke)
V3, immediate edit following crit yesterday: 8350
V4, yesterday: 7400

There’s at least another 500-700 words coming out of this thing.

Because I’m a total coffee nerd, I’ve been watching the McDonald’s-Starbucks coffee war with great interest. I’ve had the new McDonald’s drinks (road trip + wife likes the shakes) and they’re — erratic. One was good, the others ranged from passable to bad.

I realized, though, that Starbucks has really invited this. Their current espresso machines are entirely push-button: plus button, beep, extra-hot! minus button, beep, add a shot, beep beep — there’s almost nothing to do for the baristas. If they’ve reduced coffee to pushing buttons, well, McDonald’s employees can push buttons too. If it’s about the beans then, it’s tougher to match the Starbucks roast-and-deliver infrastructure, but heck, if they really wanted they could overnight roasted beans from someone good.

Then what? In terms of drip coffee, the Clover potentially gives them a sustainable competitive advantage over everyone else because they’ve got unique machines protected with a moat of patents. But I’d never really considered how much Starbucks’ long move towards machines with greater and greater amounts of automation has opened the door for other people to compete with them on their most central product.

I just realized I didn’t post about it here — my short story “Usurpers” is in the current month’s Asimov’s, my first sale of a short story to a science fiction market. I love the story and I’m happy to see it in Asimov’s, which I’ve been reading for ages and am huge on.

I was thinking about writing an “author’s commentary” on it, but I don’t want to spoil it — and I’m not sure how much demand there’d be for that anyway.

But yeah, check it out.

I want to believe there’s a special place in Hell for city planners who build light rail and bus systems that don’t include a way for people to get from downtown to the airport.

I envision a portal out of hell within sight of their punishments but separated by impassable obstacles. Various demons offer to take them there, always demanding more money than they have on hand.

These cities should serve as a crushing rebuke to people who don’t think that city governments are all that corrupt.