[SATLUG] need help...everything is popping up Linux!

[Brad Knowles]

On 9/1/07, Vern Davis wrote:

>  You know Brad, since you're OBVIOUSLY smarter than (almost) everybody
>  else on THIS LUG, maybe you need your own special "Knowles-It-All"
>  LUG?

I wouldn't claim to be smarter than the average 
bear, but in the eighteen or so years I've been a 
professional Unix system administrator and in the 
twenty-three years I've been using Unix, I have 
had a fair amount of experience in a variety of 
fields, and in some pretty high pressure/high 
volume environments.

I've worked both as a consultant and as an 
in-house employee, and I've seen the dirty nasty 
underbelly of both sides, as well as the good 
sides of both.

I've been in situations where the consultants 
that were brought in just talked to us employees 
and then turned around and regurgitated those 
ideas to management as their own creation, and 
management suddenly decided that they were the 
best thing since sliced bread, which obviously 
had to be true because they had paid those 
consultants so much money.  Contrariwise, I've 
been in situations where the consultants were 
effectively the glue that held together the 
projects they worked on, and the employees and 
project managers kept shifting on a weekly, 
monthly, or yearly basis.  Heck, even the 
companies that were providing the consulting 
services would change on a yearly basis, but what 
always seemed to happen was that when a new 
consulting company underbid everyone else and got 
the contract, what they would do would be to turn 
around and re-hire all the same old guys who were 
working on the project last time, and then they'd 
completely over-run the budget and get under bid 
by someone else on the next round.

I've been in situations where I was the 
consultant who was brought in to help a given 
customer, and couldn't get any of the employees 
to even talk to me or acknowledge my existence, 
and who effectively kept me from being able to do 
my job -- I'm assuming that was out of fear that 
I'd re-sell their ideas to management as my own, 
but I'm just guessing.


With regards to the topic at hand, I've worked 
for a company that was widely recognized in the 
field as having some of the best recruiters in 
the business, and I've personally known some 
really horrible recruiters.

If you want to make money in this world, one of 
the easiest things to do is to become a recruiter 
and make a 20% commission on the annual salary of 
the people you place at companies, and then just 
shovel as much crap as quickly as you possibly 
can, so that you can pile up as much money as 
quickly as can, before you fly the coop and go 
start a different recruiting company.

The sister of one of my brothers-in-law is a 
self-employed recruiter for high-end tech 
companies in California, and as a result of her 
previous job in sales she's got a lot of really 
good contacts she's made over the years.  She's 
looking to clear a million dollars in the first 
full year of her business operations, and she's 
got companies knocking her door down and trying 
to throw more business at her than she knows what 
to do with.  She's getting calls for placement in 
several areas where she has no experience, so 
she's having to turn those down.  In particular, 
one thing she's getting calls for is to help fill 
legal positions, which is how my wife and I found 
out what she's doing these days and how much 
money she's making, because she wants my wife to 
come on board as her assistant for placement of 
lawyers (thanks to the previous experience my 
wife has had in her twenty-plus years as a 
lawyer, including time spent on Wall Street at a 
firm that specialized in high-end mergers & 
acquisitions, as General Counsel for an 
international investment bank, etc...).  My wife 
looked at the numbers, and decided she'd only 
need to place just five people in an entire year, 
and that would be enough money to be her own 
annual salary.


Do the math.  These people can make 20% of a 
$100-150k salary for the placement of a single 
person, and they only have to make five such 
placements in a year before they clear $100-150k 
themselves.  Now, how many snake oil 
salescritters do you think that kind of money is 
going to attract?  Hint: take another look at 
monster.com, dice.com, etc....

Unfortunately, there are actually some good 
recruiters in this business, and the good ones 
usually get tarred with the same brush that's 
used for all the bad ones.  But with as many 
recruiters as are out there, there are a lot more 
of them that are bad than are good, and you can 
usually tell the good ones from the bad ones by 
their behaviour, and whether or not you even 
notice them or know about them.

Hint: if they're good, then everybody tends to 
keep their name a secret, because they don't want 
anyone else to find out what their special 
advantage is.  OTOH, if you're a good recruiter 
then you're probably almost always going to have 
way more business thrown your way than you can 
possibly handle in ten lifetimes, so you're not 
going to need to go beating the bushes to try to 
sucker a bunch of people into submitting résumés 
to you.

Recruiters are one thing I know about.


When you step into one of the areas where I have 
some experience, you can reasonably expect that I 
will speak up, and that when I do so I will try 
to speak plainly and clearly, based primarily on 
my own experience and maybe also including my 
understanding of the broader subject and related 
fields, and I'll try to be specific about what 
type of basis I'm using for what part of my 
response.

If you disagree with me, you're welcome to do so 
and you're welcome to demonstrate your superior 
knowledge and experience through the information 
you convey and the manner in which you do so.  I 
try very hard to acknowledge my own weaknesses 
and the limits of my experience, and take 
pleasure in opportunities to learn more about 
most subjects, especially those where I feel that 
I already have a fair amount of experience.


If you don't like what I have to say, but you 
can't successfully argue with me on intelligent 
grounds or through the proper use of actual 
logic, I guess you can resort to calling me names 
or bringing out the ad-hominem attacks.  Those 
always seem to work really well.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>