May 29

I got phoned today by an I.T. recruiter for a short-term MDX-related position. Multi-Dimensional eXpressions—the language you use for querying data cubes, which in turn are a way of pre-computing the results of queries on humongous databases so they run faster.

I’ve worked a lot with SQL Server 2005, and solved some very difficult programming (T-SQL) problems in it. But I haven’t used the multi-dimensional (cube/OLAP) database features at all. And I was quite open about that: As soon as I asked and found out that it was on the 2005 platform, I told the guy that I probably wasn’t the right person for the job.

He persisted a little, so I ended up explaining to him, at a high level, that significant changes have been made to the way in which data cubes are built in SQL Server 2005 (where it’s all drag-and-drop) vs. 2000 (where you had to actually write T-SQL code in stored procedures, which is the only “fun” part of building cubes, and which I had done a lot of).

And then he suddenly says, “Can I call you back in ten minutes?” as if he’s just got a call on the other line or something ... and hangs up before I can even say goodbye!

Of course, he never did call back, which is fine. But what I can’t believe is that this guy didn’t even have the decency to end the call with an actual “goodbye.” He wastes my cell-phone time by leaving such a non-detailed initial message that I had to call him just to find out what the position entailed, and then he can’t spare another five seconds for me.

It’s kinda like the time I was walking home from Second City with my long, faux-promiscuous hair bouncing in the ghostly moonlight half a dozen Halloweens ago, and got propositioned by a cheap whore (as opposed to an I.T. recruiter, heh).

Her: How’re you doing?

Me: I’m good.

Her: I’ll do you for twenty.

I silently weighed the financial, legal, moral, and viral consequences.

Her: I’m not expensive. I won’t go below fifteen.

Fifteen bucks, geez that’s ... that’s less than the cost of three beers. But then, you can imagine what a three-beer hooker would look like.

Me: Thanks, but I’ll have to have to pass.

... and she’s off like a flash to the other side of the street, where the business is hopefully brisker.

The last full-time job I had, I was hired to work in OLAP and VB.NET. For a Microsoft Certified Partner located close enough to Rexdale (“Rednecks-dale”) in northwestern Toronto that I received more advice than I could ever possibly use, shouted out of passing pick-up truck windows, about where I and my hair should or shouldn’t be walking.

The company owner was an orthodox Jewish man, around my own age, who embodied nearly every positive and negative stereotype of his people.

It was like working in Fiddler on the Roof, except his wife had dyed her hair blond, to boost her shiks-appeal. (Shiksa, from the Hebrew term sheketz, meaning “loathsome,” “abomination,” “unclean,” “dirty,” “rodent,” or “lizard.” Nothing in there about being a large-breasted blonde angling for a doctor or lawyer husband, but you get the picture).

It’s the only place I’ve ever been employed where it was written into your contract that you couldn’t discuss your salary with your co-workers, on penalty of dismissal.

So “Tevye” kinda knew, I think, that he was giving us the short end of the dreidel. Call it “tradition.”

The only really good part about working there was that we got Yom Kippur off—the owner’s day of atoning for his sins ... most of which, ironically, were probably accrued by him underpaying us during the rest of the year. And by repeatedly promising potential customers features in the software which never quite materialized.

If there isn’t an Eleventh Commandment about not promising someone the moon—and then delivering just a piece of stale green cheese—just to make a sale, there should be.

Of course, there was the time when he sold him a horse and told him it was only six years old, when it was really twelve. But now, it’s all over, and we live in simple peace and harmony.

—Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof

In the entire history of that company, they’ve employed exactly two real programmers: myself, and a world-class, Coke-addicted cracker who, on the basis of a chutzpah-filled sales pitch, quit a night-shift .NET job at a major corp to work on a flagship application written in Access 97.

I learned at least two things from that malicious hacker. One is that if you want to learn hacking, learn it from the Russians—they’re the best in the world at it. And the other was that the particular Russian who was running our I.T. Department in a manner not unlike a Bolshevik with its head cut off, was the type of person you should try to learn as little from as possible.

I had once remarked to Cracker-guy that I was worried that, if I worked there for too long, I’d start picking up the bad coding habits of the other programmers. Near the end of my imprisonment in that gulag, I actually got that confirmed: the Muscovite in charge had decided that, when we finally ported the app to .NET sometime near the end of the twenty-first century, we wouldn’t use structured Try/Catch blocks for error handling, instead sticking with the obsolete, unstructured way of doing things. Why? Because Try/Catch blocks apparently couldn’t do all the “fancy” things we’d need to be doing.

Granted, the program generated a lot of errors. But still....

To get that job in the first place, Trotsky had worked for several months at the company for free, in 2003.

Native-born Canadians can’t compete with that: You’d have to be paying the company for the privilege of working there, to be making less money. But that’s what immigrants will do to get a job here. Even in the midst of our tech “labor shortage.”

Not that my own situation was so much better: I had to survive for six months on a federal job-creation partnership, which paid me only $413 a week, to get to a $40K salary—and that was still far less than I had been making at Shitvantex Disloyalty Marketing until mid-2003, doing the data cubes and SalesLogix customizations for them.

Of course, according to the economic philosophy of Richard Stallman, being paid so little should have made me enjoy the work more, shouldn’t it? As he put it:

If we take away the possibility of great wealth, then after a while, when the people have readjusted their attitudes, they will once again be eager to work in the field for the joy of accomplishment.

Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project and the free software movement; his leadership of those has been described as “democracy under a dictatorship.” He actually squatted on the MIT campus for years. So apparently, because he was “happy but poor,” we should all be.

The final couple of months I worked under Ivan the Terrible Manager were by far the closest I’ve ever been to clinical depression—having to struggle so much to get the simplest thing done in a morass of undocumented, often-redundant code, and arcane, unexplained business rules which apply nowhere in the world except on a manufacturing-shop floor.

With people like him in Mother Russia, you can easily see how the West won the Cold War.

Finally, one Tuesday afternoon, after Khrushchev had copped an attitude on me in the midst of my quiet loathing of his utterly deficient I.T. knowledge, I just got up and left. Permanently.

If you’ve never just walked away from an awful situation that was slowly killing you, know that with each step you take in the February slush, it gets easier to take the next one away from ... Anatevka.

“A pot, a pan, a Pentium, a hat.” Or: Sometimes the only way to preserve your (literal) sanity is to do the “irresponsible hippie” thing.

Well at least, being perpetually single, when I got home unexpectedly in the middle of the afternoon I didn’t have to justify it to Golde. She probably wouldn’t have gone for getting nicely plastered while watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show, anyway.

Oh, and regarding the “technical skills shortage” you hear about every now and then: It’s a lie, and there have been studies done to prove that.

I graduated with a programming diploma in late 2001 from a private institute in Toronto, and had been working part-time for Shitvantex while in school, so I got back on with them full-time within a few months of graduation ... after being stuck with doing data-entry and filing for a month at UNICEF during their Christmas rush, to pay the bills. Another grad from that class was on contract with a bank for awhile, but was unable to find related work beyond that. A third worked for several months for free for an online gaming company, to get himself in line for paying employment there.

A fourth ended up in the porn industry. Doing websites, I mean—not films. Although there was a hot Italian girl with a delicious butt who used to sit in the back row with me, who certainly could’ve....

Anyway, the rest of the class of around fifteen graduates just wrote off the tuition and time as a bad investment, and went on with the search for a different career.

One of the guys I worked with at Shitvantex was a young East-European with an amazing knack for storytelling, who had both a bachelor’s degree in computer science and an MBA. He dumbed-down his resumé to “qualify” for a position which involved mostly just slicing up graphics for web pages and maintaining the ugly company website—it was the only work he could find. For $15 an hour, on a temporary contract.

Any public posting of such an entry-level programming position today will receive 500 resumés; that’s been the case for at least half a decade by now. Even at the height of the dot-com boom, less than half of the Comp Sci graduates at the University of California at Davis were able to find programming jobs.

Why then do you keep opening the newspaper and finding articles about a non-existent “shortage” of I.T. professionals? Well, according to big business and the blessed governments they’re in bed with like a bunch of fifteen-dollar whores, the industry needs more bodies with different skills than it already has.

But of course, it doesn’t really need more bodies, or we wouldn’t already have immigrants (and newly graduated Canadians) working for free. And any junk-food eating geek worth his or her salt (and vinegar) wants to have to learn new, cutting-edge technologies; if they can’t get paid to do that on the job they’ll do it at home, in their spare time. Hell, that’s half the reason why we got into this work in the first place: For the joy of learning, and solving new problems that no one else has ever solved before.

If we wanted a job that didn’t require us to think, we would have just taken an MBA.

There is no “labor shortage” in the I.T. industry; not a “desperate” one, not even a mild one. There never has been. Not in Canada, and not in the States either. In fact, given the nature of the average red-blooded North American male geek as a porn freak, there will be a porn shortage before there’s a skills shortage in I.T.

In the meantime, though, the glut of H-1B visas and their ilk serves very nicely to drive wages down to the point where programmers with a hospitality background (like myself) would be better off financially if we just went back to waiting tables ... as opposed to starting at $30-$35K and working sweatshop hours as a junior-level programmer.

“And would you like anything to drink with that?”

Ah, but then I’d have to cut my hair short, wouldn’t I? You know, to meet the “health regulations.”

You can just as easily be a “starving programmer” these days as a “starving artist.” The only difference is that artists have cuter girlfriends, and get out more.

Well, back to practicing guitar, then....