Just seen a site advertising links to a lot of very well paid jobs. Closer inspection revealed all of the links were to the same web site. And what happens when you visit that site, fill out a form, attach a resume and click apply? You have to sign up and pay $100 to be able to submit your resume for these very well paid jobs.

You can see what is coming next will be charging for applying to any specific position and then later on these sites will be charging a percentage of your first years salary if you want a decent position or they might just charge you $30,000 for successfull placement. With these kind of fees all sorts of sales guys are gonna be jumping on board (No doubt ‘to get a piece of that action’. Ed) and selling resumes like no nobodies business. You think agents are not too clued up now, you wait till they turn to full-on salesmen.

I know one company that can’t get contract staff for love or money. Either resumes are not quite right or people fail the interview and sometimes haven’t even appeared at an arranged interview. The reason for that is that the office is out in the sticks and there is not much in the way of public transport, read none. A couple of people who have managed to struggle through the resume submission process, the trip-em up interview and finally negotiated one of the worst contract rates ever have actually left the company on the first day due to some odd office rules and regulations. They’d prefer to be out of work, shock.

They have shot through so many contractors in the last couple of years that some agents can’t be bothered with them as their mark-up on a contractor working a few days or months just isn’t worth it. The companies new way forward, now that they know there is an abundance of contracters available, is to halve the gross rate and squeeze the agency margin even more. That should do the trick. Meanwhile the upper management are wondering why they have so much trouble getting staff.

I’ve been listening to some Sinatra studio bootlegs which includes initial song run throughs, alternate takes and a lot of studio chatter and it’s remarkable listening. A real eye opener of the time when a lot of classics were recorded. Get the following: From The Vaults – Two and More, Stranger Sinatra, Sinatra & Basie 2 and Master In His Workshop.

Had an interview for a position with a company in a very nice area of London and the interview went quite well. I was one of 5 to have my resume put forward but the only one to be interviewed.

The interview was just between the test manager and myself and we both came from similar backgrounds and had a similar view on testing software and we got on very well. The interview lasted an hour and he said he’d get me back for another interview with one of the directors, a Business Analyst and himself again. I had the second interview a few days later and I got on OK with the director and the test manager gave me some openings for me to impress them with my technical or testing knowledge. I was able to say at one point that I am quite good at getting software to work. This was a sort of rubber-stamp type of interview just to make sure that I got on with these other two but the BA wasn’t happy at all. He was in his late 20’s and didn’t come from an IT background but had learnt and taught a couple of developers all about Scrum.

At the first interview the test manager, who was also the Scrum Master, mentioned a couple of times that he wasn’t 100% convinced about the Scrum methodology and envisioned that within a year when the development process had significantly ramped up and there were 10 times more IT staff he could see a more waterfall approach being adopted, in other words rather than developer lead it would be documentation and business analyst lead. How a Scrum Master/Test Manager does that over the course of a year god only knows.

None of this explains why the BA was so unhappy at my second interview though. The development team only currently totals about 5 people and they’re probably all in their 20’s and the Scrum Master was in his 40’s and obviously way more experienced than the BA. Maybe the BA could just about handle one person more experienced than himself but didn’t like the idea of two people on the project with more experience than himself. Anyway the following day the agent, who had been extremely gung-ho about me being the only person to be interviewed, told me they were looking at someone else.

I felt a bit sorry for the ScrumMaster because the type of person they’ll now have to look at was probably the type that hadn’t been called for an interview in the first place. A little guy with between 3 and 5 years testing experience and that doesn’t say smart-ass stuff like how good he is at getting software to work but instead stays in his little box and only pipes up when he’s spoken to. That will usually be an answer to the question ‘have you tested that app yet?’ and woe betide him if he says anything about finding bugs coz he’ll probably get a mouthfull about friggin testers that don’t know how to run software right. Ouch, am I getting cynical about this or what (Yup. Ed).

Just tried to install SQL Server 2008 and it failed as it wanted to upgrade DTS (Data Transformation Services) (Why is it called DTS in SQL Server 2008 when it’s been called SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) since SQL Server 2005? Ed), and I didn’t have SQL Server 2005 already installed but instead its cut down version SQL Server 2005 Express (edition), which knows squat about SSIS or even DTS. Should have read the manual.

Just applied for a position with a hedge-fund company which pays very well. If you can get the software to work your bonus is 100% of salary. Also applied for a position with a music company in Soho which sounds very interesting. The last one depends on whether the agent actually puts me forward for it, I said I was very interested, but whether the agent actually does so is another matter (What other matter? Ed) Dunno.

Tried to get O2 to sort out our complete lack of mobile coverage at home and as usual O2 went firmly into denial.

I’ve tried several times over the last couple of years to get them to at least admit there is a coverage problem and that’s included some typically terribly confused telephone conversations with call centres in Asia. This time I thought I’d try at the top so I emailed the CEO but he didn’t really want to know. I did get a couple of calls from the Chairman’s Office and the first call was quite helpfull in that the guy said they’d send round a couple of engineers to our post code and check reception.

The second call from the Chairman’s Office was to inform me of the engineers findings and they were that I had good 2G and 3G coverage. Of course the engineers didn’t actually call on me at home to report their findings or even to prove to me the good 2G and 3G service. It was pretty obvious that they never came round to check coverage at our post code at all but instead just referred to their coverage maps. Shame on them.

I emailed the CEO and Chairman’s Office again with screen dumps showing ‘No Service’ and pictures of where I was when I got ‘No Service’. Yes I know I could have heaved good service screen dumps into Photoshop and cheated but there was blessed little reason to do that when I get no service anyway. O2 didn’t like those screen dumps as it was proof that what I was saying was valid. I got another call from the Chairman’s Office and chopped logic with some guy to no avail as it was obvious he had been told to just get rid of me by offering me £5 off of my monthly bill. Why would they do that if they think I have a good service? They wouldn’t, they would only offer the cost reduction if they knew I had no service. I said to this guy ‘what about a femtocell which uses a wireless router’ but he’d never heard of them. Just writing ‘no O2 coverage in a popular area of West London’ is insane, it’s like we’re stuck on the 1990’s. I reckon the engineers at O2 will only fix problems if they accept them as problems and they just aren’t going to do that. Talk about bloody minded.

I mentioned my lack of O2 coverage on a very sarcastic news website and the darn thing was read by some telecoms engineers who got very frothy at the mouth, chopping logic like billy-o, and moralized away trying to convince all and sundry that it was my fault. What is it with these people, have they got an over inflated sense of importance or something, jeez, it’s only telephones ferchrissakes, not rocket science.

Think we need a sea-change in attitude before this lot fix these issues and that’s not going to happen for a few years but now Orange and Vodaphone are getting the iPhone I may have to do some investigation with them.