An agent called me the other day about a position as a developer on an insurance platform that I have tested on.

I mentioned that I was a tester and hadn’t been a developer for many years and the agent just didn’t get this concept. He said ‘well can’t you develop on this platform anyway?’. I answered that the developement language that they are using now is totally different to the mainframe development work I was doing a long time ago. Still don’t think he got it and he definitely didn’t like the pathetic excuses I gave him. He was very professional though but did sound a bit like a HR person (Hence the confusion, he he. Ed). No doubt he thought I was a complete waste of time.

Just installed Visual Studio 2010 Professional beta on an XP PC. I fired off setup, went for a bike ride for an hour and when I returned it was still running. Took a total of 2 hours to install. At the end it asked me if I wanted the documentation to ber installed. Too right I do with any app that takes that long to install. The documentaion install failed with some nasty error messages so I’ll be flying blind with that for awhile.

I got Smart PDF Converter Pro the other day to see how well PDF documents can be converted into doc files. I started with a single page house sale flyer, which had photos and house plans on it and it converted that pretty well. All of the pictures, plans and headings that were on the pdf file were displayed on the doc version. I then tried converting a 20 page credit report and that seemed to convert well too. Neat.

I installed the StatPress statistics plugin for WordPress and it’s quite useful, up to a point, seeing the viewing statistics for this blog. The stats it shows me for visits was less than I expected so I checked the hosting companies log files and of course there was not a lot of similarity. I checked 30 minutes worth of log files for visits, spiders and RSS feed entries and noted those totals then I checked to see what StatPress, which doesn’t use the log files, for it’s view of visits, spiders and RSS entries for the same period and StatPress was missing about 50% of them. Not as bad as Sitemeter though, as that seems to miss most visits. I checked Sitemeters figures for another page I have, a page that gets very few hits per day, say 10, and it said that over a 3 month period I had 280 visits with an average per day of zero and an average visit length of 0.00 minutes. That page is a bit boring but it’s not that boring.

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.

Phoned the agent about the online test I took the other day and he said that two out of four of us passed the online exam though the official response from the company who set it was still forthcoming.

The agent was so confident that I had done OK and was so keen to find out what I had written eventually I sent him my answer to the virtual machine question which he loved. When he had found out that I’d made a copy of all the questions and my answers he wanted the lot but if I did that I have a feeling that somehow they’d get into the wild for all and sundry to use and that’s not to my advantage.

Apparently this was the second time this company had tried recruiting someone. The first time 17 people took the test and only one passed and he then failed the interview. The 16 that failed all came from Asia and most hadn’t even finished the test, they just left a load of questions blank. The agent said that all of them had great resume’s with every bit of sexy software experience going. So why did they have such trouble with the test? Dunno.

By last Friday I still hadn’t heard any official feedback from the company and I told the agent that I thought it was fading away but no he had a real good feeling about it. Finally yesterday he phoned to say that though he’d got negative feedback from the company on the two, out of four, of us that had failed the test the company had a big software release coming up and the guy didn’t have time to give any feedback for the two of us who had passed the test and that if the agent hadn’t heard back in three to four days then assume that we hadn’t been selected. I think I can safely assume that we will not be hearing back from that lot. The poor old agent was a bit surprised by this as the company had been very keen on employing someone for the last 3 months and finally when they found someone they ran away.

I suppose maybe us two (Smartasses. Ed) may have scared them off a bit with our exam results. Whatever, in a couple of weeks they’ll be back in the market for the same people and they won’t be able to use that agency as they have already found suitable candidates. The company will have to use a different agency and hope that us two don’t apply. If I mentioned this to the agency he’d probably get a little irritated and eventually blame us for losing him business and he’d be right.

Thinking about doing some Loadrunner stuff….