<p dir="ltr">What he said.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The recruiting process is a cesspool. If you can get a job that way, great! Do cool stuff and keep the resume current. Most recruiter positions are temporary and you can become unemployed any day.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Sadly, for many people starting out, the recruiter-pushed temp job is the mandatory slave labor required to get bullet points on the resume.</p>
<p dir="ltr">And the "health care insurance" they provide is a pathetic, cruel joke. No paid days off adds to the misery. And once the temp worker figures out the cost of the position they have is the same as if they were full time at the firm, with full benefit package they don't get, and the temp agency gets the huge difference between their paycheck and the full time position pay. The company uses "temps" instead of real employees to take advantage of accounting tricks and passes the astronomical cost of unemployment insurance off to the temp agency. When the position ends, that unemployment check is a loan that's expected to be repaid or taxed. </p>
<p dir="ltr">But it all sure beats working at the mall.</p>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Apr 12, 2016 5:06 AM, "Jeff Hubbs" <<a href="mailto:jhubbslist@att.net">jhubbslist@att.net</a>> wrote:<br type="attribution"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<div>On 4/8/16 5:08 PM, Tony wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">Hello all. <br>
I recently have been contacted by someone who works for Optomi: an
IT Staffing company saying they wish to speak about an opportunity
they think I would fit. Has anyone worked with this company in the
past before? Any opinions or experience? Any scams I need to be
worried about? </blockquote>
Yeah.<br>
<blockquote type="cite">I am rather new in IT and very much looking for some
experience in a Linux environment so I am excited, but don't want
my excitement to cause me to make poor decisions! Still waiting
for a call back with more details about who the position is with,
but it caught me off guard in the first place and wanted to get
some opinions. Appreciate any insight from the group.<br>
<br>
Thank you!<br>
<br>
Tony<br>
</blockquote>
I don't know from this "Optomi" but let me provide some context.<br>
<br>
Back in the 1980s there were ads and flyers posted around college
campuses trying to get people to go around selling magazine
subscriptions and the typical deal was, you'd get paid a little but
if you sold some number of subscriptions you'd win a trip to Bermuda
or some such. And however it was structured you couldn't get that
trip to Bermuda without some combination of either 1) resorting to
some form of coercion or <i>quid pro quo</i> 2) spending every
waking moment mostly in pursuit of 1). <br>
<br>
Fast-forward to the late 1990s and instead of magazine subscriptions
it was IT recruiting. People like me would get calls from kids who
didn't know anything about the questions they were asking you, and
in the background you could hear a bunch of other voices talking all
at once, so you knew you were dealing with a sort of call center
arrangement. Every once in a while you'd hear a bell ring and
everyone in the room would go WOOOHOOOOO! So these recruiting
companies' business model consisted of hiring some kids for peanuts
and making 'em compete for Bermuda trips or whatever by placing what
was becoming commodity IT labor with what had already become
commodity IT jobs. <br>
<br>
Just last year, I met with a guy who went to my same high school and
had come up through this system in some capacity and, I kid you not,
the office space we met in - which was pretty much devoid of people
- <i>still had a bell on the wall</i>. <br>
<br>
Come the twenty-teens, the system is still in place to some degree
or another, but it has long been a continuously rotating slushball
of appearing and disappearing companies, many of them with names
that, especially in the 2000s, ended in -int, -ient, -ent, and
-iant. It's all software-based, so you have this apparatus where
people are directed by machines to find people to direct machines
that direct other people. You can see a slice of the slushball just
in the description at
<a href="http://www.bullhorn.com/customers/optomi-recruiting-software-case-study/" target="_blank">http://www.bullhorn.com/customers/optomi-recruiting-software-case-study/</a>.
<br>
<br>
And remember, for any given IT job more than 1-3 levels below CIO,
there's an alternate H-1B and offshore labor pool that helps put an
effective cap on your salary. <br>
<br>
None of this is to say that you shouldn't go there, but you should
go in with your eyes open and always make sure you know what you are
worth at any given time. I should also tell you that in the private
sector, no matter how good you are, if you can be replaced however
speciously by someone cheaper, you will eventually be replaced by
someone cheaper. I once worked with a guy who managed a software
R&D department; he (and in fact, his department) was dropped
like a hot rock as a way to improve the numbers when the company was
put up for sale. Some 20 years earlier, he'd written much of the
code that generated revenue in the data center I managed. Worked
long hours; may have cost him a marriage. I learned a lot from him;
admired him greatly. None of it mattered. Institutional memory,
maintaining market differentiation into the future - all worth
squat.<br>
<br>
Also remember that, especially for an industry that generates such
stupendous amounts of profit (ask yourself, what is the marginal
cost of production for a single instance of a $40,000 MS SQL Server
license compared to that of a new BMW 328i that costs about the
same?), there are basically no worker protections in IT. There are
no unions, although CWA seems to be covering some jobs at the
periphery (<a href="http://www.cwa-union.org/teletech-companies" target="_blank">http://www.cwa-union.org/teletech-companies</a>), as does
IBEW. Unlike, say, the system that's in place for electrical workers
that involve independent and centralized certification as a barrier
to entry (the IBEW was started in the first place because in dense
urban centers, "electricians" were dropping like flies and there
needed to be some kind of standardized comprehensive training),
"certification" in IT is mostly product-vendor-based and therefore
designed to preserve and expand those products' market share and
even the CompTIA certifications are fairly well stovepiped. When you
see supposedly "certified" folks pop circuit breakers in server
racks or make a web app server actually call out over the Internet
by URL continually to pull in production code written by an outside
party, you start to wonder exactly where the value-add of these
certifications is supposed to be coming from. <br>
<br>
Another thing - companies don't bear the burden of poorly-designed
and accident-prone computing environments as long as those
environments can be made semi-functional by staff on unpaid overtime
and on-call rotations, and I have observed that, more often than
not, the people responsible for the design and other reliability
problems that cause the overtime and the after-hours calls aren't
the ones who get the calls or work the unpaid overtime (in many
cases, the actual perps have moved on). <br>
<br>
My ale-jobs mailing list inbox goes back to October 2009 and has 756
messages. Almost all of them are for the same kind of job - similar
requirements, similar responsibilities - over and over and over
again. And in metro Atlanta, recruiters looking for Linux people are
often hiring for the same companies - just from memory, Fiserv,
Weather Channel, Turner Broadcasting. Linux jobs are now as fully
commoditized as Windows jobs were 15-20 years ago.<br>
<br>
Oh, more about recruiters:<br>
<ul>
<li>One question to always ask is if his or her company has an
exclusive contract to fill the specific position they're
considering you for. The correct answer is "yes." If not, the
exact same job is probably available just by going to the hiring
company's web site and they wouldn't have to pay a middleman. If
the recruiter won't tell you the name of the company, it's a
sign that the position may be available directly.</li>
<li>If the recruiter wants to know where all you've applied to or
interviewed with or what recruiters you've talked to already,
there's a good chance that they fear having another recruiter
trying to shop your resume to the same places they're going to
shop your resume to. Additionally, any potentially hiring
company for you is a potential client of theirs. So, if you're
asked these questions, you can excuse yourself politely; they're
offering you very little in exchange for your resume.<br>
</li>
<li>Some recruiters will try to pump you for information about
your <i>current</i> employer. And why wouldn't they, when they
can play both ends against the middle and try to get your
employer to backfill your position through them?<br>
</li>
</ul>
<br>
</div>
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<br></blockquote></div>