[ale] Optomi

[Jeff Hubbs]

On 4/8/16 5:08 PM, Tony wrote:
> Hello all.
> 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? 
Yeah.
> 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.
>
> Thank you!
>
> Tony
I don't know from this "Optomi" but let me provide some context.

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 /quid pro quo/ 2) spending every waking moment mostly in 
pursuit of 1).

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.

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 - /still 
had a bell on the wall/.

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 
http://www.bullhorn.com/customers/optomi-recruiting-software-case-study/.

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.

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.

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 
(http://www.cwa-union.org/teletech-companies), 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.

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).

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.

Oh, more about recruiters:

  * 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.
  * 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.
  * Some recruiters will try to pump you for information about your
    /current/ 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?


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