[ale] Optomi

Tue Apr 12 08:07:38 EDT 2016

What he said.

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.

Sadly, for many people starting out, the recruiter-pushed temp job is the
mandatory slave labor required to get bullet points on the resume.

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.

But it all sure beats working at the mall.
On Apr 12, 2016 5:06 AM, "Jeff Hubbs" <jhubbslist at att.net> wrote:

> 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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