Aren't You Glad Facebook Doesn't Make Software for Nukes? You Should be!

Aren't You Glad Google Dropped out of Bidding for That $10 Billion Pentagon AI Contract?!

On Clear, Precise, and Unambiguous Requirements - Again

This is from a job post for an IT Analyst position with a Fortune 100 company (annual revenue - over $30 billion) posted on its own career site:

"POSITION SPECIFICATIONS
Minimum:
- Bachelors degree in Computer Science or related discipline and typically 5 to 8 years experience in (add area(s) of technical specialty) or equivalent combination of education and work experience.
- Broad technical expertise with deep technical knowledge in at least one area (add specifics here).
- Excellent communications skills- Able to effectively communicate highly technical information in non-technical terminology (written a[nd] verbal).
- Understanding of change management principles associated with new technology implementations.
- Demonstrated leadership ability
- Understanding of project management principles
Preferred:
- Technical certification in Technical Area of Specialty"

A Step Up from Lorem Ipsum

Comcast Center in Center City, Philadelphia, PA

I have a love-hate (or, more accurately, hate-love) relationship with what seems to be an infinite - and growing! - number of IT temp agencies (come on, let's call a fig a fig - most of them are nothing but temp agencies, no matter what they call themselves trying to come across as real technology companies). Their spam is distracting and irritating, but I have to admit that - in a somewhat... perverse kind of way - some of the e-mails are quite amusing. The websites of those outfits are often even more amusing (albeit, also, in a... not entirely healthy way), and today we are going to take a look at one of them.

The Best Recruiting Software on the Planet. Really?

From the product website: "[Product Name] is Quite Simply The Best Recruiting Software on the Planet." I don't know about that, but you sure have The Most Informative and User-Friendly Error Messages on the Planet :-P

Monstrosity, or The Irrelevance of Relevance

I know better than to create profiles on job boards. Occasionally, however, when there is an attractive gig, and the only way to get in touch with the prospective client is through a job board, I do. As expected, the job boards immediately start bombarding me with what they claim to be jobs I am likely to be interested in. Let's take a closer look at some:

Do any of the ten jobs above look like tech writing jobs to you? I especially like the "Land Combat Electronic Missile System Repairer" :-P

Unless You Really Want to Look Like a Fool, Don't Save on Business Analysis

I have just heard Tom MacDonald's news report "Philly bike share glitch creating hassle for riders looking to upgrade" on the radio.

According to the report, Indego, a public bicycle sharing system in Philadelphia, offers two membership plans: you can "buy a monthly Indego30 membership at $15 that gives you unlimited one-hour-rides or pick the $10 per-year IndegoFlex membership and pay $4 for each trip."

But you cannot change your plan!

How to Create a CentOS 7 Minimal VM on VMware Player

By popular request, here is an updated (for CentOS 7) version of an older tutorial for CentOS 6. This post provides step-by-step instructions how to:

• create a VMware virtual machine from a CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-Minimal.iso using VMware Player 6.0.4 on Windows 7;
• bring the virtual machine to a minimally usable state, i.e. to be able to connect to CentOS mirrors in order to update your new system and install additional software packages;
• install VMware Tools 9.6.2 or open-vm-tools 9.4.0;
• open ports with firewall-cmd.

A Classic Example of "Broken As Designed"

This is an extremely annoying "feature" I keep stumbling upon in all kinds of software, be it customer-facing or "internal" business applications. I have been seeing this for years (if not decades) now, and it doesn't seem to be going away.

Imagine a web site that sells tours (just an easy to understand example). On a page, you see two dependent drop-down lists: one with continents and the other with countries (again, this is just an easy to understand example). Say, you select "Europe" from the first drop-down list and "Albania" from the second. The page refreshes and displays something like "Your search returned no results". You keep trying, and -- after 50+ attempts -- it turns out that the site only offers tours that begin in Germany (DE), Spain (ES), and Italy (IT). The other 50 or so European countries on the second drop-down list are there for absolutely no reason (except to annoy users). Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Yet Another Thing Your Applicant Tracking System Can't Do

Photo credit and license: Pierre-Olivier Carles; CC BY 2.0

Like it or not, e-mail marketing - also known as "bulk e-mailing", but more commonly referred to as "spam" - is a fact of life. Most of the time it's annoying, sometimes - creepy, occasionally - hilarious... The bulk-mailed message I received a few days ago from a major nationwide IT recruiting-and-staffing agency that shall remain unnamed falls under the category of... well... kind of thought-provoking. At least that's the effect it had on me. The minimally redacted (to protect the identity of the company and its client) text of the e-mail is below.

**Evening Shift Testing Opportunity! 5 positions!​!**

ATS-Friendly Resume Builder Project Dropped

I have just spent almost three months experimenting with various implementations of over a dozen most popular applicant tracking systems (commonly referred to as ATS's) trying to figure out what a job seeker can do in order to improve the accuracy of how his/her resume is parsed by and imported into an ATS.

Had the experiment been successful, I would be able to alleviate the two major problems pretty much any ATS out there seems to have:

• for employers -- reduce the likelihood of resumes of well-qualified applicants getting "blackholed" because of bad resume parsers (and most of them are pretty bad);
• for job seekers -- minimize the time wasted filling in countless text boxes with the information from their resumes over and over again.

OkCupid, This Caviar Has Been Eaten Before

Many, many years ago, when I worked as a tour guide, somebody told me a joke that goes kind of like this:

A Western tourist is on a tour of the Soviet Union. At the hotel restaurant, he asks for ikra (Russian for "caviar"; pronounced eek-rAh). 

"Excellent choice, sir," says the waiter and leaves the guest to salivate alone in anticipation of something like... this:

Soon, the waiter comes back and brings... this:

Facebook Psychology Study Scandal: BS Science to Prop BS Technology

I've got better things to do than write about Facebook's questionable practices (or Facebook in general, or any other social networking site for that matter). So, this is going to be a short rant.

Dun Mares and Black Stallions: Another Look at Applicant Tracking Systems

Allow me to start from afar. Take a look at the screenshot of a Google ad that kept popping up in my Gmail inbox. It appears that, having been sifting through thousands of my emails for eight or nine years now, the world's #1 search engine and online advertiser "thinks" I am a flirty plus-size female who likes knitwear, has anger issues, and may be a little slow in the head:

I guess I don't need to worry about my privacy.

On the other hand... a Taoist tale many of us are familiar with thanks to J. D. Salinger comes to mind (in case you don't remember, see below):

Duke Mu of Chin said to Po Lo: "You are now advanced in years. Is there any member of your family whom I could employ to look for horses in your stead?" Po Lo replied: "A good horse can be picked out by its general build and appearance. But the superlative horse - one that raises no dust and leaves no tracks - is something evanescent and fleeting, elusive as thin air. The talents of my sons lie on a lower plane altogether; they can tell a good horse when they see one, but they cannot tell a superlative horse. I have a friend, however, one Chiu-fang Kao, a hawker of fuel and vegetables, who in things appertaining to horses is nowise my inferior. Pray see him." Duke Mu did so, and subsequently dispatched him on the quest for a steed. Three months later, he returned with the news that he had found one. "It is now in Shach'iu" he added. "What kind of a horse is it?" asked the Duke. "Oh, it is a dun-colored mare," was the reply. However, someone being sent to fetch it, the animal turned out to be a coal-black stallion! Much displeased, the Duke sent for Po Lo. "That friend of yours," he said, "whom I commissioned to look for a horse, has made a fine mess of it. Why, he cannot even distinguish a beast's color or sex! What on earth can he know about horses?" Po Lo heaved a sigh of satisfaction. "Has he really got as far as that?" he cried. "Ah, then he is worth ten thousand of me put together. There is no comparison between us. What Kao keeps in view is the spiritual mechanism. In making sure of the essential, he forgets the homely details; intent on the inward qualities, he loses sight of the external. He sees what he wants to see, and not what he does not want to see. He looks at the things he ought to look at, and neglects those that need not be looked at. So clever a judge of horses is Kao, that he has it in him to judge something better than horses." When the horse arrived, it turned out indeed to be a superlative animal.
-- J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

Joking aside, what I am trying to say - yet again - is that computers, although impressively fast, are still disappointingly dumb, and that they perform very poorly when it comes to processing human language, which is inherently ambiguous. To make things even harder for computers, humans often make it even more ambiguous.

In fact, in June 2011, having introduced Schema.org (initiated by Google), the world's four leading search engines pretty much admitted that they do not have production-ready technology capable of "understanding" what a web page really means and tried to off-load part of the job onto webmasters (humans) by encouraging them to add semantic markup to their web pages. I have written about it before, so I am not going to go into detail here again.

So much for the introduction.

When Marketing Budgets Hugely Exceed Those of QA: Thoughts Triggered by Yet Another Bug-Ridden Applicant Tracking System

If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products 

as they do on advertising, they wouldn't have to advertise them.

Will Rogers

Around 2008, I became interested in Applicant Tracking Systems or, rather, what I thought back then an ATS should do and how it should do it. I even toyed with the idea of developing my own, but the interest must have been not strong enough for this idea to go beyond a modest in-house working prototype used to train students. I am still interested in this type of software applications, which now manifests itself mostly in what I call a recurring irresistible itch to find bugs in them (Once a Software Tester, Always a Software Tester). So, here is one for your... amusement.



Let's say you are an employer using an ATS from a reputable SaaS (software as a service) provider.

A job seeker visits your web site, goes to its career section and from there is taken to your ATS.

Note: Technically, it isn't really your ATS since you just "rent" a "slice" on a multi-tenant ATS provided by a SaaS vendor. The applicant may or may not be aware of the fact that he/she is using third-party software, which depends, among other things, on how tightly the ATS is integrated into your web site and how familiar with this type of systems he/she is.

The candidate registers, begins the job application submission process and, a few minutes later, sees something like this:

Screenshot 1 (click to enlarge)

In case you didn't get it, let me show you another one. The screenshot below is from the site of another company, but the ATS SaaS provider and the bug are the same (pay attention to where the red arrows are pointing):

Screenshot 2 (click to enlarge)

Recruiter Spam (and Some Labor Statistics)

There are multiple varieties of recruiter/sourcer spam, but one of my "favorite" is when the e-mail begins with "Our records indicate that you are an IT professional..." followed by a copy-pasted job description that usually is not even remotely related to what I am qualified to do. More often than not the job description is pretty skimpy and/or vague, which is even more annoying.

Being a naturally curious type, I decided to find out how many people in this country the phrase "IT professional" applies to.

IT-Averse Senior Management? There's a Workaround for That

Last week, I was talking to someone, and - totally unexpectedly - two situations I had completely forgotten about resurfaced in my memory.


Situation #1

Quite a few years ago.

I am sitting in the office of an old friend of mine, who owns and runs a successful business. His company is larger than what in Europe they call a "medium-sized enterprise", but not huge. As a person, he is, quite possibly, the nicest businessman I've ever met. You should see how courteous he is with the cleaning lady... but I digress...

So, we are sitting in his office chatting about his business. He is telling me about some of his challenges, and I am throwing ideas (naturally, the IT kind) back at him - just to keep the conversation going. Even though I am careful enough not to get too technical, I can tell by the look on his face that he does not understand much of what I am saying. Then, looking a little embarrassed, he confesses that all of it is totally over his head, that he "hardly knows anything about computers", and that he only occasionally uses his "obscenely expensive, but mostly useless, laptop to send personal e-mails".

As tactfully as I only can, I inquire if this (I can barely stop myself from using the word "disability") complicates his professional life. "Not at all," he replies cheerfully. "At work, I have a girl for that," he adds pointing at the door behind which is the office of his administrative assistant.

This was before AMC's Mad Men. Otherwise, I would have thought I was at Sterling Cooper.

Image from The Watcher, a Chicago Tribune TV blog by Maureen Ryan

Image from AMC Blogs

Note: In order to be completely objective, I have to explain that, in the country where this conversation took place, the word "girl", although not entirely appropriate in workplace context, did not sound as terribly politically incorrect as it would have in the U.S.

How to Create a CentOS 6 Minimal Virtual Machine with VMware Player

UPDATE: This tutorial was written for CentOS 6. Creation of a CentOS 7 minimal virtual machine is very similar, but there are some differences. For CentOS-7-specific instructions, see CentOS 7 Minimal on VMware Player.


Today, a lot of pre-built VM images for specific purposes (e.g., LAMP, Drupal, Moodle, Joomla, etc.) are available. They can save a ton of time since you don't have to start from scratch (assuming, of course, that the images come from a reputable source). However, bear in mind that whoever builds those images always makes certain assumptions. For example, it is almost always assumed that in a LAMP stack the web server and the database server should be on the same virtual machine, which may or may not be what you want. Of course, you could take two identical LAMP images, remove the MySQL-related software packages from the first and all the Apache-PHP-related packages from the second and make the two work together. Still, starting from scratch is also an option, and in some cases (when the requirements of your application are very unique) the best option.

There may be a whole bunch of specific reasons why one would want to start with a minimal installation of an operating system, so I am not going to speculate about those, but, generally speaking, it allows to avoid software bloat and, therefore, maximize utilization of resources and reduce security risks. Bear in mind that minimal installs of most Linux distributions are just that - just enough OS to boot the system or slightly more. So, in order for it to actually do something useful, you will have to install additional software (again, what software to install depends on your specific needs, of course).


This post provides step-by-step instructions how to

• create a VMware virtual machine from a CentOS-6.4-x86_64-minimal.iso (or CentOS-6.4-i386-minimal.iso) using VMware Player 6.0.1 on Windows 7;
• bring the virtual machine to a minimally usable state, i.e. to be able to connect to CentOS mirrors in order to update your new system and install additional software packages;
• install VMware Tools 9.6.1.

Other versions of the software involved in all this may require slightly different steps, but the general principles are the same.

Web Content Management Systems: Poor Choices That Will Cost You

When it comes to web content management system choices, I often see two extremes:

• one is using a "professional-grade" CMS for a mostly static site that has about a dozen pages and is often managed and edited by just one person,
• the other is trying to turn a CMS into a full-blown data management application.

Both are about as practical as:

• driving an armored personnel carrier to a neighborhood grocery store (unless, of course, you live in a war zone) or
• picking raspberries while wearing boxing gloves.

Another Blogger Bug: In order to select an item from your on-line storage, please sign in

In a comment on my previous Blogger-mess-related post, Blogger Error "You have logged out from another location...", Blogger user Miyaka reported another "curious behavior" of the world's most popular blogging platform operated by the world's largest Internet company. Less than two days later, I was experiencing the same problem myself.

I must say that these Blogger glitches are getting really annoying.