Unchartered Waters » servitute

Getting People to Throw Money At You

Matt Heusser — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 15:29:06 +0000

So earlier in the week I was on craiglist, looking at gigs.

Yes, gigs. Not jobs.

Part-time, temporary, and flexible, gigs represent a different lifestyle, different risk profile, and different rewards. You can start them with a day job, and have the best of both worlds … there is just one small problem.

They don’t pay much. Or at least, they often don’t pay much.

This article is about how to change that — to get the high-paying gigs, while doing good, ethical work, that you can tell your family about with pride.

About Talent

The first thing I notice about Craigslist gigs is the types. Labor, Crew, and Talent. Labor is back-breaking work that anyone in reasonable shape can do – moving furniture, delivering pizzas. Because there is high competition for labor gigs — they are often cash-by-the-day, ideal for undocumented workers – the pay is extremely low. Crew is the next level up; it not differentiated, but a smaller number of people have the special equipment (typically a camera or A/V equipment) and skills to do it, thus it pays slightly higher. Then there is talent.

Talent is where the money is.

When a cameraman gets sick on the set of “The Counselor“, Bradd Pitts new movie, you get a new cameraman, maybe from Craigslist.

When Brad Pitt gets sick, the whole dang movie shuts down. You lose a few hundred thousand dollars a day, and you get a world-class doctor in really really fast.

Talent gets the nice office, fresh bagels, and can command the kind of rates that you would hope they could command.

Maybe not $20 million for a nine-month movie shoot, but yes, Virginia, Talent does exist in IT.

Talent In IT

Last week I was in New York, city, doing a live video-shoot with my friend, Michael Steinhart, about Cloud Computing Security fr TheSMBAuthority.com. Here’s a still from the show (click-through to watch the entire episode):

I’m not showing you the link to show off.

Actually, quite the opposite. Look at me real carefully.

I’ve got a weight problem. I have an acne problem. My shirt, though high-quality, wasn’t wearing right; it was bunching at the bottom.

Somehow, this very non-Brad-Pitt like dude got to do a day of consulting in New York City at a ‘talent’ level rate. It’s not my first one; in November, I was in Malmö, Sweden, giving a slightly ironic talk called “Building Your Reputation Through Creative Disobedience.” Yes, there is video.

Again: I am not Brad Pitt.

Now watch the SMB video. If you are a real operator in technology, you watch a video like that and say “hey man, that’s introductory stuff. wide, sure, but not very deep. Why … I could do that.”

Yes, you probably could.

How ‘Talent’ Works

When I look at the classifies, I see two general categories of talent. The first is work that many people can do, there there is an existing market for, but most of us would find distasteful. (We don’t need to get into it here, but it involves things that are probably best kept private, and no, don’t click those links at work.)

The second way is to develop specialized expertise that is a known quantity.

The last step is to offer the services on an as-needed basis. That means you trade some personal risk for the ability to negotiate each assignment separately.

“The Counselor” could have any unknown actor for a hundred thousand dollars, but with Brad Pitt, the movie is sure to be a hit.

It is better to be that guy.

Hey, I’m an old fat guy, and I have my moments.

It takes a bit of work, but we can cover it here.

The Singularity Signal – III

Matt Heusser — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 19:23:57 +0000

I just got into Sweden for a conference, and I am immediately struck by how efficient the place is. My room, which might be described as a small American room, had two additional roll-away twin sides beds in it. When I asked the front desk what they were, the one person on duty (that is the standard shift size) explained that the room is so big that it usually fits three. The hotel had some extra space available, so they gave me a free upgrade.

There is also no storage space. No dressers, just a one-foot-wide desk-like surface that goes the length of one wall, and a space wide enough for shirts with six inches of depth, a bar, and four hangers.

Most of the lights in the hotel are motion-sensitive; they waste no power. In order to turn on the lights in my room, I have to insert my key-card. If I want to get back in the room, I need to take my key-card out — making it impossible for me to accidentally leave the lights on.

Assuming you made your reservation right, sign-in is with a kiosk, not a person.

All of these efficiencies make it possible for the company to have more guests per employee, to compete on price.

In a sense, that is a wonderful thing. The Swedish people are hard-working and view efficiency as a virtue. The waste-basket is tiny because they don’t waste — these are the people that invented IKEA.

The downside is that this drive for efficiency destroys jobs.

That’s not new either; the luddite riots, when the “machines are taking our jobs away”, actually happened in 1812.

Unlike 1812, though, I do see some forces at work that are a little troubling.

The IT Jobs Story

Companies get more efficient over time. The mom and pop video store fell to blockbuster an the big-box retailers. In April 2010, Blockbuster filed for backruptcy as it fell to Netflix. Walden books, the store I spent half my youth in, recently disappeared, and was followed by its parent company, Borders, which filed for bankruptcy in February of 2011. Amazon, which was widely considered the victor, might have followed, if they had not chosen to create the Kindle.

Amazon didn’t suffer for the Kindle, but traditional publishers certainly did.

In addition to efficiencies, employers have wised up about redundancies. When two companies merge, they can not only cross-sell, but generally end up with HR, legal, and IT departments that are smaller than the combined size of the original departments — saving money by eliminating real estate, consolidating data centers, and, yes, layoffs.

All that would be fine. Efficiency is good. Employees that don’t have to be on the assembly line can go do other valuable work for the company.

Even if you lay them off, the world still has the same goods and services as it did before – and now it has a surplus of time. At the very least, the now-laid-off former employee should be able to go create a tech support company, or do yard work, or clean houses, or do laundry, or … something, right? Each of those companies can make life just a little easier for other people in society.

But there is a problem.

The political and social climate does not favor small business.

There are facts to support this; a recent poll shows that 55% of small business owners would not start again today in this current business climate.

But we don’t need stats to prove that. I know the reactions of my friends and neighbors when I went independent, and I can drive the streets and see the pain of small business and victory of chains and franchises.

There’s More to Talk About

The opening sequence of Issac Asmov’s “The Caves of Steel” is scene of open revolt. There is high unemployment; robots have just become automated enough to fit, size, and sell shoes.

When I checked in to the hotel today, at the Kiosk, after getting tickets from a kiosk, and riding a train without ever seeing a human, I have to worry, a bit, about what the singularity might really be.

It might not require a computer to become self-aware and tell us all what to do. Instead, it might be a more graduatal separation of a producing class, a service class, and the folks who don’t fit in, Sadly Out of Luck (SOL).

But that’s a horrible, incomplete picture drawn on limited information.

Right now, I see two real choices: Find ways to stay relevant as companies continue to merge and change, or get serious about that small business thing.

Over the next few months, I intend to cover both on this blog.

For tomorrow, though, I’m going to enjoy Sweden. If you’d like me to blog some pictures, just ask.

Are IT Workers the Coal Miners of the 21st Century?

Matt Heusser — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 03:14:46 +0000

No I will not reset your password

A few weeks back, I introduced you to my friend Shawn. He’s a strong systems thinker, a former soldier, someone I respect and admired from my youth.

Shawn cut his teeth in the dotCom era, becoming a programmer, then general technologist, then IT manager, now … I’m not sure. Last time I checked, he was an account rep for an IT managed services firm, the kind that has been eating a hole in traditional IT departments.

Shawn cares about his field, and his perspective is shared by life in the trenches. So when he kept writing about what he sees happening to our field, and asked me to publish it, I couldn’t say no.

Here’s the question that keeps Shawn up at night: Are IT Workers the Coal Miners of the 21st Century?

From here on out the words belong to Shawn, not me.

IT as Coal Mining

Starting in the 1870s and extending to the Great Depression in the 1930s, coal miners in the US suffered at the hands of their employers. Coal companies took absolute advantage of their workers to maximize profits: Working conditions varied somewhere between “poor” and “lethal.” Workers were paid by weight of coal they sent out of the mine, not for time spent doing things like shoring up the tunnels for safety. They were forced to live in company-supplied housing and paid in worthless company scrip, redeemable only at the company store.

Is IT that bad? Really?

Now, I’m not suggesting that IT workers today are at a high risk of cave-in, injury or death. At least, not like the colliers of old. Our cave-in risk comes from the stack of decommissioned 100 Gb disks piled up in the server room, carpel-tunnel is our most common on-the-job injury, and yeah, I suppose you could die from that ulcer you’re developing, but if you laid off the coffee a little, it might get better.

Yet, employers today seem to have no qualm about taking advantage of their workers without due respect paid toward working conditions, hours committed to the employer, and payment for work accomplished.

How do they do this? Its thru what was once a “wonderful” opportunity called being a “salaried” or “exempt” employee.

Back when the “exempt” classification of employee was created, it was because there was an obvious difference between the hourly “shop floor” kind of workers and the salaried “higher ups” in the office. Your hourly “blue collars” and your salaried “white collars.”

White collar workers were there to direct the business. Their contribution to the bottom line was not easily translated into a per-hour pay basis, unlike the worker working on the production line whose productivity could be measured in pieces per hour, tons per day, whatever.

In 2004, the federal labor laws were changed and more classifications of employees were able to become exempt employees (especially administrative employees). A lot employees were happy to be considered exempt. I know I was when I started one of my first professional jobs in IT. If I worked till 6pm, oh well. But if I had to leave at 4pm for a doctor’s appointment, I didn’t have to worry that I wasn’t going to pay the heat bill because my paycheck was short that week.

In today’s business environment, however, more employers are using the “exempt” employee status as a way to get extra coverage and more work out of their IT departments without increasing headcount.

Have a company that runs two shifts in the warehouse? Naw, we don’t need two shifts of IT people. The PC tech who was in the office at 7am to meet the telemarketers can also be the guy who makes sure the executive’s printer gets unjammed at 6pm, that the hiccup in the telemarketer’s VoIP phone system gets squared away at 7:15pm, and he’s also the guy who gets the call at 9:55pm because the damn UPS system is printing FedEx labels *again*.

To be fair, they do this to some extent with other segments of the business, too, but I’m pretty sure the marketing manager didn’t get rolled out of bed at 2am because the new product brochures crashed…

Back in the “bad old days” before Y2K and the dot.com bust, I worked for a software company that had a mainframe. They employed “computer operators.” On a legitimate 2nd and 3rd shift schedule.

Want to hear more about Shawn and those computer operators?

He’ll be back next week.

More to come.