Gamblers doth Idyl

When hiring or being hired, if they fuck you during the application they will fuck you on the job.

No work is better than bad work.

Professor Mein Smith. March 13, 2009:

“It’s time to stop trotting out the sheep jokes and the endless ribbing on the sports field and make our relationship more sophisticated”

Professor Mein Smith. March 24, 2009:

“Isn’t Tasmania the butt of all the jokes over there? They’re just attacking us because they themselves are at the bottom of the pecking order back home.”

Hypocritical much?

I live 17km from work. A zone 1&2 ticket to get there for a week costs $47.40.

To drive in a car that I will own regardless (so I’m not really factoring in rego and comprehensive insurance) using fuel at $1.25 a litre, is $30 per week.

This car uses 10.4 litres per 100 km on average driving city/highway cycle.

Per month that works out at $130. The monthly ticket is  $161.

This is the same for people who live in the northern suburbs of melbourne from the north side of Reservoir to Epping. Those a bit closer, but still in zone 2,  the mathematics of driving is going to be better still.

Oh and driving is the same or quicker for the overall trip in peak times. And did I mention that trains in Melbourne are now constantly overloaded and unreliable? From Epping, its standing room only after about 5 stops. By Northcote its sardines. In the evening, the trains are consistently late and DANGEROUSLY overcrowded. How there hasn’t been a death or serious injury lately is just pure luck - I have been on carriages where people have fainted or become caught in doors. The latter is a once a week observation.

If I factor in my registration and insurance its more like $255 a month. However were I to buy a crappy corolla or datsun or some other $1000 shitheap to get to work in (which I’m seriously considering), bomb insurance only plus rego brings it down to pretty much the same cost and providing the engine isn’t shot will get more like 8 litres per 100km. Now if I get a motorcycle…

Jim Hacker: Humphrey, the National Health Service is an advanced case of galloping bureaucracy!

Sir Humphrey: Oh no minister… Certainly not galloping; a gentle canter at the most.

I have never seen a system like this.

To change your licence (car, boat, motorcycle, etc) over from an interstate one requires you to make an appointment with VicRoads. No, you can’t just walk in and fill in a form and do it over the counter like anywhere else on the planet. You need an appointment. You also have to make separate appointments to change registration over as well. I have three licenses: car, boat and motorcycle. I own two registered vehicles: a car and a trailer. This to VicRoads is a completely unusual occurrence and has never happened before.

To change these things over requires me to make four (yes, 4) separate appointments.

It has taken me the best part of an entire day just to make appointments to change licenses and registration over. Not change the licenses, just make appointments to do it. I have yet to spend a separate afternoon filling these appointments. This apparently I should be thankful for as the Vogon I was dealing with was surprised to get them all in one afternoon for me a mere two weeks in the future. A very polite vogon, I must admit, but still a Vogon administering a ridiculous system.

The phone waits to make an appointment are at least 30 minutes. Calls drop out. They accidentally hang up on you when they try to pull you off hold (happened twice). The girl I finally spoke to in full needed to get special dispensation from a supervisor to allow me to make appointments for both a car and boat licence. The software wouldn’t allow her to make two appointments for two licenses (because you can’t possibly do both at the same time) as it obviously doesn’t differentiate between the different kinds of license. “You can’t change a license twice!” The business logic exclaims with an exasperated look.

I never thought that I would consider the RTA superior to anything. NSW’s licensing system now appears to be a shining beacon of competence and efficiency compared to this. I have lived in Tasmania and even they manage to do this without needing a vast army of bureaucrats filling in little appointment schedules that takes the same amount of time to do as would the actual work. Perhaps our Tasmanian friends ejected their Golgafrinchans, who went and founded VicRoads and Melbourne at the same time (If you read the history of Batman and Fawkner, Melbourne’s own Romulus and Remus, there may actually be some truth to my insult).

For the love of mike, if you must have this Dickensian appointment system, let one person handle most or all of the transactions at the same time. In every case its 95% the same information typed into the same terminal.

Apparently the office scenes in Brazil were not shot on a UK soundstage but filmed in situ in Melbourne.

I’m looking for a full time role in Melbourne. I’m not feeling the love week one. Here’s one example.

Job description: C++, Object Oriented Design, Systems analysis.

Me: 12 years C++ experience. Bachelors, masters and (by the end of the year) doctorate in computer science. Umpteen jobs describing exactly what they are looking for in glorious detail in my resume. Have worked here in Australia and overseas. Papers published. Referees for jobs completed available. Big jobs, small jobs. Process control systems in heavy industry, public multimedia systems and also web sites like centrebet.

The recruiter: “Thank you for your updated resume, unfortunately you are still not a technical match for the noted position.”

Not even the offer of an interview for the client to decide for themselves.

Occasionally I do come across a recruiter that seems to have some idea about the nature of software jobs, but its not as often as one would expect. Instead it is often people who are completely and utterly ignorant of all of the acronyms they are requesting you have 5 years experience in. This can’t possibly be the best solution for a company looking to recruit quality staff.

It would be interesting to see things from the recruiter’s side and see if its really is just a boiler room as I expect that it is. During my sojourn in academia I was hoping that the IT recruitment stupidity of the .com era would have been naturally selected along with all of the contracts that they were fielding back then. Unfortunately, that seems not to be the case.

For those recruiters who are doing their jobs properly, more power to you. For those of you who think a technical PhD is “not working for 4 years” and irrelevant to the technology job market, as I’ve been told over the past fortnight, please get out of the way as you’re just contributing to inflation. And for those who remark: “isn’t PhD a web language?”, you’re really just wasting our oxygen.

Rather sums up contracting life… In most cases.

Go there now: gapingvoid.com