Thoughts on being unemployed

Being out of work sucks!

After 35 years in the workforce, I found myself on the bad side of a corporate lay-off.  I understand that business conditions change and sometimes the company needs to do what it needs to do in order to keep the books in balance.  It’s always painful to someone and it will never really be fair.

It’s been a long strange trip so far.  My layoff happened just before the holidays at the end of 2019 (something as a manager I always worked to avoid doing to my team) and while it added a lot of stress to what would have otherwise joyous time of year, it also provided me with some long needed time with my family.   I’m an Operations and Support guy, so taking time off has always been a second thought for me and knowing that there wouldn’t be a lot going on during the period around the end of the year, I did my best to scrub the boards and wait patiently for after the New Year!

I’m the first to admit I have been pretty lucky throughout my professional career.  I’ve had a sense of when things were changing at the job or it was just time for me to go look for the next interesting challenge.  And I have been able to kick off the next search with networking and skill building.  This time though, I didn’t see it coming till it was too late.  Likely a problem based on the way my manager and I communicated, it wasn’t clear that something had gone off track till my window of opportunity was very narrow.  I can’t say I was shocked when the call came at my desk to come upstairs and help the CTO and HR with something, but I was surprised.

The job market has some definite cycles to it.  Especially in the Media and Entertainment business where I have hung my shingle for the last twenty-five years or so.  Studios, like manufacturing production lines find it less expensive to shut down between Christmas and the New Year holidays than to deal with the vacations and other absences that bring productivity to a trickle, so I settled in for a couple of month outage in my work life, fortunate for the severance to get my family through without too much of a change in our lives.  People come back to work on January fifth or so and then get back into a daily rhythm with the world returning to normal in the mid to later part of the month.

But 2020 decided to be special!  The first cases of the Corona virus started to show up in the US around the same time that the world was going to get back up and going for the new year and all of a sudden, all bets were off.  As things progressively got worse, businesses became more cautious.  Throughout February, everyone was in a slowly progressing state of confusion and while the new opportunities were still popping up on the boards, employers were doing more “Harvesting” of resumes than hiring.  By the middle of March, when the Stay at Home order came down, the job reqs started to dry up or get put on official hold.

So, here I am… seven months at home, starting to have serious worries about the future and my ability to keep my family kept.

I want to call out a couple fo themes I have discovered that make it really difficult in the market these days (other than conducting interviews while completely social distancing).  

When I started out in business, you found a job either at an agency, or through an advertisement in the local newspaper.  These methods provided some genuine advantages to the job seeker, since the majority of applicants were coming only from the market where the job was hiring and/or the candidates were pretty well vetted before they landed on the hiring manager’s desk.  Today’s employer wants to recruit on their own because they don’t want to pay the fees charged by the agencies if they can avoid them.  They have built big web databases to harvest resumes on The Internet and as a candidate, you need to figure out how to craft a resume that will make it past the OCR Robots to actually get reviewed.  This also opens up every job in every market to everyone in the world, which in a high profile industry like M&E brings a lot of chaff with it, because if you don’t want to pay the fee to have an agency vet a candidate, you probably don’t want to pay relocation expenses for an out of market candidate either!

Say you make it into the couple hundred or so resumes that land in the recruiters queue, they typically discount any experience going back beyond a decade.  As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been around awhile, and while I have chosen to make the entertainment business my home, I also have experience in finance and aerospace.  You won’t see that on my resume unfortunately because of that ten year limit.  What that means as a potential employer, is you won’t ever know about that diversity of experience and growth unless you decide to pick me as one of the top 50 to actually talk with.  It also means you can easily discount me if I have decided that I’m finally done with Entertainment and want to go back to Aerospace for example.

When did education become more important than experience ?   I have been an IT guy since the early 1980’s.  I’ve gone from Programmer/Analyst to Systems Admin to Systems Engineer to Lead, Manager, Director and Sr. Director.  I’ve maintained a great deal of my hands on skills and I’ve learned to develop and execute multi-million dollar budgets.  I’ve managed large and small teams of people and architected large and small technology projects.  I have also been turned away from even being considered for multiple positions that are looking for experienced managers because I don’t have a Bachelors Degree.

I recognize that we have decided that a college degree has become the equivalent to a High School Diploma in the old days, but I have always been one to value experience over pure schooling when it came to looking for an experience employee.  That BA I would have gotten when I finished High School had me doing my programming using punch cards on an IBM 370.

I admit my state of frustration is hitting a peak!  My family is beginning to feel the financial impact as the severance is running out as well as the Unemployment (which actually became valuable with the CARES Act bonus if $600 per week).  But I get myself up every day, find my way down into the office I have built down in my garage, scan the job boards on Indeed, LinkedIn and Glassdoor and keep on keeping on!   I’m spending my open time taking on-line courses to refresh and build dup my skills (Look for some discussion of that experience in a coming post) and hoping that soon, things will get better.

A big MIStake

Originally published in Computerworld - May 22, 1989

I once worked as a programmer/analyst at a modest-size company. It was a good shop to work in if you had a passion for what you did and an ability to police your own work. Management took a hands-off attitude in running the department.

At the time I came aboard, this policy worked fine because the tasks were challenging and plentiful. About 10 months later, after completing the outstanding major projects, the work ran out. It didn’t take much time after that for the department to fall apart. Paradise Lost!

I have found this problem to be a common one throughout most of my 10 years of experience in MIS. In most companies, the responsibility of MIS falls under the supervision of former programmer/analysts without any background in managing people. Often they have been rewarded for having done good work keeping the machines alive and then been promoted right out of what they do best. Frankly, they are usually not up to the task of running a computer shop.

I’m not talking about a lack of experience or knowledge. The simple truth is that computer people, generally speaking, make lousy managers. Computer people have egos the size of the great outdoors (myself included), and speaking from my experience as a director fo data processing at a small shop in New York, our egos make us impossible to manage.

It’s an understandable phenomenon. Computers have revolutionized in a very short time the way the world functions. Techies are a part of that revolution, and it has been a real ego-boosting experience. The world cannot survive without computers, and computers cannot survive without programmer/analysts making them dance.

If management works effectively, slow periods in an MIS shop become highly productive. This is when the seeds of new ideas are nurtured - a time when the company gets to take advantage of creative minds without pressure of deadlines. People are free to brainstorm and build better systems.

But when management is ineffective, a period of stagnation results. The staff becomes bored and begins to look elsewhere for new challenges. Self-motivation doesn’t create new work, but it serves as the fuel that gets work done on time and within budget. It is the responsibility of management to create new work by assigning tasks and setting a course of action. Without direction, self-motivation dies.

Management is the art of delegating responsibility. With a staff of big egos,delegation can be tricky prospect that requires an MIS Director to be a salesperson, a technical genius and a diplomat. If he is doing it right, all ideas have value because brainstorming promotes a sense of contribution among the staff.

Back to my tale. After a few months of very damaging stagnation, the vice-president decided to hire a director of MIS to put the department back on track - a very sound decision. The person they brought in fit the needs of the company from an MIS standpoint. He had some experience as a consultant and a knowledge of computer systems.

Unfortunately, he did nothing to encourage the sharing of ideas in the department. A self-confident man provides strength and leadership, but self-confidence with a closed mind is arrogance. It took him less than a week to alienate his already discouraged staff, creating a deeper rift in the department. Ultimately, a loyal and talented group of people moved on to other jobs.

If there is a moral to the story, it is this: When hiring a manager for an MIS department, technical ability is not the most important skill to look for. Employees will spend more than 40 hours per week at their jobs, and most of them will take the job home at night. Employees need a sense of value, belonging and purpose to have a feeling of self-worth. Without feeling part of a team, those 40 hours are long and hard to handle.

I’m no authority on how things are supposed to be, but I’ve watched some fine MIS centers dissolve because the people managing them can’t seem to work well with the employees as they do with the hardware.

We have to look more for the human qualities in our managers. Technical knowledge is an easy commodity to obtain: It comes with experience. Maybe it’s time we started looking for managers who manage people as people and not as machines.

Has the Uncanny Valley grown ?

I came across a blog post on Gizmodo the other day, where Casey Chan posted a video that proposes that Visual Effects have gotten too good and have led to a flattening out in audience attendance on effects-driven movies.   I don't necessarily agree with the message, but it did bring some interesting thoughts to mind.

I remember when I saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow at a Visual Effects Society screening back in 2004 and wondered if we might be jumping past a point of no return in film making.  Sky Captain was one of the first (if not the first) effects-driven films where the entire movie was shot in front of a green screen.  The actors were only given props to interact with when necessary and the rest was done entirely in the computer during post production.   While the movie was visually stunning to watch, I felt a distinct disconnect between the actors and the place they were in that left me unsatisfied with their performances.  I think the film grossed just shy of $40 Million and disappeared into history...

Filmmakers seem to be going back to building practicals on large effects-driven movies (JJ Abrams built set pieces for Star Wars: The Force Awakens for example).   Have they found that the movie just works better when everyone involved in the storytelling is actually interacting in the world they are telling about ?  

Or is it a cost based choice ?  After all, several hundred VFX artists in front of a large studio infrastructure animating and rendering images over a couple of years is an expensive proposition as well...

No conclusions here...  Just some food for thought.   I for one believe the world is a better place since they actually built the Millennium Falcon.

CBS Rememberances

One Month In…

Thought I’d commemorate my first month at CBS (KCBS/KCAL-TV) with a little post about what my life is involved in these days… So I’d like to share (in case anyone actually reads this and cares) a little history of the place where I currently hang my hat…

For those who don’t know what the heck I’m yammering about… I am the Manager of Information Technology for KCBS/KCAL-TV in Los Angeles. This Duopoly of TV Stations are part of the CBS Televison network (well actually, KCBS is the LA Affiliate and KCAL is an independant but Network owned station).

KCBS was originally licensed as an experimental station on May 10, 1931 and carried the call letters W6XAO. On December 23, 1931, the experimental station went on the air one hour per day, six days per week. (There were all of five TV sets in all of Los Angeles at the time.)

On March 10, 1933 the station broadcast the first full-length motion picture ever presented on television, “The Crooked Circle.”

On April 15, 1938, television’s first serial started on the experimental station. The title of the series was “Vine Street.”

On January 1, 1940, the first remote television broadcast west of New York City took place on W6XAO. It was the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Parade.

On May 6, 1948, the station was granted full commercial status and adopted the call letters KTSL-TV. It was acquired by the Columbia Broadcasting System January 1, 1951, and ten months later, the call letters were changed to KNXT to coincide with CBS Radio Station KNX.

Opened in 1938, CBS Columbia Square (my current home) at 6121 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California has been home to the radio stations KNX, KCBS-FM (formerly KNX-FM) and television stations KCBS-TV (Channel 2, formerly KNXT and KTSL) and KCAL-TV (Channel 9, formerly KHJ-TV).

Columbia Square was built for KNX and as the Columbia Broadcasting System’s West Coast operations headquarters on the site of the Nestor Film Company, Hollywood’s first movie studio. KNX began as a 5-watt radio station and was purchased by CBS founder William S. Paley in 1936 at a cost of $1.25 million to expand his fledgling network’s California presence and to tap into Hollywood’s talent pool.

Columbia Square opened on April 30, 1938 with a full day of special broadcasts culminating in the star-studded evening special, “A Salute to Columbia Square” featuring Bob Hope, Al Jolson and Cecil B. DeMille. The program was carried coast-to-coast on the Columbia Broadcasting System, beamed to Europe via short wave, and carried across Canada on the CBC. On that premiere broadcast, Hope joked that Columbia Square looked like “the Taj Mahal with a permanent wave.” Jolson quipped, “It looks like Flash Gordon’s bathroom.”

Columbia Square became home to some of the best-known comedies of radio’s golden age. Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Edgar Bergen, Red Skelton, Eve Arden “(Our Miss Brooks),” “Blondie,” Jack Oakie and Steve Allen sparked to the airways from the Square.

Dramas included “Suspense,” “Gunsmoke,” “Dr. Christian,” “The Whistler,” “Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar,” “The CBS Radio Workshop” (author Aldous Huxley introduced a production of “Brave New World”) and “Columbia Presents Corwin” (dramas produced by Norman Corwin.)

Musical acts performing at Columbia Square included Eddie Cantor, Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby and Gene Autry. Composer Bernard Hermann frequently scored and conducted Columbia Square broadcasts. Through the facilities of KNX, the Columbia network broadcast big band music from nearby ballrooms including the Hollywood Palladium and the Earl Caroll Theater.

Bob Crane was a top-rated KNX deejay at Columbia Square in the 1960s. James Dean was an usher. The pilot for I Love Lucy was filmed on the Square’s stages in TV’s early years. Some of the Square’s once-luxurious radio theaters were converted to recording studios for Columbia Records where Bob Dylan and Barbra Streisand, among many top stars, recorded albums.

KNX moved into new studios in the Miracle Mile neighborhood on L.A.’s Wilshire Boulevard which it shares with CBS Radio stations KFWB, KTWV, KCBS-FM and KLSX. KNX, the last radio station to operate in Hollywood, moved after 67 years of operation at the Square just after 11pm on August 12, 2005 following a farewell broadcast from its Columbia Square studios.

KCBS-TV and KCAL move into a new facilities at CBS Studio Center in Studio City in April of 2007 (Something that is keeping me very busy these days!).

The old building really is showing it’s age… But without a doubt, when you are in Columbia Square, you are literally and figuratively Right Smack in the middle of Hollywood!

Happy New Year everybody!

Cheers,

Jeff