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.