[HD] PearL Jam - Release (Live Holland 1992)

i'll wait up in the dark

for you to speak to me.....

Wussy - Teenage Wasteland (Live on KEXP)

Golf

Jesus Christ is London full of twats. was out driving with my little boy in the car after taking him to the library and some idiot in a VW golf starts tailgating me. the speed limits have all been set to 20mph where i live, and its a good thing if it prevents accidents and saves lives.......unless you happen to be an under-educated pleb in a 2009 dark blue VW golf. what the fuck are you doing?. what is the point of driving 6 inches away from my bumper you cockney cunt?. 

I know you hate immigrants and it must sting you inside that you have drive behind the son of an immigrant in a Benz, but its not my fault you are angry with your life that its left you having to drive a 13 year old diesel Golf. You did not work hard enough at school, you are thick as shit and you now do a shit job despite having opportunity and advantages, so be angry with yourself, dont be aggressive with me when you are driving your piece of shit. 

hey maybe he was in a rush and needed to get to work quickly. all those cocks aren't going to suck themselves.  

Asymmetrical power?

having spent most of my professional career as an IT contractor, i switch jobs and get interviewed probably more than most people and with sites like linkedin, i can now see the the backgrounds and experience of the people who will be interviewing me. 

In the same way people make assumptions based on my work history, the firms i have worked at, my funny foreign sounding name and how whis all adds up into how i would fit into their firm and their projects, i also do the same on my side. The difference is the assymetry of power in the process, with them interviewing having the power to hire me or not, and me not really having as much decesion making power in the process of choosing who to be intereiewed by and getting hired or not.......except i do and have been exercising what little power i do have. 

A couple of recent examples. I am currently working for an investment firm but i want to leave as its gotten a bit boring and they gave me a piss poor raise aftre praising my work. sorry, but i think i can find someone else who will give me more money. this is not JUST my hobby. so I get a call and a job spec for a role at a Japanese bank. first thoughts even before reading the spec or meeting them are that its going to pay very well but will be stale, boring and easy, but hey!, getting well compensated for being bored for 6 months is fine by me, and then i will move to the next thing. 

I have worked at a Japanese bank before and that is how it went. the agency sends me details of who will be interviewing me and its obvious within in 30 seconds of looking them up that this shit ain't going to work. the head of IT is someone who has been there for 20 years and worked their way up from heldesk. they also have no degree. sorry, but that is whack.  i started doing support and helpdesk type work early in my career, but then i moved to get more exposure to other tech and more experience. you dont stay at the same firm being promoted by default as everyone else leaves. I also look up the other techie who will interview me and once again the degree is non-existent and he had been at the firm 14 years. A 3rd person who will be on the call had been there 9 years. coincidentally they all seem to be from Essex. alarm bells are ringing!. 

I log into the zoom interview and the IT manager is a middle aged woman, who is sat in her kitchen, looking dishevelled and appears to have just rolled out of bed and has 9 year old kids running around behind her. really?, that's how you log into a online video interview with a candidate as the IT manager?. very unprofessional. Then the other 2 guys start talking and they are asking me about Microsoft Access issues????. I used MS Access in the late 1990s and have not been anywhere near it since. that is for helpdesk to deal with, even if you are running it 2 decades longer than you should have. i nearly interrupt them and ask them if they have heard of SQL server, but 2 minutes into this interview its just reinforced my preconceptions about Japanese investment banks in London and also the type of people who would stay for a decade or two, in one. they then start asking me about Microsoft Exchange. Cool, i know about Exchange, i used to support it in 20-fucking-12 but its now 2022 and you really should be using Office 365. its a bad reflection on the environments and estate you manage that you are asking me about old shit like this. do you want to ask me about Novell 3.12 as well?. i used to support that a couple of decades ago. 

I really am not interested in old shit. we are very luck to work in technology and are lucky to be in a sector in which the pace of innovation is so fast where stuff from 5 years ago looks antiquated. my mono syllabic answers and shrugs of shoulders let it be known i really was not interested in them, their firm or their job. these peoples heads are going to explode when they discover Office 365, Amazon Web services and terraform. 

Also, why is it that there is a almost always a requirement of having a Computer science or science/engineering degree when i apply to jobs in finance and yet i constantly come across people in the industry that do what i do or at even higher positions and do not have what i am always being asked for?. None of the people that interviewed me at that Japanese bank had a degree and yet i wont be considered unless i have one. fortunately i do happen to have an engineering degree, but i do wonder if that requirement is just a selective excuse to be used as a bar to prevent some people getting even the opportunity to be considered, because the amount of people i have seen that do not have a degree in these organisations is quite high........as long as you are of a particular ethnic group. Have NEVER met a Chinese/Indian/Asian/Black person working in a bank that did not have a degree. have come across plenty o cockneys who appear to have left school at 16 and then just managed to land jobs at investment banks some how. how the fuck does that happen....?. i recall leaving uni and struggling to get a job with an electronic engineering degree and physics, chemistry and maths A-levels. the half wit PM of the UK is a thick as shit, clown with a classics degree. which sort of proves my point. read an article the other day about Tony Blairs son doing an ancient history degree and landing himself a job at Morgan Stanley trading derivatives. why the fuck would you hire a history grad. surely there are enough maths, economics grads out there that could pick it up faster. oh wait.....Tony Blairs son. i get it now.....

the other interview i had was at a very prestigious US investment bank, which i described to a friend as like Goldman Sachs but without the scandals. Here i was being interviewed by a graduate, who had worked at a handful of other firms but had now been at this bank for about 9 years. that is what experience is supposed to look like. not just one name on your CV and still being at your first firm for the last 20 years. 

Anyway he starts telling me about the role, and 2 minutes into it, i realise they are looking for a different skill set than mine. i politely interrupt him and tell him so, and he seems surprised. he tells me its the first time anyone has said that they might not be suitable for a role and effectively asked not to be considered for it. He even amusingly says, that i did not even attempt to 'waffle my way through' his questions and pretend to know it. I told him, i could have but there really is no point and it does not serve either of our interests to do so. 

we end the interview and he tells me that London tech scene is a small world and he will keep me in mind if anything closer to my skill set comes up in his team. 

we dont have much power and as contractors we realise we are just a resource for a firm and to be honest, i do my job mostly for the money, but we do have choices. i have wasted far too much time in boring jobs doing easy work just playing along in the pantomime of work that everyone else has, and i know how frustrating it is. i been doing this shit for too long and now i know what i can do, what i want to do, and what i want to learn. hopefully the US investment bank calls me back 6 or 12 months down the line. if that Japanese bank calls me, i am not available....ever. 

in the meantime i got a new role doing AWS and terraform for an online payments provider. interesting technology on a massive scale. less money than the Japanese bank, but not career suicide as i figured out why they have all been there at the Japanese bank for so long. they cant leave because who the fuck is still using Access and Exchange!!!. 

a friend of mine who was a contractor in the early 2000s and made a fortune doing Lotus Notes at a bank for over a decade, recently told a mutual friend he had 'retired'. he is not even 50 let alone 60. he has not 'retired' from tech. tech retired him. dont do old shit and just cash in on it as long as you can. yes, he is rich but now he just sits at home. i took my little boy to the park a few weeks ago and saw him trying to jog. holy shit, people get fat in retirement!.