employment

[KA4HJH]

>Well, FWIW, I know a guy who lied and said he had a BSEE, but he was a good
>enough tech that when they asked him the *money* questions during the
>interview he answered with authority so they never even bothered to check
>his references.  ; ) He is now a program manager and no one except me and a
>select few know about it.
>
>Honestly, too, after the fact the higher ups will not want to admit they
>were duped and will prolly not attempt to follow-up on the guy. As long as
>you can do the job, I really think mosts execs do not care enough about it
>to go through the trouble.

Heh, heh. This reminds me of the now infamous story of the guy who 
scammed his way into one of the major medical universities. He was 
rolling in research grants and cranking out the papers. Everyone was 
thrilled until one of his assistants discovered that he was faking 
results. It didn't take long for the whole thing to unravel except 
for the problem of getting rid of the SOB. The "higher-ups" were of 
course extremely embarrassed about the whole thing and he threatened 
to sue, blah blah blah. Fortunately, someone had the sense to check 
everything thoroughly. Seems he lied about his education on his job 
application to the university. And the funny thing was that right 
above his signature it had the usual statement about "falsifying any 
of this information is grounds for instant dismissal".

Even though this guy was full of it and perfectly capable of causing 
everyone a lot of grief, he was out the door overnight, and I 
seriously doubt any lawyer would touch that case with a ten foot pole.

So whatever you do, be careful about what you say on that job application!

BTW, they way he did the paper scam was to take an article from a 
really obscure journal and republish it somewhere else under his own 
name. He never got caught until after the shit hit the fan.


>But, getting your foot in the door these days *requires* at least a BSEE,
>and its starting to look like an MSEE is starting to take the place of the
>BSEE. Of course, what kills me is when I see a guy with an economics degree
>or something bumped up to Engineer or Program Manager while the rest of us
>techs and engineers plug away day after day waiting for a position like that
>to come open only to interview and be trounced by someone who didn't have to
>go through the weed out courses like Diff Eq, Thermodynamics, RF circuit
>analysis, etc. I guess drinking beer and playing golf with the right ppl has
>a lot to do with it too. Seems that the workplace gets more and more
>corrupted like that too unfortunately. They *want* a BSEE, but will *accept*
>their buddy who doesn't know much about circuits period, but needs money to
>buy a new house. ugh!

Yeah, pieces of paper/who you suck up to will always be more 
important to some employers. I highly recommend reading "What Color 
Is Your Parachute?" just for the part about the stupid ways potential 
employers avoid meeting qualified applicants. It's positively 
mind-boggling, and it goes on all the time.


>So, such is the market world. My advice: Get your piece of the pie anyway
>you can, be willing to *elaborate* a bit (just be sure to know your limits),
>and do anything you can to get a piece of the pie. The work enviroment IMHO
>is extremely hostile. If you treat it like life or death, you will generally
>do alright, because it *is* life and death, but on a very subtle scale.

Just watch what you say on anything you sign...


>Also, too, make sure you are familiar with the terms in which the company
>does business in. IOW, if you are itrying to get a job,  find out what they
>make, how its made, how your position fits into it, and how the corporation
>as a whole did last year. Word your resume in a manner that would be
>appealing to someone who is a manager the division you are looking to get
>into so that you will actually have something to talk about that the
>interviewer is interested in. I have found that you interviewing the
>interviewer is far more pleasurable to the interviewer than the other
>option. Remember, the easiest way to make someone favor you is for you to
>favor them first and give them ample opportunity to talk about themselves.
>Just shows how 2 dimensional most ppl are if such a simple thing an lock in
>a job interview. Although I have had quite a few jobs, I was awarded every
>job I interviewed for by using this technique. Good luck.

Cynical but true.


-- 
Terry Bowman, KA4HJH
"The Mac Doctor"