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I grow old... I grow old... T. S. Eliot |
Dominic Vautier
2/2012
This discussion is about my struggles with unemployment following 9/11. I see the same kind of thing happening again, only it's much worse.
So for the first time in my life I was on the street, jobless, old. What kind of a chance did a 63 year old guy have getting any kind of a job other than flipping hamburgers, and not even that to think of it, because I was way overqualified for about everything around including flipping hamburgers. That’s what the resume scanners do. When a resume is submitted electronically for a job, sometimes in the thousands, it is impossible to manually select the ones that look good. Instead computer based resume robot scanners screen them and eliminate the non-fits, like mostly overqualified people. In the two years of looking and applying for as many as five jobs a week, I received just one interview, and it was an out-of-town phone interview. I tried every which way to fool the scanners, with chronological resumes, skill resumes, short-term resumes, liar resumes, key-word resumes. Short-term resumes are ones that only show achievements over the last five years. Key-word include hot keywords like HTML5. Nothing worked. Somehow or other my age came to light.
There were lots of people laid of from Boeing after 9/11 and I ran into quite a few of them in meetings, informal gatherings, and job fairs. Many were older like myself: engineers, managers and computer specialists. Some were in dire straights, far worse then I was. I joined an age discrimination class action suit against Boeing. I wasn’t at all interested in personal compensation. I liked the company very much, and felt a certain pride having worked there for so long, but it seemed to me that older people had been unfairly targeted because of their age and higher salaries. When I was laid off I was the oldest guy in our group of 60 people. I also was more qualified than most, with two degrees and certifications up the nose. Besides contract workers could have been let go, instead of permanent employees. Anyway the lawyer representing us was also representing Boeing so she dropped the suit just before the statute limitations ran out.
Initially and like many others I feared retirement.
I suppose it’s natural to fear this change of state. It’s like leaving the mainstream of life, like being put in a corner,
and not being noticed anymore or not being in the flow of life. But I found my retirement turned out like just another career, albeit running at
a slower pace and interacting with people less. Aside from the possible financial insecurity and the psychological
readjustment that many go through, to me it seems like a pretty great career
change after all. So now I have no
excuse for not doing all the stuff I was supposed to do or had to do or wanted
to do when I was working a "real" job. Life is a series of
jobs.
We still have three kids living with us and going to school and a ton of home improvements to do. Then there’s the constant bills and cooking and cleaning toilets. Houses are just like babies. They always get dirty and want to be changed.
It's a true gift from God to have had a career,
especially one that's incredibly enjoyable at times. I loved my job
and was extremely pleased when I did it well, and besides, I think I was
pretty good at it. My nature craves answers to things and I
always look for simple answers. But with retirement I left many of my
skills behind, and I sometimes feel cheeted of my best assets. I still carry all the mechanical knowledge used in dealing with
refrigerators, plumbing, washing machines, computers, broken cars and the
rest of life’s day-to-day needs and necessities. I even feel conceited at times like a renaissance man, “a master of
all trades and a jack of none”. At moments of
accomplishment I say "Damn, I'm good". At some time
early in my life I became generalist in my thinking, good at dealing with a
lot of processes, a big picture guy so to speak in what seemed like an
increasingly compartmentalized and small picture world.
The only skill I am losing with age is my ability to multitask but
not my ability to see the forest. it just takes longer to see.
I strongly believe all complex systems can be reduced to
simple solutions. This applies
to everything, not just information and computers, but even politics. Nature itself craves simplicity.
When you die you go from the complex to the simple. When
ancient monetary policies fell apart, cities form their own internal credit
and business systems. Analysis of complex issues consists of
decomposition to the smallest parts in order to understand how each works
and interacts. Putting it back together properly and in the right way is a much
harder task. I have met a lot of good analysts in my day but few good synthesists
because you need to be able to do both well to deliver workable product.
In the 40 years or so that I have been involved in information systems, computer programming, systems analysis, project management, data bases and all the other various jobs for developing computer systems, I feel all of these disciplines are to be used to make complex operations simple, not the other way around. People who come later to enhance and maintain these computer systems can only make them more and more complex, so much so that, the systems themselves become useless, and the process has to be done again, often badly. I call this “reverse entropy” because complex things are suppose to get simple with the passage of time. Computer systems work the other way. People just come in and make them worse and needlessly more complex, possibly to justify their own jobs. Modern management of computer systems development have changed little, just the techniques have assumed more incomprehensible and inscrutable names. The modern procedures that are supposed to simplify a task become themselves more convoluted, a victim of this "reverse entropy".
I don’t know why so many people can’t take things
apart and put them back together better. Children can certainly take things apart.
All I know is I was good at taking things apart and putting them back together better.
So this is the story of my career.
Dominic.