Jobfox.com is a scam

For people looking for work, beware of Jobfox.com. I got hit by their scam when I was looking for work last week. Based on the various reviews about this company out there about this company, I can safely say that they are a scam.

The scam works like this: Jobfox.com has a number of job postings on their web site; once you sign up with them, they quickly send you an email that they have looked at your resume. They then tell you that your resume sucks, and that you should pay them $400 to improve your resume to have a chance in the job market.

They give this form letter to everyone who signs up for one of their postings on their site, giving out a letter like this: “Your resume does not pass the 30-second test, and the content is not up to the standards one would expect from a candidate like you. Countless studies have proven that resume quality is the key determinant as to whether a candidate is selected to be interviewed. Your resume needs a boost from a visual, content, and overall writing standpoint to engage the reader. It needs to make them want to learn more about you. I didn’t find it to be exciting, and it didn’t make me want to run to the phone to call you. In short, your resume is effectively sabotaging your job search.”

It does not matter how well-written one’s resume is. It does not matter if one has the best resume that was ever made. After Jobfox.com has their spambot scan your resume, they give you the above scathing criticism. Indeed, according to one anonymous poster, resumes written by Jobfox.com’s own resume writers get the above very negative review.

Googling the exact above phrase gives multiple results. Why am I not surprised?

I have a new gig

Well, that didn’t take long. Just a couple days after ending my last gig making a complete webpage and CMS (web content management system—a webpage you can edit in a browser) in a month, an old buddy of mine wants me to convert a blog from one format to another.

I’m already researching things so I can make a proposal later on this afternoon.

Looks like I won’t be able to finish up Deadwood quite yet.

What’s it like to work in the tech industry

Now that I’m in the tech industry again, adding HTML/CSS/PHP/Javascript/Postgres (My boss feels this is a better database than MySQL)/CMS design experience to my résumé, some thoughts on how the tech industry works.

The technology sector is extremely fickle. It’s feast-or-famine; some new technology comes along that everyone wants to have (Aerospace in the 1960s; video games in the early 1980s; the internet in the mid-to-late 1990s) and people are hiring like crazy and fortunes are to be made. If you’re at the right place at the right time, you can even make millions and retire young.

But then, all of a sudden, no one is hiring any more and all you get at Monster and what not are idiots who want you to have ten years of experience in whatever technology is the hot new buzzword, regardless of whether the actual technology has even existed for ten years.

The things that appear most stable in the tech industry, based on the people I knew in the 1990s and where they are today, are technical writing and middle management. Tech support is underappreciated and underpaid; programming and system development is very fickle — when there are layoffs nearly everyone becomes jobless; after the dust has cleared and they start hiring again, the listings on Dice and Monster generally only hire people with proven experience in technologies that didn’t exist or matter before, and it’s very hard to break in again.

I remember, when I was working in San Jose, an older gentleman telling me the story of what happened when Nixon cut off the funding for an orbiting space station that NASA was supposed to build in the early 1970s. People would come to Silicon Valley to work, buying a house, and start moving in. They would show up for their first day of work, and be told that there was no longer a position for them and that they should pack up and move back. Indeed, this inspired the computer revolution because there were a lot of really intelligent people who found themselves suddenly jobless.

So, I’m finally getting paid to do tech again. With the exception of a short-term contracting gig in the mid-2000s making a Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP website, this is the first job I have had in tech since I was laid off during the dot-com implosion in 2001 (No, the job babysitting Windows machines and doing things like reinstalling Windows or copying Outlook files from one computer to another doesn’t count). I’m starting on the ground floor again; the pay is low but the experience is great to put on my résumé.

The one thing I don’t like is the lack of time to finish up MaraDNS. My boss wants an entire CMS ready in two weeks and I just don’t have time, between that and my wife, for MaraDNS right now.

Every HTML/CSS coder’s dream

Every HTML and CSS coder out there with any semblance of clue is eager awaiting the day when no one is using Internet Explorer 6 any more, and dreams of the day no one is using Internet Explorer 7 either.

For example, the last two days at my new job, I have been designing some web pages as per the client’s specifications. The client wanted a certain type of navigation bar, which I implemented using a pure CSS design. It looked great in Firefox, Opera, and Safari.

It looked ugly in Internet Explorer 6. I had to spend over an hour redesigning the navigation bar using a table-inside-table design. Once I did that, I had to spend about another hour doing more workarounds so the design would look good in IE6 and Internet Explorer 7.

I would have been done with the entire site design right now if IE6 and IE7 weren’t used by anyone. Since I had to spend hours working around these browsers’ bugs, I won’t be able to finish things until this afternoon.

I know of four web stat sites who freely give out their numbers on Internet Explorer by version number. Here are the current numbers:

Site	IE6 usage	IE7 usage
Hitslink.com	19.76%	13.57%
Statcounter.com	14.04%	21.21%
Statowl.com	12.75%	24.47%
W3counter.com	9.79%	14.40%

We probably won’t see IE6 numbers go below 2% until 2012; IE7 (which, while buggy, is a lot more pleasant to work with than IE6) will probably linger with numbers higher than 2% until 2015 or so. So, yeah, I will be wasting a lot of time with these ancient browsers and their bugs for a while longer.

Update: I’m not the only one eagerly awaiting IE6’s death. YouTube has just dropped IE6 support and puts up a big “Upgrade your browser” banner visible only in IE6.

I’m a web page designer now

Well, I’m slowly but surely getting back in the tech sector. My last gig only had me peripherally involved with tech. My job there was to teach English and translate documents; I also was supposed to help babysit the Windows machines.

While I was happy teaching English, and pleased with how well I translated documents, the tech sector part of the job was not the type of experience I needed to keep my skills current in the tech sector.

So, here’s to the new job giving me more relevant experience (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc.)

No Deadwood update today

I had every intention of working some more on the service code for Deadwood today; however this morning, as I was setting up my computer, a co-worker came to me with a huge spreadsheet with over 8,000 entries. She told me she needed a number used for Mexican ID purposes calculated for all of these entries.

There's a fairly easy way of calculating a reasonable approximation of this number if you know their full name, their gender, and in which state they were born. Well, the spreadsheet this co-worker gave me only had their full name, and the name of the city (not state) they were born in.

So, not only did I have to figure out how to calculate this number, I also spent the day downloading a list of all notable cities in Mexico (cities with zip codes) and which state they are in, and another list of names and which gender usually has a given name. I haven't really touched Perl for a few years, but this kind of data consolidation and merging is perfect for Perl, so I wrote a series of shell, Perl, and awk scripts to consolidate this data.

When everything was said and done, I was able to reasonably accurately calculate the requested numbers for about 40% of the data I got. I gave this data to the co-worker this afternoon and told her I would work more on this next week. As you can imagine, all of this Linux scripting left me mentally exhausted by the end of the day.

Needless to say, I wasn't able to work on Deadwood. I will see if I can work on it tomorrow. In the meantime, I did post a snapshot of Deadwood yesterday with a copy of the service code I have been working on this last week here, but it hasn't been integrated in to Deadwood yet.