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January 2017

WITNESS THE 2017 SOUTH SNOWPOCOLYPSE: How Hard Is It To Be a Manager of People at McDonalds? Hard.

Peeps - I'm rerunning this as I told my 2014 Atlanta Snowpocalypse multiple times over the past couple of days as reported snow and ice is bearing down on the South, where of course, schools made the call to close 48 hours in advance.  While temps where in the 50s...

Dateline: Atlanta, January 2014

How hard is it to be a manager of people at McDonalds?  Hard.  Like riding a bike on the freeway hard.

This week found me for almost 2 days at Exit 11 off I-20 in Georgia, stranded because of the South's Snowpocalypse, which was caused because when you don't own a snowplow, salt or sand, 3 inches of snow and ice in hard freeze temperatures can screw things up.

So I got the last room at a Microtel (no lobby restaurant) and bunkered up.  Next door was a McDonald's, and since the wifi at the hotel didn't work, that was my place of residence any time they were open - which is the story here.

Wednesday morning I saw they were open, so I rolled over there and got some coffee and fired up the laptop.  I proceeded to be more sociologist than remote worker.  Here's what I was observing: Mcdonalds

1. When I got there, it was just the manager and someone working the grill.  Skeleton staff to be sure.

2. Most of the rest of the team had called out and said they couldn't get there.  That is, if they called at all, which was a topic of discussion.

3. As it turns out, Wednesday was payday.  The checks had been shipped to this location (day before for sure) and most of them looked to be live checks.

4. Even thought the roads were enough to keep most people from work, at least 12 employees (I'm guessing that location has 30-35 people on the payroll?) came in to get their checks.

5. When they came in to get their checks, the manager did everything in his power to ask them to stay and help them.  He asked. He begged. He complemented them.  He said he would take what ever time they could give him.

6. Guess how many people out of the twelve I saw said yes?  One.  1!!!

Think about that for a moment.  You need your check and you go through hell on the roads to come get your check, even though the banks are closed - so you really didn't think that through.  Then, when you're asked to help out, you say no.

I know some of these folks had kids at home, etc.  But 1 out of 12?  Shows you how hard it is to be a manager of people at McDonalds.  If I ever saw my kids in their early adult life and they went to pick up a check on a day where they could do nothing else, were asked to pitch in (in a nice way) and said no to the person who manages them, I do believe I would kick their ###.

Kudos to the 40-ish lady that came in with her 20 year old son and said yes.  I watched her interactions with customers for a couple of hours, and she was money - very good at what she did.  If you're reading this, you are all class.

McDonalds just needs more like you.  Hell, after spending some time watching the interactions, I'm guessing America needs a lot more like you.

I know some emails back to me will say, "but Kris, those jobs use people for low wages and they're disposable jobs, etc."

Guess how you get out of that job?  You act like the lady who said yes.


Can Coding Camps/Schools Get You a Job? The Real Answer Applies to All Career Changers...

In a post-Trump world where AI is increasingly eliminating jobs that aren't coming back to the states - or to earth for that matter - it's a good exercise to think about workforce development/retraining alternatives that are out there. 

Let's look at one of those alternatives that has been especially hot. Coding bootcamps, which are Code camp 12- or 14-week programs that teach software engineering - are increasingly seen as failures by those who hire software developers here in the states.  Here's the backdrop from a Bloomberg article:

"When they first became prevalent a few years ago, coding schools were heralded as the answer to the technology industry’s prayers. “We can’t get enough engineers because the field is growing so rapidly,” said Tony Fadell, the former head of Google’s Nest smart thermostat company, in a recent promotional video for a nonprofit coding school, 42. Companies complained they couldn’t hire programmers fast enough, and meanwhile, many jobseekers said they couldn’t find employment. Just give those people an engineering crash course, the reasoning went, and voila, problem solved. 

But the great promise of these schools training a new generation of skilled engineers has largely fallen flat. Coding House’s spectacular fall is an extreme case, but interviews with more than a dozen coding school graduates reveal that when they do land a job, often their engineering education doesn’t cut it. Many admit they lack the big-picture skills that employers say they want. Training them often requires hours of hand-holding by more experienced staff, employers say. The same holds true for graduates holding computer science degrees, but those employees generally have a better grasp of broader concepts and algorithms, recruiters said.

Mark Dinan, a recruiter who works with Bay Area technology companies like Salesforce, said many companies have told him they automatically disqualify coding school grads. “These tech bootcamps are a freaking joke,” he said. “My clients are looking for a solid CS [computer science] degree from a reputable university or relevant work experience.” Startups can be more flexible than established companies, he said."

The article goes on to report that 91 full-time coding bootcamps exist in the U.S. and Canada, with almost 18,000 people set to graduate from them this year. That’s up from 43 schools two years ago, and about 6,000 graduates. Tuition averages over $11,000 at non-degree granting programs that generally last around three months, but it can go as high as $21,000. Some schools take a cut of future salary instead of tuition.  

So let's say you're a former production line worker in Michigan with the right makeup for software development.  You voted for Obama in 2012 and went Trump in 2016, but you're not waiting around for anyone to save you.  You financed your tuition, took on debt and learned lots from a coding camp.  But now you can't get a job.

You've got reason to be pissed, right?

Well, no you don't.  The rise and fall of coding camps is just another chapter in book about career change.  Career changers who have had success pivoting in how they provide for themselves and their families are all similar in one important way:

Career changers never believe education will deliver a new career to them. They understand that passion and the display of work in the new field of choice - often for free - are required to get employers to take a chance on them and provide the additional investment needed to complete their transition.

Think about what I wrote above.  If you or someone you love wants/needs a career change, I'm here to tell you - don't plan on that happening if you aren't willing to do free work.  The work doesn't have to be extensive, and it doesn't have to be particularly excellent - it just needs to show that you've got some passion about making the transition you indicatied you're serious about.  You know - the transition you indicated when you applied for a job that you're not qualified to do in any way.

I mean, damn - wake up.  The world doesn't care that you got 3 months worth of education - or 4 years for that matter.

It needs to understand that you're serious about the transition you want to make and you're not some old dude that's going to crush everyone's mellow from the first day you hit the cube farm.

If you or someone you love is retraining themselves, try to help them understand that they need a simple portfolio of work they've done in their transition field of interest in addition to a coding bootcamp certificate. See my posts on portfolios here.

BONUS - listen to my friend Tim Sackett's interview of Nate Ollestad (director of recruiting at Duo Security) as they dig into coding camps and the types of candidates they produce compared to top-name schools. The question, they find, is less about what type of degree a candidate has, and more about what they're doing with it.  Click the link above to hear that interview or just use the player that appears below.

Word.


How Les Grossman from Tropic Thunder Manages Remote Teams With Video...

I'm back.  How was your holiday?  Mine was great - caught up on some reading, spent time with the nuclear family (spousal unit +1.8 kid FTEs), decided I now don't care about football, had a life changing experience related to the value of Patagonia in cold weather, etc.

You?

Oh yeah, another thing I did was watch parts of Tropic Thunder on HBO.  As a recruiter/HR pro/Talent Agent, I'm obviously partial to Ari Gold of Entourage as the classic agent to emulate (the good parts, not the bad parts), but there's an alternative...

That alternative is Les Grossman, the super-agent played by Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder

The walking contradiction of Les Grossman is that he does so many things wrong - while doing so many things right.

Take managing remote teams via video, for example.  The video embed below is a scene where Les patches in from Hollywood to manage a remote team shooting a SE Asia war movie on site.  Take a look at the video below (email subscribers click through for video) and BE WARNED THAT THIS IS TOTALLY NSFW AND NOT RECOMMENDED IF YOU'RE SENSITIVE:

Amazing, right? The movie was released in 2008, so Less was way ahead of his time.  Here's what Less did right in managing remote teams via video, even while he was doing so much wrong:

  1. He had big tech that made it seem like he was there.  Big screen.  He didn't go halfway with him having the need to talk to 25 or more people in the same room.  Broadband pipe was obviously large to get screen image quality up - that's worth paying for.
  2. He had people on the ground to connect him with the larger group in the room.  The guy in the pink button up is his lackey from LA who went to be onsite.  Whether you send someone or not, when you patch in via video as a leader, someone in the room you're connecting to needs to be in charge of making sure your connection is good and dealing with agenda issues and conversations that need to happen locally while the call is going on.
  3. People had assigned roles for what needed to happen.  You need a report on the Finkelstein account.  Less needed his key grip to be ready to punch someone in the face. Tomato/Tomoto.
  4. He thanked people for their work, even when he wasn't sure of who they were. He didn't know who the author of the book was when he spoke.  He didn't miss a beat and thanked him for his service. Of course, he then cursed at him, which you should avoid, right?

If you aren't afraid of language and inappropriate behavior, this clip works for you.  If not, you shouldn't have gone through the warnings.

But you could do worse than the 4 key elements of doing a video call with remote teams displayed by Les Grossman above.

Make 2017 a year of connection.  That's a successories poster right there.