Recruiters: How I love to hate you

Oh recruiters, how I love to hate you!  I think it all started back in 2004 when I was dealing with a particular recruiter that begged me to do some manual labour work while looking for my first graduate IT position.

She said “It will look good for you, like you are willing to do anything and have a good work ethic” and she asked me to do some work helping set up the exhibits at the Sydney IT expo.  About a month later I was still ringing the agency to see when I would be paid (because this was temp work paid by the recruitment agency) when I received a letter in the mail stating the recruitment agency was in receivership and I was about 200th in line to be paid.  They already knew this when they employed me and unconscionably employed me to help them get paid one last time, but I never was.

So now, 8 years later when I was on the trail again, I was a bit more cynical and, I think, with good reason.  After several weeks of getting no responses (not even a “no, thank you”) I decided to send an email to the recruiter, not to apply for a position, but to see if they thought I should apply for a particular position and to give some feedback on my resume.  The recruiter replied and said I should come in to talk about my resume.  I thought this was a good thing and might help me to understand what was going on and why I was not getting any call backs.

Refreshingly the recruiter was open and honest and gave it to me straight.  To me she looked to be about 12 years old, probably paid next to nothing and had a daily workload that would keep the Prime Minister (and her staff) working up until the wee hours.

Very patiently and kindly she explained that my resume was simply:

1. too long (2.5 pages),
2. too “big and clunky” (the font and headings were font sized 14) and
3. too incomprehensible (I have done several technical jobs in different fields)

for her to assess in the 10 seconds she normally allocates to such a task.

She then explained that she evaluates hundreds of candidates every day for many positions and makes the short list very quickly without fully reading the resume.  She did not read the career profile, she did not read anything below the headings and she did not read any further once she decided I was not easily pigeonholed (my words, not hers, but its my interpretation of what she said).

I have since started work (not found through are recruitment agent) and so feel safe enough to give recruiters a blasting: I think they are all so INCOMPETENT!

Whenever I speak to a recruitment agent they remind me of the local real estate agent, or property manager as they call themselves.  Again they are inexperienced, over worked, under paid attractive young women that are thrown into the deep end of whatever job they are doing then the business manager/owner charges out their services at extortionist rates and assumes that all is going well…uurrgh!

I wish I had some tips to give out, I don’t.  The only thing I try and do is apply for positions that are not marketed through an agent but go directly to the employer.  How different was my experience in Arnhem Land!  My interview was done in a Toyota Prado whilst driving from the air port to the resource centre.  It was a day trip and consisted of an overnight stay and a flight to one of the remote communities.

Sigh…

Tropical Outback Christmas

Hmmm, how do I explain a Tropical Outback Christmas?  There are a combination of elements that make up this peculiar environment.

Gove weather radar image

Firstly you need to live in the southern hemisphere…our seasons are reversed from the north so we don’t get a winter Christmas, we get a summer Christmas.  An area close to the equator will get you a tropical Christmas, you might get weather like ours, check the radar image to see all the rain we are receiving.

Next you need to live and work in a remote area such as a mining town and or an indigenous community.  If you did such a thing you might see a Yolngu Santa as I have.  I could not catch one for a picture this year (yet), I found this one on the ABC web site.

Yolngu Santa

This Yolngu Santa picture was taken at the remote indigenous community of Gapuwiak, a three hour drive from where I live.  Yolngu Santa does not have reindeer or ride in a sleigh, he normally rides in the back of a ute.

Today it was raining so heavily we had to bring our Christmas lights inside, I got absolutely drenched taking this picture.

Tropical Christmas

We now have news that there is a cyclone circling back towards us.  This certainly is part of any Tropical Outback Christmas, though hopefully it will turn away before reaching us, there will be many many people without proper shelter it if reaches us.

But along with the serious side there is always the lighter side.  Below is a picture captured by my wife of some kids trying to make the best of a bad situation…Merry Christmas!

Making the best of it

Gangan Internet Banking Kiosk

Since my time in East Arnhem Land is coming to an end I thought I should document some of the things I have seen and done up here.  It has been the greatest experience and I have met some of the best people on Earth.

One of our projects has been the development of an Internet Banking Kiosk (computer kiosk) to allow people in remote communities to perform those daily tasks we of the big smoke take for granted.  These basic tasks are those such as checking your bank balance, paying your bills, applying for loans and transferring money between accounts.

The Road to Gangan

The road out was fantastic because it had recently been graded.  Mike and myself left early, about 6am, so that we could get the work done before the heat of the day came in.

About 3 hours later we arrived in Gangan and, after speaking with the head man Waturr, started the installation of the kiosk.  We found it to be cooler than expected, however, an hour later it was starting to warm up.  Humidity levels were climbing and, we didn’t know it, but a storm was on the way.

Internet Banking Kiosk

It took about 1.5 hours to get it installed and working.  Most of this was removing the packaging and because I had to perform a software update.   The kiosk itself is a very interesting design:

• its highly ruggedised solid steel frame and sheet metal body
• made from cheap, replaceable PC parts internally
• the PC components are mounted on a removable plate to make servicing easy
• the software is a Linux distribution (Ubuntu) which gives us some security and freedom from virus protection and anti spy-ware

After completing our work Mike and I had a brief look at some of the other work that was going on in Gangan.  There were some tradesmen working on the new training centre and also some work going on with a refurbishing project.  We stopped in to speak with Denis who has been working on the refurb project.

One of the refurbished houses

Painted deck of refurbished house

This is is a great project because the local community get involved in refurbishing their own homes, there are shelves erected inside and further painting.

Mike and I decided to head back to work in Yirrkala but did not realise we driving directly into the storm that had been looming.  The picture I have of the storm does not do it justice, there were several lightning strikes close by and times when we could not see the road.  Fortunately Mike is an experienced bush driver and steered us home safely, next we are planning for the installation in Yilpara!

The Trip Home

Laynhapuy Homelands Association

LHAI funds release has been approved by Australian Government.

Wrestling with jsvc and procrun

Recently I wrote a small monitoring app so that I would know when some servers and apps were down or up. Its a very simple Java app that listens for XMLRPC calls to state services are up. Upon completing (mostly) the app I decided to integrate it nicely into its appropraite environment with an installer and finally try out the Apache commons-daemon libraries.

Having had lots of positive experiences with Apache projects before (you name it: Tomcat, Ant, Maven, Commons etc) I was expecting the commons-daemon to be the same. What I found was quite different…the code is solid but the documentation is lacking.

I found this site very helpful as well as some others that I came across, and detailed here are my solutions to the problems I found.

Commons Daemon Project

Firstly, my app is meant to be run as a Linux/UNIX daemon or as a Windows service. This is where the Apache commons-daemon project becomes useful since it is designed for this purpose.

The commons-daemon project provides an interface for a Java application that should be implemented and then provides system specific binaries for different operating systems. These binaries are sort of launchers that make calls to the JVM on your system and launch your app in a system specific way. This means as a service on Windows and a daemon on Linux.

Jsvc

Since most of my programming is done in Linux I started with jsvc. One of the first problems I encountered with both jsvc and procrun is that they are hard to find. I mean the web site is easy to find and it has links to Downloads but the jsvc binaries are quite old.

Looking to complie jsvc I could only find the source in the Tomcat binary distribution. Inside the bin directory is a jsvc.tar.gz file that contains the source for jsvc which can be compiled.

Jsvc allows you to set the username that you want to use for your service, that being a good way to increase security by running your service with minimal privileges. Supposedly if no user is given then the same user that starts the service is used. What I found during testing was that I was starting the service as the root user but unless I put –username=root into the jsvc options it would not continue.

My next problem involed Log4J since I generally use it for logging on my projects and especially on this project because I wanted the ability to use the windows event log. I put my log4j.properties file into the jar package as per usual and it was found properly by Log4J if I started the jar from a script but not if I started my app using jsvc. I stuggled with this for a while but eventually gave up.

As a work around I added a “-Dlog4j.configuration=file:///path/to/log4j.xml” to my jsvc config. I am not sure why log4j.properties was not found, especially since other property files were found but I decided that having the logging config outside the jar was more appropriate anyway.

Overall jsvc was not too difficult to get running and only these minor problems were encountered.

Procrun

Procrun was much more diffucult to use than jsvc, with lots of little gotchas. The first (again) was downloading which was (again) only found in the Tomcat binary download. Procrun is made up of two binaries that are prunsrv and prunmgr. Prunsrv is the actual service launcher and prunmgr is a GUI client config dialog for prunsrv. Generally you would install your service by renaming prunsrv to servicename.exe and prunmger to servicenamew.exe

This is the case with Tomcat and you will find prunsrv and prunmgr as tomcat6.exe and tomcat6w.exe respectively…assuming you downloaded Tomcat 6.

Next I found that my classpath was being trimmed. Since my app has a lot of dependencies it had quite a long classpath and this is one of the options to prunsrv. To get around this I made a jar that included my app and all of its dependencies which makes for quite a small classpath and meant procrun didn’t trim it. This was quite easy to do since I used Maven for my project and just had to add the shade plugin.

Finally I had issues using the main method. Apparently prunsrv is supposed to use the main method to start and stop your service if no other is defined however I found that the main method would start the service but not stop it nicely. To make it shutdown nicely I had to create a static void service(String[] args) and then use service start and service stop calls.

All this as well as the notes I found on the site mentioned above.