Yo, my company needs computer programming interns badly. If you know anyone appropriate please let me know (in the comments or get ahold of me directly). They should probably live in TO already.

An understanding of the difference between stack and heap memory is, basically, the only requirement. We’re having trouble finding people.

I just contacted the “women in CS” group at UoT. Only about 4% of programmers are female, so I’m affirmative actioning it up. It’s probably not legal or something, but fuck being PC: statistics is science.

Today was contract renegotiation day. They’re looking at bringing me on as an employee, which I am ambivalent towards: I love freedom, I love dental coverage, and never the twain shall meet.

To that end, they’re getting me to help them revise their hiring process, towards which I am also ambivalent: I get to pick my own coworkers, but I have to do HR — traditionally the most useless development task of all.

How does one hire coders? Interesting question. More to follow (and much discussion, I imagine). Since I’m building HR policy from the ground-up, here’re my preliminary decrees:

HR policy #1: We will never hire anyone who has had anything to do with iTrade or Canada Post.

HR policy #2: We will never hire anyone on my shitlist.

HR policy #3: all my industry friends now have job offers (let me know if you want one).

Corrupt, I know. Fun, too!

I find myself needing lightweight CRM software. Trello helped me convert a contact into a later opportunity that I need to follow up on, but storing information in TODO lists is like storing TODO lists in email: stress-generating and bad.

Anyway, more later. For now: Drive with Jill @ The Fox.

[Update: there is no good small/micro business CRM software. 37 Signals was on it, but I guess that project failed -- or converted to Highrise. I just want a one-user-free solution.]

I just got a cold-call from someone looking for a mobile app developer on a short-term contract.

I have a slightly longer-term contract already locked up.

It might be possible to do both, but that might also really suck.

Wat do? Need cash, but don’t want to over-work (which I have in past).

White whine: I have too many job offers?

Remember The Ventletter? Well, I actually did something much more strange. I’m really interested in people’s opinions here. I’ve noticed a certain uniformity in reaction.

When the company called and asked for references, I decided I’d had enough. The CEO asked me to track down a reference they were having trouble contacting and something in his tone made me furious.

I called up my other references and had them all agree to two things:

1. That we hadn’t discussed what to say to the guy.
2. That when I work overtime I sometimes, playfully, strangle coworkers.

And that, as they say, was the end of that. He was digging, so I gave him something to find — a strategy from poker. I’m collating reports from my obliging refs, perhaps for another update.

I’ve seen a couple of beneficial side effects already. First, I feel better about my interactions with the douche — like I counted coup. Second, I broke a creative block I’ve had on a story I’ve been working on for a couple of years about the games industry. Third, I feel more confident — I got an anecdote out of an unpleasant encounter. Fourth, I feel more connected to my references. Fifth, I didn’t send someone a crazy fucking letter.

I’m sure the list will grow.

My friend Chris recently linked to this blog post by a guy named Steve about the correlation between education and lifetime income. It’s a response to this New York Times column by a guy named Michael arguing that what America needs is uneducated entrepreneurs.

Steve’s first problem is that he’s using historical data rather than a forecast model. Michael is arguing that just because people who got degrees in the past make more money now is not a good predictor of how much people getting degrees in the future will make.

Steve’s second problem is that he missed Michael’s argument that education does not cause income but they are correlated because they have the common cause of ambition. To determine if education causes income we would need to control for ambition.

Finally, Michael has a larger point: it is better for the economy if more people are starting businesses, even if many of them fail. Education may lead to higher median income for individuals, but entrepreneurship should lead to a higher mean income for everyone.

Canada’s solution to encourage entrepreneurship is the social safety net: your life will not be that bad if you fail. America’s solution is greed: if you don’t take risks, you won’t be able to afford all that shit you’ve been tricked into wanting.

I think it’s clear that a social safety net is not enough on its own. Since I’m not that interested in material possessions, I’ve never been inspired to be an entrepreneur – I don’t see what’s in it for me. To increase job creation, the governments of both countries have the challenge of maximizing the pay-off for success, minimizing the penalties for failure and keeping society smoothly functioning (which is why winner-takes-all is not a sustainable strategy).

I was just asked some pointed questions in a company’s second interview. They want to talk to me again next week, but I am fuming and considering sending the following (this is one of the benefits of pseudonymous posting — I can do this, have the satisfaction and self-esteem boost of a public whinge, and then send it or not depending on how I feel tomorrow). It’s ordered from most-to-least likely for me to actually send:

Hi Chris:

I thought some more about the questions you asked during our meeting, and I have some different answers.

First, it is standard in the game industry to take time off, and even change studios, between projects. I have left studios for a variety of reasons, including being headhunted and to pursue educational interests. I have also stayed at studios for consecutive projects, and been invited back to ones I left. I was wrong-footed when you asked me about this so pointedly and might not have responded skillfully.

Second, I have multiple interests and I have been fortunate enough to be able to explore lots of educational avenues: the visual arts, business, computer science. If I choose to go back to university again, next time I’ll probably study anthropology or linguistics. Or maybe philosophy. Or French.

Third, I think diverse skills are both valuable and needed in the game industry. I can code. I can critique visual layouts. I can budget. But only by accident — I just studied things that interested me and, as luck would have it, found out that I’ve got multidimensional competencies. You’d need to hire two or three people to duplicate my skill set — think of the cost!

The questions you asked revealed more of your understanding of HR best practices than, perhaps, was wise. You seem to think my background is fragmentary whereas I think of it as broad. This makes me think you are looking for someone who is “just a coder”, whereas, in the words of Marshall McLuhan, I am not looking for a J-O-B, I am looking for a R-O-L-E.

Given that disconnect, I don’t think we’re a good fit. Thanks for the opportunity, but I don’t want to explore this particular avenue any further.

Sincerely,

[Jack]

This company has severely upset me twice during the interview process, so that’s it for them regardless of my decision to send this or not. “Won’t be a strike three ’cause I don’t play fair.” But, via BB, some mollifying quotes from Steve. Another fave was “getting fired from Apple was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

… to be employee #4 of a mobile startup or not? I guess that’s not really a choice, because they haven’t offered yet and my alternative so far is unemployment. Plus, there’s no reason to not do something awesome.

They want me to come in and work for them on a two-day contract as a trial period. I love that — it’s something I’ve planned to do with employees since I read about it back in the day, I think in a /. comment multiple years ago. You get both get to see what the day-to-day is, more or less, before over committing.

My job search is going well — I have several more interviews lined up. It’s been a few days past three years since I’ve had a “normal”-ish job and it’s only slightly terrifying being back in the market. I have a small “how am I going to be abused this time?” feeling and a larger “money!” feeling.

Jill and I have been filling our castle with IKEA, decent stuff of the MALM, EXPEDIT, and JOKKMOKK varietals.

IKEA’s flat packs are marked in the warehouse with the number of units you need to complete construction. For example, EXPEDIT came in four packages and was marked: 1(4), 2(4), 3(4), and 4(4).

Except beds. We went during a rare IKEA sale on bed frames and snagged one. We thought we’d mastered the tricks, had our 1(3) thru 3(3) plus secretly-needed slats. We got home, assembled the bed, and found that we also needed a crossbeam, which was included in the price, is located in a different bin, and is not marked clearly as necessary to complete construction.

IKEA’s checkout process allows a coworker to scan any package in a set to bill for the whole set but apparently doesn’t prod them towards checking that a customer has a full set before walking out the door. We don’t have a car so at some point [today] we have to shuttle out there to get a piece we’ve already paid for (or rent a car or pay to have it delivered). In the mean time we have a bed frame sans one part cluttering our room and inviting late-night stumbles.

IKEA offloads the economic costs of actual production onto consumers — it’s furniture version of picking your own strawberries — but it’s inexcusable (in business terms) to make it this difficult to actually obtain a paid-for-product. Come to think of it, it might be a violation of GAAP’s inventory accounting guidelines.

This is a business process design failure, plain and simple. I’m relatively happy with the design of IKEA’s actual products — you get what you pay for — but good product design without good service design is still enough for IKEA to win Jack’s DESIGN FAIL award (given as needed).

[Ed: Turns out we hadn't yet paid for it -- which means the information design of the website is also shit.]

The film I’m on is financed without government support. The mainstream industry is notoriously difficult to break into, even for people with multiple indie features under their belts like my production team. I did it once before, in games, but it wasn’t pretty — took a couple of years of rejection.

One of the problems with the Canadian film industry is that it’s very freelance-based and everyone is on the grind, looking for a piece of a constant-sized pie. One of the stated goals of my sci-fi project is to break the “addiction” to government funding the Anglo-Canadian industry has and set up an investor-based capitalist system like that supposedly flourishing out of Montreal for Quebecois cinema.

The insular “film-is-full” nature of the no-pay-internship Anglo cinema is a result of staggering production costs arising from trying to compete with, while producing, American films. There’s a lot of money sloshing around, but most of it gets tied up, perhaps rightly, in “safe” productions that the funding bureaucrats can justify to stakeholders.

Which means hiring newbies — or doing anything experimental — is the dead-last thing on production company’s minds. Government film funding doesn’t really create jobs, it maintains them — increases in government funding create jobs. This is obviously unsustainable (because, while arts jobs supposedly have a positive tax ROI, they’re not profitable enough to also pay for, say, universal health care).

The bright side is that cameras (like the GoPro) are now ridiculously cheap — to the extent that the buy-versus-rent question almost becomes moot. People in the industry see this as a “Bad Thing” because it means “anyone can make films” — it’s slowly becoming what you know, not who. This strikes terror and hatred, fear and loathing, into the hearts of the mediocre. And rightly so: LeBron doesn’t make $15 million per year because he’s decent at basketball.

This year I shot a super hero film and an action movie with guns and explosions for a COMBINED cost of under $1,000. It’s actually getting easier and cheaper to make blockbuster-style pictures than to make indie-talkies like Clerks. Anyone who’s seen Thor knows what I’m talking about — why pay for a writer and actors when you have cheap HD and After Effects? I bet one could build a 3D rig out of GoPros for under $1,000 in parts and labour (aside: this is one reason I’m going to take a welding and metal sculpture class in TO).

The trick with these films, of course, is stylization — working with the limitations of the technology. Yes, it’s shittier-looking and no, that’s not a problem if you roll with it as part of your “look” (cf Paranormal Activity).

In essence, we’re in a similar position to post-war France: local and American productions are mostly formulaic, single-voiced, and stagnant; while low-cost, shittier-looking productions are becoming possible with technological improvements. In the 1960s in Quebec, and later in France, this gave rise to verité and the New Wave.

I want something similar to happen here, now — and thanks to YouTube and NetFlix this revolution won’t have to be televised.

PS — In b4 “white whine“: boo hoo, it’s hard to have a film career