IBM

What is a non-degree student?

February 17, 2019 Incoherent ramblings , , , ,

In various places on this blog, I’ve mentioned courses that I took as a non-degree student at UofT:

I was recently asked what a non-degree student was, which is a good question, because I think it is a fairly obscure educational path. Here is how UofT describes their non-degree option:

“Non-degree studies is for those with previous university experience who wish to upgrade their university record to qualify for graduate school, a professional program, or for personal interest. Non-degree students enrol in credit courses, for which they have the prerequisites, but are not proceeding towards a degree.”

There are limits of what you can take as a non-degree student. You cannot, for example, take graduate physics courses, nor any courses from engineering. The engineering restriction seems to be because engineering (and computer science, and a few other programs), have a higher price tag. The restriction against taking graduate physics courses as a non-degree student appeared to be arbitrary — I suspect that the grad physics administrator really didn’t want to be bothered, and was happy with the fact that somebody had once imposed that restriction. There also isn’t a large set of people that are clamoring to take grad physics courses just because they are interesting, which makes it easy not to care about removing that restriction.

When I started my non-degree courses, my work at IBM had started to become very routine, and I was seriously questioning my career choices. I’d started off with an interest in the sciences, especially physics, and somehow had ended up as a computer programmer!? At a point of reflection, it is easy to look back and say to your self “how the hell did that happen?” My work at IBM (DB2 LUW) was excellent work from a compensation point of view, and lots of it had been really fun, interesting, and challenging. However, the opportunities to learn on the job were limited, and I was generally feeling under utilized.

I ended up with an unexpected life change event, and took the opportunity to try to reset my career path. IBM offered a flex work program (i.e. 80% pay and hours), and I took used that program to go back to school part time. I ended up taking most of the interesting 4th year grad physics courses, except the two GR courses that I’d still like to take. I had put myself on the path for new employment in a scientific computing field (or perhaps PhD studies down the line. I figured that once I had filled in some of my knowledge gaps, I’d be able to find work that would allow me to both exploit my programming skills, work on a product that mattered, perhaps even learn (science) on the job.

Because I was aiming for scientific computing work, where I figured my 20 years of programming experience would be more relevant than an undergraduate physics degree, non-degree studies was an excellent fit for me. Like any other student in the classes I took, I attended lectures, did the problem sets and exams, and got a grade for each course.

What I didn’t get was any sort of credential for the courses I took. I did end up with 2500 pages of PDF notes for the classes that I took — in my eyes that’s as good as a 2nd degree, but if I did end up looking for that scientific computing work, I’d have to convince my employer of that.

I’m now done with my non-degree studies, and did a followup M.Eng degree so I could take some grad physics courses. This should be the time that I should be looking for that scientific computing work. Why didn’t I switch gears? Well, part way through my M.Eng, I got poached from IBM to work at LzLabs. My work at LzLabs has been way too much fun, and is going to be an awesome addition to our product once completed. A transition from a mega company like IBM to one with ~100 (?) employees wasn’t one that I expected, and perhaps I’ll still end up eventually with scientific computing work, but if that happens it will probably be in the far future. For now, I’m working at LzLabs full time, and not looking back.

I still have a strong affinity for physics, but my plan is to go back to unstructured recreational studies, on my own schedule, once again without any care of credentials.

IBM and other companies now claim to be loosening college degree requirements.

August 29, 2018 Incoherent ramblings , , , , ,

Here’s an article about companies that are starting to drop college and university degree requirements.

I’ve been expecting this for years.

I really enjoyed university and much of what I learned on my undergrad engineering degree. However, most of the skills that I required for software development, I learned on the job at IBM on my student internship, not from my undergrad engineering degree. I was very disappointed in the software engineering course that I took in university, as it was primarily droning on about waterfall models and documentation driven development, and had very little substantive content. I learned a lot of mathematics and physics at UofT, but very little of it was useful. I was once really pleased with myself when I figured out that I could do compute some partial derivatives on the job to compute error-bars in some statistical performance analysis, but that one time calculation, was the only non-trivial math I ever used in about 20 years at IBM. In short, most of the specifics I learned at University were of little value.

My view of the engineering degree I obtained, was that it was mental training. They tossed problems at us, and we solved them. By the time you were done your undergrad degree, you knew (or at least believed) that you could solve any problem. There’s definitely value to developing that mental discipline, and there’s value to the employer as a filtering mechanism. Interestingly, my first manager at IBM as a full time employee told me that they preferred hiring new engineering graduates over new computer science graduates. That is despite the fact that many of the computer science courses are quite difficult (computer graphics, optimizing compilers, …), and arguably more relevant than all the physics biased courses that we did in engineering. Perhaps that preference was due to the problem solving bias of engineering school?

An apprenticeship based recruitment system can potentially save software companies a lot of money, as it should provide cheap labor for the company and a valuable opportunity to learn real skills for the apprentice. It’s a good deal for both parties.  You can get paid to learn, vs. going to school, and paying to learn things that are not truly valuable. I’ve actually been very surprised that IBM, who is offshoring so aggressively to save money, has not yet clued in that they can hire students directly out of high school (or earlier!), for much less than the price tag that a university/college graduate would demand. While offshoring is nominally cheap, unless the whole team is moved, it introduces large latencies and inefficiencies in development processes. Hiring out of high school would provide companies like IBM that are desperate to reduce their costs, the chance of acquiring cheap local talent, free of the hassles and latencies of splitting the team to pay some members offshore rates, less benefits, and so forth.

Assuming that a university degree is not actually useful, the problem to be solved is one of filtering. How does a company evaluate the potential of an untrained candidate without using (potentially useless) accreditation as a filter? I’d guess that we will see a transition to IQ style testing (although that is illegal in some locals) and a bias for hiring youth with demonstrated interest and proven open source project contribution history.

Propublica’s IBM age discrimination investigation

March 22, 2018 Incoherent ramblings , , , , ,

Not too long after I quit IBM for LzLabs in 2016, I was sent a copy of Pro-publica’s survey about age discrimination based firing and forced retirement at IBM. It appears that this survey was just the start of a very long investigation, and they’ve now published their story.

I wasn’t forced out of IBM, and am only ~45 years old, but at the time I had close to 20 years at IBM (including my student internship), and could see the writing on the wall. Technically skilled people with experience were expendable, and being fired or retired with gusto. To me it looked like 25 years at IBM was the firing threshold, unless you took the management path or did a lot of high visibility customer facing work.

IBM’s treatment of employees in the years leading up to when I quit was a major part of my decision to leave. I considered my position at IBM vulnerable for a number of reasons. One was my part time status (80% pay and hours), as I’d been slowly studying physics at UofT with a plan of a future science based job change. Another was that I was a work in the trenches kind of person that did not have the high visibility that looked like it was required for job security in the new IBM where the quarterly firing had gotten so pervasive that you could trip on the shrapnel.

Even after two years I still use “we” talking about my time as an IBMer working on DB2 LUW, as I worked with people that were awesome (some of which I still work with at LzLabs.) Despite now competing with IBM, I hope they stop shooting themselves in the gut by disposing of their skilled employees, and by treating people as rows in resource spreadsheets. It is hard to imagine that this will end well, and it’s too easy to visualize an IBM headstone sharing a plot with HP and Sun.

When I was recruited for LzLabs, my options seemed like continue working for IBM for <= 5 more years before I too got the ax, or to ride into the wild west working as a contractor for a company that was technically still a “startup”. Many startups don’t make it 5 years before folding, so even in the worst case it looked like no bigger risk than IBM, but I thought I was going to have a lot of fun on the ride. LzLabs was just coming out of stealth mode when I was interviewed, but had an astounding ~100 people working at that point! Salaries add up, so it was clear to me that LzLabs was not really a startup in the conventional sense of the word.

It is amusing to read the Pro-publica article now, as most of LzLabs employees are probably over 65. At 45 I’ve been singled out in staff meetings as the “young guy”. Many of the LzLabs employees are technically scary, and know the mainframe cold. I once wrote a simple PowerPC disassembler, but that’s a different game than “disassembling” 390 hex listings by chunking it into various fixed size blocks hex sequences in an editor so it can be “read” by eye!

In less than one month I’ll have been working for LzLabs for 2 years, about six months of which was a contractor before LzLabs Canada was incorporated. Two years ago, if you had mentioned JCL, LE, PL/I, COBOL, QSAM or VSAM (to name a few) to me, I’d have known that seeing COBOL is a good reason to get to an eye wash station pronto (it still is), but would not have even recognized the rest. It’s been fun learning along the way, and I continually impress myself with the parts that I’ve been adding to the LzLabs puzzle. Our technology is amazing and I think that we are going to really kick some butt in the marketplace.

LinkedIn replies to headhunters

September 25, 2017 Incoherent ramblings , , , , , , , , , , ,

I blundered upon my messaging history on LinkedIn the other day, and noticed that it has, for the most part, transitioned from chats with IBMers that I was saying goodbye to (and the ever growing ex-IBMer population that I now know) to rather canned responses to headhunters.

Like contact requests from anybody I don’t remember having worked with, I ignore those from headhunters.  I’ll reply to the headhunter connect requests with a terse “Sorry, I don’t accept requests from people I haven’t worked with personally”.

Going through my replies to the last 10 headhunters who explicitly messaged me, it appears I’m pretty consistent, and most of my replies were fairly close to the following:

Hi XXX,

Thanks for reaching out. I enjoy my current work, which is challenging and interesting, the potential of the company I am working for, and my compensation. I’m not currently interested in a job change.

Peeter

The company that you are recruiting for would have to offer really damn interesting work to get me to defect from LzLabs at the moment.

There were two headhunters that got non-canned responses:

1) A banking and financial sector headhunter got a more direct response:

Hi XXX, thank you for reaching out, but I’m not interested.

This may surprise people, but it’s a moral choice.

I picked up a microeconomics text from the bookshelf of our local Unionville recycling depot (the best priced second hand book store in Markham). That text book was packed with enough Hamilton and Lagrangian equations to make any physicist (or want-to-be physicist like me) at home.  Application of those techniques would surely be interesting, and I was being targeted by a recruiter for a company where that probably would have been possible.  However, it would take a lot more than that chance to make me work directly for a financial parasite.

Yes, I know that I spent 20 years working in the guts of DB2 LUW, which is a product that is used in many financial institutions.  Yes, I know that I am now working for a company with a mainframe solution that is going to be used by many financial institutions.  Both of these cases have a level of indirection that influences my attitude.

If I wasn’t employed, or I had my mortgage paid off, perhaps I’ll feel less hostile to the financial sector.  However, in the near term, I’m certainly not going to work directly for one of the leeches.

2) google.

Hi XXX,

I’m very happy with my current job, which is challenging, interesting, pays very well, and is with a company that has potential I find very appealing.

Google was previously a company that I found intriguing as a possible employer, but has recently demonstrated aspects of authoritarian political correctness that make it much less appealing. There is also evidence of political bias, anti free-speech tendencies, and censorship related to the google products that I find very unsettling given the power and scope of its technology. It is not at all clear that I would be comfortable working at google in its current state.

Peeter

This response was one that surprised me when I wrote it, but I think it is honest.

I would have previously considered working for google if the conditions were right.  When I was at IBM, I never accepted any interview requests from google.  The rationale for that choice was knowledge that relocation was required for any interesting technical work at google (their Toronto lab was marketing only), and I made it clear that relocation was not an option in any correspondence.  I’ve been rebuked by colleagues for that hard line position on relocation, since interviewing at google is said to be really fun.

In recent times, I have been continually reading and hearing of political bias at google.  I’d expect a company that wields so much power to take a non-partisan political position, but they seem to have actively attempted to bias the recent opportunistic-psychopath vs narcissistic-idiot competition in the US, and also appear to be actively attempting to introduce questionable social engineering (biased search rank manipulation, selective demonetization, …) into their products.   In spite of this, even in recent times, had google had google offered up interesting work at interesting compensation levels, without a relocation requirement, perhaps I would have bitten hard enough to interview.

The recent James Damore fiasco is a game changer.  Damore’s primary crime appears to be have been the use of the psychological term neuroticism (a “big five” personality trait that seems to roughly be a measure of negative emotion) without explicit inline definition in his memo. If you are going to fire somebody and make them a scapegoat just to appease the diversity police, then you become uninteresting as an employer.  I just finished working for IBM, which seems to have made it their business to treat people as entries in a HR ledger, irrespective of competence.  It will take some hard sales work to pique interest in google when their HR department is evidently trying to be orders of magnitude more insane than IBMs.  Unless there’s some evidence of HR reform at google, I suspect google technical recruiting is going to get really difficult until their treatment of Damore has been forgotten.

IBM and government are both strong evidence that insanity scales with organization size.  With google clearly growing in size, I am not holding my breath for the chance that it will reverse any of its tendencies down the path toward organizational dementia.

Note to IBMers re: LzLabs employment.

August 22, 2016 Incoherent ramblings , ,

When contemplating the decision to leave IBM for LzLabs, I found it helpful to enumerate the pros and cons of that decision, which I shared in a Leaving IBM: A causal analysis blog post after I’d formally left IBM.

Who could have predicted that a blog post that wasn’t about programming arcana, physics or mathematics would have been my most popular ever.  There’s no accounting for the taste of the reader;)

In response to that blog post, I’ve been contacted by a few IBMers who were interested in potential LzLabs employment.

Please note that I left IBM with band 9 status, which means that there is a one year restriction (expiring ~May 2017) against me having any involvement with hiring, or recruitment of IBM employees.  An IBM lawyer was very careful to point that the band 9 contract I signed in 2006 has such a non-solicitation agreement.  I don’t think that anybody told the IBM lawyer that IBM appears to be trying really hard to throw away technical staff, but that does not change the fact that I am bound by such an agreement.

If you contacted me, and I was to respond, it could probably be argued that this would not count as solicitation.  However, I don’t feel inclined to pick a fight with IBM lawyers, who I imagine to have very sharp teeth and unlimited legal budgets.  So, if you are working for IBM, and asking about LzLabs employment, please don’t be offended that I did not reply.  I will try to remember to respond to you next spring, when the sharks are swimming elsewhere.