First impressions really matter

You know, if you're going to screw up a first impression, it is probably best to make a mess of it with people who you'll never see again.

A long time ago I decided to try my hand as a car salesperson. Now that in itself is material for many other posts, including the things that led up to the hare-brained decision of trying that career.

Anyway, any city will find itself with a large array of caryards and combined with a reasonably high churn in staff, means that there are plenty of openings for someone new to enter into the industry. In my case, I had quite a few applications out there, and eager to get to my first interview, I was up early and all set to go. Caryards open at 8am, though not because of the eagerness of customers, but due to the various activities that go with getting ready for the day. It also tends to mean that yard managers like to get interviews done early in the morning before sales opportunities begin to take precedence.

I worked my way through traffic to get to the yard in time for the interview. Checked my documents, proof of sales license, tie and business shirt, then strolled in to the showroom to find the manager who I'd be meeting.

The bright administration girl greeted me, then was a little stumped when I told her about my pending interview.

I repeated the name of the manager I was supposed to be meeting, and just as she asked me to wait so she could run around to ask if a manager of that name was there, that was when I realised I'd made an embarrassing mistake.

I was at the wrong caryard.

In my process of getting ready for the interview and making sure I was on time, I hadn't double checked the specific yard that I was heading out to.

Of course, by this time, there was beginning to be a small gathering of sales people, admin staff and their existing managers as they all tried to work out what was going on and who I was. Red faced and apologetic, I excused myself to make a phone call to the correct yard and explain to the interviewing manager why I wasn't there. He had a good sense of humour, had a laugh, and gave me another shot at the interview the next day.

In terms of the people at the first car yard? Well they did have my application on file for a job opening that they had as well, but seeing as I'd made a monkey of myself there, it was no surprise that they never called me in for a real interview. I think my unexpected audition had told them everything they needed.

Capital Punishment

I'm slowly learning to force myself to proofread posts prior to posting them. My first draft on this topic was less informed than this one, as I hadn't actually read much on the internet in terms of what arguments are commonly presented against Capital Punishment. Hopefully this time around I come across as more thoughtful.

First up, I should set the tone; I am for Capital Punishment, but I wanted to know more about why people oppose it as I'm open to hearing more and I'm not against being educated. Now I thought a good reasoned website would be Amnesty International. They're a huge human rights campaigner and they've been around for quite some time. So I had high expectations from them, you can read their posts http://www.amnesty.org.au/adp.

Reading through through some of the arguments in Amnesty International and other sites such as www.antideathpenalty.org, I think that quite a number of the arguments are flawed. Here are a couple of reasons why:

1. In most cases, victim impact is hardly touched. I can kind of understand why, as it is such a complex and difficult topic to handle. But there is no denying that violent crime, and this is not just limited to homicide, has huge immeasurable impacts that last a lifetime to the victim and the victim's family.
2. Often people compare USA against other western countries that don't have the death penalty and use that as their sole comparison of homicide statistics and death penalty. Now that is just gross simplification. These sorts of comparisons are way too complex to present in such a simple fashion, and in particular to handle so glibly by using a single country (USA) as a reference point. By Amnesty International's own webpages (http://www.amnesty.org/en/death-penalty/abolitionist-and-retentionist-countries) about 20% of the countries in the world actively support and practice the death penalty. About another 20% support it by law, but aren't actively practising it. So shouldn't there be more detailed comparisons against are broader range of countried? And shouldn't those comparisons account for education levels, economic conditions, availability of guns, and other indicators that could be considered to have bearing on violent crime?
3. Kind of related to the point above, but a lot of sites use the Canada crime statistics to support abolishing the death penalty. Their argument is that since 1975, homicide has dropped 40%, and the death penalty was abolished in 1976. The problems with this argument are again that they are ignoring all other factors, but secondly, the USA has also seen a drop in homicide rates over the same period. Not as great, but a drop nonetheless. An interesting book that touches on this issue is Freakonomics written by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, where one of the things he looks at is the recorded drop in homicide and general crime over this period, and his reasons why. Part of the difference is that he provides numbers and facts to support his theories, which I find more persuasive than organisations which just present a correlation without justifying why they have linked a cause and analysis.
4. A number of webpages use the argument that "several countries have already abolished it" as a supporting argument against capital punishment, but that is like saying "majority of people are trending to obesity" so that makes it suitable to shift the ideal weight in health guidelines. It is illogical to purely use majority or trend as a justification to the morality or effectiveness of an activity.
5. The argument of false convictions pertaining to those sentenced with Capital Punishment is not so much an argument against the punishment itself, but highlighting a need to change workings of the justice system itself, including the qualifications of government appointed defence attorneys.

I'm not saying that I think capital punishment is a magic pill to resolve violent crime, and it isn't because people can't be rehabilitated. But I also think that punishment does need to suit the crime committed. It might be easy to react against my opinion and say I'm a crazy right-wing extremist, but this is a serious real-life issue and have you ever logically considered about how explain your own viewpoint?

Social Sciences n00b

I miss my sunglasses too much.

Maybe I was on some sort of weird emotional bender, or maybe my brief spurt of optimism has run dry without any psychological stamina to handle the magnitude of the task I set for myself (see An impossible ideal). The whole thing about trying to somehow connect with people on the train and the bus just seems ridiculous now in hindsight. People don't want to be vulnerable to strangers during the fleeting encounters while in transit so whatever ideal I was thinking of was just going against the current of a river that is too big.

So the sunglasses are back, and my local library just got in a new novel from Terry Pratchett, "Long Earth". My head will be buried in that during my commute for the next few days.

Some people...

You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your relatives. Tragically you don't get much choice in your work colleagues either. Sure, if there's something particularly bad then you can quit or transfer internally if the company is large enough. But if your industry is in a rough economic patch, or maybe too lazy to switch jobs, then you could be in for some interesting times.

The company I work for does software, and they employ a person as the build/release manager. If you're not sure what that means, essentially think of them as the person who provides a quality control factory environment for the software. He ensures that it is labelled clearly, so that if there are any problems it can be traced to a date and easily audited. Its an important role in any software company that wants to be commercially viable.

I used to do that role, but then yearned to hop the fence, so they went through a couple of people in trying to fill the role and currently have a young man who is here on a working visa from Italy.

Where this guy gets interesting is in his style of communication, and as a person who used to do that role, I've had a lot to do with his orientation and ramp up with our tools. In addition, my current role also means that I also interact with him on an ongoing basis with further work and refinements.

He seems to know his stuff, but the problems I have are:

• He doesn't listen. The number of times I find myself repeating myself to this guy, or referencing emails I sent to him earlier that day is crazy. But maybe it is a learning style, and reading isn't his thing.
• He doesn't seem to care about the company.

Now, if people are honest, if I'm honest, I wouldn't say I care for the company that I work for in the same way I (for example) care for my wife or even my cat. If the company folded, I wouldn't be grieving for the company as much as I am for the now absent paychecks.

But I believe in a certain amount of professionalism and that people should do their job to the best of their ability with a sense of pride that they are achieving a service or goal with all their colleagues. Maybe I'm naive.

Anyway, in the two years that I've worked with this guy, the two ways he has managed to lose all my respect is:

1. In a discussion about a change in process, he loudly sided continuously with another team member who was against the changes, but could provide no reasons or justifications why he felt that way, other than my original proposal would mean more work for him. When we proposed an alternative where we would take care of that work on his behalf, he still objected to the changes. I have nothing against him objecting, and his role meant that he should have valid, well formed input to this item, but objecting without a logical reason? That isn't cool. At least the other team member had his technical reasons for why he was against it.
2. He recently encountered an issue where his working visa almost lapsed. He wouldn't have to leave the country, as he would be able to switch to a tourist visa while he addressed the working visa issue, but it would mean that we would have to suspend his employment legally, until it was sorted. We had a mass of confusion because he didn't explain this to the rest of the team properly, most of us thought he was intentionally leaving the company. When asked if he was leaving, his response was "if something better comes up". We had to go to HR to get the full story.

Dude, what? I thought maybe he was just messing with me, but he was giving the same coy answer to any of the other staff who asked him, even the ones who were friendlier with him.

In preparation of the possibility of him leaving, we asked whether he would document his work in case we have to transition, or have someone cover him temporarily, and his reply to that was that he didn't have much to write down, and people would pretty much work it out.

So now I find myself kinda torn. Finding people to fill this sort of role in the corner of Australia is a little hard, and can take months before you get a suitable applicant. If we get someone new who has to decipher what this guy has left behind, then that could be a month or two of headaches in itself. Yet on the flipside, I am done with this guy and really don't see it being in the company's long term interests for him to stay on.

Il tempo per voi di lasciare, amico.

North Korea

I have nothing personal to add about that country as I have not even been to an adjacent country, let alone North Korea itself. I've also never personally met any North Koreans. Closest is a South Korean who attends my church, and she herself has no real knowledge of what goes on in that country. Not sure if anyone does.

But a couple of years ago I came across an interesting blog from a couple of europeans who took a train trip from western Europe through to North Korea. They wrote about the train trip, and they are really into their trains, and have a stack of photos from the entire experience as well. Its a fascinating journey to read, but make sure you keep a few hours set aside for the experience.

Vienna to Pyongyang

I find it interesting that the Wikipedia article on the first Kim (Kim Il-sung) to begin communist North Korea, mentions that he reported he was the son of a Protestant minister. He must have held some deep seated resentment for Christians as they're now automatically considered traitors to the state.

Egg on face

Man, what a rollercoaster the past few days at the office have been. One of the exciting aspects of my job is dealing with people's fault reports. I work as a software developer providing tools and support for a software test automation team at the company I work for.

So alot of my job is creating tools, and making ammendments, in order to have software automatically testing software. Kinda sounds like the build up in plot for some sci-fi horror story.

Anyway, things occassionally don't work as planned. Sometimes I make a change to a tool and it breaks something else, sometimes I don't understand what they originally needed and I need to make changes to the behaviour. All up it means that I need to understand them, but I almost never understand them on the first try of any issue. This is actually normal for people talking about complex topics in relation to unexpected technical situations.

Where this whole arrangement baffles me sometimes is that it is the test teams' job, their specialty, a core part of what they do each day, is communicate about unexpected things to other people. For example, when they determine a way which causes a system to fail, they then need to clearly and concisely report to the original software developrs about what they did, what happened, and how to accurately reproduce the issue.

I've spent large chunks of the past four days locked in a tense standoff with one of the testers who I couldn't understand the details of her problem. She's a bright lady and hard working, but perhaps tiredness and frustration at the issue meant that on this occassion she was not inclined to go into much detail. So I was left guessing and trying to pick up pieces from other sources. That did not go well.

I ended up with a situation of providing a resolution for her that was part right and wrong. The problem was she didn't want the solution, because it only partly worked, but also she wanted something now that would fix the issue without her having to make any changes. Of course this aggravated me as there was no logical way to achieve what she wanted.

Managers got involved, answers and solutions were demanded to be provided in short time frames, and in my rushing around to make things happen, I made some mistakes and assumptions because I didn't do proper checks before presenting results.

End of the day, I achieved a good solution, but managed to also confuse and mislead a few people on the way. Weeks like that have me looking forward to friday night drinks. I need something to wash this egg off.

Yee haa

Fooling around with Blogger has been interesting. I've heard about all the things you can do to track popularity and viewing stats so that authors can keep track of their popularity and also try to gauge who are their main audiences.

I just noticed I can see what countries some of my hits are coming from, and I'm getting a bunch from USA. I don't know how that works as I'm pretty sure I unselected the option to make this page visible to Google, so I'm guessing a couple of my friends are using something to hide their IP.

But just in case; greetings uncle Sam.