Andy's Mind

I’ve just spent (I wouldn’t say wasted) half an hour browsing through a collection of old photographs made available by the Library of Congress on Flickr. Images of a world long gone, so old that even children depicted on those frames are most probably long dead. And a thought came back to me that I had years ago when first really reading up on the history of late 19th century: how easy it was, in a sense, to live one’s life then. The society’s values and roles were very clear then. No doubt as to what was wrong and what was right – everyone was believing in the general set of values based on the ten commandments and moral teachings of Christianity. Not everyone followed them – liars, murderers, thieves, deviants and the like were with us always – but no one questioned them. Most of insanity we see every day on the news now, including all possible perversions, was not thinkable or – at the vert least – was limited to single cases on the fringes of the society. No question then why general decency prevailed – no one posited immorality as a norm.

It very well might be that while we have much developed since then technologically as a culture we – Europeans – have rather declined. The turn of the 19th and 20th century was, I think, the golden age of our culture – even though the first seeds of the catastrophic 20th century were there already. Good that at least we have those images to remind us of times when right meant right and wrong meant wrong.

Bad things are happening on the markets, as everybody knows. One can read (and view talks) about all kinds or problems in the US economy, including imminent predicted collapse of the US dollar and some grim political theories behind it.

Putting the political dimension aside those predictions seem to be based on solid economical theories. In fact, opponents of the Keynesian economy have predicted exactly this kind of thing to happen for years. Just no one believed it will really happen, because said opponents (Hayek, Friedman, von Mises) have been saying that for such a long time people got used to it. But maybe the mechanisms involved required a long time to produce results we are about to see.

And here comes the startling analogy that occurred to me today: same thing happened with “real communism” in the Soviet Union – no one really believed it can fall apart within our lifetime, especially leading sovietologists. May it be so that Western-style socialism will collapse like communism – just a few decades later, because it is – after all – more efficient then communism?

I know someone who recently applied for a job in a recruiting agency and learned quite a bit about their working methods. As it turns out a recruiter at that agency has to handle in parallel 14-16 cases – positions that they have to fill for the agency’s clients – and there is no industry specialization. So, one might have to find three accountants, two C# developers, one scrum masters and three floor cleaners – and five other people from other, completely unrelated fields. With this number of cases to handle and lack of focus on a given industry the recruiters they have can’t be good, even if they wanted to. It becomes a number game, hence retorting to database handling and everything really that can make the process faster. Hence I was not surprised when I’ve learned that on top of all that the recruiters at that agency were required to strictly follow company’s procedures.

And this is not a small agency, they employ some 60 people and have been recently acquired by an investment fund (who, btw, requires them to be more profitable – read increase the load of cases on recruiters).

This corroborates what I was long suspecting and explains why no recruitment agency I’ve worked with was able to deliver really good programmers, IT managers, routing specialists and the like. First – the best rarely ever look for a job or read ads in newspapers. You have to go after them and fish them out of the universities, this or that language users group etc. And you have to know that a typical geek is a completely different type of fellow than a sleek marketing graduate looking for a job. I bet fishing out good accounting & finance talent is equally hard and in this day and age requires much more effort than just shuffling CVs around as they flow in.

Somehow this – and most other recruitment agencies – don’t get it. Why? Well, because the truth is most jobs – especially many corporate jobs – don’t require exceptional talent and outstanding skills. Filling the seats with half-decent people is a success already so anyone who can deliver them in numbers has a business. That’s why I expect also this agency to grow along, congratulating themselves they do the right thing – and still missing the point completely.

I have to return to Amazon’s Kindle device for a moment today, because in my last post I didn’t cover some aspects of this device I find disturbing.

Not only it is totally proprietary and binds you to Amazon as the sole source of content – it also opens up a whole new set of possibilities for privacy invasion. First, Amazon knows about all the books you’ve read. And as the device is on-line all the time through a GSM network and knows who its owner is all kinds of things are possible: from gathering detailed statistics of what you read, when you read it, how fast you do it – and what notes you scribble – to tracking your whereabouts. Since the platform is totally closed there is no way whatsoever to verify what the device does and what it doesn’t.

But not only that – it would be also possible to retroactively alter publications. It could be seen as a good idea – manuals could be updated, errors could be corrected – but it can be also used to alter history, by for example removing mentions of someone or something from a newspaper days after it was “published”. This is purely Orwellian – the Ministry of Truth was doing exactly this.

Overall, I find this whole thing and the mindset behind it highly disturbing and dangerous. This can be best exposed by pushing this idea to its limit: let’s imagine it is immensely successful and everyone has one. Then everyone has only the books that come from Amazon, pays them for the right to read, there is no second-hand book market, no libraries too and Amazon knows who was reading what. All that is totally opposite to what a traditional book is – it is yours to keep, forever, no one knows what you read – you can walk into a bookstore and buy one totally anonymously – and you can lend it or give to anyone for free.

I think, in a nutshell, monetizing on everything and locking users into a proprietary platform on which they in fact don’t own anything, just pay for the right to read, is what I find most repulsive. Circulation of the written word has been limited until recently by the physical limitations of the books and newspapers. Now Internet removes those limitations – it should be an opportunity to make more available for free. There is something inherently wrong with the idea that you have to put a dime in for any page you read, any tune you listen to or any picture you see.