Category: Realty Bites

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Part I

BobbieLeave a comment

As we sit in meetings and hear “yeah, so let’s circle back to that in the new year”, as we receive out of office emails, as we get quite literally bombarded with solicitations (to go buy things or donate money), we find ourselves yet again at the end of a calendar year, heading into “the holidays”.

It is “the holidays” because it incorporates a selection of them with a variety of observances and customs, and I can get behind any seasonality that involves getting together with the ones you love and eating things. Oh, and pretty lights.

This is also the time of year where you may be dragged into being tech support for a friend or family member and remember that it is an honor and a privilege: You Are the Techie Person. You get to say stuff like “it works on my machine” and “have you tried turning it off and turning it on again”. Practice holding your coffee mug in your non-dominant hand while gesturing at screens, it will help.

If, however, you do not want to spend all of your time at a gathering doing tech support, and you’ve allotted a specific amount of time to do the Good Work, here’s some suggestions. For all of these you should explain to the recipient what you are doing and why, so they understand when things change. It also means that they can’t wander off and leave you by yourself to play tech support (unless you, and they, want it that way).

15 Minutes

With 15 minutes, grab the phone(s) of the intended persons (WITH THEIR PERMISSION) and:

  • Ensure they are updated with the latest patches – this will help guard them against security issues and could help performance.
  • Adjust the text sizing/accessibility features as needed – sometimes these are hard or confusing to get to.
  • If the phone is a sea of apps, make sure they know how to search for apps and/or reconfigure their first page of apps to the ones they use the most.
  • Establish a family code word for human MFA – AI has gotten savvy and so if Grandma gets a call from her “Grandson” explaining he’s in jail / trapped in a town someplace else / needs money, Grandma can ask for the passphrase. The kid will know it, AI will not. (You may need to show Grandma some examples of AI real-time deepfakes, so she understands the abilities of the bad guys).
  • Depending on the state of the person and what kind of support you do, you may want to enable location sharing to you. If you do that explain why.

3o-45 Minutes

With this additional time,

  • Make sure they are storing passwords someplace safe. IF THAT IS A PIECE OF PAPER, make sure they understand that that piece of paper needs to be hidden and not just hanging out and visible to anyone who visits the house. Pitch solidly for a password manager — the one Apple has built in is fine; Bitwarden is good too.
  • Make sure they understand to NOT STORE THEIR CREDIT CARD INFORMATION IN THEIR BROWSER. If they are doing that, walk them through why it needs to be removed, and teach them how to use Apple Pay or Pay Pal. Yes, this may take more than 15 minutes.
  • Walk them through how MFA works (if they don’t already know it) and ensure it’s set up for any/every instrument tied to money (bank accounts, shop/store accounts, subscriptions, etc.)

An Hour or More

  • Check to see if the router ADMIN password is unique and not the one the router shipped with. If it is, change it, make sure they add it to whatever they’re using to manage their passwords, and explain to them why (I find it useful to use the “Garage Door Opener” example: there was a thing a few decades back where folks discovered that if you bought a garage door opener and drove through neighborhoods eventually you’d find one you could open).
  • Make sure their Wi-Fi is not open for all – it should be password gated and that password should be stored accordingly.
  • If you have crazy amounts of time and inclination – let’s say you’re visiting from out of town and staying at the house a few days? –
    • Consider setting up a guest Wi-Fi and/or IoT Wi-Fi network. Separate things-that-touch-money from “smart” things (e.g., smart fridge, smart thermostat, etc.), and also separate “visitors”.
    • Go through browser hygiene on all machines – how cookies work, what you do and don’t get for them (explain that this is how Facebook knows you were shopping for boots).
    • Make sure machines are on auto-update for patches.
    • Consider getting a separate authenticator, and walking them through how and why to use that.
    • Explain passkeys.

Stocking Stuffers

  • Don’t plug your phone in to charge at any rando USB port. Instead, use a USB Condom. And with this, let the recipient know that they should never have to download an app just to charge their devices.
  • You can also get them a portable charger, especially if they travel a lot.
  • Bitwarden has a free tier but also for $1/mo or $3.33/mo you can get extras.
  • Ghostery is free but does accept donations.
  • Signal is free but does accept donations.
  • Credit Monitoring – even though we all get it “free” every time one of our accounts is compromised, it’s a good idea.
  • Authenticator Apps – Wirecutter and PC Mag have covered these.

Next post: why the Credit Monitoring is a good idea, and how to deal with the never-ending Data Breach issues.

Burner

BobbieLeave a comment

I recently had the opportunity to travel internationally, and to test a few things. Namely, using a “burner” phone.

To be super clear: it is very hard to do this perfectly and I did not do it perfectly. We’ll discuss some hypotheticals further down, but I felt the need to start with that. This was a test, it was only a test, and it went pretty much how one could expect it to.

Why

There’s a lot of discourse in the media about phone confiscation, personal privacy, etc.; this shows up in articles hearing about journalists being issued “burner phones” or the advice to acquire one yourself before international travel. I wanted to see firstly how that would work and secondly, frankly, if I would actually need it. I am not the target demographic for the sort of privacy harassment (yet?) that would require a burner phone (I am not a journalist and I hold no real position of power) so the likelihood I was going to have to hand over my phone to a Cellebrite was small, but not zero. How painful, then, would a burner phone experience be?

Who

This phone was just for me, in my private travel, to talk with about ten people in two countries. The number, once acquired (see “How”), was shared with those people via What’s App and/or Signal. The phone wasn’t used by anyone else during this period.

When

The actual phone was acquired about 3 weeks before my trip which, with life being as busy as it is, did not leave me much time to set up the necessary infrastructure. The plan was to have it set up pre-trip, test it a bit, and then evaluate it for the trip.

How

There are the “right” ways to do this for “ultimate privacy” (and I put that in scare quotes for a reason) and then there are the “okay” ways to do this for like 80% of scenarios, and I went with that one. Firstly, you have to acquire a phone. You could, for example, revive an old one of yours or a family members’, or purchase one off of Swappa. I did the former, but for “perfect” you would ideally do a cash deal off-record for someone else’s phone. Once you have the phone, you need to install a phone plan. You could, in theory, get a prepaid phone plan through a different carrier and in some cases they don’t actually require an ID (as long as you’re paying with cash and/or a prepaid Visa card) but note that everything, on some level, is traceable. There’s cameras at the phone store, there’s call recording for the wireless provider, etc. I didn’t bother with that, I just added it to my current plan.

I will note here that adding a phone to your plan immediately gives it some tether to you. The phone, when added to my plan, got “my name”, and anyone with a warrant, or really good phishing, could probably divine that this “Bobbie Conti” on the phone plan is related to that “Bobbie Conti” on the phone plan. They can also then probably get that other phone number, and my address, which in turn means they would know already quite a bit about me. BUT, the *phone itself* doesn’t impart all of that – in order to get there you need to do that “hop” and either that warrant or phish. Moving on…

If you have an Apple phone – and for security reasons I prefer them – you are best placed to get an iCloud account, so you can load apps and suchlike. For that, you need at least an email address. For a Google email address, they like it if you have a backup email and a phone number for 2FA. So the phone comes first, but where do you get the 2nd email address? Proton mail. Armed with my new Proton mail, and then my phone number, I got a Gmail account and wired that all up to the Burner. Great! I now have a phone, with the ability to load apps, text, etc., that on the surface level isn’t “me”.

A really, really driven person would have gone to a public forum of some kind (e.g., Best Buy when busy and using their demo machines) and used their computer to set up the Proton Mail account, then gone to a second one several miles away to set up the Gmail account, and so forth. I did none of that, but I did use a VPN on the machine that I set them up with. That said, Google almost certainly was able to figure out it’s me, since the machine I logged into was the same machine I use my personal Gmail (note: my gmail is my spam hole and I do not use it for anything important).

From here I did some final tweaking and followed some basic principles:

  • I removed location services from all the things – including even weather.
  • I deleted a bunch of apps I did not need.
  • I installed Signal. Yes, What’s App was on there, too, but if one has to choose one chooses Signal.
  • I did NOT load up any other accounts (emails, etc.), and absolutely did not tether any cards/payment forms to the phone.
  • I brought my own chargers, charging cables, etc. and never hooked up to public USB, nor to any bluetooth.

This left me with a phone I could use to search the internet (Duck Duck Go for the win), send texts/Signals/WhatsApps, and… that’s about it.

A truly driven person would probably purchase, with cash, some Visa gift cards, load those up in the “wallet”, would add in one or more VPN’s, and would almost certainly have not used What’s App. I know what they say about What’s App being private. However, What’s App *can* read your texts if a recipient requests them to, e.g., if you’re getting reported for fraud or abuse. If they can do that under that circumstance, they can certainly do it under others. Additionally, What’s App shares data with other Meta products, so if you are traveling with others who use those, the proximity tracking (and more if those folks are your friends and taking pictures in which you may be, *tagged or otherwise*), it’s not much for them to figure it out.

What

What happened was an exercise in frustration for me, and not much else.

Not having access to “tap to pay”, location services (hello maps!), etc. meant for a substandard experience to the one I could have had, had I had my phone. Instead I relied on others and/or visual directions, and physically pulling out my card to tap it. It also meant I wasn’t getting health tracking benefits, etc. If I had been on a trip by myself and not with friends, the maps/location piece would have absolutely driven me nuts.

The phone itself received generic text message phishing (in this case offering a job), allowed me to text the group I was in, and that was about it. There was no case in which it was compromised, invaded, etc., and there was no indication that someone or thing actually cared about it (other than me). It’s hard to prove a negative, and as I said earlier, I’m not that important :).

The final curiosity was to see if it were to get plugged into the aforementioned Cellebrite on the return trip and… it wasn’t. Not a hint of it. In theory, an Apple phone equipped with Signal and not voluntarily unlocked is fairly “protected” (thus far) from Cellebrite forensics but nothing lasts forever and I would imagine that Cellebrite, having preemptively declared victory in the past only to have to walk back their words would, in future, not advertise a capability until proven. Still, the plan had been to see if any of the account information stored on the phone (with the new emails, etc.) were to show up elsewhere post-plug-in.

Addenda

You could fit the “what ifs” and caveats in this scenario into a small football stadium.

If the concern is a government acquiring the data to do things with it (whatever one might imagine those things to be) then it should be noted that so much of our data is available to JUST ANYONE at any time it’s scary. With a first name and last name, you can search court records, find addresses, see property tax records, etc. With a social security number (which, erm, the gov’t gives you), you can run a credit report, know where someone is banked, and (if again you are said government) know their income and income streams. The things the government would need a warrant (purportedly) for would be specific financial transaction information, and possibly what calls were made at what time and to whom and for how long. If one is to believe the news of the early oughts, the NSA is already listening in anyway. What is left, then, is texts to/from the device itself, the contents of which you have and the person to which you texted have; and either can be forced via warrant.

The other concern is non-government entities or government entities that are not your own and, in my case, again, I’m not that important :). I would imagine the same holes in the process apply to those, if not more. I also generally ascribe to the notion one should not say out loud anything one is not willing to defend in court or another public forum.

The core scenario in which we hear about burner phones (e.g., journalists) are different from mine – I don’t imagine journalists using tap to pay from a burner phone in the middle of a war zone and I don’t imagine foreign officials using said burner phone to send sensitive messages (or if so I imagine some sort of Mission Impossible self-destruct smoke thing happening). For their sakes I hope it works, but my own scenario is nothing so dire.

One should remember the name here, too: a burner phone is so named because when it ceases to be useful and/or is compromised, you burn it; the real purpose of a burner is to get a message from point A to point B and then discard it, hopefully with no traceability back to your thumbs.

You can donate to Signal here.

You can donate to Reporters without Borders here.

Now What, Part III

BobbieLeave a comment

They say history does not repeat itself but boy howdy does it rhyme. Another quarter, and another batch of layoffs. This builds on previous guidance.

If you are Leaving

Firstly, I am sorry. I really am. Go check out Now What, and Now What II, for some initial guidance (especially about that RIF package you may or may not have gotten).

Resume

In addition to everything else in those other pages, you will want to use modern tools for modern solutions. While I do not believe AI is a golden hammer, it *can* help you brush up that resume. The key here is to use it for *parts* and then review it and add your voice and finishing touches. Things to particularly pay attention to:

  • a concise summary at the top – by concise I mean 240-character-tweetable concise.
  • bulleted skills list.
  • tailoring to different role types that are adjacent – a given person is perfectly capable of being a Technical Program Manager or a Product Manager, but how you slant your resume will differ for those two roles.
  • clean design – you want enough white space to not make it cramped and not so much that it creates extra pages of reading or the eye falls off the page.

Before you send it out, triple check it for accuracy, and remove any “the user” or other phrases that signal AI use.

Networking

Find local chapters and meet-ups of folks who are in the same industry/specialty as you. Yep, meetup is still a thing, as is dev.events. You may be an introvert (Hi. It’s me. I’m an introvert.) but you’ll want to get out there and network – this can lead to consulting gigs, soft intros, expanding your LinkedIn (up next), etc.

LinkedIn

OK I mean yes, you can post how you are/were impacted. And your feels. But after that you need to look at LinkedIn as a tool.

  • “Link” to those you worked with that you had a good working relationship with – because now you can see jobs that get posted on their pages, by *their* network.
  • Clean up your profile like you clean up your resume: get yourself a headline, an “about” section, make sure your experience and skills are up to date.
  • Did you know you can set the “Open to Work” feature to Recruiters only?
  • Use it to find companies that say they are hiring (more on that later). When you reach out to recruiters or folks hiring, add a short note about why you’re messaging them (personalize it). It will help you stand out.
  • Take a look at your post history – is there anything there that *might* give a recruiter or a company second thoughts? I’m of a “hey if I say it at all I will shout it in a public square” mentality, but not all are.

Job Hunting

Indeed, LinkedIn, etc. all post roles that are “open”. I say “open” because you know and I know that some organizations aren’t great about their job posting hygiene, leave roles online that have been filled, or (in some cases) have “ghost” roles open. You don’t want those, you want real jobs.

If you can, look at the posting date. Focus more on applying to things posted sooner to “now”, than older. Those are less likely to be well into the interview and/or hiring process, and more likely to be legitimate and still funded.

If you know someone who works at that company, reach out to them and ask them for a soft intro to the hiring manager, or a referral.

Stress Management

Touch grass. I’m serious: go out for a walk, make sure you’re hydrated, and so forth; this is a stressful time and stress management is going to be a requirement, because stress can impact a lot of things including your immune system. You don’t want that.

If you are Left

Yes, this sucks for you too; go see “Closure“.

LinkedIn

You get LinkedIn homework too.

  • Find the folks you know are impacted, that you have a good working relationship with them, and “Link” them. This gives them an extended network and exposes them to more opportunities.
  • As fellow Linkies post jobs available, repost them. You don’t have to add your thoughts if you don’t want to, but reposting them extends the visibility of the opening through *your* network directly.
  • For closer impacted folks, you can help them eyeball their resume. Sometimes when you’re in the thick of a role you don’t realize all that you do, so you can be that “realizer” for your impacted friends.

Referrals

  • If your company has open positions, offer referrals for those you know would be a good fit. Referrals may sometimes feel like a black hole via the “system”, so if you can (without too much political capital) reach out to the hiring manager of the role your fellow Linkie is applying for, that can absolutely help.
  • If a position has been open for longer than 2 weeks, *definitely* check with the hiring manager if you can before referring. In the current market, that role is likely already filled or deeply in the hiring process, and it may be too late.

Stress Management

This applies to you, too. Both from a survivor’s guilt perspective, but also from a “there’s bound to be a shuffle in the work structure or the workload”. Try to maintain good sleep hygiene, get some cardio, and stay hydrated, because it’s going to be icky for a bit as you juggle what you see online and what you experience at work.

Deep breaths, and do the best you can, with what you have.

Ripping

BobbieLeave a comment

Ask any sewist or person who works with fabric what their feelings are about their seam ripper, and they will either tell you it’s complicated or that it’s their favorite. Most of us think it’s complicated.

A seam ripper is a little tool with a sharpish-hooked edge that you use to rip seams (“it’s that easy!”). “Ripping” sounds more violent than it is — it cuts through the threads that hold the seam together whilst (mostly) preserving the fabric on either side and is used for either letting you take something that wasn’t right for you and make it right for you, or for tearing out a mistake.

In knitting, if you have to do that it’s called “frogging” and it’s where you yank the yarn free of the needles and, row by row, disassemble the knit into an unwieldy pile of yarn.

For the most part, NO ONE is having a good time doing these things. At the very best, these are an impedance to actual progress, a necessary correction on the way to doing the thing you actually wanted to do. More often, they are an admission of error, and a painstaking reminder at that. By the time you are frogging or ripping seams, you are watching as you undo dozens, perhaps scores of hours of work. It hurts.

At the very least, though, you have control – you can choose to let the seams stay as-they-are, or you can choose to undo them and refashion them into something you want — but you choose. If you’re one of the thousands laid off last week — or millions over the last year — you didn’t get to choose (or likely didn’t). You have been forced into a Very Large and Very Painful change.

I’ve got some older posts on the practicalities of handling this situation but for the most part they do not address one of the more problematic aspects: what if you’re old?

I speak as someone who is “old”. At least, considered “old” in the workforce for technology: this year I will be 52. With the power of hair dye and wrinkle cream and soft focus and carefully applied makeup I may still be “looking” mid 40’s but the reality is I’ve been in the corporate workforce now for 32 years.

Mind you, “age” isn’t a problem for the person who has it. *I* think my brain works just fine, thank you (or at least as fine as it did some 10 or 20 years ago), but the perception on the exterior could be that I am not as “fresh” as someone younger in career, or as “raw”. (Why do we use phraseology for candidates that we would for produce?). Older folks who have been hit by the layoffs are going to have a harder time getting a new job, and that can mean a forced early retirement or a forced early cliff in finances, neither of which sound great.

The irony is, of course, that we need people to be working as long as possible to support the infrastructure our government uses to support the *really old* people. With the largest generation — Boomers — retiring, the more of us Gen X-ers that can be kept in play, the better off “the system” will be. Gen-X has more in common with Millenials in terms of why we stay at a role, and while I don’t necessarily agree with everything in this infographic, I do think that our generation’s skeptical approach to most things — rebranded as “critical thinking” by the time I got into the workforce properly — is and proves to be quite useful.

Which is not to say the pain is solely borne by us “semi-olds”. Millenials are still paying off student loans while trying to hold a mortgage and save for their kids’ college. Gen Z are coming in with student debt and skyrocketing housing expenses. Getting yoinked out of your job, and also your health insurance, with no notice, is catastrophic. Sure, the unemployment rate — even today — isn’t as bad as it has been (the Great Recession and COVID both created huge spikes), but that is cold comfort to the person evaluating their current situation in what is hopefully a “garden leave” period.

This could be a post that tells one impacted to “buck up”, refashion that resume, pound the pavement, work your network, etc. There are plenty of those posts. This post is to acknowledge it sucks, and for some in a specific stage and circumstance, even if eventually they do get something bigger and better, it sucks hard.

DMV Beige

BobbieLeave a comment

I want you to imagine a color, a very specific color, that I think most US-based folks would recognize and it may have an international bent (I haven’t been to the motor vehicle licensing offices in other countries). This color is that sad, slightly icky beige color reminiscent of the transitional period of the 70’s to the 80’s where not everything was yet Duran Duran and you still had smokey glass tumblers and “non-smoking” sections in restaurants were new. It’s the kind of beige with no redeeming qualities- it’s not Indiana Jones Adventuring Beige, it’s not Tasteful Coat Beige, it’s not even Mid-Century Modern Influencer Revival Beige. This is that Beige of No Redeeming Attraction that can sometimes still be found on the walls of your local DMV (or other underfunded government office).

Yesterday I was feeling very DMV Beige.

I am *not* very good at discussing strong feelings because feelings are not logical, and they don’t follow a predictive pattern. When they happen, I end up having a “retrospective” to try to figure out why they happened. Nevertheless, I have them, they will surface. Yesterday I found myself talking with some good friends at work about feeling “beige” and… they got it. It resonated. A lot of us are feeling “beige”.

Beige isn’t bad, per se. You wouldn’t pick it on purpose, at least not this irredeemable beige. You’ve heard about “beige flags” and such and this is its cousin: the idea that “everything’s fine” but somehow it could be better and/or worse; it’s this liminal, waiting room feeling.

After noodling on this with a fellow engineering friend, we came upon a hypothesis: this feeling is appropriate and also going to happen a lot more. She and I both have A Lot Going On both personally and professionally, and those Lots Going On tend to be of an urgent and complicated nature. There are often fires, emergencies, or confrontations that have to be had to further the product (or to keep it alive). There are translations, meetings, “per my last email”, and “I think you’ll find that…”. This is not limited to our work lives but also to the complications of personal lives as you get to a certain age and stage (family members passing and estates must be settled, the additional attention your health requires as you advance, etc.). We’ve both been underwater on both fronts for so long that now, as we are bobbing on the surface and we see the rescue boat coming, we’re wondering if there’s a shark somewhere.

If you’re conditioned to be hypervigilant and constantly alert for a problem to solve, and no problem (that you can solve) presents itself, then what remains are the problems that exist and that *you cannot solve*. For an engineer, or any “go-doer”, this is problematic. Maybe it’s because you do not have authority to solve the problem, maybe it’s because you do not have the ability or technological understanding to solve the problem, and/or maybe it’s not necessarily *your* problem at all (but someone else’s), and the bias to action drives one part of your brain whilst the other part of your brain screams at it to stop wasting time and energy because surely, surely a You Problem will come along soon and you’ll need your energy for that.

There is no shortage of problems to be aware of and feel inadequate or unable to solve or even subdue them. Which problems those are and how focused or personal they feel are largely determined by where you live and what 24/7 news hysteria cycle you consume. I say “hysteria” not in a dismissive tone – real news is real news – but the objective McNeil Lehr News Hour/ 60 Minutes that I grew up with is gone and replaced with Alternative Facts and non-neutral phrasing like “crushed” and “slammed” and “outrage” and such. Curating the inbound flow is almost a job in and of itself – I mean yes, you can tweak your algorithms and provide feedback to the “machine”, but the machine doesn’t feed off of you feeling happy or even content.

It feeds off of you feeling sad, angry, outraged, or any number of negative emotions. The very *best* you can hope for, on some days, is that all it wants is to feed off you feeling DMV Beige.

Now What, Part II

Bobbie2 Comments

We’ve discussed before of what to do when you’re facing a layoff/Reduction In Force (RIF). It would appear that “the market” has decided the latest vogue is to do straight firing, based on “performance”. I put those in scare quotes because there is no small amount of evidence that some folks being let go for “performance” were under the impression– with receipts — that they were not under any form of performance improvement plan and/or had stellar reviews. Even if you were, being let go with no warning and no health insurance sucks. So let’s do this:

  1. Take a deep breath. Panic will not serve you now; and the energy you used to put into your job you now need to put into YOU. If you need to take a moment to scream into a pillow or sob in the shower or make a little felt voodoo doll, well, do you. Don’t take too long, because there’s more to do.
  2. Are you covered for health insurance? E.g., do you have a spouse and can they cover you on theirs? If you’re under 26 you may be able to be covered by your parents. Being let go (for whatever reason) is a “qualifying event”. If not, check out your state’s health insurance exchange. (If that doesn’t work, type your state name and “health insurance” into your browser… because that previous link is a federal government link and some of the sites are being “updated” lately).
  3. Different states have different rules for unemployment – in some there’s a waiting period if you’ve been “fired”, in others it “depends”. Put your state name into your browser along with “unemployment” and follow the links on how to file and what is needed. Do your best to NOT be emotionally compromised during this, you’re going to need patience. I find it useful to pretend it’s not for me, but for my kid or my mom. How would I advocate for them? Then I do that.
  4. Review whatever paperwork they gave you as part of your “firing”. What happens with your 401k, your pension, etc. … when does your last check drop – make a note of that too.
  5. If your insurance covers you “through the month” or suchlike, get an emergency appointment with your doc (if you can) and refill all your prescriptions, etc. Insurance goes by date of care.
  6. Take a look at your budget at home and, if you don’t have one, now’s the time. You need a hard list of the things you cannot NOT pay (like rent, food, utilities) and things you can cut out if you need to (like subscription services, dining out, etc.). Will it suck? Yes. But let’s get with Maslow on this one: needs first. Then figure out the gaps.
  7. Time for some math: you have whatever’s in your account, plus possibly an inbound “last check”. That “account” balance may include your emergency fund (this, friend, is an emergency) or you may not have one. Take that into account, along with how long before you can get unemployment, and compare that to your budget – are you going to be in the hole, and if so how much? (Then start trying to figure out what you can do to bridge the hole: how fast can you get a new job (any job), where can you pull cash from to bridge the gap, etc.). You can also negotiate with companies as to payment plans and hardship stays.
  8. Brush up that resume, your LinkedIn, etc. Network. Have informational “coffees” with people. Scour the job boards (e.g. Indeed).
  9. Have your talking points ready as to why you were let go. If you have references from coworkers, previous managers, etc., have those at the ready. Those employers know the score and they watch the news too: this is not necessarily a scarlet letter.
  10. This too shall pass. It’s going to absolutely suck, but you’re resilient, and you can do this.

Productive Tedium as Therapy

Bobbie1 Comment

About six or seven months ago some enterprising individual got ahold of my work email, my personal credit card, and did some damage: desiring to hide their purchase of a trip to Cancun, they created a spam bomb attack which flooded my mail with something like 2500 subscriptions.

One of the older “features” of Outlook and the instantiation of it in our company, was that if mail was in your junk folder, you could *not* click on links. That makes sense – phishing is as phishing does. When it’s not phishing and instead is noise, one wants the noise to stop.

Complicating this is that in response to the attack I set my junk folder on the highest threshold – meaning that a good many *real* mails got sent to junk. This has meant, for the last six months, me going into my junk folder several times a day to weed through hundreds of mails to find the pearl that is, for example, my company’s newsletter telling us how we should be all more secure (we’re working on it). It has given me the opportunity to be smug on a few occasions when someone says, “oh check your junk folder it might be in there”, which is nice.

After some resistance I have clicked the little slider on “New Outlook”, which instantiates a whole separate app. While I am disheartened to give up in-mail anchor points and jump links (I assume they want me to use the newsletter function, but I am obstinate), what has happened is we now have the ability to click an “unsubscribe” link from junk without sending the mail first to the inbox. In the last two weeks I have gone from hundreds of junk emails a day to about seven. It’s cathartic.

It’s also very, very tedious. Many of the mails are in a foreign language, so I’ve learned that things like “abstellen” and such are the “opt out”/”unsubscribe”/”stop” links. Edge translate has also been my friend. I’ve equally been fortunate that the bulk of the newsletters I got subscribed to are harmless — products and services from around the world (though there was one that I ended up having to email my manager to let her know what I was doing because I’m pretty sure the site I visited to unsubscribe was NSFW).

So here I am, each early morning, click, unsubscribe, click, unsubscribe, click, unsubscribe, and so on. For low effort “productivity” you can’t beat it. And I need some low-effort productivity right now.

This electronic version of doing a laundry load of towels is helping me avoid the crazed hype machine that is our current media and particularly the media circus around our elections. The ads, the next-minute analysis, the fearmongering, the rage, the hysteria, the 20/20 hindsight, and so forth: the exhausting part of politics is doing its thing, and we will be in it for another four and a half months. Given the last round, we won’t be done after election season, either. “If it bleeds it leads” is a disgusting phrase that turns out to be true and as such we get fed a steady diet of screaming rage.

I have voted in every election (even the teeny local ones) since about 2000. While I appreciate the phrase that “all politics is local” – it isn’t, or not really. The bulk of the politics that directly affect *you now* is/are local. The politics that will directly affect you *and your offspring* are more likely state and federal, and in a country that cannot seem to decide who is in charge (state or fed) it makes for an erratic tug of war.

I click, I unsubscribe, I delete the mail. I click, I unsubscribe, I delete the mail. With this, at least one small part of my world gets a little more orderly.

In the End it Catches Up with You

BobbieLeave a comment

I am at present paying dearly for not reading the fine print.

I work at a large company, and we have SharePoints. We have more than one. Just in my group I think we have four. In some cases, the SharePoints are tied to a Teams instance, which means the security for access to said SharePoint is driven by membership to the Teams team. Because Teams does not restrict membership to security groups and instead does membership to individual humans, this can make for an administrative nightmare.

At any rate, I am having to move things from Teams-SharePoint-Locked-Folder to Regular-SharePoint-Locked-Folder and in order to do that there’s this handy-dandy little “move” function right at the top navigation. You can select all manner of things, select “move”, tell it where you want to move it to, and just hit go. It’s just that easy.

Except it is not.

Because the move functionality has unexplained and unannounced limits – at least no process on the site tells you about those limits, you have to actually RTFM, which is found at the very bottom of this page. Those limits are both in file size, number of files, and total file size. I did not know this two days ago, when I hit “move” and walked away thinking in 30 minutes everything would be magically done.

Instead, what happens is SharePoint looks at its old location (hm…) and at its new location (hm…) and starts to build out the folder structure in the new location before moving files. So that when it chokes — and it will choke — you are left with folders that are empty in your new location, and all your files still sitting merrily in your old location. Then, if you try to move folder by folder, it will give you a duplicate of your new folder, in your new folder location (e.g., now you have Folder and Folder1). Seamless transition this is not.

I am a victim of my own shortsightedness, and now I must pay – delicately and carefully deleting empty folders, then manually chunking and moving files, all in an environment where people are trying to use said files. Don’t even get me started on the One Note. I am, at present, 9 hours into this endeavor (of course I am multitasking).

The thing is, we set ourselves up for failure – or headaches – when we don’t read the fine print. Reading the fine print takes time, and effort, and sometimes it is incredibly boring, and often complex: it’s the written equivalent of bran. We all know we should do it and some of us do but you only get the benefit at the very end of the process (and depending on how long you waited to do it, it can be a really messy end).

We’re in that time of year (at least at my company) where we are evaluating again: ourselves, our teams, our output, our goals, our objectives, how we measure people/teams/features and how we should think about strategy. In times where there is Too Much Going On it is tempting to have the mindset of “I’m sure this will just work” because 1. in so many cases it just does and 2. the idea of investing the time into reading the documentation “just in case” seems limited. Until the end.

Choose your shortcuts wisely.

Now What

Bobbie4 Comments

I work for a major tech company, one that is/was recently in the news for layoffs, and I get that that doesn’t narrow things down much. I’m not immediately impacted. Many are.

This is my best effort at a salient list of what to do if you found/find yourself on the receiving end of a difficult conversation, a last-minute scheduled meeting with HR, or a sterile email. (I am glad to be working at a place where it wasn’t the latter).

  1. Read Everything – I mean really read it. Don’t gloss over the letter/notice/information you’re given, read everything and make sure you read everything before you sign anything. You should be given time to read it and review it with someone else if needed.
  2. Get answers to the questions you will have after reading everything:
    • What happens with your health benefits? How long are you covered, is there COBRA?
    • Can you claim unemployment insurance? (in some states you can after a layoff, and in some if you take a package, you can’t. Your state may vary, check the state site. Here’s that page for Washington State.
    • What happens with your stock, specifically your unvested stock?
    • What happens with your ESPP (if you participate)?
    • What happens with your 401k?
    • Are they offering employment assistance (e.g., helping you find another job)?

If it’s all happening NOW

  • You’re going to feel overwhelmed, but you’ll need to do steps 1 and 2 above to the best of your ability. Don’t *sign anything* until you have to. Let the person who notified you know that you need time to review the notice with your SO, parent, roommate, whatever.
  • Take a walk or scream into a pillow or take a hot shower or do something, anything to give yourself some space. Breathe.
  • If you have a budget, revise it based on what your package will be (if you get one) and what your unemployment will be (if you get it).
    • You can work with most companies (energy, mobile, etc.) to create payment plans and/or assistance depending on your circumstances. The reality is that some people live paycheck to paycheck and so if that’s you, start communicating early. This includes you credit card companies.

If you have time between now and D-Day

  • Use your benefits. That means:
    • Get your doctor’s appointments in, eyeglasses, dental, etc. *Same for any dependents*.
    • If you have other perks, use them.
  • Establish *how much time* you really have and what “normally” happens in that time:
    • Do you have stock that vests? Do you contribute to your 401(k)? Do you participate in an ESPP (Employee Stock Purchase Program)?
  • Do you have enough time to look for another role in the same company (large company layoffs are usually strategic and around projects, your skill set may work in another project).
  • Should you start changing automatic deductions/drafts *now* to accommodate an uncertain future?

And then

  • Brush up your resume. This includes:
    • Updating your work history
    • Looking at current job listings at other companies/your companies and identifying how skill sets are being labeled/displayed “these days”
    • Updating your LinkedIn profile
  • Consider working with a contract or temporary agency – not glamorous, but it keeps you out there, it gets you exposure in companies, you get additional skill sets, and most importantly, it helps pay bills.

Your mileage may vary, and some may be in a better position than others. There is this perception that if you work in the tech sector, you have scads of cash just lying about for just such an occasion, and whilst there are those that do, there are those that do not. Not all tech sector jobs are high-income engineering, and things are tightening up.

We’ll get through it. It’s going to be rocky, but we’ll get through it.

Forcing Functions

Bobbie1 Comment

I am staring down a forcing function Then Me put into place for Now Me, and would like to have a talk with Then Me. To be clear: Now Me knows Then Me was right. In just a little over six weeks I need to be able to run 9.3 miles (15k), and I have successfully run recently as far as… 3. Three miles. If you are doing math and saying, “hm… you can make it, but just barely”, you’re right.

This year I turn 50, which is a nice round number. This year also marks the fifteenth anniversary of when I first started running – I was at a birthday party and a friend waited until after the second glass to let me know we were all running in the Seattle Half Marathon (2008). When I told my (then boyfriend) he laughed, which was all the incentive I needed to actually do it. At 50, incentives require a bit more “oomph”. Signing up for events as forcing functions is one of the “oomph” things, reminding myself of the health benefits is another. But oh, it’s hard to wake up when it’s gray and rainy and tell myself I need to go running up my hill (I live on a hill. No matter which way I leave my house, there will be hills to run).

I also have purchased a Smart Scale. The Smart Scale is quite smart – so smart that it talks to my phone, and it talks to My Fitness Pal, and it talks to Apple Health, and it blabs about all of my intransigence, including my lean mass and therefore also my body fat percentage. You’re not supposed to weigh yourself every day, more like once a week. So naturally, I weigh myself every day. In the olden days, I could step on the scale, and if it said you weigh NNN.4, I could say, “well we can just round that down to NNN” and put that manually into my phone. Now… now my scale tells on me, with that blunt matter-of-factness that I know I do to other people sometimes, and now I understand the look they give me when I do that. It’s not that I (or the scale) am/are *wrong*, it’s just that the message could be a little softer.

I do know what I have to do to get the numbers to go in the correct direction, but after a Holiday Season TM stretching from October to early January, it’s hard to convince yourself that cauliflower rice is really that good, and that you shouldn’t have that cookie. Four months of “I’ll take care of it later” have come home to roost.

The problem with all of these forcing functions is they also come with a dollop of potential backfire: at my age (and this is not me pitying being nearly 50, it’s me celebrating it but being honest about some of the constraints of it) you can injure yourself a lot easier by pushing too hard, and having taken a nasty fall a couple of years back I don’t want to do that. I’ve started lifting recently and got lectured by my PT for not stretching adequately (such that standing up “straight” had me pivoted slightly to the left; my left hand was correctly at my side, but my right hand was about 3″ forward). It’s a balancing act, and when you layer on the realities of the current working environment and just being an adult in general there’s a lot of room for failure … and improvement.

And so, I have my forcing functions, and I’m trying to expand them… as long as they’re not too forceful.