10 Stupid Reasons Managers Overlook Dan

What are the top 10 dumb reasons managers don’t hire Dan?

10. Dan’s over 50

Face it.  Idiots throw away experience.  That kills the company.  Not convinced?  Think.  Are you more or less experienced and savvy than you were ten years ago?  How’s your work ethic?  Your attitude?  Better or worse?

If you’re refusing to hire those over 50, then maybe it’s because you are on the decline and not the over 50 crowd!

9. Foreign labor is cheaper

What an awesome way to put the competition out of business and dodge taxes and fair labor laws.

Your job can be offshored, too!  And your office can be put up for rent.  Tycoons from India and China can buy up your foreclosed property for pennies on the dollar and charge you dollars on the penny to rent it back.  And the people you fired will be living in luxury in foreign countries while America pays off its foreign debt with your unemployment insurance money and social security.

Smart?  Not.  Hire your fellow citizens.  Besides it nice to have them working close to you.

8.  Dan is unemployed.

It does not take much business savvy today to realize that most of the best people are unemployed.  They’re considered “too old”, “overqualified”.  Millions of dollars of valuable IT skills lie on the table.  The savvy grab.  The stupid lose.

Dan his last company between $150,000 and $2,300,000 in sanctions and lost reinsurance revenue almost monthly as he corrected difficult long standing technical issues and rearchitected the Medicaid Pharmacy Encounters systems for Centene’s health plans in several states, and the cost of his entire employment package was recovered many dozens of times over.

Hiring unemployed candidates is not only and honorable civic duty, but it can be lucrative considering that the unemployed can be hired more quickly, and many spend their unemployment time studying hard to develop new skills or sharpen their existing skills.  Dan studied for the PMP exam, completed about 35 Brainbench certifications, and developed a couple dozen websites from scratch applying his mastery of the LAMP environment and developing very substantial skills in CMS and blogging packages such as Drupal and WordPress.  He studied Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in depth, and deepened his experience in security and performance.  He also installed an Exim email server with Dovecot and tied them into a MySQL database for authentication and for setting up several virtual email domains with greylisting, spamassassin, and custom Perl scripts to keep drop spammers and hackers into the firewall safely.

A manager would be wise to grab Dan fast.  A stupid manager would let him get away.

7. Dan has been away from PeopleSoft too long

Substitute any piece of software.  Dan has experience with Oracle 7, 8, 9, and 10 but not 11g.  Dan has experience with PeopleSoft 6, 7.x, and 8.x but not 9.1.  Dan has worked intimately with Solaris 2.0 through 2.9, but only a little on Solaris 10.

If that is such an ominous reason, if experience with the exact version of a technology is so vital, then why does Dan consistently display a total mastery of the new version almost instantly?  Could it be that the foundation is bigger than the change?  Another Doh coming.

6.  Got SAN?  NAS?  NetApp?

How about a NetApp with a blue pencil mark on the top left by a 37 1/2 year old person of Hispanic ancestry on a Friday?

When someone has worked in a major company like Oracle in production and applied research on many storage configurations from several vendors with both hardware and software RAID, the laws of physics don’t change and the experience is adaptable.

You don’t need experience with exactly version 2.4.5.6.8.7 of anything.  Ever.  If you have 2.4.5.6.8.6, you can read about 7 in the release notes.  And if you’re a smart manager, you’ll make smart requirements.  It’s better to have a strong foundation than substantial knowledge of a small delta.  And if you don’t know what a delta is, then you probably were not smart enough to hire Dan.

5.  We need someone with substantial technical support management experience

When you have successfully built and managed an IT Department from scratch for a successful startup, and when you helped build the Support and QA departments and have had extensive training and experience in professional support as Dan has, you have the makings of a great technical support manager.  A director or VP would be an idiot not to hire you.

4. Dan is White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant

Some people are dumb enough to make that a reason, so I have to list it.  Computers don’t care what color or gender or race or religion or whether you’re tall or short, skinny, fat, green or purple or whether you worship the flying spaghetti monster.

3. Dan “doesn’t fit in”

Unless you’re stuck on #4 above, Dan fits in almost anywhere.  He has been to about 20 nations, is multi-lingual, attends an Indonesian church, worked for Pakistanis and had very close friends from many nations and all the continents except Antarctica.   And Dan has been to almost as many states in the US as he has been to countries.  He had liberal and conservative friends, Christian friends, Wiccan friends, Atheist friends, Muslim friends, Buddhists, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses friends.  He fits in well with the rich and the poor, the famous and the unknown.  And he deals with political situations with wisdom without engaging in any underhanded behavior.  But, he won’t lie, cheat, steal, take drugs, get drunk, or cheat on his wife to fit in.

2.  Dan could not code in Python or Java on the spot or remember the exact parameters to use in nawk.

If you want someone who is competent and experienced, you will need to hire someone who has forgotten more than most young IT professionals have learned.

If you want someone who is competent and experienced, you will need to hire someone who encapsulates functions, subroutines, classes, methods and keeps the details unique to an operating system or machine or version of software stashed aside into one location so if something changes, you will not have to go through hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of code looking for the parameters or system calls that need to be changed.

So, don’t expect an experienced professional to remember every parameter or switch of every system call.  The neophytes are the ones who remember all the transitory information and have a nearly complete lack of understanding of the foundation that they should focus on instead.

Smart managers hire the pro who knows how to encapsulate and make software highly maintainable, hot performing, scalable, and long lasting.  The neophyte remembers all the parameters of the function calls.l  But, the idiot will hire the neophyte and throw out the experienced pro nearly every time.

1. Dan knows “A” therefore he cannot know “B”

Rarely does an idiot think long enough about this to realize how stupid this notion is.  Dan is a systems guy, therefore he cannot be a developer. He is a developer, therefore he cannot be a manager.  He is a manager, therefore he cannot be technical. He is technical therefore he cannot be strong in support.  Dan plays ping pong, therefore he cannot play trombone.  He plays trombone, therefore he cannot be a photographer. He is a photographer, so he cannot be a mathematician or play guitar or ride a unicycle or fly a plane or speak Indonesian or do network security, performance, web development, database work, software or systems architecture, etc.

For people who don’t know, there is a word called “synergy” where the combination of is greater than the sum.  It applies to people, and it applies to skill-sets.

For people tho don’t know, there is a word called “foundation” where time spent on core skills makes it possible to learn many delta skills very rapidly and effectively allowing a person to become a world class performer in many areas, many of which work synergistically.  Dan does that.  And by the way, in addition to winning awards in many of the above mentioned skills, you can give Dan your date of birth and he will tell you the day of the week you were born on.

But, where does Dan add value?  He adds it by finding out where value is needed.  He will know your company’s vision and goals and your team’s vision and goals and the desires, visions and goals of most if not all the people on your team in a very short time and he will zoom in on those things and attack them with a fury.  Dan works within constraints complying with company standards, seeking them out, understanding them, and his determination to benefit the company greatly is consistently successful.  And he focuses on what’s important to you and the company.

So do away with these ten stupid reasons and hire Dan.  You’ll be glad you did, or someone else will!