Blessed by the Potato

As a gift for defending my thesis, a colleague and friend here got me a pen with my name engraved on it. I, being the pen-losing master, lost it in under 6 months. I was cleaning my desk today and found it again! Over a year later! …goes to show how often I clean my desk, though :(

Well, it looks like the over a thousand Canadians who took advantage of the strong dollar in the last few months and bought cars in the US, only to be turned away by an overly specific rule on immobilizers will get amnesty and be allowed to register their vehicles. This will hopefully keep pressure on the auto makers to keep lowering their prices in Canada. I doubt we’ll see pricing on par, even if the currencies are, but the prices should drop to within 6-10% so that it’s no longer worth the effort… and if they don’t, then I’ll probably be planning a trip down south when it’s finally time to let my car go…

Well, abstract submission season is in full swing, and it looks like it’s going to be a busy summer for me, with conferences in Toronto (may), Victoria (may), San Diego (june), and Chicago (july august). At least nothing is scheduled for the other side of an ocean, or August the fall (yet). I wonder if I’ll get to stay in a hotel while in Toronto, or if they’ll make me commute (though, do I want to stay in a hotel with someone else, when I could just take the subway and sleep in my own bed?).

Right now I’m deep in the depths of rewriting fatigue. There’s a fine art to submitting the same stuff to different conferences, in rewording things to focus on different aspects of a multidisciplinary project to appeal to the audience of each conference. One, for instance, might be frequented by biologists, and so that aspect of the project should be played up, with a minimal mention of the whole MRI thing. The other one may be a conference just about MRIs, so the biology stuff serves as a background for all the cool things we’re doing with our MRI system. And of course, each one has different word counts, so sometimes things need to be exquisitely trimmed down to just the most succinct of summaries, while other times a more liberal vernacular can be applied. There’s a surprisingly large chasm of difference between a half-page 12-point font abstract, and a full-page 9-point one.

The hardest part to tweak for each is of course, the introduction, since it’s usually completely different for each submission, rather than simply (heavily) tweaked. I’m killing myself on that at the moment, just completely drawing a blank as to how to write the one I’m working on at the moment. It doesn’t help, of course, that I’ve turned my brain to mush with image analysis recently, and the increasingly psychotic effects of sleep deprivation.

There was an article in the London Free Press today about a lack of skilled workers in the city. (Note: the LFP has pretty terrible online retention, this article may not be accessible after a week).

A London company is poised to grow, hiring as sales increase — but it will have to expand outside the city.

Autodata Solutions is an example of how the shortage of skilled workers is hurting the city’s economic growth.
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In fact, 62 per cent of companies said they faced a shortage of qualified candidates and another 29 per cent said they had trouble finding people to relocate here.
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The most ambitious of the plans is to bring more than 1,000 students from Fanshawe College and the University of Western Ontario to the London Convention Centre in January to meet with businesses looking for workers.
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For companies such as Autodata Solutions, which cannot find software developers, the labour shortage has had a serious effect.
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Over the last year, the company has hired about 100, and it now employs about 200.

“The problem is we do not need people out of school. We need workers with three to five years’ experience. The issue is skill,” said Lisa Harrison, director of human resources. “I would prefer to grow here; we love London, we’d be happier if we could find people here.”

[Emphasis mine]

This is just retarded. It’s not that there’s a shortage of skilled workers: this is a university town, with way more skilled workers graduating every year than the city can possibly hire all by itself. The problem is with a lack of skilled, experienced workers. But companies have to realize that someone has to hire recent grads in order for them to get skilled. Yes, they’ll need a bit more training, but they also cost less at first, so it’s a bit of an investment, really. After all, someone with 3 years seniority at another company will still need to be trained to the specificities of your company. It might take only a few months instead of a year or two, but it will hardly take 3 years for a recent grad to actually catch up in the experience specific to your company. If nobody in the city hires recent grads, then the grads move away. And once they move, it’s very hard to get them to come back. While many students may come here with a plan to move to Toronto as soon as their finals are done, there must be a substantial portion who would stay if they had a local job offer within weeks of graduation.

As one advances in life beyond graduation, one tends to settle down, start a family, etc. Once that happens, it becomes hard to convince one to move cities for a job. Especially considering how difficult the “two-body problem” is to solve in London. If I am a talented, experienced software engineer, there may be a nice selection of jobs for me. But if my wife is a teacher or librarian, then there might be no work for her, and I might instead try to find a job for myself in a larger city like Toronto or Ottawa, where we could both find jobs. These factors make it much harder to lure someone away from another city as they progress in life, and again the solution appears to be hiring recent grads and training them up within the company. Get them while they’re single, then keep them while they put down roots here, and it might even help reduce turn over down the road.

If indeed this one company in London has hired 100 skilled employees over the last year, how many of those really needed to be veterans, and how many could have been trained in house? If they have a need for another 100 in the next year or two, how much easier and how much sooner could those positions be filled with local recent grads than job searches abroad? Is it better to have a position lay vacant for a year while one searches for an experienced employee than it is to hire a fresh employee and have them trained up by the end of that year?

And, moreover, how much does training cost vs. opening another branch?

The company is looking to add branches outside London and is considering the United States, Guelph and Windsor, where there are workers.

“Our growth will not be in London and the skills shortage here is a big part of the issue,” Harrison said.

There may be skilled workers in Guelph and Windsor at the moment, but with cities that are even smaller than London, how stable is that job market/pool of workers?

It’s been a very busy couple of days here with a few all-nighters while I try to finish off a paper. Consequently, I was taking a nap at around four this afternoon when my landlord stopped by to finally survey the water/mould issues in the basement. She’s full of wacky ideas (I’ve got a whole separate rant in the works about her ideas to fix our problem, which unfortunately is going to have to come later), and relayed more to Wayfare today. I’ll leave it up to her to blog about on her own about the whole experience of the landlord dropping by, but I just had to post her tip of the day to try to prevent break-ins: popsicle sticks. Yes, her brilliant suggestion was that we should glue some popsicle sticks together and make it look like security bars on the window.

Yeah.