TheGarage Tech Blog

I haven’t seen this technique before but I already don’t like it. In my email:

MATRIX Prof Services (MATRIXpServices) is now following your tweets on Twitter.

MATRIX Prof Services may not appear in your follower list. MATRIX Prof Services may have decided to stop following you, or the account may have been suspended for a Terms of Service violation.

I added the emphasis to show why MATRIX Prof Services sucks so bad. Of course they are not following me. It’s all automated: Follow someone, autogen the email alert, unfollow. These sumbitches learn a little something about the Internet and they think they know something. What really sucks is they will get thousands of followers.

If you go to their site let me give you a warning: Many jobs listed by these staffing services don’t exist. You heard me. Vapor ware. A staffing service sells people and to sell people you have to have a big supply of resumes. To get resumes one needs to advertise jobs. To get the most resumes with the fewest ads is why so many job listings on Monster and such have so many buzzwords in them, and why you never get a job from them. No real job is going to have 50 proficiency requirements.

If you work through one of these agencies as a contractor, you need to know how much the contract is paying and how much of a cut the agency is taking otherwise you can’t negotiate a fair deal that compensates commiserate with your skill and experience. Most will not tell you; it’s a take it or leave it deal and that’s how you can know you should walk away.

If they do tell, you might be very surprised to find out you’re making $35/hr on a contract that’s paying $65, or more. If you are a straight up 1099 contractor paying your own FICA and have no benefits that’s a whopping shitload of money you are just giving away for nothing in return. If you are struggling to raise a family, $1200/wk for the length of the contract is a lot of dough to trade for someone running a key-word search on a bunch of resumes and making a few phone calls. $30,000 on a 6 month contract. Just half that amount is the difference between making a decent living and just making it. One person should not have to earn a living for 2 people.

Make no mistake, if you take my attitude, you will find it hard to get work because the corporations who use the agencies, which is almost all of them, care more about saving a dollar than they care about the people who work for them and the agencies have a big, big stack of resumes, remember. Whether the next person is half as qualified doesn’t matter to the agency if next person will take $5/hr less, or even a dollar less for that matter. All they have to do is tell the customer the top candidate became unavailable, but they have these other candidates available, many of whom they may or may not have spoken with in months, if ever.

Given the current economic environment and high-profile business failures, corporations might want to take a closer look at how they staff their technical positions. Continue to let morons staff your critical business functions, such as IT, and your enterprise could fail. Just think, a company using Matrox Professional Services might get their next .NET engineer come from a Twitter spam.

I guess there are some reputable IT employment agencies out there but many, if not the majority, have nothing to offer except for taking a huge cut of what YOU earn. Read this earlier post to get a further idea of what I think of I.T. staffing services, and by extension the companies who rely so heavily upon them.

Related posts:

• Hey, psst, do I have an opportunity for you
• AIG bites the dust but is “too big to fail”
• A Great Opportunity
• ROI Best Metric in Measuring IT’s Value

I don’t care how many top ten lists are posted and couched as invaluable, insider how-to advice on how to blog and make money, it’ still just SPAM. I don’t care how good your SEO is; I don’t care how visually appealing your theme is; I don’t care about anything except that if your content sucks I’m not gonna come back. And neither is anyone else with any sense. Trust me, I know. I’ve had a lot of people not come back over the last many years.

Of course your theme  and search engine optimization are very important, but the bottom line is that any blog about how to make money blogging = SPAM! If you read those sites you are reading spam. No matter how much you want to believe, it’s still spam.

It’s like a wiener in a bun advertising how much money can be made from selling chili dogs. Put some chili, cheese and onions with mayo and mustard and some dill relish on that wiener would you? If you can’t dish out some relish, you are in trouble. If you get into blogging solely as a means to make money, you are a silly fucker; you have bought into a scam. You probably already have paid someone some money, I bet, to learn how to do it. You think you are getting in on a scam on a bunch of idiots when it is you who are, in fact, the idiot. Now I may be mis-underestimating things, but the pool of available idiots is not big enough to sustain all the other idiots trying to sucker them. See pyramid scheme. See Maddoff. See Social Security.

People who write a blog because they love to write and have always wanted to write, and they somehow wind up with a big audience and are able to make some money, those are the guys who inspire me and I am simply amazed by all the fucking morons who buy in to the idea that they can throw up a web page using this trick or that strategy and that they will somehow rake in huge amounts of money–or even moderate amounts of money. These people are likely the same ones who purchase hair transplants or male enhancement pills. Call ‘em a bunch of Smilin’ Bob’s. Such pie in the sky delusions makes Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds seem pragmatic. Come off your trip already!

Want to know how to make money blogging? I’ll tell ya. This is the best advice you’ll ever get: Consistently provide a bunch of great content that people want to consume and that people will want to come back to consume more of. Consistent means over the course of months and years, not days and weeks. See InstaPundit. If you can throw up decent content week after week after week, a Google blackball can’t stop you. You could serve the dish from a 28K dialup line and people would figure out a way to get it.

A series of never ending top 10 lists on how to create a blog to make money, on the other hand, bores me to tears and tends to make me belligerent.

You know who you are.