Category Archives: bio

bio, living in Italy

Strikes and More Strikes

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Italy’s 155,000 public medical employees are on strike today, led, with unusual unanimity, by all 42 of their unions. The major issue is that their contracts were due to be renewed two years ago (I suppose that implies cost-of-living increases, at least), and have not been, due to disagreements between the federal and regional governments over who should pay. The medics have also issued a multi-point protest document demanding the de-politicization of hospital appointments and more control by the medical personnel of their shifts and how their work is organized, which seem reasonable demands.

Alitalia is also on strike, protesting a restructuring plan for the struggling airline which would cut at least 1500 jobs. I don’t sympathize with this one. The entire airline industry is in trouble; why should we taxpayers pay to keep an ill-managed national airline afloat when better and/or cheaper flights are widely available? I fly low-cost airlines so I can go more places, more often, but I lose that advantage if I also have to pay more taxes to benefit Alitalia employees.

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bio, travel

Fearsome Flying

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“Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said yesterday that he believes security crackdowns over the Christmas holidays, including the cancellation of some passenger flights into the United States, averted a terrorist attack. But intelligence on the threat was so wispy that U.S. officials may never know for sure, he said.”

By John Mintz, Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, February 5, 2004; Page A10

It’s not for me to judge the real level of risk, but here’s a thought: al Qaeda doesn’t actually have to get terrorists onto planes now, they only have to make the US government think they will. The flight cancellations and delays cost millions to the airlines and individuals affected, and scrambling US Air Force jets to escort planes is surely also expensive. Maybe all these precautions prevent real threats from being carried out; no one wants to take the chance, of course. But maybe al Qaeda is just toying with us and enjoying the ensuing mess.

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bio

Melancholy Baby

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I’m no good at flirting. I just haven’t had much practice. There were times in my life when I would have liked to, but the opportunity rarely arose; I seem to give off a “don’t come near me” vibe. The year in Benares, when my female teammates were abundantly grabbed and “eve-teased” by Indian men on the street, no one ever came near me, and few even said a word. I think I scared them off (for one thing, I’m larger than many men in Benares).

So men never approach me, and it’s usually been up to me to make the first move. Which is usually a miserable failure, because most guys don’t like that, either.

There is an exception to the rule, however: when I’m feeling horrible, whether for physical or emotional reasons, that’s when men suddenly get interested. I suppose I look more vulnerable, and therefore approachable. In Washington once, in the deep of winter, I had a bad cold and was freezing my butt off on an outdoor subway platform. That’s when a guy came over to chat me up. Another time, riding home on the bus, I was immersed in my own thoughts, and ill as well. As the bus pulled to a stop, a guy brushed past me, murmured, “I think you dropped this,” and handed me a note. I was so befuddled that I barely even saw him, but I was pretty sure I’d never seen this piece of paper. I opened it up, and it read: “Roses are red, violets are blue, you’re beautiful and I’m in love.” With his phone number. It was touching, but I was already taken.

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bio, opinion

Globalization is Spelled with Three Rs

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The boom years of Silicon Valley will not be returning. Thriving new companies will be founded there, but they won’t create many jobs, because so many white-collar jobs are now being outsourced to India. In future, these jobs may also go to China, Russia, or other countries that have technically-educated workers willing (so far) to work for lower wages than their US-based peers.

To take a typical case: Technical support has long been a problem for high-tech companies. It’s something that customers complain about when it’s bad, but don’t appreciate when it’s good – at least, they rarely appreciate it enough to want to pay for it. Profit margins on software and hardware tend to be slim, and a single support call can eat up the entire margin on a sale. At Silicon Valley salaries, it’s hard to provide support cheaply. But you can’t pay people there less, because they can’t afford to live on less in that very expensive part of the world.

Long ago, discussing with colleagues the costs and difficulties of providing technical support from Silicon Valley, I suggested having email support done from India, which has a huge pool of people who write better English than the average American. (At the time I assumed that phone support could not be outsourced to India, because Americans often have trouble understanding Indian accents.)

A few years after my (then radical) suggestion, this was exactly what began to happen at many companies, for both email and telephone support. Indian third-party support companies solved the accent problem by training their people to speak with American accents and even chat about American topics (discussing baseball from Bangalore? weird). Basic nuts-and-bolts programming has also been shipped off to India – cheaper than the previous solution of importing Indian programmers (on H1 visas) to the US.

By sending jobs offshore, American companies are simply doing what businesses are supposed to do: reduce costs and increase profits. This keeps companies healthy and stockholders happy, and reduces the cost of goods and services purchased by Americans in America. Attempts to “protect” American jobs are likely to – and should – ultimately fail. American businesses are part of a global economy, and will stand or fall by their ability to compete globally. Forcing them to compete on unequal terms, with companies who can obtain essential high-tech services more cheaply, would hamstring them in that battle.

How do we reconcile this with jobs for American workers? Individual American workers are part of a global job market, in which we compete for jobs with people who have lower salary expectations, and often better education, than we do. We can compete by lowering our salaries, or by improving our education.

American education at the highest levels is doing just fine: the scientific and technical programs at American universities are the best in the world. But American citizens are proportionately few in the top-flight PhD programs in physics, mathematics, computer science, etc., because few Americans are adequately prepared at the primary and secondary level to pursue these subjects higher up. Other, much poorer, countries manage to provide such preparation for many of their citizens. How is it that the wealthiest country in the world fails to do so?

The American system of public education has long been cause for shame, and the consequences are now becoming clear: we are failing to prepare our children to compete in the global economy. One of the issues of this presidential election is likely to be offshoring jobs; the first moves towards protectionism are already being made. I’d like to see a presidential candidate address the underlying issue that may ultimately save or ruin the American economy: education to global standards, for all of our citizens.

Unfortunately, some parts of America are heading stubbornly in the opposite direction:

Georgia may shun ‘evolution’ in schools – Revised curriculum plan outrages science teachers, By MARY MacDONALD , The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia Takes on ‘Evolution’ By ANDREW JACOBS, January 30, 2004, The New York Times: “Sarah L. Pallas, an associate professor of biology at Georgia State University, said, “The point of these benchmarks is to prepare the American work force to be scientifically competitive.” She said, “By removing the benchmarks that deal with evolutionary life, we don’t have a chance of catching up to the rest of the world.”

May 3, 2004

The New York Times provides the follow-up to this one: U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences By WILLIAM J. BROAD, May 3, 2004

Also see a New York Times column by Thomas Friedman.

A recent article in the Economist also talks about the globalization of innovation (you may not be able to reach this story unless you are an Economist subscriber – which I heartily invite you to become! It’s one of the world’s best and most internationally-balanced news sources.)

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bio, what I do, working in Italy

How I Got My (First) Job in Italy

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I don’t claim to be a comprehensive resource on any aspect of living in Italy; my reasons for being here are different from some others’: I married into it, which made getting a visa (permesso di soggiorno) and permission to work relatively easy. And that was years ago, so what little I remember about the process is probably out of date. There are sites with expertise to offer about the law and other technicalities; you’ll find some listed here.

When I first arrived here, I had been a mostly stay-at-home mom (in New Haven) since Rossella’s birth, and I was ready to go back to work. I had very little experience in job hunting anywhere, let alone in Italy. One of my major saleable skills was desktop publishing, which in those days was still an arcane art that could be sold as a third-party service. The closest thing I could find in the Milan Yellow Pages was “editoria elettronica”. Neither Enrico nor I was sure what that meant, but I sent off a resumé and cover letter to each of the four or five companies listed. Deafening silence ensued.

I pounded the pavements, taking my resumé to computer firms that might need someone who knew how to put systems together and train people to use them. Showing up with a resumé at an office where no one knows you is not the done thing in Italy; people stared at me uncomprehendingly, and at one place they literally laughed in my face.

I didn’t know what else to do to find computer work. Contacts are all-important in Italy, and I had none in the high-tech field. I did get a few translation jobs, thanks to my father-in-law. This was also the period in which I accidentally became a computer journalist. I could have taught English, but the idea didn’t attract me, and I didn’t want to fall into teaching as a career when I had other skills that ought to be far more valuable.

In June (1991), Enrico had a chance to return to Yale for an academic visit, and Alitalia happened to be offering two-for-one tickets. I figured that, if I couldn’t find work, I might as well go on vacation. So we left Rossella with her grandparents and prepared to take off for a week. This was on a Sunday morning. We were putting luggage into the elevator when the phone rang. I answered it, and the conversation went more or less like this:

“My name is Caffarelli. I received your resumé a while ago. Could you write a software manual?”

“Uh, yes, I guess so.”

I had never actually written a manual, but I had designed and written course materials to train people in using desktop publishing software, and had worked with a friend on a manual he had written for a deep-ocean exploration and recovery apparatus. I didn’t think I’d make a fool of myself in the attempt, at any rate.

When I returned from the trip, I went to meet Fabrizio Caffarelli, who had founded a software company in Milan a few years before. The software in question was for optical character recognition, which I actually knew something about – I had beta-tested some scanners and software, back when a 100 dpi black-and-white scanner cost $10,000. So I wrote the manual, in English, and it was “simultaneously” translated into Italian by Fabrizio’s niece Cristina. We had a great time doing it.

At the end of the six weeks or so that the project took, Fabrizio said to me: “I like the way you work but, unfortunately, I don’t have any more work for you right now.” We parted on good terms, and I recommenced the job hunt (well, not until September — no one does anything in Italy in August). I wrote a few more articles for computer magazines, and began to wonder whether I could write a book about something computer-related, perhaps in Italian. I was casting about for a topic when Fabrizio called, sometime in November. “Would you like to write a book with me?” he asked.

So we wrote Publish Yourself on CD-ROM, published (in English) by Random House. It was one of the first books in the world to include a CD. We didn’t get paid much for writing it (and Fabrizio took the lion’s share of what little there was), but I made some extra money on the deal by desktop-publishing it myself, using FrameMaker software. I also used FrameMaker to create a hypertext version of the book to go on the disc, a skill which was to come in handy later on. The disc mainly contained a demo version of Easy CD 1.0; Fabrizio’s reason for writing a book was to publicize the software by showing how easy it could be to make your own CDs – if you had our software, of course.

By the time the book was published (January, 1993), I was working full-time for Fabrizio, writing software manuals and other materials, and doing just about anything else that came up. (The small-company environment suits me precisely because I get to wear a lot of different hats, and people aren’t so territorial about their jobs.)

Fabrizio moved the engineering team to California in late 1993, and, having conquered the 75% of the worldwide Windows market for CD recording software, sold the company to Adaptec in August, 1995. I was hired by Adaptec and had a very good run with them, and later with the Roxio spin-off, until I quit in 2001. Along the way I helped a few other people find work (hired some myself), in Italy and elsewhere. Most of the freelance work I’ve had since has come through friends: good karma pays off, I guess.

In sum, it’s hard to advise anybody on how to find work in Italy, except in these very general terms: be flexible and patient, meet a lot of people, and when opportunity knocks, be ready to leap on it.

Multitasking

Feb 4, 2004

I said, “I developed a new skill with Fabrizio: simultaneous translation and transcription. If he wanted something written in English, he would dictate it to me in Italian, and I would type it straight out in English. I’m not sure I could do simultaneous translation if I had to speak, but I can do it typing, as fast as he can talk.”

Mike L. responded: “According to recent studies, this is something that (almost) only women can do. The explanation behind this is that the female brain is better capable of handling multiple tasks simultaneously, such as translating and writing. The experiments were quite funny to watch. One person would read a series of words, while the test person was asked to repeat after him. Most of the females managed to speak just a single syllable (sometimes even less) behind, while most of the males had to wait longer. My explanation is that males are equally well capable of multitasking, but one task is constantly allocated to thinking about sex – sex – sex…

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