How NOT to get a job at a library as a student worker

[thewayne]

We employ two students each semester part-time. There are two basic qualifications to get hired: you must be receiving financial aid, and you have to pass an interview and a basic computer literacy test.

We had a new guy who started this fall semester unexpectedly quit on us last week before the semester ended. That was a bit annoying, having to rejigger the schedule with no notice. And if you quit, well, we're not going to bring you back. So we start looking at applications. And find a young person who allegedly wanted to work with us.

Their interview was this morning. And it became a "not only no, but hell no."

Well, this person was receiving financial aid. Completely blew the second half.

It rapidly became apparent that they held what we refer to as the 'Google View' of the information universe, that is, that all information can be found via Google searches. Well, it can't. There are huge tranches of information that aren't indexed by Google and never will be. The astronomer and author (of the Cuckoo's Egg, recommended read*) Cliff Stoll said it quite nicely in one of his books, though he might have been quoting someone - I can't remember - but the saying was that the internet is an information resource infinitely wide but only a millimeter thick.

ANYWAY, they were asked the question: what programs or activities would you like to see in the library to encourage students to use it. And the reply was "Well, people will use the library or not, libraries are on their way out." Yep, the Google Answer. Everything you need to know is online.

Additionally, they needed to complete a very basic Microsoft Word exercise. Load a document off a thumb drive into Word, follow the instructions in the document to make specific changes, save the doc, close it, return the flash drive. Should take no more than 5-10 minutes. 30 minutes later, they were not done. My boss goes to see what's happening: they'd plugged the drive into a monitor port that was not connected to the tower PC. Apparently they were not very familiar with PC hardware and couldn't be bothered to look at cable pathways to see if a USB cable lead from the monitor to the PC. Some basic PC knowledge is also considered useful for the job, as is asking for help if you're having problems, not wasting a half an hour of time.

"Thank you for coming, we'll be in touch." Or not, in this case.

* * * * *

*Cliff Stoll was an astronomy graduate student at Lawrence Berkeley Nat'l Lab (LBNL) in 1986, he ran out of grant money and was given the task of finding why two different computer accounting systems were off by SEVENTY FIVE CENTS. And he found it: in an account of a professor who was on sabbatical and out of the country, and thus did not have computer access - keep in mind that at this time there was the internet, but mostly only available at universities and gov't labs/military bases. No World Wide Web, that started in the early '90s.

Cliff was not a programmer, at this time he's an astrophysicist working on a PhD. To find what caused the error, he taught himself programming to understand the code of the two accounting systems to find out why the discrepancy.

Unix, in a server environment, has/had an internal accounting system for billing time/resources against individual accounts. On top of that, LBNL had written a second accounting system for whatever reason.

In studying the code, he figured out that a properly logged-in account would be accounted for by both accounting systems. But if someone hacked into LBNL's system, there would be a discrepancy because the hackers knew about the Unix accounting system and how to bypass it. They didn't know about the second accounting system and thus didn't know to bypass it and thus generated the discrepancy!

Stoll kept digging, and uncovered - I kid you not - an East German spy ring! They hacked into LBNL's system and used it as a gateway to bounce around the internet and get into various government and military networks across the country.

And it was all discovered because of a seventy-five cent error.

Cliff wrote two other books, Silicon Snake Oil and High-Tech Heretic. The quote about the internet being a millimeter deep came from, I think, Silicon Snake Oil. But as I said, I highly recommend Cuckoo's Egg, it was made into a PBS movie! All three books are fun, and I think Cuckoo's Egg includes a cookie recipe.

The spy ring incident also resulted into a pretty gruesome murder and conflagration in East Germany when the identities of some of the people involved were subsequently uncovered by police.

Comments

[elayna]

I know a woman who believes that no one needs to be an expert in anything, except on how to search online for information. So you can duplicate 7 years of medical training with bopping around WebMD-type sites, I guess. I find it so absurd, I can't even engage.

[thewayne]

Now, the sad thing is that there is a point where you do have to become your own medical advocate to get anything done!  We had to do that with my immune system collapse.  But most people who use Dr. Google don't do a good job and are wrong.  But I agree with you, and a lot of those people have loud voices and eventually start complaining that libraries cost too much "of my tax dollars".

[dewline]

I also tend to doubt that we're going to see the end of the libraries - public and private alike - any time soon, barring a total disaster for human society. We're still going to need them as much as we need the Internet.

[thewayne]

I am concerned with the rise in successful challenges in school and public library book bans.  In a couple of cases the result has been libraries losing funds and closing!  Mostly academic libraries, like mine, have not been hit by these.  But we are concerned and watching.

[melita66]

Agree on Cuckoo's Egg! I watched it first on PBS (Nova, I think?) and distinctly remember that there was a scene that strongly implied/kinda showed Stoll and his girlfriend in the shower. When I got a copy years later on video, it had been cut. I still have a copy of the book. I'd helped my mom out with some mainframe jobs at her work at Ohio State and taken a SNOBOL community class there in the early '80s so I was already familiar with the billing and picking up printouts, etc. I found it very interesting seeing more of the behind-the-scenes setups.

[thewayne]

Ah, SNOBOL!  Been a long time since I've heard THAT name!  I never studied that one, always wanted to.  MUMPS was another one I wanted to learn.  I knew COBOL quite well from my studies, but only wrote one production program in my early days: a crosstab report that our database system didn't know how to generate.  It was a Wang Mini, we had both a 7150 and a 7300 and though the database was fantastic, it only did basic reporting.  Then everything started going micro and I moved on to Microsoft SQL Server for the rest of my career.  Now I do most of my playing in Python, though I'd like to learn more of Rust and R and PostgreSQL.

[disneydream06]

WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I would have shown him the door as soon as he said Libraries were on the way out. :o :o :o
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

Yeah, I wasn't there but that pretty much ended the interview from what my boss told me. :-)

[disneydream06]

I wish him a LOT of luck. :o

[kaishin108]

Those potential employees, yikes! I hope you have a few others to interview.

An East German spy ring?! My goodness!

[thewayne]

We don't have problems filling positions.  The library is a great place for them, easy work load so they have lots of time to do homework and a nice environment.  And lots of access to books and databases to research! As I said, I highly recommend Cuckoo's Egg, as both the book and TV movie.  Very interesting stuff.

[kaishin108]

Yes, it seems like a great place for them to work.

[julian]

Lrn 2 Interview, guy.

[thewayne]

Yeah, didn't even know about the 'fake it 'till you make it' rule.  While there is a time for brutal honesty, it's not when you're trying to get a job.  And who knows, when you're in the place, you might learn that your opinion wasn't very accurate.

[kraig]

Imagine learning things at an institute for learning!

[thewayne]

facepalm Whould'a thunk it!

[gingeriana]

why having financial aid is a requirement?

[thewayne]

That's a good question.  The financial aid is a benefit to the student, the work aspect is to give them a little bit of job training and a place to study when it's slow and it gives them a job reference for young students.  The jobs can be in any number of places on-campus.

[silveradept]

The short answer to that is "because the federal work-study program provides dollars to institutions to hire students that don't have to come out of their own budgets, but the students hired have to have qualified for and accepted federal student aid to receive those work-study dollars."

[thewayne]

Ah, thank you, SA!  Makes sense, I didn't know about the Fed connection.

[silveradept]

Work-study was always part of my aid package for my undergraduate years. It's how I got paid for officiating intramurals and playing in pep bands that came with paychecks. (And also in being a front desk clerk at a specific institutional library.)

[silveradept]

Ouch, that's a pretty strong failure on the interview candidate. All the same, as a practitioner, there are a lot of people who don't know how to do that part with the USB drive and nobody has taught it to them, on the assumption that "everyone knows" by now.

[thewayne]

I do agree.  It's a computer knowledge a bit above base.  But at the same time, if something isn't working and you've been at it for more than 5 minutes, why didn't you ask for help rather than waste another 25 minutes?  We could have easily moved them to another computer or shown them to insert the flash drive into another jack.

[silveradept]

Indeed, and also, some people either have too much pride or are convinced that were going to fail someone if they ask for help in an interview. There were other reasons to pass on your candidate, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are other places out there that will terminate the interview immediately if you ask for help on something.

[fairy69]

And people are depending on the young to save the future. LMAO!!!!

[thewayne]

They aren't going to be much different than the generation that came before them in terms of some being information literate, some info illiterate.  There's good 'uns and bad 'uns.