Author Archives: Tim Newman

Token Leaders

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This story describes a good example of a widespread phenomenon:

Rep. Barbara Lee will be joining the House Democratic leadership team, filling a key void for the caucus after its elections earlier this week left the group without a woman of color in the top ranks.

Lee is expected to fill a new position being created by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to oversee the Steering and Policy Committee, the panel that determines committee assignments for Democrats.

…

The decision to elevate Lee comes as a group of House Democrats, disappointed by both Lee’s narrow loss in the race for caucus chair earlier this week and that lack of a woman of color in leadership, was planning to ask Pelosi to do just that.

Don’t have a minority in a position of leadership in your organisation? Well, just invent a new position, have a minority fill it, and pretend they are now a leader.

This phenomenon was discussed in yesterday’s podcast with William of Ockham, after he spoke of a highly-competent woman who found herself holding down a position which appeared to have been created just for her. When local content legislation started gaining traction in the various oil patches around the world, organisations ballooned as positions were invented to fill with locals allowing quotas to be met. I knew an Azeri who’d previously worked for BP in Baku who told me his department went from about 5 people to 15 even though its function and workload remained the same. He got out of there pronto.

If a functioning, profitable organisation is told to put more people of X in position Y, they are less likely to replace the Y incumbent with X than create new positions with the Y-label attached and fill them with X. So rather than prominent companies hiring female CEOs, they demonstrated their commitment to diverse leadership by elevating the HR function to director level. Some years back I attended a town hall meeting where the senior management of an oil major took questions from the drones on how they intended to deal with an extended period of low oil prices. The assembled big cheeses were all men, except for the HR representative. In the three hours that followed nobody asked her a single question, because unless there is a headcount reduction in the pipeline nobody cares what HR has to say. But as the session was drawing to a close the HR director seized the microphone and delivered a five minute monologue answering questions nobody asked. One must always justify one’s existence in an organisation.

This is probably why some people are agitating for diversity to be separated from HR into its own function: it will open up another female position in the (shudder) C-suite. A few weeks back, as part of my course, I was asked to read this article regarding the high turnover of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs). It contained this gem of a line:

Let’s start with a simple question: What does a CMO actually do? Surprisingly, there is no clear, widely accepted answer.

Followed by:

In our research we’ve interviewed more than 300 executive recruiters, CEOs, and CMOs; conducted multiple CMO surveys; performed an analysis of 170 CMO job descriptions at large firms; and reviewed over 500 LinkedIn profiles of CMOs. We’ve discovered extreme variations in the responsibilities CMOs are given and in the skills, training, and experience of the people who occupy the role.

The article’s main thrust is that the CMO role is ill-defined and CEOs have no idea what to do with them. So how did we end up here? Well, just ask Nancy Pelosi.

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A tale of two protests

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While I was wandering around the centre of Annecy on Saturday I came across a parade of the gilets jaunes – yellow vests – protesting Emmanuel Macron’s fuel tax hike. It was very peaceful, mostly middle aged folk carrying the flag of the Haute Savoie region accompanied by a couple of gendarmes who didn’t look as though they expected trouble. Those marching stopped to natter to locals they passed on the way.

This was in stark contrast to the scenes in Paris over the weekend where cars were tipped over and set on fire, monuments defaced, and shops looted. Judging by the Arabic and anarchist graffiti on display my guess is the yellow vest protest in the capital has been hijacked by the usual troublemakers. In other words, what is going on in Paris isn’t representative of what is happening everywhere else. This is the case for most things in France.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Macron uses the violence in Paris to smear the entire movement. If he does, the division between the capital and the countryside will grow even larger. That won’t be good for anyone.

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The Desert Sun Podcast #004

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Another long podcast, this time with the blogger William of Ockham during which we discussed business, economics, feminism, gay rights, rugby, and more. He lives in Australia meaning we had to do it over Skype, and unfortunately the sound quality suffered greatly as a result. Hopefully the subject matter is interesting enough for you to ignore the shortcomings in the sound. The good news is you can hear my side of the conversation just fine.

You can listen to it on iTunes here, Player FM here, download it here, or listen on the blog by clicking the link below:

If you liked this podcast, please consider supporting me on my Patreon page.

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Enough is enough

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It’s not surprising people are turning to violence:

What began as protests over President Macron’s fuel tax has transformed into general anger at high living costs.

Mr Macron says his fuel policies are needed to combat global warming.

So global warming is an existential threat, is it? Okay, but:

France is heavily dependent on nuclear power, which Mr Macron pledged to reduce to 50% of the national energy mix by 2035 by closing 14 of the country’s 58 reactors.

If global warming is really going to kill us all within decades, the problem of nuclear waste disposal and fear of accidents would seem rather small indeed. That politicians are closing nuclear power stations is proof that even they don’t believe global warming is an existential threat, or even a serious one.

That is on top of the closure of all four of France’s remaining coal-fired power plants and investment of billions of euros into renewable energy.

And that’s what this is all about: elites in government making life more expensive for the ordinary citizen so they can virtue-signal to other elites and the wealthy, middle-class idiots who support them. Like I said, no wonder people are turning violent. I’m amazed it’s taken this long.

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Lost generations

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The other day David Thompson wrote a post on an article in New York magazine featuring various women whose marriages have fallen apart and they’re blaming it on political differences with their spouses. But a perusal of the article and David’s commentary suggests perhaps these women are simply unsuited to long-term relationships, being as they are selfish, deluded, and insistent on making everything in their lives political. There’s also more than a hint of mental illness at work. Consider this from a woman in – you guessed it – Brooklyn:

I’ve been sexually assaulted and raped, but for a long time I didn’t identify in that way. I didn’t like the idea of seeing myself as a victim. It’s only recently, with the amount of coverage [sexual assault has been getting] that I’ve realized, Oh, if I verbally dissented, just because I didn’t fight someone off doesn’t mean I wasn’t assaulted and raped.

You didn’t realise you’d been sexually assaulted and raped until the definition was expanded a year ago by hardcore feminists to include any sexual encounter which is not supervised by two woke lawyers and a (female) high court judge. Now perhaps this woman was raped and assaulted in the traditional sense of the terms, but I rather think if this were the case she’d have realised it immediately, not at the advent of a political movement. And what’s the betting she knew and admired the guy who supposedly assaulted her? Oh, wait:

My husband and I have been together 14 years and I’ve mentioned it vaguely, but I’ve never given him details, partly because one of the guys is still in my life, and they’re kind of friends.

Her husband is “kind of friends” with a guy who raped her? Yeah, Trump’s really the issue here.

Recently we had some friends over for dinner, and we had an argument about whether this kind of trial by mob that’s happened in the press is unfair. My friends, a man and a woman, took the position that a man shouldn’t have his reputation ruined because of an allegation. I disagreed, and as the conversation kept going, I got upset.

There’s a school of thought, held by misogynistic dinosaurs, that women cannot handle robust debate and burst into tears when pressed on a difficult topic. There’s another which says emotionally unstable women make poor dinner party guests.

Finally I said that it’s obvious none of them had been sexually assaulted,

Ah yes, the Natalia Antonova approach to debating.

Later my husband told me he thought my intellectual points were good, but he didn’t respond to the emotional outburst I had.

I imagine he was deeply embarrassed.

But really, I wish he would feel like, Fuck those guys. I want to punch them. How dare somebody treat the woman I love like this? I hate that happened to you. That’s what I’m looking for.

You want your husband to start punching dinner guests because they disagree with your view that men aren’t entitled to due process when accused of rape?

I mean, I wrote to the man who assaulted me, the one who’s still in our lives. He said he didn’t remember, and that it turned his stomach to think I’d been carrying around this thought about him, but he fell short of accepting responsibility.

As with so many of these cases, this woman needs psychological help. Instead she’s got pandering journalists from New York magazine.

Sticking with the topic at hand, here’s a letter to an agony aunt:

I feel like a ghost. I’m a 35-year-old woman, and I have nothing to show for it. My 20s and early 30s have been a twisting crisscross of moves all over the West Coast, a couple of brief stints abroad, multiple jobs in a mediocre role with no real upward track. I was also the poster child for serial monogamy. My most hopeful and longest lasting relationship (three and a half years, whoopee) ended two years ago. We moved to a new town (my fourth new city), created a home together, and then nose-dived into a traumatic breakup that launched me to my fifth and current city and who-knows-what-number job.

To be fair to this lady, she’s at least tried to settle down into a normal life. What I suspect is lacking is a serious investigation as to why her relationships have gone wrong, particularly those parts for which she’s responsible.

For all these years of quick changes and rash decisions, which I once rationalized as adventurous, exploratory, and living an “original life,” I have nothing to show for it.

If this describes the period in which she was in her successive relationships, it explains a lot.

I have no wealth, and I’m now saddled with enough debt from all of my moves, poor decisions, and lack of career drive that I may never be able to retire. I have no career milestones and don’t care for my line of work all that much anyway, but now it’s my lifeline, as I only have enough savings to buy a hotel room for two nights. I have no family nearby, no long-term relationship built on years of mutual growth and shared experiences, no children. While I make friends easily, I’ve left most of my friends behind in each city I’ve moved from while they’ve continued to grow deep roots: marriages, homeownership, career growth, community, families, children.

She at least understands she has a problem and, crucially, that her situation is a result of her own poor decisions. This puts her much further down the road to recovery than most women in her position. Now the advice she gets from the agony aunt us beyond useless, which is a shame because she still seems to be living in cloud-cuckoo land:

I used to consider myself creative — a good writer, poetic, passionate, curious. Now, after many years of demanding yet uninspiring jobs, multiple heartbreaks, move after move, financial woes, I’m quite frankly exhausted. I can barely remember to buy dish soap let alone contemplate humanity or be inspired by Anaïs Nin’s diaries.

Sorry, but this sounds like a middle-class whine that your dreams of becoming an artist never came to fruition, probably because of a dearth of talent and an unwillingness to knuckle down and learn a discipline. What this has to do with your relationship status isn’t clear, but my guess is living with anyone with this mindset would become tiresome very quickly.

The thought that pops into my mind increasingly often is that young women have been appallingly advised, and the horrific results of this are now being laid bare. The trouble is they are still being given the same advice, and many of them are listening. I’m sometimes accused of being misogynistic or sexist for what I write on here, or what I say in the classroom. Whenever my motivations are questioned I simply say I believe the advice being dished out to young women will leave them disappointed, bitter, and desperately unhappy later on in life. I’ve got nothing against women, indeed I’m rather  fond of them, and I’d much prefer to see them living happy, fulfilling lives. Unfortunately, they’re having their heads filled with third-wave feminist garbage by people who see them as expendable pawns in a never-ending political battle they can’t win. Even some women seem to be realising the damage the malign influence of modern feminism is causing:

I’m 50 years old with four college degrees. I was raised by a feminist mother with no father in the home. My mother told me get an education to the maximum level so that you can get out in the world, make a lot of money. And that’s the path I followed. I make adequate money. I don’t make a ton of money. But I do make enough to support my own household.

I want to tell women in their 20s: Do not follow the path that I followed. You are leading yourself to a life of loneliness. All of your friends will be getting married and having children, and you’re working to compete in the world, and what you’re doing is competing with men. Men don’t like competitors. Men want a partner. It took me until my late 40s to realize this.

And by the time you have your own household with all your own bills, you can’t get off that track, because now you’ve got to make the money to pay your bills. It’s hard to find a partner in your late 40s to date because you also start losing self-confidence about your looks, your body. It’s not the same as it was in your 20s. You try to do what you can to make your life fulfilling. I have cats and dogs. But it’s lonely when you see your friends having children, going on vacations, planning the lives of their children, and you don’t do anything at night but come home to your cats and dogs. I don’t want other women to do what I have done.

The crucial line?

Men don’t like competitors. Men want a partner.

The sooner young women understand this, and learn to balance their careers with their long-term life goals, the better.

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Conflicts of interests

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Nothing in this report surprises me:

A rift was growing between Britain and key allies yesterday as European diplomats pushed back on calls for a firmer response to Russia’s weekend naval clash with Ukraine. The fracture in the Western alliance sets the stage for tense exchanges when European, US, and Russian leaders meet at a G20 summit in Argentina later this week.

Anyone want to guess where the fault lines lie? Here’s one side:

Britain, Poland, and the Baltic States have urged other members of the EU 28 to impose extra measures when existing sanctions against Russia are renewed in December.

The calls have been backed by the US.

And here’s the other:

France and Germany, which brokered a ceasefire and tentative peace accord between Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and Petro Poroshenko, the leader of Ukraine, in 2015, are understood to fear such a move could split the bloc and further inflame tensions.

So much for solidarity over the Skripal poisoning, then. One of the most bizarre spectacles in recent times has been the European media and its gullible consumers portraying Merkel and Macron as standing up for Europe against the Putin bogeyman, while Trump is portrayed as a Russian puppet. Yet whenever it comes to actual policy, Germany and France fall over themselves to avoid anything which might damage the commercial interests of their major firms in Russia, and the same media utters not a peep.

Regardless of what the correct approach to Russia is, the double-dealing on the part of Germany and France – saying one thing, doing the other – is inexcusable. Last week Macron was saying he wants an EU army to protect against, among other things, Russian aggression. Merkel’s approach to NATO, Trump, and Russia requires contortions which are seriously impressive for a woman of her age. The hypocritical, self-serving behaviour of France and Germany who, when it suits them, demand ever-more cooperation and integration from smaller EU states is one of the strongest arguments in favour of Brexit.

On that subject, I’m reminded of something I wrote in a post in April last year:

The Baltic states are completely reliant on Nato to keep the Russians out, which in this case means the United States. However, in diplomatic terms (and probably  a token military one as well) it also means the Brits. If we can imagine a scenario in a few years time when the Russians are massing tanks and troops on the borders of Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania on some pretext and revving the engines noisily, Britain will be one of the countries they will be pleading with to intervene (meaning, persuade the United States to intervene). How Britain responds ought very much to depend on how the Baltic states behaved during the Brexit negotiations.

I’ve noticed that Estonians and Lithuanians have said very little during the Brexit negotiations, and the Latvians have been urging caution. I’m sure it’s occurred to them that with Britain out of the EU they suddenly become a lot more vulnerable to malign Russian influence, be it commercial or even military.

This is why I think the EU will ultimately fail. The European continent, and the islands off it, do have genuine shared interests and concerns but the EU is structured along very different lines. These conflicts are now coming to a head, and at some point in the near future people are going to be asked hard questions as to which alliances matter most to them. I expect it will take some pretty ugly scenes before they find an answer.

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Africa’s choice

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I have no problem with this:

Tanzania’s President John Magufuli has said he prefers Chinese to Western aid as it comes with fewer conditions.

It has been abundantly clear for years now that, in the main, Africans can’t stand Europeans and Americans. Several reasons are cited for this, the principle ones being Africa’s treatment at the hands of European colonial powers, the racism of white people towards Africans, and the manner in which western companies exploit Africa. This is why, every time an African leader such as Robert Mugabe delivers an impassioned speech denouncing the west, he is given a standing ovation by his peers. I therefore think it is high time European countries left Africa well alone, quit with the neo-colonialist moralising, and sorted out the mess in their own countries. China seems more than willing to fill any gap left by a European and American withdrawal from the continent, and Africans seem to think they will be treated better by their new partners. Good luck to all concerned is what I say.

China has become a major investor in Africa, challenging Western influence on the continent.

It has promised to spend $60bn in investment, aid and loans in Africa over the next three years, mostly in infrastructure development.

What’s there to dislike?

“The thing that makes you happy about their aid is that it is not tied to any conditions. When they decide to give you, they just give you,” Mr Magufuli said.

I doubt this is true and Mr Magufuli hasn’t read the small print about military bases, mineral rights, and work permits for Chinese nationals, but who am I to argue?

On 15 November, Denmark said it had suspended $9.8m (£7.5m) in aid because of “unacceptable homophobic comments” by a Tanzanian politician.

I thought the era of the white man telling Africans what to say and how to think was over, but apparently not.

The European Union (EU) is currently the East African state’s biggest development partner, giving aid of more than $88m annually.

If the Chinese are willing to match this, and Tanzania’s government is happier to work with the Chinese, then where’s the downside?

The EU announced earlier this month that it was reviewing its policy towards Tanzania because of concerns about the rights of gay people and restrictions on civil society groups.

Not decades of kleptocracy, then?

Homosexual acts are illegal in Tanzania.

There was a time when European overlords would travel to the dark continent and force the local population to abandon their savage ways and embrace western moral values. Then that sort of thing went out of fashion, but it seems it’s coming back. Which leaves me with a question: is it okay to start wearing my pith helmet again?

The World Bank has put on hold a $300m loan for an educational project, partly in response to the government’s decision to expel schoolgirls who become pregnant.

I dunno, maybe the government is trying to dissuade schoolgirls from getting pregnant? How’s western policy regarding teenage pregnancies, incentives, and educational outcomes holding up?

Young mothers would be distracted if they were allowed back in school, Mr Magufuli said in a controversial speech last year.

“After calculating some few mathematics, she’d be asking the teacher in the classroom: ‘Let me go out and breastfeed my crying baby,'” he added.

How uncouth! It’s almost as if these swarthy folk down there need civilising. I don’t suppose just leaving Africans to run their own societies is on the table, is it? Little wonder the Chinese are looking attractive. They might run off with Africa’s entire supply of minerals but at least the locals will be spared lectures on their lack of moral virtue. I can’t imagine any amount of aid money is worth that.

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A Crimean-shaped thorn in Russia’s side

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I can’t claim to know anything about what’s going on in the Black Sea with those Ukrainian and Russian boats:

Sunday’s naval clash was off the coast of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014. Russian coastguard ships opened fire before special forces stormed the Ukrainian vessels. Between three and six Ukrainians were injured.

Ukraine said it was a Russian “act of aggression”. Moscow said the ships had illegally entered its waters.

What I do know is that Russia is probably not playing a very smart game here. When I was in Perth I spoke to a Russian who was adamant that Russia had no choice to annex Crimea in order to prevent NATO warships from being within striking distance of their Black Sea coast. Now you could hold an entire seminar on the delusions Russians subject themselves to when justifying their seizure of Crimea, but I wasn’t going to start arguing geopolitics during a social visit. As I’m fond of saying these days, politics shouldn’t interfere with friendship.

Instead, I said that regardless of the rights or wrongs of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, this will be a thorn in their side for generations to come. There are certain historical events which occur between two peoples at a particular time which one party is able to use as a stick to bash the other in perpetuity. Both the relative size of the parties and the timing are crucial, which allows a certain narrative to form which, regardless of actual facts, never goes away. Russia’s mistake was stealing land from a weaker neighbour at a time when Russia was itself weak and also generally disliked. When Stalin’s USSR annexed land from their neighbours, they were strong enough to brush off criticism and people’s attention was focused elsewhere in any case. Similarly, China’s land and sea grabs don’t seem to have become a stick which their enemies use to beat them, at least not effectively.

But the narrative has formed that Russia illegally annexed Crimea and is illegally occupying it. Even if their administration of the territory is eventually recognised by the international community, this will be an issue Ukrainians and those opposed to Russia’s ambitions will use to thwart them indefinitely. Ukraine is a complete dysfunctional basket case and will in all likelihood stay that way, whereas in 10, 20, 30 years time Russia might have reformed enough to want to play a more positive political, diplomatic, and commercial role around the world. Frankly, nobody knows what Russia’s future holds but it’s at least possible that whoever succeeds Putin might want to involve Russia more in global business, for example. They’re likely to find that, despite any character reforms they’ve undergone, a well-funded and influential lobby group will pop up at every point and turn and say “Ah, but Crimea”.

A good comparison is with Turkey and the Armenian genocide. No matter what Turkey tries to do, there is a small but effective body of Armenian lobbyists who say “Ah, but the genocide”. Like Russia with Crimea, Turkey decided to massacre the Armenians when they were too weak to set the narrative, losing the war months later and being occupied by foreign armies. It probably never occurred to the Turks that, a hundred years later when anyone with even memories of the event is now dead, the issue would be thrown in front of them like a tank trap every time they want to do anything in the US or Europe. I suspect most Turks wish they’d just left the Armenians alone.

The other similarity between the two cases is that neither issue can be resolved. No apology from Turkey can bring back dead Armenians, and I suspect even now the Russian presence in Crimea is so entrenched it can never be returned to Ukraine without enormous upheaval and more human rights abuses. But this is the beauty of it from a fanatic’s point of view: an insoluble moral objection is perfect, because it’s a club that can be used to beat your opponent again and again. Sure, this isn’t exactly productive from the point of view of the person wielding the club, but fanatics aren’t normally motivated by progress. I’m reminded of a comment I read recently from someone who’d spent a few minutes listening to an Irishman rant about the British:

“So what are you going to do, keep protesting until the last 600 years didn’t happen?”

Like the Armenians and Irish, Ukrainians have little to lose by throwing a spanner in the works of their larger neighbour’s ambitions in protest at their perceived historical beastliness (look at the behaviour of the Irish over Brexit, for example). Ukraine won’t suffer for it, and they’ll find plenty of support from whoever Russia has managed to make an enemy of that week. I reckon that, like the Turks with the Armenians, Russians will one day believe Crimea is a lot more trouble than it’s worth and they should have left it well alone. Where this will leave Putin’s reputation among Russians as a geopolitical strategic genius I don’t know.

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Vacuum filled

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Via Whiteboard Technician, this story:

Smith and his colleagues at Shirley Street Watch have become the scourge of low-level criminals in their little corner of Solihull in the West Midlands since they started patrols in January. Police credit them with effectively forcing drug dealers away from parts of the suburb and significantly reducing antisocial behaviour.

While Smith bristles at the term “vigilante”, the volunteers are one of a rising number of groups springing up across Britain as crime surges and police officer numbers hit a record low. Added into the mix is the very low and falling detection rate – 75% of thefts unsolved. Victims of crime are willing to take matters into their own hands.

Regular readers of my blog won’t be tremendously surprised by this. As I’ve said before, the role of the police is to protect suspected criminals from the mob by helping to dispense justice; if the police opt out of that role, the mob will take its place. Now this bunch in yellow jackets in Solihull thankfully don’t look like an African mob who suspect a young woman of being a witch, but we’re heading in that direction. And these groups are sprouting up everywhere:

This week Hartlepool was called the town “where the police don’t come out” in reports about a neighbourhood group formed to try to fill the void left by police. On one recent Saturday not a single officer was on duty in the town of 92,000 as all were called to another job.

Perhaps the police were checking Twitter for racism? Or were they busy putting LGBTQ decals on their patrol cars?

A new Midlands-based group, We Stand Determined, has amassed nearly 3,000 members on Facebook in the past week, with splinter groups already forming in Manchester and elsewhere.

I rather like this development, mainly because it’s focusing minds. Unsurprisingly, Plod doesn’t:

The emergence of these unofficial groups, formed on social media, has led to fears among the police that a new breed of “have-a-go heroes” are putting themselves at risk and jeopardising investigations.

I rather think it’s the lack of investigations which are the problem.

Insp Iftekhar Ahmed, of West Midlands police, told the Guardian he was concerned that well-meaning citizens were “hindering the situation” by taking matters into their own hands.

Ah yes, mustn’t do that now, must we Inspector Iftekhar Ahmed? Far better the British people just meekly tolerate criminals running rampage while the police do nothing. What they’re really afraid of is their own irrelevance.

Ahmed runs the force’s Street Watch scheme of 350 volunteers who patrol neighbourhoods under the supervision of the police, who pay for their insurance and provide a basic training course on safety.

I know nothing about these groups, but if they’re subject to the same SJW doctrines as the regular police, they’ll be useless.

He said: “Citizenship is what they’re doing: look, see, report, don’t have a go – that’s the ethos. They’re a vigilant group, not a vigilante group.”

Spy, snitch, tell…but don’t do anything. Ah, modern policing.

Smith said residents were “majorly disappointed” when Shirley police station shut down two years ago – one of 27 West Midlands police buildings closed as a cost-cutting measure.

…

“We have had a couple of people say: ‘You’re just policing on the cheap.’ But things aren’t going to change any time soon. If you want to make a difference you’ve got to get boots on the ground, you’ve got to get off your arse and do something for your community.”

The fact these groups are being given a sympathetic hearing in The Guardian of all places is illuminating.

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Highest standards of quality and professionalism

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An unsolicited email I received from a Dubai-based recruiter over the weekend speaks volumes about HR standards in the modern oil industry:

Dear Sir,

Greetings,

We are a human resource staffing agency providing highest standards of quality and professionalism. We pride ourselves on our efficient, professional and yet personal services both to our clients and applicants and our ability to supply the right staff complements the recruitment needs of our esteemed clients.
As per our discussion, please find below details:
Company: Qatar Petroleum
Position: Sr. Project Engineer
Location: Qatar
Status: Family Status

Because nothing says “personal service” like a mass-mailing where they don’t even bother to use your name. And highest standards of professionalism? Let’s see.

Interviews are at London, between 9th to 13th December, 2018.

Which is in 2-3 weeks’ time. Rather short notice for an international interview, no?

Please send us your updated CV in MS Word Format and the details below at the earliest.

PLEASE PROVIDE US WITH FOLLOWING DETAILS
Total experience:
Reporting to:
Current salary in USD per month (After Tax): (Basic)
Other Benefits:
Current salary in USD per month (After Tax): (Basic)
Notice period:
Date of birth:
Contact no:
Current Location:
Alternate Email:
Nationality:
Education: Degree / Completion year:

Because I can’t be bothered to take certain details from your CV, I’ll ask you to list them separately. And I’ll twice ask you your current salary even though, quite frankly, it’s none of my f*cking business.

Here’s a snapshot of the job description:

It’s well formatted, isn’t it? And this made me chuckle:

Good luck with that. For quite some time now, oil and gas recruitment has been farmed out to increasingly shoddier manpower agencies engaged in a race to the bottom. The above is typical, and indicative of the standards one finds across much of the industry. You can imagine the sort of candidate they’ll get.

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