I got the best job offer ever

Yes I did! No, I wasn't offerred to be the CEO of Microsoft or anything, I was offered to be a senior software engineer (which is my current position by the way), but the offer itself was unbelievable. Well, let me start from the beginning.


Like most people, I have profiles on recruitment sites, like monster and others, where I look at the current openings in the market. There is no harm of knowing where the market is going, and what's your current price in the market. It would also help to find great offers, like the one I got (well, maybe not as great as the one I got).


Since I have a public profile on some recruitment sites (which is not a really very nice thing to do), recruiters and companies can view my profile and cv to contact me directly instead of me having to look for job postings and submitting to them (I'm kind of lazy). Anyway, on February the 21st, I got an email from Renfield Recruitment Agency in London, telling me that Duramex Petrolium PLC (also in London) is looking for all sorts of engineers (petroleum, mechanical, computer, electrical, aerospace, etc.) for an extremely large project. Accepted candidates with more than two years of experience will be given a full time position, while candidates with less than two years of experience will be given a one year contract, which is renewable on satisfactory basis.

Well, all I had to do was to send a copy of my CV to Engineer Peter Wilson on career.renfield@gmail.com, and so I did. I also forwarded the mail to two of my friends whom I thought might be interested of relocating to London. Anyway, on the 26th of February I received another email from Renfield recruitment containing two attachments. The first being the appointment offer and the second being the terms of agreement!

Yup, I was accepted as an employee in Duramex petroleum WITHOUT AN INTERVIEW. The appointment offer said, and I quote "...your placement was based on with out any form of oral interview, from; the RENFIELD RECRUITMENT SERVICES. You should also note that your placement was based on certified information found in your CV/Resume...". I know that my LinkedIn profile is quiet good, but to get me a job offer without an interview? WOW!

OK, here's a summary of the package:

• Monthly salary of 9945.00 British Pounds (YES, thats Nine Thousand Nine Hundred Fourty Five GBP) TAKE HOME (After Tax). I can ask of taking them in US dollars or in Euros by the way.
  
• Full medical insurance for me and my family
• Family accommodation in company community
• Local transportation will be fully provided for me and my family
• A land line and a mobile phone will be provided
• Security in both work place and housing community
• Life insurance
• Complete meals for me and family
• And the list goes on...

Well, who would be stupid enough to turn down an offer like this one? We are speaking of an income exceeding 237 thousand dollars a year, after tax deductions, plus full housing, medical insurance, life insurance, meals, and even a travel allowance on your vacation complete with airline tickets, plus of course the other benefits. This is like an income of half a million dollars per year (if not more). All I had to do was to contact "International Global Visa Rite Services" before the 10th of March, either by email (employment_visa_rite@mail2consultant.com) or by phone (+447045766361), to apply for the immigration visa. I should have paid the fees, and would have been fully reimbursed after my arrival.

Seems like a good deal, right? Actually, it seems too good to be true, doesn't it? Well, yes, it isn't true. I wasn't lying when I said that I got such an offer, but what I mean is that this was a fraud. There is no Renfield Recruitment, no International Global Visa Rites, and above all, the is no Duramex Petroleum! This was a scam from the very beginning, but it was a well played one.

If you google Duramex Petroleum now, you'll find tons of results on the scam, but this wasn't the case back when I got the email in February. I had to search for the company records in the official UK government register of UK companies, and do a lot of googling to find out that everything was a fake (and to shatter my dreams of wealth too :P).

Well, why didn't I blog about this earlier? Stupidity is a good answer. I thought that by contacting the authorities I would be doing a greater good, so that they can catch the villains when they're not taking care, since no one was blogging on them. I was an idiot. I could have been the number one result in Google for Duramex Petroleum by now, but NO, I didn't do that so that not to grab attention to the scam, so that the authorities could do their job. I got absolutely no response from the Interpol. The Scotland Yard website suggested to either go to the local police station (I'm in Dubai, UAE, not in UK), or to report it to the American Internet Crime Complaint Center, which sent me an automatic respond, and no one contacted me after that.

Anyway, this wasn't the end of it. One of the two friends whom I forwarded the first mail to got the same offer (well, same package, but as an IT manager) on the 15th of April. He got it directly from Duramex Petroleum this time, and not through Renfield Recruitment :D. The scammer had launched a fake website using Microsoft Office Live. I contacted Microsoft, and they replied in less than an hour to tell me that the fraudulent website had been closed. They also told me that they have taken appropriate action, and asked me about any information that would aid their investigation. I sent them the info, but don't actually know if a real action was taken against those people or not.

I really want to kick myself for not blogging about this earlier.Here are the links for the Appointment Offer and the Terms Of Agreement I received on the 26th of February. Also here is a text file with all the contact details that I collected from my communications with Renfield Recruitment and from the mail sent to my friend. This file is a part of the mail I sent to Microsoft.

Now just some few tips for you, whether you want to be able to find out scams, or to run your own scams professionally :D

• People contacting you claiming to be a company or a recruitment agent should regularly have a corporate mail and domain, and not emails on Google and Hotmail. Some recruiters do use free mail servers so to reduce the number of spam on their corporate mail system. If you receive a mail from a free mail service, you should at least be a little bit careful.
  
• A large company or corporation should have a website, and it's usually a dot com website not a dot org. The latter is cheaper, and is mostly used with non profit organizations (or people who want cheap domains). Another thing, a corporate website will not be hosted on Microsoft Office Live, Google sites or any other similar service.
  
• If you suspect a website, do a whois lookup to see who's the registrant, and try to make sure that the information is true.
• ALWAYS research the company that wants to interview/hire you before taking some serious action
  
• If relocating to another country, ask friends who know this country about rules, standard of living, cost of living, and salary ranges for people of your experience

Finally, I would like to thank Emad Bakir a lot for helping me with information on UK, and UK companies, and for being the one to tell me that this is probably a scam.

EDIT (4th of May 2008)

Just wanted to add some links to other sources

• A post on Yahoo Answers
• Another post on Yahoo Answers
• Fraud Watchers (that was the only thread available at the time I got the offer)
• My post on java ranch
• Available on a warning page on job scams on Oil Offshore Marine's website

Weird Tattoo!

Today I was in Deira City Center mall with my wife, and I believe that I have seen the weirdest tattoo. I don't know if this was true, or my mind was playing games on me, but I think that I saw a girl with a big (I mean really big) tattoo of McDonald's logo on her back. Most probably I was hallucinating after the the large Subway sandwich I ate. It was weird

JDC 2

Yesterday I attended the annual Java Developers Conference, held in Cairo, Egypt. This event was the main reason I extended my vacation, so that I can attend it before coming back to Dubai. This is the second year EGJUG (Egyptian Java User Group) has such a conference (apart from their monthly meetings and seminars of course). This years event was WAY better than last year's. Well, let me summarize the event for you.

First of all, Ahmed Hashim, EGJUG's leader gave the keynote of the conference, then he was followed by words from the two golden sponsors, Etisalat Egypt and Microsoft Egypt. Yes, you read it right. Microsoft was a golden sponsor for the Egyptian java developer's conference!

I believe that Microsoft found this as a chance to give a better image to the developers, and show them how good they are. I don't believe that they were supporting java, since I've heard from my sources in a Microsoft parter company, that Microsoft did some pressure on them to stop them from sponsoring the event (both last year and this year). I believe that Microsoft thought that improving their image, and promoting port25 and codeplex is worth sponsoring JDC, but since thew would have gained nothing from their partner companies sponsoring the event, Microsoft pressured them to not do it. Anyway, this post is about the event not about company politics, so let's go on.

After the keynote and the sponsor messages, Ed Burns gave a great session on Demystifying JSF. His presentation slides were divided into two parts, but he gave part one only, due to the time constraints. Ed was followed by Hossam Karim (Software Architect at ITWorx) who is one of the eldest members of EGJUG, and a great contributer to the java community. Hossam's session was on "Enterprise Integration: A Service Oriented Architecture perspective", where he spoke about the methods of integrating different enterprise applications from different vendors together, with the pros and cons of each method. He spoke about the types of integration(information portals, data replication, shared business function, SOA, distributed business process and business to business integration), the styles used (file transfer, shared database, remote procedure invocation and messaging) an then he spoke a lot about messaging with its problems, solutions, concepts and implementation. I believe that it was a really great session, but he needed some more time, because the material was quiet large.

We took a coffee and a prayers break, then we went back for the next couple of sessions. The third session was given by Gisele Consoline from IBM Brazil, and it was titled "Discovering Business Driven Development for SOA". This session was one of the worst sessions I have ever attended in my whole life. First of all, I believe that the title should have been "How to use Eclipse for absolute beginners". The "Business Driven" part in the presentation was a sentence she said in the middle of the session that can be summarized as "before you begin coding, take the requirements from the customers, so that you don't code something different from what the customer wants"! As for the "SOA" part, she was not using just any Eclipse, she was using IBM's WebSphere that supports SOA development! Overall the session was a terrible experience for me, especially I was sitting in the front row, so it would have been embarrassing if I had gone to sleep :D.

The fourth session was given by Pooya Darugar, from Microsoft. I don't know if having a Microsoft speaker was part of the sponsorship agreement or not, but the session was nice. The session was titled ".NET and Java Interoperability" (Notice that .Net comes before java in the title :P). The session was really nice. Pooya had great presentation skills and was able to catch everyone's attention. Afterwards, when I was evaluating the session, I found out that the session can be summarized as this: "Microsoft, along with other companies, standardized web services so that .NET and Java web services can communicate with each other, without the need of customization from the web services developers". As you can see, nothing new was gained from the session, but Pooya used his skills brilliantly to make the people feel that it's a valuable session. At the end of the session, he had a couple of slides promoting Microsoft products/sites/technologies, like WPF, silverlight, codeflex, popfly, etc. Overall, it was a good session, but the gain from it as a technical person was just this: "Web services now can work together without any problems, regardless if they are written in java or in .net", which is why web services were created in the first place.

A lunch and a prayer break, then the final two sessions. The next session was given by Ed Burns (again). I thought that he would give part 2 of the first session, but instead he gave a session titled "Enterprise Grade Ajax and JSF", which was really great as well. The last, but certainly one of the best sessions (if not the best) was given by Alef Arendsen, and was titled "Spring Dependency Injection & Java 5". The session was mainly on the new method of configuring spring beans using annotations.

After that, there was the giveaways raffle, where I won my third free book in quiet a short period. The book I won was given by O'Reilly, and it's titled "Enterprise Java Beans 3.0, Fifth Edition".

The overall experience of the event was great. It's not just the sessions, but also meeting people that I haven't seen in a very long time, like Amal Kheirallah from ITWorx Alexandria, and like Mohammed Hamed, Ahmed Rizk and Mostafa Askar who were with me in college, and who I haven't seen in a really long time.

The main thing that I think could have been improved is the crowd. This year, the size of the event was increased to accept about 600 people, which is great, but accommodating all those people in one place made it impossible to have desks for the people to easily take notes, and the crowd on the buffet during lunch was a disaster. I believe that dividing this event into separate tracks will allow more people to attend the event, and there will be less people in each session, causing a less crowd. The area where the buffet is held should have been larger to reduce the number of people in the queues. Other than that, it was a really great day.

The Missing Perfect Processor

On the 23rd of January, I sent an email to the editor of PC Magazine Middle & Near East. Well, I like the content of this letter, so I decided that I would post it as a blog entry here, so here you go.

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I read your February issue article on the "CPU Road Map 2008", and I started thinking about how far we are from the perfect processor. I'm not talking about future processors that are going to have gazillion cores and do everything from simple arithmetics to 3D graphics processing. I'm speaking about the processors that we could have this day with today's technology.

Intel is better in developing transistors; they keep producing smaller transistors each day, giving the possibility of putting more cores on the same chip and reducing power consumption and heat (especially after they created the High-k metal transistor). Another thing is that Intel supports DDR3 with it's greater speed (even though the FSB is still slower than the fastest DDR3) and lower power, while AMD moved to DDR2 recently.

AMD is, and was always, better in their processor architecture. They created the 64 bit PC processor more than a year before Intel adopting it to make it's own EM64T, AMD is not using an FSB to access memory, which is a great advantage and finally, AMD's Phenom processor is going to be a real Quad-Core processor, and not two dual cores glued together.

With the technology available from both manufacturers, we (the consumers) could have had better processors than we have today, especially that each of the two companies is excelling in something totally different from the other. Unfortunately, since they are competitors, and it's impossible to convince any of the companies of sharing their secrets with the other company, then we are never going to have the perfect processor, because there will always be great differences, that if combined would have produced a far more greater processor.

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Well, this was the end of my letter to the editor, and I hope that you like it.

Finally, I won something!!!

Did you know that java ranch is one of the best java communities with one of the best forums around? I'm not saying this because I won a book from them, but because it's one of the largest java communities on the web, where you would find nearly the answer of any java question you want an answer for.

OK, did you know that they have a book promotion that runs nearly every week, where the author of the book goes online to answer users' questions (and of course promote his book)? This promotion runs from Tuesday to Friday, and people who post eligible posts (real questions, answers to questions, discussing the book, etc.) are eligible for winning a copy of that book. Every promotion, there are four winners, and this weeks promotion was on Struts 2 Design and Programming: A Tutorial.

Guess who's one of the winners? IT'S ME!!! Finally I won something, and I'm really glad, to the extent that I'm blogging about it, at the time where the project I'm working in is on crisis, and with more than 8 (yes eight) draft blog posts that I want to still write. Any how, I'm happy, and I thought of letting you know :D.

Welcome Mr. Bush

Bush is visiting Dubai today; HOORAY!! Well, lot's of presidents and VIPs visit Dubai, like they visit any other city in any other country, but this time it's different. This time, Dubai is officially closed for the day! YUP, you read it right. They ARE closing the city.

Well, the story is, for security reasons, they are closing the main express ways that lead into and out off Dubai, including Sheikh Zayed Road (E11), which is the backbone of the city, and since you have to pass by E11 to go to nearly all of the industrial and business areas (Jebel Ali Freezone, Dubai Media City, Dubai Internet City, etc.), the government announced that today is going to be a day off.

Even though I never mind a day off, but I hate when it's for the wrong reasons. I do not accept that a whole city is shut down for the visit of someone, no mater who that person is. I do not accept being a prisoner in my own house because all the roads around my house are blocked because of GWB's visit.

And how much money is going to be lost in that day? All businesses are going to be closed. How many millions of man hours are going to be lost? And how many business deals are going to be delayed this day? How many people in need for hospitals and medical care are going to have to take alternate routes through traffic jams that no one thought possible, because the main express ways are closed, and no one will know how to reach their destinations? How many people are going to get delayed for their flights?

I really hate what's happening, but anyway, I'll try to enjoy my day in the morning by relaxing at home.

Something is wrong between me and the design patterns book

About a year ago, I bought Head First Design Patterns, which is a really great book. I started reading it right away, and I was reading Head First Servlets and JSP together with it while I was on an assignment in Alexandria. Suddenly, something weird happened. I reached the chapter on the command design pattern, and then got back to Cairo to get stuck in crisis mode for two months, which didn't leave much reading time for me. I lent the book to a friend of mine, and kept the servlets & jsp book to read in my free time.

After the crisis mode I had a knee operation to regenerate my torn ACL, had a month sick leave, and went to visit my family in Abu Dhabi, but without the book. Went back to Cairo after that month to get an assignment in Dubai, and I got the book this time, only to leave it on the shelf until I study for the SCWCD certificate from the servlets & jsp book.

When I had time to read it, I ignored it for a while to read The Jesus Papers, which I loved by the way. Finally, I had a chance to start reading the design patterns book again. I revised what I had already read a very long time ago, and again reached the command pattern chapter, and guess what?! I had to travel between Dubai and Abu Dhabi twice a week, since my wife and kid were in Abu Dhabi with my parents, and I was in Dubai for work. Of course this didn't leave me any reading time. I went back to Cairo a couple of weeks ago for ten days, where I didn't even have time to sleep. I'm back in Dubai, and I have the book with me, and I hope that I would be able to start reading it again. Wish me luck.