next in series: Starmedia runs an illegal lottery to raise its profile

Over the weekend I set up a whistle-blowing site to expose all the illegal activities of my former boss, Alex Cholella of Starmedia.ca and 770star.com, and this morning emailed links to the people he's conned, scammed, etc., as well as to the Justice and Education ministries, and about 100 other places.

The timing was perfect - it was the same day he's trying AGAIN to re-re-re-re-re-re-launch his lousy group buying site, 770star.com - and I had emailed a few of the people he listed as supporters. One of them denied any connection whatsoever within a few hours.

Of course, he was totally freaking out, so he did the only thing he COULD do - he complained to iWeb, who suspended the account.

Now, if you're like me, you haven't completely disabled advertising on slashdot because you want to see what's going on ... and iweb is a BIG advertiser on slashdot and a bunch of other tech sites.

So, I'm in the process of converting the site into static [pages which I'll make available (along with the images, etc) for anyone to download and host anywhere. In the meantime, I'm going to post the text of each article, so you can see why he was so scared. Next: Starmedia runs an illegal lottery to raise its profile

Here's one of them:

(Ab)using interns and government job retraining programs

Friday, June 10 2011 @ 09:45 EDT

Submitted by: barbara

Job scams

Summary: How Starmedia Communications fails to provide any sort of proper on-the-job learning experience, the John Abbott Web Developer training program fails both the students and the taxpayers who are footing the bill to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per student, and government job training programs are abused.

"Gubbermint Cheez 2.0"

When I was hired to work at Starmedia Communications, I was told that part of my job would be mentoring several job interns from the John Abbott Web Technology Program. It turned out that Starmedia depends heavily on the free labour provided by this program.

First, the hidden costs to the taxpayers

These courses are free for the student (well, except for a $75 testing fee, a $30 application fee, $261 in registration fees, and between $800 and $1000 for books ... ouch, that's not so free after all). Here's what each student costs the taxpayers:

Tuition for the Web Technology Program is paid for by taxpayers; the figure that I heard bandied about by a government worker was that each course costs, on average, between $10,000 and $15,000 per student.

Continuance of the job trainees' employment insurance benefits, at a cost of up to $468 a week ($24,336 for the year)

Bus pass ($72.75 a month or $873 for the year).

Total direct costs to the taxpayer (does not include the cost of managing these programs) of up to $40,000 or more per student.

Multiply this by thousands of job trainees and we're looking at millions of dollars - and if what I saw of the interns from the John Abbott program is any indication, it's a complete waste.

Read on for a look at 3 interns from the John Abbott Web Technology Program between October 2010 and January 2011 ...

First up, a web monkey who is afraid of his computer

Let's call him "Poor Dave" (not his real name). Poor Dave was obviously out of his element, and I really couldn't figure out how he ever got into any sort of computer-related job training program, even though he was Alex Colella's next-door neighbour.

Then I found out that the employer gets to see all the resumes, and picks who he wants. That explains how Alex picked Poor Dave, and why Poor Dave was given what could only be termed the crappiest computer in the house, the worst display, and spent all his days working on one small aspect of one unimportant web site.

Here are the qualifications laid out for admission by John Abbott:

Secondary V diploma or equivalent diploma

Knowledge of word processing

Basic knowledge of computer fundamentals

Experience with the Internet

Keyboarding/typing an asset

Successfully passed the "logic and problem" solving aptitude and computer application tests Interview by the admission committee to evaluate the match between the candidates' learning and career goals and the teaching objectives of the program

"Keyboarding/typing an asset????" Are you serious? Listing this as "an asset" means that it's optional. There is no way that someone who can't type and who isn't comfortable with a keyboard and mouse should be considered for any sort of web development program - this is manifestly unfair to both the student and the taxpayers who are footing the bill.

Interns like Poor Dave are one of the reasons why 5 months of "work" can be replaced in 5 days, and why clients should be forewarned if a student is going to be put in charge of their web site, so they can decide if they can tolerate the risk of extensive delays and failures.

Pity Poor Dave, and the taxpayers who had to fund this.

Next, a full-time job retraining student who skips out to go to work

People considered for this job training program are supposed to be devoting their working hours to the program - not to another job. In fact, they are not supposed to be working or taking other courses.

So we have a second intern, who I'll call "Brett", who is milking the system, with Alex Cholella's knowledge (he told Alex that he had to leave whenever he got beeped because he was also training to become a firefighter).

"Brett" provided some rather interesting times. For example, he removed several fields from a database because "they weren't being used", and all of a sudden credit card transactions were being lost AFTER the customer was being billed.

Think of it - the customer gets charged by their credit card company, but the web site has no record of it.

Businesses everywhere are praying that "Brett" gets a job ... with their biggest competitor. Having seen the low quality of the code he produced, his refusal to follow guidelines, and the poor match between his attitude and what's required in a programmer, his "training" was a waste.

When I asked just how much database training the students actually received, the 90 hours listed in the curriculum was in reality only 1/3 that. I would have to score this as a failure all around:

The student was not supposed to be in this program while training to be a firefighter;

The instructors didn't follow even their meager curriculum;

Alex once again assigned unskilled labour to a critical part of the same project that had already failed several times;

The program administrators didn't have controls in place to detect any of this

The student contributed to the problem by continually rejecting advice and instruction;

Finally, an intern with a clue

I'll call the last intern "Dan the Man." He was generally able, with the occasional show-and-tell or a bit of give and take, actually get work done mostly on his own initiative. He knew when to ask questions, when to explore on his own, etc. However, absolutely zero credit goes to the job training program. It turns out that everything he knew, he was self-taught before he ever entered the program.

This helps explain why the gaps in his knowledge were fewer, and why he was able to see the deficiencies in both the John Abbott program and Alex Cholella's so-called "management skills".

What did he learn at Starmedia? He learned that Alex Cholella was ready to resort to pressure tactics such as refusing to give him an evaluation by the deadline if he didn't respond favourably to pressure not to reveal the problems at Starmedia.

When "Dan the Man" tried to discuss the unsuitability of Starmedia as a learning environment with Alan Gaudet (the John Abbott Program Coordinator for student intern work term placements), he was told that "perhaps it's best not to look too closely."

I really should email him to see if this "policy" is going to be carried on to the new Internet Programming & Development job training program.

M-I-C ... K-E-Y ... M-O-U-S-E

The "Web Developer" program is what we used to call a "Mickey Mouse course" - except that instead of being a couple of easy credits on a transcript, it's a very expensive waste of time and resources. It also sets students up for failure, since there is no demand for an "assistant to the webmaster", and anyone graduating from this program who is relying solely on the skills they learned in the program and the "real world experience" they gained from Starmedia is going to face some real challenges.

The real beneficiaries are Starmedia, who gets free labour that can't complain without being threatened with not getting a favourable (or any) evaluation, the instructors at John Abbott who don't even follow their own curriculum, the government and academic program administrators who haven't lived up to their responsibilities by having proper controls, reporting procedures, and audits, and the politicians who can say "we're doing something about the jobs situation.'

The real losers are the students who take these courses and find out a year later that there's no real job at the end of the rainbow, and that when job counselors said that "job prospects were good", it was only because of the high turn-over due to an overabundance of workers, declining wages, and generally poor work conditions.