Category: Job Search

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And then there’s this…

Ouroboros

I sometimes find myself in the most interesting discussions.

This one came about when a Friend asked how a couple of interview / tests had gone in the past week. 

Group

Friend:
Any news?
 
wwducat:
Nope.
 
Friend:
Sorry, does that necessarily mean anything?

wwducat:
I don’t think so. There were a LOT of people taking the tests, the last test had six essay questions. I think it’s simply about them grading the tests and as you know essay questions are highly subjective.  My guess is that there were at least 50 – 60 people total competing for the positions.

ISP Server Racks

Friend:
None more qualified than you

wwducat:
Based on the conversations I heard prior to the testing, these folks were Seriously qualified!  Fierce competition.

Friend:
Were they all for the same position or were there other positions being tested then as well?
 
wwducat:
All for the same two positions.  These guys knew their stuff every bit as well as I do and much better in some cases, because like me they’d been in the trenches.  Some of them knew stuff about fibre optics that I never thought to ask.
 
Friend:
That surprises me.
wwducat:
Others in the group knew configuration of really high end routers, the kinds of routers that your ISP uses for entire cities.
 
Friend:
But you have the user relations experience.

Get Out

wwducat:
Yes I do have user stuff.  Surprised I don’t know things? Believe me that shouldn’t surprise you, it’s normal.  In technology, you tend to get specialized. You bring some things to the table and others bring different abilities. Successful teams hand off tasks to the person or persons within the group that is best suited to perform those tasks. 
 
It’s an almost organic thing, which is why it hurts so much to be layed off or transferred.  You lose contact with those parts of you that you are as reliant upon as your left and right hands. Then you have to find another team where you can be an integral contributing member.  That’s the problem with a lot of “outsiders” including management, they don’t look at a team as an entity, they see only the parts.
 
Friend:
So alien to me since I work so much alone.
 
wwducat:
My specialization / Talent is user interfaces. Either in communicating for the team or in testing software that the users access. I’m usually the coordinator of resources, and the “go to guy” to obtain resources so the team can move forward.

Buss & Tag Terminators

I understand the technology, and leverage that knowledge to help the team. I also am usually the team historian and the guy that members of the team brainstorm with when they’re stuck. 
 
Because I’ve been around forever and Can relate everything I’ve ever encountered to the new stuff I help by providing new perspectives or a different view of a particular problem.  That function requires building trust between myself and the team members.

Friend:
And trust is critical.

wwducat:
Very! I have to be willing to tell them that I don’t know something, and ask that they explain it to me. And they have to be trusting enough to lower their guard and admit they don’t know something or that a problem has them stumped.
 
Then we put our heads together and call upon other resources from the team directing our energies toward a resolution. No one is criticized or derided about it. The focus is about all of us doing our job and learning in the process.
 

Cabling Evolution

Friend:
That’s a team.
 
wwducat:
These abilities are not shown by tests, or speaking with HR representatives. The only people that get it, are people that have been there, themselves.
 
Unfortunately over the past 10 or 15 years teams aren’t often perceived as entities, they’re seen as individuals and any person that appears flawed is replaced instantly, often without telling the team. This results in critical data being lost. I’ve referred to it as Tribal Data, because sometimes things are done in a particular way that is not immediately obvious to an outsider.  Those “special” things are done because they work not because they’re part of a policy or procedure.
 
When you have a lot of churn in corporations or a stressed group of individuals who never become a team, fewer people have ever had the experience of team work.  
 
Instead they’ve only dealt with Machiavellian machinations that lead to promotions and raises by eliminating people in your way.  These kinds of office politics have become commonplace and the sense of teamwork is becoming more rarified.
 
Wait!?!!? Isn’t that kind of like the academic world?

Friend:
Too much so.
 

Bad Boss

wwducat:
It would be a cruel irony if american businesses were falling behind, not due to degradation of skills but instead due to the most negative lessons learned in institutions of higher learning.  Especially when so many college graduates can’t seem to write a cogent sentence.
 
Friend:
But the academy is becoming more of a business- money driven and sales defined
Some of my colleagues argue grammar is a vestige of colonial patriarchal oppression. And they’re teaching writing.
 
wwducat:
So we could be looking at a college, business, college, self perpetuating model. Oh crap whats that snake thing eating it’s tale?? Ouroboros! that’s it.  A never ending  cycle of education & business eating and creating itself at the  same time.
 

Plato

Friend:
Education now is the process of technical training.
 
wwducat:
Sadly from what I’ve seen, in general the technical training isn’t all that good.
 
Teach me how to find things, teach me how to teach myself, teach me philosophy, and ethics, teach me that learning is a lifelong pursuit not an end state,  teach me that independent thought is equally important to equations and sums.
 
Friend:
To think critically, to express yourself effectively, to know where to go to find information.
 
wwducat:
Teach me the value of duty, and honor, and how bad choices lead to bad things and that there may be shades of grey but that the best choice is the choice that is mostly white. (Meaning good, not the great white way.)  
 
I’m such a dinosaur,  I’ve held many of these philosophies to be true the majority of my life.
 
Friend:
And that life is more grays than black and white.
 
What does that make me?
 

Gravitional Quantum Physics

wwducat:
You’re T-REX!
 
I’m probably more like one of the smaller Raptors.
 
Friend:
I’ve had to learn about life being shades of gray. I was taught it is all b/w.
 
wwducat:
Oh respective histories are similar, I too had those lessons. While I think there is  value in a B/W philosophy and it should really be the “Ideal”. 
 
Practically speaking, humans are not computers, and not all situations lend themselves to a binary outcome.  There is always fuzz in the stuff to the right of a decimal point.  AKA Chaos theory.
 
The best I can do it navigate toward the white and get as close as I can before the time element collapses on a particular choice / outcome scenario. 
 
So That’s how some of my day gets spent. Nonetheless it makes for an interesting blog post.
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Reflections

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It was my birthday last week.

This one is a strange one.

I am the same age my father was, when he died. It messes with your head, I’m a young guy.

When I look in the mirror, at first glance I see myself in my early 30’s

When I look deeper, I see grey around the edges. The beginnings of that awful “Chicken Neck” thing that happens in some of my family.  Some blotchiness in my skin, a bit of sun damage and crows feet. My beard and goatee aren’t nearly as youthful as they once were. I take a moment in the steamy mirror to contemplate the changes and decide either due to reality or my ability to delude myself that I’m still not “OLD”.

The grey at my temples doesn’t look bad, the sprinkling of grey throughout my hair is still easily hidden with a shorter hair cut and even the slight recession in my hairline isn’t a disaster.

Then I flash on Dad lying in the hospital bed. With a little imagination I can strip away the ravages of disease and I see a guy that looks remarkably like me. It’s strange and disconcerting to think that If Dad was alive today he’d be in his 70’s and probably still spry and active. He’d certainly be able to hold his own in a political discussion.

Billy 20 7785

What would my Dad think of things as they are today? Would he be pissed, or would he have just given up; realizing that the battles he’d be trying to fight have already been lost?

Oddly, and something that spooks me deeply is that my life has mirrored my father’s in many ways.

Dad made his own way, he started businesses and generally was successful. He had a nice home, nice cars and a successful business when I was a child. He decided to “Check Out” of the ratrace in his mid 30’s and moved to Tennessee. He built a beautiful home, (or so I’ve been told) I never saw it completed. The house burned and Dad was back to square one.

666940 macro image of an old circuit board with transistors

Unfortunately, for dad, time passed and he’d missed a large transition from discrete electronic components to IC packages. This meant that he had a lot of catching up to do if he wanted to return to office dictation equipment sales and repair. I don’t know if he was ever successful in making that transition, we lost touch with each other for a while.

The next I heard he was in Florida again this time putting together an custom office furniture business where he built all the furniture. I lost touch again then heard from him when he told me he was in Sarasota building and selling houses. Again I gather that he was pretty successful, he must have been in his late 40’s by then.

Next I heard, he was in South Carolina. He was living with his Mom and starting another business. This time in cabinetry, That’s where his time ran out.

Resilience is one word I think of when I think of my father. He did all he did with a high school education, Navy training, determination and raw smarts. 

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In the late 70s I got into computers. By the mid 80s I had been kicked in the teeth, done a bankruptcy, and was clawing my way back up the heap. For the most part I was successful, I was working in an industry that didn’t care what school you went to. All they cared about was your ability to fix shit, make shit, sell shit, or support the shit that had already been made, or sold.

I did quite well for a long time and never thought about going back to college. After all experience trumps book learning any day of the week right?

Well, it did… back in the old days. By the mid ‘90s those of us in the industry were beginning to notice that H1B1 visas were taking positions that we would have recommended our friends for. Often we didn’t even know there were openings in the department we were working in.

Jobs got harder to get.

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California entered a slow death spiral that continues to this day. Suddenly your college pedigree was the most important thing regardless of how much experience you had. 

Then the layoffs happened.

Like my Dad at this age, I’m trying to find and create a new place in the world for myself. College? A new career? A complete change, or only a partial change? Do I want to return to the tech rat race, or would I prefer to do something more interesting? 

I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m running out of time.

I’d expected to retire from the last tech company I was working for, maybe I was retired… 

Must’ve missed the memo.

Lately, it seems that nothing I’ve tried has worked out as expected, perhaps “as needed” is a better description. 

I’m not the only person in this situation. I’m still hearing about friends that are bailing, either out of their careers, or California. 

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I’m starting to get over the weirdness of this birthday,

I’m at a place in my life I’ve been before… It’s the “fuck it all, cinch up my bootstraps, and start kicking some ass” point.

I thought perhaps I didn’t have the strength to do it all over again. I’m tired, I’d grown sick of the bullshit in corporate America, but it’s all I know. I’ve wanted to just give up, to allow myself to just be swept aside, to accept that my fate was not my own and be a victim.

Then I think of Dad, he didn’t have the time to reboot his life.

I think he’d understand what I’m feeling now, then I suspect he’d say “Now that you’ve gotten that off your chest, GET OFF YOUR ASS!”

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OK Dad, this one’s for you…

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Working on reworking my resume

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How do you take a 30 year career and convert it to a blipvert?

Blipvert is a reference to a movie called Max Headroom where a new form of advertisement in a slightly dystopian future was blasted into the general populations brains. The problem was that at some point the bombardment would cause your head to explode.

My resume is dated, to be sure. I’ve been looking at articles and suggestions about generating the attention necessary to get your resume past an idiot HR person and into the hands of an actual hiring manager.

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Apparently you need to create a resume that caters to the short attention span, so prevalent in todays young people.

I was wondering if I could create a Twitter version that might actually be read.

Exp Technical SQA prsn, no threat to your job, looking for employment. HMU if pos avail pay needed = min wge or better. Amer Citzn, Ntv Eng

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Blast it out to every single corporation with a Twitter account. Who knows, It might actually work. Maybe I could get my 15 minutes of fame and cash in like the Kardashians.

I’m half serious.

The problem is that my resume is, uh, diverse.

Hey it’s not my fault, the 80’s and 90’s were  tumultuous time in the high tech industry.

It’s not like today when everything is like the Linkin Park song “When they come for me”

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Part of the lyrics say “Everybody wants the next thing to be just like the first.”

What that means to technology is that more and more of the tech has all the originality and creativeness of building a toaster.

The diversity of my resume is seen as a demerit not a plus. Rather than an HR person looking at it and saying “Gee, this guys has been in the industry since the beginning and has done quite a bit they look at it and say why has this guy been at so many companies?

They don’t think about the mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, and “leading edge” technologies that fell by the way side.

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Most of the HR people today are barely in their 20s and they have zero clue about life pre cell phone or iPod. Most of them never consider that a lot of the technology surrounding them wasn’t in existence 20 years ago. They have no sense of history and even less interest in learning about it.

There are three contract positions on my resume that illustrate my point elegantly.

Ameriquest Mortgage, Washington Mutual bank, and Countrywide Mortgage

Yep, I worked for all three of them and they are all gone now.

Here’s some more:

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Kentek Information Systems, Peerless Systems, Konica Business Technologies, BlueKite.com, Splash Technologies

Kentek is gone and has been for a while. Peerless is still limping along, where they once had a floor and 1/2 of a building in El Segundo the last I heard they were down to just a few offices. Konica merged or was purchased by Minolta and while the office still exists it’s not the development office it once was. BlueKite.com, GONE! in a particularly ugly way, as is Splash. The remainder of Splash was absorbed by one of their competitors.

I’ve got more…

Suffice it to say that unless someone is printing a score card there is no way a 20 something HR person could come close to understanding what the business was like, or the reason that someone like myself would have such and extensive resume.

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Especially when they’re looking for the cheapest newbie out of college they can lay their hands on.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that but sometimes experienced people just want to work and they don’t care so much about climbing the corporate ladder or the money. We just want to do good work, and live our lives, and leave the ladder climbing and Machiavellian machinations to the young.

I’ve been in management, I’ve been a real manager and a manager in name only. I’m not looking for that career path right now.

If I was offered a management position where I was really a manager and not one in name only, I’d consider it.

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I don’t want to have the title and simply be the scape goat for someone above me that’s calling the shots but serving up their “Managers” when things go badly.

I’ve been there, done that and I have the T-shirt.

Of course none of this is something one could or should say in an interview. Honesty is strictly forbidden when dealing with an HR child.

Depending on the hiring manager you could get away with saying to them.

Note, the manager would have to be a guy and he’d have to be a stand up kind of guy.

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There are perhaps a few women who could take it in the spirit in which it was said, but they’d have to be from Australia, or New Zealand.

You know places where pragmatism, a “can do” attitude, and common sense are still preferred over political correctness or the fear of hurting someones feelings.

Yeah, I said it!

If I were young enough or wealthy enough, I’d try to move to Australia or New Zealand and become a citizen. I miss the days here in America when having a common sense approach at your company would get you raises and promotions.

I’d love to find a place to work in the world where that philosophy was still the norm instead of the exception.

I can dream can’t I?

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The Current Plan

NewImagePhase one of the current plan begins on Monday. As with all plans it’s subject to change without notice…

Monday I start class to become a Bartender.

This isn’t a lightly chosen direction. I sure as heck won’t make the kind of money I was making. On the plus side I probably won’t have the kinds of headaches that I once had.

According to the technology industry and especially according  those little 25 year old fuckers just out of college my skills are 5 years out of date. Thank YOU aerospace!

After all, we no longer use Binary… oh yeah that’s right we still use binary.

Well we no longer use Hard drives… wait… yep we still use them.

Well there are no servers anymore it’s the cloud… oh wait…

Clearly we don’t use displays, or ethernet, or the conventional model for networking. We certainly don’t use IP addresses or HTML, XML, Windows, Microsoft office, or bug reporting software of whatever stripe.

Oh yes that’s right we DO still use all those things! 

Well automation software has radically changed… after all no-one uses QTP, Loadrunner, Quality Center, or any of the Mercury interactive tools anymore. True… They’re all HP tools now because HP purchased Mercury interactive.

Oh well nonetheless, My skills and abilities are out of date.  I’m hopelessly old and outdated. I’m clearly too old  to be able to catch up or refresh my skills.

Well you little fuckers… when the house of cards comes falling down around your heads… and it will… don’t call me or my friends to fix it for you.

You’re on your own… And one day… you’ll be right where I am and If I’m still around, I’m going to laugh my ass off.

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Meanwhile MY plan calls for me to move into a career that lends itself to my pseudo-retirement.

Step one – immediate income. 

Step two – develop multiple streams of income. (This step involves writing, & photography. Perhaps it will involve becoming a life coach, and possibly a massage therapist. These options are still being fleshed out based on time required and costs.)

Step three – become a SCUBA instructor.

Step four – combine SCUBA, and one or more of the other streams of income into a nice retirement that involves me being on a warm sunny coast with a turquoise ocean and a regular flow of tourists. 

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I’m thinking about an island life, with island time, and little if any of the rat race.

That’s the dream… well,  I suppose it’s the goal.

When I check out. I want to remember a beautiful sunset, the smell of the sea, and warm tropical breeze. Maybe a seagull cawing in the distance.

So while I’m still kinda pissed off about the way the technology industry has gone for me, I’m not nearly as pissed off as I was, with each step toward a future that I’m in control of I’m less angry. 

I’ve got a plan and If at some point I’m working for a resort and they choose to pay me for my knowledge of technology I’ll gladly whore myself out for a few thousand bucks.

Overall, I see my days being a lot more relaxed.

I see myself bar tending and people watching. Then I see myself using those observations to color and bring realism to my characters. I see my near future self leading a less stressful life where I’m not worried all the time about being laid off and what thats going to do to my retirement plan. 

I think I’ll be able to travel a little more easily, instead of hearing the bullshit line, “Well business needs have to take priority, I’m sorry but you can’t go on vacation this year.”

I’m looking at these changes as building a somewhat recession proof income.

After all even in crappy times People drink.

I’d considered the sex industry. I’m a little past my expiration date.

I may yet run a couple of solo videos up on Xtube just to test the market…

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Unemployment has run out…

Today I filed for the last of my unemployment benefits.

I think I’m eligible for food stamps. Who knows, maybe I’ll give it a shot.

Still nothing much in the jobs arena.

I would like to thank President Obama for choosing to end U/E extended benefits just prior to Christmas… What a lovely gift!

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Let’s make absolutely sure that you’re super stressed perhaps even desperate for the holidays when few companies are interviewing and even fewer still are actually hiring.

I do have a plan, that’s of course something that I can only initiate after navigating yet more government obstructions. Sixty days of waiting… Damn! The banking regulations are interfering at every turn in my life lately. 

Many of these regulations are about preventing money laundering but as usual are targeted at the little guy. It’s ashamed that our government doesn’t understand things like limits. You know… a situation where only after X amount of money is flowing through a bank account monthly, does the government stick their big fat noses in.

But if you’ve got a SUPERPAC you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars simply disappear. See the Colbert Report video and listen very carefully to the attorney talking about how to make the money go away.

Instead, they want to make everybody suck cock to open a simple checking account. Welcome to America…

Oh well, as my Mom used to tell me… “When you’re king you can make the rules, until then quit bitching and obey the rules.”

SO 60 days it is…

In the mean time I’m going to keep working on my alternative plans to deal with being out of the technology field.

Wish me luck.