Category: Job Search

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve been a technology guy for almost 30 years.

Now I’m unemployed and have been looking for a new job for the better part of 18 months.

Usually I can’t get the time of day from the places that I apply to. Those placement firms that do contact me are often not much more that one step above spammers.

Got a call from one of these guys the other day, He was obviously Indian and his English pronunciation was so poor that I had no idea what he was saying. I finally got him to send me an email with the job description. His written English was only marginally better, which explains why he was trying to match me up with a position that was almost completely NOT anything I can do.

I find myself wondering things like why can’t I get any decent leads.

I’m still working on that one… but I’m beginning to wonder if I’m not paying back some seriously big karmic debt.

Many of the companies that I’ve applied to, I also do occasional business with. This morning I was looking around online for a decent six or seven port USB Hub. 

As I wandered through the myriad websites I kept seeing one defect after another.

These are major, nationally known companies who advertise and sell their products on the web and yet I was seeing things like;

Dead links,

Typos,

Dialog boxes that were blank, (I mean… just a white box with nothing in it.)

Check boxes that appear unchecked yet if you do check them, to narrow your search you actually destroy your search results.

Oh, and these companies… all have either flat out told me that I wasn’t good enough to work for them, or they simply have never responded to my inquiries.

While I many not be good enough to work for them, clearly their existing staff sucks!

Part of the problem is this. 

All of these companies want someone that has long list of software development methodology certifications. To date I’ve worked with virtually every methodology.

However, I’ve never bothered to get certified in any of them, for the following reasons;

1) The certifications are very expensive and often required me to burn my vacation time and pay for the seminar and the hotel & food costs. Often as not just sitting through the seminar got you the certification.

I don’t believe in buying certifications. If that’s what I’m doing… then let me send you the $1000 and you send me the paper with my little name printed on it, and we’re done.  

I think that there should be something a little more structured and some accountability or grading must be built into the system.

Then there’s this thought… I have one miserable week of vacation. Do I spend it at an expensive seminar in a hotel conference room or do I spend that week on a beach somewhere? Let’s think about this for all of a nano-second! If I’m going to spend my vacation time and have to pay for a hotel and transportation… I’m going diving in the Caribbean!

2)  These methodologies are ever changing and in fact I’ve worked for companies where the methodology changed as frequently as the upper management did. It was simply impossible to keep up with the method du jour and as a result, the certifications were pretty much pointless.

3) These methodologies claim in some circles to be a standard. But in point of fact they are really only the framework of a software development philosophy that allows for variable implementation based on the needs, desires, and whims of the corporation where the method is being used. 

The practical upshot of this is that a new employee starts out having to learn how the company has implemented a particular methodology whether they’ve got the certifications or not.

4) I have noticed through the years that regardless of the published “Methodology”, corporate “Procedures”, or even ISO standards all go right out the window when the project is late,  (Every Software Project ends up being LATE). Which means that Agile is pretty much the defacto standard of ALL software development regardless of the corporate sales pitch.

5) I’ve actually been involved in companies where the process was so complex that it actually impeded the development and testing processes. In these companies, I only got 3 hours of work done on software I was testing per day. The other 5 or 6 hours of my day were spent in meetings, explaining what testing was being done and WHY the testing was going so slowly. 

REALLY?

In point of fact it wasn’t the methodology, it was the implementation.

I’ve always thought it was funny how almost anything begins to take on the worst aspects of religion. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Agile,SCRUM, PC vs. Mac, iPhone vs. Android…

None of them are inherently bad ideas or philosophies but all of them suffer from problems introduced by zealots.

I guess now it’s time for me to pay for some stupid seminar where the badge of honor is that I have a certificate saying I sat through the seminar.

At least I could legitimately say I’m certified in one of these things…  That 30 years of experience is irrelevant but a silly certification in a software development methodology is annoys me beyond belief.

I could take my laptop and spend the time writing and half listening. God! The soul crushing boredom  of seminars like this makes me cringe. When I’ve attended these kinds of seminars in the past,  at the end of the day I headed straight for the hotel bar and worked on anesthetizing myself… All the while having to listen to other folks from the seminar gushing about the importance of the words of the presenter… aka The Prophet. 

Meanwhile, I’m looking for the nearest exit and wondering if I can find another convenient bar where I don’t have to listen to a rehash of the day faithfully regurgitated by those who’ve drunk the kool aid.

I suppose it’s jaded cynicism on my part. A large part of my inherent resistance comes from knowing these methods, don’t make me a better tester. It just means that I’m going to be better able to recognize when someone is wasting time in needless meetings.

Which leads me back to Karma…

Am I now paying the price for not drinking the kool aid? Are the errors I’m seeing on web sites the not so subtle reminders that my choice not to play the latest corporate mental masturbation game has left me on the outside?

I still stand 100% by my conviction that as a Software Quality Assurance Analyst, knowledge or lack thereof about these philosophies won’t change the quality of the software.

Actually testing the software will. 

My Karma is to be unable to ignore software defects, and to seemingly bring out defects simply by wanting to use software as a normal user. 

I guess, I was a serious asshole to someone in a previous life. 

Now where was that catalog of obscenely priced seminars????

I’ve mentioned in the past how frustrated I’ve become with the job search.

I’ve been puzzled as to why this task is so darn frustrating for me.

I finally figured it out.

It’s the difference between the Old and New way.

In the old days, back in the beginning of time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth we would look religiously through the newspapers each day or every other day.

We’d read small descriptions of the jobs being offered then dutifully write a cover letter. We’d stuff the cover letter and our resumes into an envelope then put a stamp on it and drop it in our local outbound mail box.

I’d sometimes send out 5 or 10 resumes a day. Sometimes I’d send to a company I knew of “Blind” because their HR would actually file a resume for 6 months or so, sometimes longer…

Often, these applications would generate nice little letters addressed to me.

Many times these letters would say in a nice way the position had been filled but that my resumes would be kept on file.

Other times the letter would be something like “Thank you for your interest in our company we have no openings but will call you if we do.”

The best day was when a company you applied to called you to schedule an interview. That was a WHOO HOOO DAY!

Now we apply online and each application requires MORE time to fill out than writing/mailing a simple cover letter & resume.

Dice

Monster

Cybercoders

Careerbliss

Careerfinder

All of them have their own method of accepting information. They all want you to have an account, and then you have to cut and paste your resume into their form. You’d think that would be that… once the information was in their format… You click apply and all that data would be sent to the hiring company HR and bing, bang, boom, you get called for an interview.

You’d BE WRONG!!!!

You log in, search for the job, click on apply, THEN you get to fill out a 20 minute survey about the job, followed by an essay exam “Tell us why you think you should be presented to our client.” “Make us believe that you are worthy of our attention.”

The problem is this, when I start talking about what I do 50% of the words don’t make sense to the average person. Those that actually understand the words still don’t understand what I do. So I’m faced with a conundrum… Do I write something simple enough that an average person will get it without bleeding from their eyes, or do I write something assuming that a hiring manager is going to see what I wrote and understand? 

I’ve tried both ways with little difference in result.

(I’ve noticed that the job application process gets a WHOLE lot easier with these people if there are a lot of jobs and very few applicants)

Where I could crank out a nicely customized cover letter  and have it and a resume in the mail, in about 15 minutes. NOW it takes closer to 45 minutes to apply for some of these positions.

There is ONE of the above headhunter sites that is awful in this regard.

Almost every single fucking application requires that you answer different questions and move little sliders around then enter the number of year experience you have. It’s maddening! Especially since all this information is already contained in my resume. And that same information is already contained in their specific forms that I filled out when I created my account.

I’ve actually gone back to sending a fax or mailing a cover letter & resume whenever possible!

Even that can be fraught with difficulties.

Since so many of these sites link to other sites which link to other sites it’s pretty easy to get messed up thinking you’re responding to an ad from one site when it’s really from someplace entirely different.

In general, I prefer to send something I wrote, and had control over from start to finish rather than turn my future over to a snot nosed idiot.

Back in the day… If you were going to use a professional placement agency… you’d contact someone that specialized in your industry and you’d work with a single agent.

That way you could actually build a relationship and that person could sell you because they knew you. It was an implicit recommendation.

Now, you never speak with the same agent twice and you’re damn lucky if they speak English.

So to all you job placement firms… Understand that some of us have little to no desire to spend our days filling out 4 job application forms online when we can type and stuff 8 or 10 of our cover letters and resumes into an envelope or fax machine in half the time.

Heck, I have a fax machine and a nifty little usb fax modem… I might as well get some use out of them!

Maybe I should get into the job placement gig. Perhaps it’s time for OLD SCHOOL standards to return.