Category: Job Search

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Pretty good morning job searching…

Dollar signOf course it’s only sending out applications. But at least there were companies requesting the applications.

The proof will be if any of these applications generate follow-ups.

I’ve also taken a look at creating a personal web site to augment the job search. Many companies seem obsessed with their employees having a social media presence. I’m not into social media, so I’m thinking that perhaps a website would be a way to split the difference. 

I’ve noticed that most recruiting sites have places to link your personal web page. So I figured I’d give it a try.

I don’t really like social media because it’s a time suck. In order to have a robust social media you have to have been at it for a while or send updates at minimum daily. I don’t have that much interest or time. Generally speaking, I’d rather be actually living keeping my phone in my back pocket instead of fiddling with it all day long.

It’s interesting that many people with my same model phone often complain about the battery life, while I have no trouble at all with the battery in my phone lasting almost 2 solid days. The only difference is that my phone is usually in my pocket instead of lit up all the time.

I like technology and I use it, but I don’t live on it.

I don’t think it’s an age thing. I think of it as a values thing.

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Ugh! Monday!

Not that I have anything much to do.

Job Search of course, but that’s feeling more and more like beating a dead horse.

FYI. Typically, beating a dead horse isn’t going to make the horse move any faster. In other words… It’s a pointless exercise. I know there are a lot of people out there that have no idea what a horse is. Perhaps the phrase should be updated to beating a dead electric only Prius?

Anyhoo.

Got the plumber here, taking care of some long overdue plumbing issues.

As an aside, I don’t do plumbing! It’s not that I can’t, it’s that no matter what I buy at the hardware store, it’s always the wrong whatsit. I’ll leave it to the professionals. Now I know why plumbers always have big assed trucks, it’s to hold all the wrong whatsits until they’re someplace where the part actually fits.

Thus far today, I’ve paid bills, updated & balanced the checkbook, taken out the trash, vacuumed, showered, shaved, started an automated process on the computer to back up files to other storage, and currently I’m looking for a new job. (Albeit writing this blog isn’t looking for a new job, I’m using this as a break from depressingly unfruitful job search.)

I’ve also scanned the news. Another depressing endeavor, the headlines tell the tale, and it’s not a happy one. I’ve purposely avoided the impeachment stories. However, every once in a while I do get sucked in. 

One of the things that has made me sort of say huh? Is that some of the testimony appears to lead back to the Bidens and potentially the Obama administration. If that is the case and the Biden family is drawn into the investigation, doesn’t that mean that Joe Biden is not a viable Presidential candidate?

PE4EM.jpgAfter all, If Trump was involved with the Russians and he’s bad. Then by extension if Biden was involved with the Russians he must also be bad.

Which begs in my mind another question. If the Democrats are so enraged that they’re willing to burn down their own party to get at Trump, do I really want them to have control of the nuclear football?

Where would they stop to end Russian collusion? How far exactly would they go?

Trump only has one more year in office. It’s taken Democrats three years to even get to an impeachment hearing at this point… Let the American People decide in November 2020.

This kind of wasted time and taxpayer money is exactly what the American people don’t need. 

The Democrats would be far better served by providing a reasonable candidate instead of what we’ve seen thus far. Provide someone who is so far and away better than Trump, that the American People all say, “YES! That’s the person for the job.” 

That’s what happened in 2008. Hell, I voted for Obama because I believed in his message.

In 2016 I didn’t vote for either candidate. Hillary had too many scandals and / or bodies around her. Trump pretty much had the same problem.

Bernie was right out because living in California, I know all too well what his kind of government would be like. Since I want out of California precisely because of that kind of governance I certainly wasn’t about to vote for it nationwide.

It’s a lot harder to leave an entire country behind.

IPARedTape sitepostLARGE v1 061516 APAs an example, my CAR registration for next year is $543. I’d have no problem paying that amount if California had the finest roads in the country. But California’s roads suck donkey balls! Potholes, trash, rough broken concrete, flooding in the rain, and top that off with some of the highest gas taxes, and the inability to import gasoline from refineries other than those that make the “California Blend” and you can see why I might think that amount is excessive.

IMG 9809Oh and by the way, there’s a move afoot to divert the registration fees to mass transit and other “Public works” projects neglecting again the decaying roads, which most of the population is reliant upon to get to and from work, so they can pay the taxes that aren’t being used for their intended purposes.

Don’t even talk about the water taxes that aren’t being used to build or maintain reservoirs for use in time of drought. The politicians think it’s better to ration water year round, instead of plan ahead for lean years.

We already have a Federal government that thinks the citizens are a piggy bank, I couldn’t vote for Bernie because I believed his ideas would have made us much closer to indentured servants who were still paying out of pocket for everything.

We just would have been paying more in taxes to fund a government bureaucracy that was more wildly out of control.

69-vs.jpgWhich brings us to the 2020 democratic candidates, and the party itself.

Given the circus in Washington pissing away millions of dollars, leveling forests for documents no-one is going to read, and generally distracting from the business of running the country. Is there any democratic candidate that’s worthy of my vote?

Time for more coffee. Time to turn back to job searching.

Mondays! Ugh!

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Resume Rewrite…

I paid a resume service to rewrite my resume…

I was looking for something that would make it through all the HR filters and get me actually in front of a hiring manager so that the real discussion could begin.

The rewrite is a more standard (Un-Unique) resume. Not that my previous resume was all that flashy but it did have some elements designed to catch the eye and hopefully stand out a little. In retrospect those element were probably being lost anyway since the HR systems pretty much strip any non-standard elements making all resumes homogenous when they’re printed anyway.

The rewording of my experience and abilities is not comfortable for me. There are lots of words that are somewhat ambiguous and kind of “over the top”.  I realize that a resume is like a sales brochure but some of this is like the old days when software companies sold nothing but “vaporware”. 

“This new version of our software with its muffler bearing algorithm will increase your accounting efficiency by 1000% when properly implemented*. (Implementation is dependent on your server being more advanced than the NSA)” 

Why do we do this? Why not simply tell the truth?

I’ve got a ton of experience across a wide range of systems and topics. Obviously I’ve been around the block a few times and Generally speaking, as an older worker what I don’t know, or remember, I do know how to find or figure out.

I sent the initial copy back dripping in red-line. I paid for someone whose command of English was better than mine, so why did the initial draft need me to edit it for continuity, grammar, and word usage?

This whole resume thing is a mess anyway. We’re now writing our resumes to get past computerized filters, so that HR people can find the keywords the Hiring manager mentioned, and pass the document on to a hiring manager who is probably asking for something the HR people don’t understand in the first place.

What’s the likelihood, in this system,  that the interviewee is exactly what the interviewer is looking for? Yet HR is trying to apply exacting standards to the variability of human beings.

And as usual, the HR people really like to find your social media so they can figure out if you’re popular enough to join their team. After all we only want to hang with, or hire the cool kids right?

I’ve often thought  about creating a completely fictitious social media profile just so the HR people would have something to look at. I could do it, I’m a fiction writer after all. I haven’t because I don’t want to create and maintain a character.

In the wee hours of the night though, I’ve put the character together as a sketch that looks something like this;

  • Democrat or Bernie Sanders supporter 
  • Pro Gun control
  • Shocked and outraged that machine guns are freely available
  • Rabidly Anti Trump
  • Habitual commenter on Twitter, Facebook, and instagram. Follows the mainstream opinion, sharing outrage over the cause of the day and remarkably silent when any one of those causes happens to be disproven.
  • Social Justice warrior
  • Likes puppies and kittens, sends cutesy video clips frequently.
  • Live in a Hipster area
  • Complains bitterly about their name being misspelled on their Starbucks order. It’s Raven with a “Y” for goodness sake.

That’s just the beginning of the character, it still needs to be fleshed out.

I’ve thought that it might form a basis for an experiment. 

What would happen if you created three characters with equal qualifications and ages and the only difference between them was their social media feeds? Two characters interests overlap, differing in only, say their opinions about Trump. One is Rabid and the other isn’t actually a supporter but isn’t as much of a hater. One mentions how much they don’t like Antifa rallies and the other attends. The third character has no social media presence at all.

Would there be a measurable difference in their rate of interviews? 

If a demonstrable bias could be seen, could that bias be used to get back to a real hiring process instead of something akin to prom queen voting?

I doubt it.

Which is why I normally think about stuff like this in the wee hours of the night when I’m trying to bore myself back to sleep.

I’m thinking I’m going to tell the resume people that I’m not pleased. I don’t think I got equivalent value for the money. The more I look at this, the more it fills me with revulsion.

… improve organizational resilience, posture, and management …

Ugh!

However, I have gained a greater insight into why so many of the memos and “important notifications” at my previous company read like a poorly abridged thesaurus vomited on the page.

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I really need to get a real job again

The past three years have been a bit of a waste. Don’t get me wrong, income is a good thing. The problem with income where all you do is tread water, is that you’re not pushing the ball forward.

office politics KnivesWhen I joined the most recent company I thought it was an entry path to Software QA (my primary career) in the medical field (new territory). Unfortunately, the company tends to silo each of its departments very heavily. The HR department doesn’t really look at the employees as assets, they only think of employees as components that are replaceable as was so vividly demonstrated.

My Career arc is funny. Not haha, but strange, when I started out many years ago, I had technical aptitude, and the ability to repair machines that some people described as uncanny. Not surprising since generally I like machines better than I like people and so I had an understanding of machines that I still don’t have with people.

I carried a tool kit in those early days, and moved gradually, as I was able, into positions of greater responsibility. I’ve worked a lot of jobs in the technical industry gradually moving up the corporate ladder and accumulating a lot of experience and knowledge.

Problem is, a lot of corporations don’t really like that kind of employee. It’s tough to silo someone like that. Folks like me tend to just fix a problem, we don’t worry too much about coloring outside the lines. We’re dedicated to the mission, getting the product out the door, and we figure the toes we step on will be bandaged, and the paperwork can be finished up after the launch party while we’re counting our bonuses.

In most situations this worked very well. The old saying “The proof is in the pudding” won out. Then sometime in late ‘80s it started to change. The workplace became more political and forgiveness was harder to come by, especially if your decision was glaringly the correct one.

It wasn’t that big a worry for me because there was enough “old guard” management who appreciated someone who not only would make a decision to move things forward, but who would also stand behind that decision and take the hit if things went wrong.

By the late ‘90s political machinations were so entrenched in technical corporations that making an independent decision was tantamount to corporate espionage. In some cases it was worse. This was especially true if you happened to step on middle management’s toes. 

Organizational politics by noman ghalib 2 638There seemed to be a trend toward vendetta, and loss of sight about getting the job done. People spent more time covering their asses, and currying favor, than they did actually working. Those who sat quietly doing their jobs were forgotten and almost never acknowledged for their contribution.

The only time these folks were acknowledged is when they needed time off for medical procedures, or to tend to family business. Then, their request was subjected to a bureaucratic nightmare of discussion and rules & regulations.

It didn’t matter how many years they’d worked in silence or how many weeks of unused vacation time they had, or that they’d never asked for time off… after making a request they were on the radar and were considered a “problem”. Often, “business needs” was used as an excuse to deny the employee’s request. This left the employee in a difficult position of quitting their job to meet medical or familial obligations or ignoring those obligations altogether. 

The political machinations only got worse throughout the ‘00s. 

At some point in the 2000’s I decided that I wanted something different and that I wanted to contribute to our country’s well being. In the mid 2000’s I found a job that paid a bit less and was a lot further from my home in the defense industry.

Generally speaking, I loved it. There were frustrations to be sure. But as long as I could avoid the politics that were growing like a malicious weed, I was a happy camper. I was fortunate to have a couple of bosses that thought their job was to insulate their employees from the endless bullshit or the politics so that the employees could get the job done.

Under their umbrella, I could just work, be productive, and happy.

Political cartoon corporate greedThat changed after the 2008 election. Then, there was no protection from politics. Because the US govt. started switching funding on and off. A lot of great people lost their jobs through no fault of their own, because our politicians loved playing games with each other and gave no thought to unintended consequences.

That led me to unemployment and experience with agism coupled with full blown corporate politics and this rather strange philosophy that regardless of your experience if you’d not completed college you couldn’t possibly know anything. Or that whatever you knew wasn’t relevant to the job you were applying for even if the job requirements were exactly the same as the position you’d previous occupied.

At my most recent employer, there were a lot of people about my age who experienced the same bias I had, and who’d taken this job to get a foot in the door. What we didn’t know was how different things had become, or that the company was going to doom us to a “boxed in” position where the only options were suck it up, or leave. 

As we learned that hard lesson, we began to start looking elsewhere and many of us found other positions, though in the San Diego area there aren’t many positions to be had for experienced older workers. The pay scale for those available positions is representative of a two class system. (Obscenely high, or barely scraping by.) With the cost of living in the area, many of my former coworkers  have relocated, just as I’m doing. (I do hope someone remembers to secure San Onofre before the last “old guys” leave or are forced out.)

I think a lot of my former coworkers realized they’d made a mistake before they were out of their training classes. I know I did, but like “Old guys” we figured it was a mistake that could be corrected after we’d paid our dues. Turns out we were all operating under old rules that no longer apply in the Corporate America of today.

I’ve decided that I’m going to chalk this experience up to, “The School of hard knocks” and I’m going to focus my attention on getting a job in the defense industry. At least there, people are more results oriented and appreciative of someone that will make a decision, take action, and move the ball forward.

I’ll be looking over other positions and will apply to those that pay well and are also within my experience base. But my focus will be on defense jobs, I really need to work someplace where I fit.

My next challenge is getting my former company to send the check to a valid address or better yet do what they say they’re going to do in the exit paperwork. Then I need to re-establish my access to ADP for my tax records (yeah, looks like they turned that off).

I just want to close the book on this whole wasted time, and move forward.

I suspect that dealing with the company’s HR department is going to be as difficult as they can possibly make it. It’s been their modus operandi for the past three years, it’s unreasonable to expect anything different now.

So it’s off to have the car serviced, then back to packing for the move.

Wish me luck, and as always have a good day.

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The Job search continues…

I’m at a tipping point now.

Our team has returned to answering the phones full time. Oh Joy!

Our team was set up to fail from the beginning.

We warned the supervisor, and she chose not to listen. She actively deluded herself into believing that everyone was her friend.

Now she’s terrified that she’s going to lose her job.

That little tidbit is something I’m going to get a lot of milage out of. I have been and will continue to use that the give her a taste of what her inaction has done to all of us.

She refused to stand for anything and has demonstrated graphically, Those who don’t stand for something, stand for nothing, She didn’t stand up for us or her team, instead she was off in her own little world. We, her team, did all the heavy lifting and we got raped for it.

Now we’re being used and abused by anyone and everyone.

She’s weak, and once it became obvious that she had no clue about any aspect of what we did, questions were asked. Shortly thereafter there was blood in the water and her friends started taking bites out of her.

It sounds like I’m describing sharks…

Comparing the management at my company to sharks is an insult to sharks.

Perhaps Jackals is a better comparison.

Now, I’m enjoying playing Loki. The right word in the wrong ear, and chaos rains down. I’m enjoying watching these jackals trying to figure out who they should attack. What’s happening is that they can’t identify their enemies and are unsure of past alliances.

The supervisors are dividing and isolating themselves. They’re having a taste of what they’ve done to their employees over the past few years.

The two brightest of my colleagues figured out what I’ve been doing and they’re as amused as I am. Where there was one – now there are three… They’ve joined in.

At the same time all of us have stepped up our job searches. We sniffed something in the air and it’s since been revealed the upper management is doing two things that are not unexpected, but are tell-tails of where this is all heading.

They’re moving the mahogany row offices to towers in the sky, only a short 15 minute ride away. It also appears that a new office that replicates all our functions is being established in another country.

This means an already checked out and clueless management will move further away from the wage slaves they’re supposed to be “connected” with and they will become more removed from the actual work being done.

“What was it that management said about not closing our facility? Did former President Obama ‘if you like your health care you can keep your health care’ join the board of directors?”

Well Mr. President, I liked my healthcare and lost it in the first wave of changes.  Due to the confusion created by the sweeping healthcare changes, I also paid for more than a year of healthcare insurance for which I received no benefits and subsequently filed 

and WON

a suit against the insurance provider. Truly a case of winning the battle and losing the war. So as the costs mounted, was it any surprise that insurance companies started bailing on ACA?

I digress.

I’m listening a lot more to the talk of my coworkers.

The bottom line is that none of them are happy or care about doing things the right way anymore. It’s not that there is a right or a wrong way to do things (There is) but in what we do there are shades of gray. Most everyone is not even worrying about situations where they’ve missed the mark entirely. After all the client will call back and bitch about it later anyway, to someone else.

Burnout is evident everywhere. I think of it as repetitive stress in your brain.

We deal with people on medicare. They’re the worst. Don’t get me wrong it’s not about agism, after all I’m almost there too. It’s about so very many of them being technologically ignorant. They’re not dumb or stupid, they’re just fighting through a system that is stacked against them. Icons that don’t convey the entire message, equipment that is difficult to read for aged eyes, and instructions that are unclear.

By the time these people call in, they’re pretty frustrated and pissed off. There are a number of them that completely miss the point of the devices we support and do things that make no sense.

These people take time to address and sort out. Often you can’t answer the question from a technological standpoint, you’ve got to make the information relatable to the person. This  takes more time.

These days, it’s time we don’t have. We’re constantly asked why a particular call is taking so long. This of course makes us try to hurry the process along and often results in miscommunication. Which leads to additional calls from the same person because now they’re expecting the equipment to behave in a particular way and it’s not.

The medicare person’s frustration is compounded by fear, confusion, and long telephone hold times. Lots of my younger coworkers will say just about anything to get a medicare person off the phone, it not that they truly don’t care, it’s that we’re in a toxic environment and the priority is to get to the next call.

This has devolved into a strictly numbers situation. The employee is only as valuable as the number of calls they answer, not whether the client hung up the phone knowing what they needed to know and how to actually use the equipment.

So in addition to the frustration of working in a truly shitty environment, we’re all dealing with the truly shitty job of finding another place of employment.

President Trump talks about fake news, he’d totally lose his shit if he had to deal with fake job leads.

While it sounds racist, I’ve gotten to the point that if I get an email from someone who is obviously Indian (Dot, not feather) the email goes straight to the SPAM folder. 90% of the time these are emails completely unrelated to qualifications spelled out in my resume.

I really love the emails that start by telling me the sender has spent hours choosing me for a position that is nothing like what my resume says. Those assholes are immediately deleted. My next favorite email type, are the ones where the city, state, or job title is completely misspelled and also on the other side of the country. Uh yeah… you did a lot of research to make sure that you presented a professional appearance.

I’m changing the job search paradigm. Blindly sending resumes to positions posted on job search sites isn’t working. I’m looking for companies that are interesting and checking their “careers” sections. I’m applying directly rather than on sites like Dice, Monster, LinkedIn, and the rest.

Thus far the results aren’t any better in terms of interviews, but at least I’m cutting out the middle men.

I’m also trying to build connections with other people. That’s a lot harder than it sounds. Where do you go to meet people these days? Social media is right out! No one on social media is what they claim to be.  Besides, I hate social media!

Anyhow, if I’m not writing very much or only posting sporadically it’s nothing personal. I’m just preoccupied with more immediate issues.

Hope that as we head into the holiday season you’re all doing great.