Journal turgid's Journal: The Job Hunt Continues 9
Auto Test has gone to India. There have been Indians learning about Auto Test for a few (3?) months and work being started off-shore in parallel. At the daily scrum one morning last week our Auto Test folks were told that they weren't doing auto test any more and not to do any when they got back to their desks. They were to be reassigned to other existing projects.
Within a day or so they were not working on anything different, but were responding to a barrage of "how to" questions from the Indian staff who had taken over...
My project is allegedly getting an Indian soon. He will be with us for 3 months. It usually takes a new person about a year to become productive on our project, let alone an expert. But, hey, these guys are empowered and motivated.
I still haven't found a new job yet. I did have another telephone interview on Friday for a job in London with a company that does security software - allegedly cross-platform software - who were looking for a Linux developer.
I heard today that they don't want to proceed to a face-to-face interview. That's fair enough.
First of all, the interviewer got the time wrong by 15 minutes and he was a bit exasperated when I eventually answered the phone but I explained that I had a printed copy of the email with the correct time and date on it.
On with the questions, so I went backwards through my CV. The poor soul couldn't fathom how I'd got from nuclear physics to software engineering without any training. I explained that I'd been writing code all my life and had largely taught myself etc. This didn't seem to impress him, but I explained about some of the highly-technical OS internals courses etc. that employers had sent me on.
Then came all the Windows questions. I thought this was a Linux and pre-boot environment job and I explained that I knew about real mode and the memory lay out and that when I was 16 I'd worked on a DOS TSR in 8086 assembly language, looked at LILO code and put a protected mode boot loader on a system I used to work on. Not very impressed.
It actually turns out that most of their stuff is for Windows: i.e. disk encryption and protection against malware. As he said, Linux already has disk encryption (which we all know anyway). The "cross-platform" claims come from the fact that they have a product that sits on a network (and runs on Windows) that clients of all kinds can access in some fashion, presumably for authentication and virus checking (but he didn't explain further).
To add insult to injury, this was a fairly senior position and the top of the salary range on offer was £5k lower than most other company's low end offers for that sort of work in London.
I've been trapped in Application land for a long time now. A few years back I got to to everything from the boot loader, initialisation scripts, device driver modification, demons up to the web UI and packaging of binaries.
My value proposition is that I have all of that experience plus in recent years I've been doing Scrum, Agile and TDD. And I'm pretety darned good at C and bash.
Good luck (Score:1)
I can't even get a phone call or email returned at the moment. Lucky I have just had my contract extended
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I don't get much offers either... I'm not actively searching, but basically I don't get contacted. If I get contacted it's for Java development (no, no, no... I've done that 10 years, I have bode my time) or even worse EMC^2 Documentum which I don't want to touch with a ten feet pole. I'm probably not the only one as experts in that are paid mucho €€€.
Oh, well, won't complain with a job at a porn peddler.
That's one of the things I also don't get. I'm gainfully employed, if people call me
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Heh. Today I had one guy very carefully ask me what I was looking for, what my skills were, possible locations etc. and he enthusiastically told me straight away that he had at least two possible positions for me to apply to.
When I got the email, they were both Windows jobs.
What part of "I don't do windows and I'm not looking to move in that direction and I don't have any real experience of it" is so difficult to understand.
When I spoke to him about it he said sorry but he thought that since they were close
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At least, that's my theory.
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Quite
And I've thought up an analogy to use the next time one of them asks me why I don't want to do Windows. Once I was fed up and just said, "Because it's rubbish!" The guy laughed.
Next time I'll say it's like trying to walk with a piece of grit or a small stone in your shoe. You can put up with it for a short time, but it's uncomfortable. Then you start wriggling your foot about and walking funny to try to avoid putting pressure on it. You start to get more and more distracted and angry. Eventually you ha
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I know exactly the one you mean. It makes me smile every time I see it :-)
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I'm sure things will get better soon. Here in the UK they say that the market is starting to pick up (but on the other hand inflation is now over 5% and there's a whole lot off offshoring going on and cut backs).
I was very lucky when I got made redundant 6 years ago, my employer sent us to outplacement consultants. It was all a bit pointy-haired, but they gave us help with our CVs in addition to practice interviews. I've kept the format they showed me there and it seems to work really well.
At the top it's g
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My CV is fine, it is the asshats who will not reply and tell what is going on that piss me off. I did get help with it like you when I was made redundant in 2007.
Maybe a move to better weather is what you need
URL:http://www.seek.com.au/JobSearch?DateRange=31&SearchFrom=quick&Keywords=linux&nation=3000&salary=100000-&page=1&worktype=242&refinement=WorkType .