Hire me! (The Find Work Thread)

If they're that dependent on you, is there anything you can ask them to do that would make the work more tolerable, or is it a job that's just inherently sucky?

The work itself is great; I love it. The issue is one of the people there, who has a bad attitude and is also really terrible at his job. I've discussed it, but the guy in charge doesn't want to do anything. My coworker is long-time friends with one of the senior people (which is why he works there), and even if he wasn't the guy in charge isn't really a manager and doesn't like the idea of making manager-type decisions. Nobody is really running the company, we're just a group of engineers/programmers getting things done. The situation will probably come to an ugly head in a few years.

I've gotten to the point where I can't work with negative (bad attitude) people. Lazy or unproductive people, sure; stay out of my way and don't make my job significantly worse and I can deal with you. Negativity, though, is killer.

Sorry about your situation, Ross. Have never personally worked in software or tech, but I've taken a lot of management guidance from Rands (in Repose) and Joel (on Software) over the years. One thing I've picked up from reading both of those guys (plus a lot of tech rags), and that your workplace (and a lot of smaller tech shops) seems to be suffering from, is that no one wants to pick up the management baton and lead. Or, if someone does want to, it's dissuaded by everyone else. That always seems to lead to an inevitable conversation with The Bobs. I might be totally off the mark, but I suspect that the difficulty in "corralling programmers/engineers" is one of the reasons why software behemoths like Microsoft and Amazon, and even older engineering firms like Boeing, all have ten thousand layers of professional management who are probably better PMs/Directors than they are programmers/engineers.

Just thinking out loud about an industry I've never worked in. Sorry, that's really pretentious of me. I've just been thinking about this a bit lately and your post served as a good jumping off point. :) I wish you the best in luck in leaving should you decide to. No one should have to suffer imbeciles.

Myself and six other developers just got laid off on Monday due to lack of work (no new projects signed). We really liked it there (good bosses who worked "in the trenches", no office politics or drama, everyone got along). It's the nature of the game industry in Vancouver and I was actually expecting it after the last project was done back in the summer. The shitty thing is that one of the programmers let go has a newborn (along with two other young children and a wife) and another coder and his wife are expecting their first child in the next week or so.

I'm not too worried about finding another job but odds are it may be out east (Montreal or even Halifax), where I loathe the cold winters.

Man, that sucks. Sorry to hear that and best of luck to you.

On my front: I had a phone interview last week that went pretty well. It was a "cultural fit" interview, which means that I talked to a lady for half an hour about what kind of worker bee i am and what the company is like. I must have impressed on her that I'm the right kind of worker bee because she said before hanging up that she'd set up a second phone interview for the technical portion. That's scheduled for this afternoon and for an entire hour, which seems... odd. Does that mean it's the main interview and there won't be a substantive in-person one? Does it just mean the recruiter is mistaken? I haven't had this happen before so anything seems possible.

Anyway the company seems pretty cool. It's a very small operation so they're looking (from what I can gather, anyway) for someone with a lot of database experience and a range of shallow other experience along with a willingness to learn how to do all the little things that crop up with servers, firewalls, applications and so forth. I think that describes me. Here's hoping they agree!

Hahahah, I wish. I've seen far more bad managers at Microsoft than good ones.

Interview for DC job on the phone real soon. It's junior dev so there's not much worry about the technical aspect, but I dunno. I have my fears.

In any event it's something I actually give a fuck about so that's a nice change. And I've been chatting back and forth with the relevant individuals for a bit now so hopefully I've got a chance.

Sweating bullets. I think I did pretty well (I've had years of phone experience) but I told him up front I was nervous because the job was exactly what I wanted. I also confronted the lack of professional experience up front which was 'exciting.'

I may or may not get a call back. Wheeeee.

Hey Aeon221 , can you tell me a little more about this reddit job-hunting? Is it mostly just techy geeky things?

Don't even trip, man, either you get it or you don't.

November is a lousy time to start looking for new employment. I scrape by with research assistant work at the moment, but giving me things to do is far from the highest priority of anyone at the firm, so it's been twenty days of this month so far when I haven't had work. Please permit a moment of incoherent, untypable raging at "three to five years of experience" for a phone-answering desk job.

<raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaage>

Thank you.

And really, Aaron's advice of "learn to program!" is (a.) reasonable, (b.) bloody hard, and (c.) not something I can do on a week's notice. So I've had that advice. But...someone please tell me the job market's due to pick up soon.

http://www.reddit.com/r/forhire/

As someone who does alot of interviews, I think that was a great statement to start out with.

http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/data/inflation_expectations/

It will not. Price and wage increases this low mean that we'll be continuing with GDP growth of ~3.5% (we need ~5% for that, or almost double current rates of growth) if we're lucky, meaning not enough to pull the un/under employed fully into the market. If anything expect an early winter slump unless the Fed gets its shit together and offsets the fiscal cliff. Job betwee 150-200k at best.

Include the potential impact of a fiscal cliff sans monetary offset and expect a decline in hiring come dec/jan, with reduced hiring in the current period for non-essential positions as companies look for ways of reducing their exposure to a low(er) demand environment.


edit: to better understand the importance of a rate of growth, let's calculate the years til the economy doubles with 3.5% vs 5% growth. 72/3.5 = ~20, 72/5 = ~14. In other words, the economy doubles 25% faster with a 1.5% higher rate.

Sorry for being the bearer of bad news but things are basically fucked and the people at the Fed who could fix it don't give enough of a shit about unemployment to do so. Good luck!

Well, thanks for the straight talk, anyway. <exits thread so as not to further depress self>

Aeon, I have a server development position if you want to CRUNCH THE DATAZ. About fitness.

An 'entire' hour? I'd suspect you'll have a longer in-person one, and this is yet more screening.

It was, in fact, and entire hour. That's maybe longer than any in-person interview I've ever had, even. Is that something you've done and then had followed up with an even longer in-person one?

It went pretty well I think, btw.

Yeah, an interview process consisting of 1hr phone + 1hr in-person would be the shortest I've ever experienced, and it sounds like we're in quite similar fields and you're not someone without a past job history to walk through. The shortest I've had was a >1hr call + 2hr interview with the boss (no time wasted in HR).

Interesting. I don't know why that hasn't been my experience so far but it does make more sense. Thanks!

Mr. Alligator finally called the company he interviewed with two weeks ago, since we were supposed to hear something back after a week. Apparently they're concerned about salary, and the fact that he would start out at a step down from engineer. Luckily their benefits package is awesome (compared to his almost nonexistent benefits at his current job), and the new company is in an area where the cost of living is much much lower, so salary is one of the things we're pretty flexible on. I'm really just hoping that they can find a figure to agree on so we can keep living together; if he can't get this job then I'm probably going to wind up moving back in with my dad (ugh) since there really just isn't anything available for me in the area we're in currently.

So I'm finally out of law school and I'm looking for a proper grown up job™. Preferably as a trainee lawyer. I have no idea what I'm doing, I have no idea what lawyers are supposed to do, like, in practice. Luckily my peers don't have a clue, either.
I'm doing interviews and I show up dressed nicely, trying to fake confidence, and I'm like, uh. Here I am. Relevant experience? Honestly, none at all. But look, shiny grades! Also I have work experience, so you can trust me to actually show up (nothing more than that, 'cause it was brain dead data entry stuff - which I don't say out loud, but we all know). I'm aware that there is nothing in my curriculum that shows I would be a better employee than any other random dude. Hell, I myself don't know if I would be a good employee.

On the plus side, I got an offer almost immediately. On the down side, I'm not sure if I got amazingly lucky or if they are trying to scam me, 'cause they don't want to pay me for the first 1-2 months, and then only a mysterious undisclosed amount I shall find out when the time comes.
It's not a completely terrible offer, 'cause I would be more a burden than a help during that first period, and asking around people tell me it's not an unusual deal - I'll find out whether they are honest or not after a few months. The only problem is, by that time I'll have no money left, so if they screw me I'll be really screwed. I could refuse, but what if I can't find anything else?
Anyway, I'd start in december, so in the meanwhile I'm scheduling other interviews to see if I can get a better deal somewhere else (not very likely). And I'm alternating between confidence - plenty of idiots in law school, and most of them eventually landed a decent job - and panic - OMG I have no clue, and the economy is kinda collapsing right now.

/ventings

I don't know if "scam" is the right word precisely, but I've known some people who've gotten into just such an arrangement with a firm, and unless you're a serious rainmaker you're not going to make any money. The money you DO bring in is going to get skimmed, and you will see very little of it.

Can you talk to someone in the placement office at your law school and get their take on it? Or even a professor you trust?

Well, I'm under no illusion I'm going to make any significant money with that kind of arrangement. On the other hand, initially, I'm not going to bring in any for them, either - being fresh out of school, and with no experience or contacts with clients, it's not even expected of me. I would be there to learn the practical aspects of the job and then, once I'm actually productive, I would be in a better position to ask for compensation. I didn't talk with people in the placement office (I'm not sure we have one) but I did ask a few experienced lawyers - a family acquaintance and the parents of a couple of classmates uninterested in hiring - and they told me it's fairly standard practice. If I found a firm that really wanted me I might be offered some money to at least cover raw expenses, but not enough to really live on. The reason is, they can pick from hundreds of fresh graduates like me, and until we learn/prove ourselves we are a cost/investment rather than a resource. The only thing that differentiates me from the masses is my graduation score, but thanks to grade inflation it doesn't mean much (and to be honest if it wasn't inflated I wouldn't have reached the maximum score anyway).

So the real question is not whether I'll see a lot of money, but whether they'll teach me useful skills (instead of using me as a low-cost secretary) and whether they'll start to pay me a livable wage a few months in. If they don't it's a problem 'cause the work I'd be assigned to is fairly specialized, so if I'll have to look for another job I could find myself being back close to step one.

My other options are to try for a public sector job (but the number of applicants for each position are way crazier, and I'd have to study a few months to have a realistic shot at passing the specific competition) or to look for a generic office job (at which point my degree becomes more a proof that I'm not a complete idiot, rather than something useful; and the average wage would probably be lower on the long run).

By now you are probably thinking I'm an idiot for choosing law school. I'm not beating myself too much over it 'cause the entry level job situation in Italy is pretty much shit all across the board these days, with a few narrow exceptions for sectors I really have no interest in.

I had no idea you were in Italy. Huh. Not that it matters; I think the arrangement you're looking at is pretty common in the states.

Normally I doesn't afraid of anything, but I just bounced on a phone interview after they accidentally forwarded me the email discussion they were having about me. Basically, it discussed me as trainable cheap labor, and not exactly in the kind of terms you'd like to hear used about yourself. You know what? Fuck that. I'm not moving just to be someone's bitch, no matter how much I dislike my current job.

I'm tired of this whole thing. Incredibly, incredibly tired. I'm working my ass off for what? The dream of making it on my own? I should go back to school, own that for a few years and look for work with another piece of paper from another fancy school. Maybe it'll be easier. Maybe that'll just leave me even more depressed.

Hahaha, that's hilarious. "Trainable cheap labor" is sometimes a growth opportunity though.

Wow, that's rough. Maybe you dodged a bullet though, who knows.

I had 2 other interviews, and got 2 new offers. The deals are basically the same though, nobody wants to pay me (or in one case, so little as to be functionally equivalent, and kinda insulting) until I prove myself useful to their discretionary satisfaction, a few months in.
I have 3 other interviews scheduled for this week, before I have to give the others a definitive answer. I'll try to bargain harder, but I already did in my last one and they were quite clear, they'd want me but "no money while I'm still so green".
I shot an email to the professor who supervised my thesis and he also confirmed that these kinds of arrangements are very common; he advised me to take one of the offers and not to wait for something better, 'cause I'd be unlikely to find it. Better look again after I get some experience, if the firm I'll be working for holds out for too long: at that point, I'd have much better chances.
Fair enough, I guess? I mean, not really, but I can stand working for nothing for a while, if that's what it takes to get out of random temp jobs, and started into a hopefully real career.

I have pieces of paper from two fancy schools and I hate my job, so that's no silver bullet.

UPDATE: Mr. Alligator finally got a verbal offer yesterday from the company he interviewed with. He'd be taking a tiny pay cut, but the moving allowance he was offered is five times bigger than the pay cut, plus the benefits offered are worth significantly more the pay cut, too. It's also likely that he'd get his engineer title back (plus an appropriately sized raise) after he finishes training. After he gets the official fancypants written offer, which should be later today, he'll tell his boss about it. He's nervous how his boss is going to react, but his current job is just so dead-end that he is having a lot of trouble trying to justify staying.

So now my job is to juggle packing over the next month or so with starting a long-distance job hunt and my family visiting in two weeks. And deciding what damage to repair to the apartment we have in hopes of getting our deposit back.

Screaming in frustration.

So I'm looking for a Teacher's Assistant job to take over the one I currently have. More pay and actually related to the future career I wish to have. Unfortunately, all of them demand fluency in Spanish. Not surprising, considering where I live. I took four years of Spanish in high school and remember none of it. By the time I've taken enough classes to be considered "fluent", I'd be so far in debt, I would never be able to pay it back ever.

this is terrible.

The place I interviewed with last week has decided to pass. The recruiter included a ":(" in her email to me and everything. Oh well.

Also, not a lot of new interest postings this week, probably because of Thanksgiving. I'll keep looking though.

Time for the first real interview I've felt nervous about nailing in years. With store management instead of department management. At the same store my wife works at. And I had to hobble together a good looking outfit based on a severely reduced wardrobe, so I'm fairly sure I look like a gangster from The Long Good Friday. Wow.

Here goes nothing.

Edit: Well, I THINK that went well.

Alligator - where are you moving to? And MulMizu, I'm feeling your pain there.

Also, most of the applications I'm looking at require fluency in some basic job-related programs, so I figured I might take a quick class on one or two of them to beef up a rather flimsy resume. Intuit wants four hundred and eighty bucks for me to take a class to become fluent in QuickBooks. And they want the same price whether I'm actually going to a hotel in San Jose to sit and learn the software for two days, or whether I watch the presentation from my own computer at home. That's unreal.

/italics, mostly /rage

Do you get an official certification with that? In the era of free information the only reason to spend money on knowledge is if it comes with a piece of paper that proves you know things.

I did for my Microsoft Access class, but for this one I didn't even look that far. To me, right now, that sort of knowledge is not worth that much.

Leaving for an interview in about an hour. The job description sounds like I might not really be qualified, but their recruiter (who actually works for them, not a freelancer) contacted me unprompted and I described my skills to him honestly and they still want to interview me so I guess we'll see. Wish me luck!

Good luck, extar!

So I had an interview last week at a high school.
They wanted me to work as a TA for a "high-risk" group of students that were at risk of not graduating (again). I went to the interview cheerful as a baby with some pots and a stick and left feeling terrified.
Luckily (???????), they didn't call back. I want work, but I don't want to be hit (on) by the people that I'm teaching. That's just...n-no.

Note: I genuinely did want the TA job because I like being able to help people further themselves, no matter what the age. But the way the interviewer sounded, if I got this job, I would be harrassed and assaulted on a weekly basis. Jeez.

So I guess now I'm focusing on being able to go take another test (this time for Instructional Assistance), since you need to take that test to be able to TA in elementary schools, apparently. why do i need two tests, can't you just make it one big ass test what is wrong with this system.