Hire me! (The Find Work Thread)

Meanwhile, I find shit like this on MONSTER. This is Craigslist-level scamming. I feel bad for the people who fall for it and wind up getting their identities stolen.

Gearbox is hiring several positions, including concept artists ( Eric T. Cheng - is that what you do?). Even though most of their job listings look old (or have the wrong dates), they posted to FB yesterday that they're hiring.

Alligator, what's the red flag in that ad?

A box number (the physical address is for a newspaper), with no contact name, phone number, or email address.

I get that some companies want to be confidential, but I'm much more trusting if they at least work through a third party so I have someone to hold accountable when handing over my personal information.

You need to be good with a shovel, since there's a lot of shit to keep moving around here.

So for reasons I might be looking for a new gig. Senior Designer on a UE3 FPS and a bunch of tabletop games, CM/Lead CM on a couple of AAA MMOs and also worked on the bizdev side of some F2P client games.

Anyone? Bueller?

Just got off the phone discussing an interesting consulting prospect. There's a company that might want to hire me to consult for them on a couple of projects. Basically doing data analysis, theorycrafting, designing some social science experiments, and forming business recommendations based on results.

It sounds like it could be fun and profitable, but I've got absolutely no context for how much to charge since I haven't done any consulting work in a long time. Not even sure if I should pitch them a per hour or per project fee. Anyone got any advice, rules of thumb, resources, or suggestions for figuring this out?

My opinion: Per-project is for suckers who roll over and accept the loss in income when your client changes the project's scope halfway through your expected work. Or it's for people doing assembly line work rather than providing expertise ("building a website" vs "developing an online strategy").

As for your price, I base my rate on 4x the effective hourly rate of my salaried job. ie, pre-tax yearly income / 250 (working days in a year) / 8 (hours in a day). I think that's on the low side for my industry, and others charge double my number.

Neither the military nor the VPD say an upper age limit but then again I would have to compete physically against people twenty years my junior. Several years ago I stopped by the Canadian Armed Forces recruitment tent at the PNE and one of the recruiters was a woman in her mid-30s and probably in not as good physical shape as me. I think she mentioned she joined the military late.

The CBSA doesn't have as high rigorous physical requirements like the police or military though (they require applicants to pass the gun safety course and have a valid first aid certificate).

I just got back Halifax this past weekend. It's smaller than metro Ottawa but probably around the same size as London, Ontario (the two Ontario cities I grew up in). I prefer small to medium-sized Canadian cities over urban sprawls like Toronto and Montreal since I would like to leave the city (you know...in case of the zombie apocalypse!). I just happen to be there the week there was a cold snap -- it was around -19C (but it felt like -29C with the wind chill) -- when normally it's around 5C.

Has anyone here ever shared an employer with a spouse before (not including businesses you own yourself)?

Hubby's employer just posted a position I'm qualified for, in a different department from the one he's working in. We've sortof shared an employer before, but it was in a student organization we were both members of, and we only overlapped for 8 or 9 months before he took a position in another organization.

I've asked for his thoughts on it before I apply, but while I'm waiting for a reply I figured I'd see if anyone else has a perspective.

Yes, but we work at a very large firm and in different groups, so there is little opportunity for weirdness. It is pretty nice on the whole, but I could see it being a problem if there was a chance that we would end up working on the same matter.

I don't think that's ever a good situation. Married couples aren't seen as two different people (SAY HI TO TOM FOR ME) and whatever one person does reflects on the other...as long as it's bad. You can be held responsible for how well your spouse is doing and vice versa. Never mind that if you have to interact at work, that can get super awkward fast if you're ever having a fight about something. Or if you have a boss that's overbearing and is going to think that you'll be at his desk all the time regardless of whether that's true or not (i.e. if you aren't at your desk you're clearly visiting him even if you're not)

It just gets complicated very quickly. If the place is big enough it might not be an issue, but the smaller it is the worst it gets.

I've never worked with my spouse, but I have a family member that works at the same place as me--not same building, not same department, just same place. It gets really...stressful sometimes. We have NOTHING to do with each other and yet I have to deal with fallout from their bad job situation. To the point where it may block future promotions for me.

It is possible we'd be working together, but not on a regular basis and not the same type of work. The position is for technical writing, and he's in product development so it's possible I'd be somewhat involved in documentation for a project he works on.

The location he's at has ~300 people, most of whom are fabricators. It's exploding in size right now though, so there's no telling how big it'll get.

I was my wife's boss for a while in a small team within a very large company. It wasn't a problem for the most part.

"Can I see you in my office?"

(Bow chica bow wow)

When I was a student worker there were several married couples there in the school's network administration dept (server, network and printer admins). In each case, they got married after being coworkers. One couple worked in adjacent cubicles directly for the same department, while the others were both heads of separate but related departments. It was never an issue that I could see from my outside perspective. One couple got married about 4 years ago, while the other has been married for about 5.

I knew 3 or 4 other married couples that worked in very different departments at the school and basically never interacted at work.

We've ultimately decided that his employer is off-limits for me to apply to, not because of the working together thing so much as the aspect of "if this company ever goes under or something else catastrophic we are both fucked" which hubby can't shake his worry of.

Thanks for all the feedback though!

It's pretty common in my line of work (journalism). The rule of thumb (or hard rule in most larger media corporations here) is that as long as you don't work in the same department or one is the boss of the other, there's no problem.

Too late but...

My wife has a part time job at my accounting firm. She doesn't work with me on anything, but I see her a bit. However, I am out of the office at clients' offices a fair bit of the time, so there is much less chance of us even seeing each other. Since my wife knows I am kind of a pig, then my reputation of being mildly inappropriate is not really an issue. However, there are days when she walks in my office to bitch about something at work or remind me of something I need to do at home and I want to swat her away like a flying pest.

On first reading, I missed the 'want to' part of that sentence and thought "Damn, that's harsh!"

Anyway, it probably depends on the company. As mentioned above, in academics there's a lot of this kind of thing. Certain types of people are attracted to the field, so it makes sense that they would also be attracted to each other. But in some businesses, it would be awkward because of the power structures in play and the type of work being done. I'm not sure there is a single rule of thumb for such things, but in general, if there's a chance that one spouse would be directly in charge of the other, it's probably a bad idea.

This is completely tangential and I apologize, but out of curiousity: what tax preparation software does your firm use?

No problemo. ProSystem fx Tax. We're paperless. Woohoo! Ya know, since all I do is audit, I have never even opened our tax software (I actually use TurboTax Online for my personal taxes) so you now have the full extent of my knowledge as far as how our tax practice operates. :)

Yeesh. You're just making it worse, here.

Let me know if your firm ever comes to its senses and wants to crawl out of the Dark Ages and into the light. :)

Not likely. The partners hate change and love the Dark Ages. :)

Do you work for Thomson? My sister does selling some fancy lawyerly software to government agencies and municipalities or some such. She travels to the home office in Minnesota now and then and lived there for several years. She spoke at some big to do last year for all the Thomson troops.

Yep, I work for TR Tax & Accounting in the Professional Software & Services division. I write the documentation for the UltraTax platform system, among many other things.

That's cool that your sister works for Legal. Maybe FindLaw? Or West? I'm not entirely familiar with that division, though my I think my dad used to use Westlaw at his old law firm.

Westlaw. That's it. She was doing really well at it too unti the economy went in the crapper. Then those monthly sales goals put the pressure on. Anyway. We may change....when I make partner....when the freezing begins in Hell.

Manual shepherdizing! It's the best way.

Westlaw: well, at least it's better than fucking LexisNexis.

I've worked with couples (married and live-in common law) at past studios. People have no problems they're married couples because they just treat them as individuals. The only problem is like what you said -- two of my friends (a married couple) worked with me at two studios and both times there were layoffs. It really hurts them because both of them are out of work. They later decided not to work together so that at least one of them could be working if the other is laid off.

Well, I found out earlier this week that there was another round of layoffs at a studio I used to work at.

Then today I got an email saying that I didn't get the job at Halifax BUT they're willing to offer me contract work in the future.

Sigh.

I'm seriously consider leaving this industry more and more.

All but one program where I work was jettisoned into orbit by our executive board. This includes a Big Brother, Big Sister program that's been in the area for over 30 years.

My program was the only one not destroyed by these maniacs. They all believe our Executive Director is hot-shit, yet she's systematically destroyed every single program in the building since she started working there. Unless they hired her to be a bulldozer (Which doesn't make any sense), I don't know what they see in her.

*sigh* I want out of this place but I feel such an obtuse obligation to the people I work for and with that I probably won't leave until the place goes down in a burning wreck. I honestly don't think the program could survive without me, but I'm probably just deluding myself. It's a tough position to be in.

I'd try and get you a job where I work, but right now we're only hiring accountants (ones with a *lot* more experience than me), and the positions are all in Calgary.

A bunch of folks I worked with at Vigil have now been hired by Crytek USA. A bunch of the rest are fucked. I don't know how to feel about this.

Fuck I hate this job market. All this bad news just pisses me off righteously.

Seconded. Seeing how bad the market is, I have to ask: Anyone know how the accounting industry market is right now? What's the chance of getting hired as an articling student with a fresh degree and zero audit experience? I've heard of firms cutting the number of new hires, so...any hope?

I wish I was more outgoing. The bubbly grads seem to have no trouble getting in, from what I've seen. The introverts like me....eh....are completely awkward and get flagged/tossed immediately. I know I'm going to be working in commerce after grad, but don't know whether finance, marketing, or accounting is the way to go. I suck at IT, so no chance for me there.

Dunno about your neck of the woods, and I can't speak for public practice, but up here in Canuckistan, there's all sorts of accounting jobs in private industry. A lot of them require you to either already have a designation, or be fairly close to it, though.

I've seen tons of postings requiring a designation...which I then can't apply for because I need to be employed to get my designation. I hear the salary for private is better than public most of the time... but there are fewer opportunities. I've tried interviewing a few times for public (firms), but didn't get in.

The land of maple syrup does not like the surplus of accounting students.

Well, if you've already got a bachelors in accounting/finance a lot of places would consider you as long as you 'intend' to peruse your designation. I used to put on my résumé/cover letter "recent grad intending to persue a CGA designation."

Did you go straight into private after you graduated?

Yup. Landed a job in the oil/gas industry straight out of school, as a contractor. They offered me a permanent employment offer about a year later.

OtomeGamer, get an internship or two under your belt. That shows that you're competent. That was my biggest mistake in college; not taking a single internship.