When you’re reinventing yourself in a new career, first impressions are even more important because everyone secretly doubts that you have what it takes to be successful. Without waiting for you to explain why you’re qualified, people will make a snap judgment based on your appearance and demeanor. Do you look and sound like someone who does this job?
I’d just finished reading another tiresome “why oh why aren’t there more women in IT?” article when I found a former colleague on LinkedIn . . . he lists his job title as “Analyst, Software Quality Assurnace.”
Would you hire him as a QA guy? I wouldn’t, and that’s even before I saw how he misspelled “Assurance.”
The IT “profession” is chock full of idiots like this. Why anyone thinks women are missing out on something if they don’t work in IT is a total mystery.
If I had a daughter, I would tell her to be a meeting planner or a flight attendant . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.
After shooting some hoops, we stop at Extra Mile for hot dogs and sodas. Something catches my eye about the clerk’s name tag — underneath his name, it says “MIT.”
“Did you go to school at MIT?” I ask him.
“No,” he says. “That means ‘Manager In Training.’”
“Oh, that makes sense.” Convenience store clerk seemed like kind of a low-level job for a MIT grad.
The house two doors down from us is for sale. The house across the street is empty and for sale.
The woman behind us and the woman next door, who was recently laid off, have asked my wife if she knows anything about loan modification . . .
There was a troubled-looking guy in Petco this afternoon giving away packets of Natural Balance dog food. He looked like a meth addict or something.
As I walked past him, he mumbled, without making eye contact, “Want some free dog food?”
“My dog won’t eat that shit,” I said, which is not true, but it certainly took the wind out of his sails.
Now you might say I wasn’t very charming but by verbally assaulting him in that way, I was motivating him to rehabilitate himself and get a real job.
Tough love . . .
Full disclosure: I got a free advance copy of this book because I know the author, G.L. Hoffman.
The books I’ve read on business and career advice fall into three main categories:
Dig Your Job is in Category 3, like every other book I can think of to recommend to people.
It’s a high-density book. Hoffman has done startups for 25 years and shares hundreds of ideas and observations about the workplace in blog-sized chunks.
The style is conversational, easy to read — like having a career mentor you can consult whenever you want to.
Hoffman is currently running excerpts from the book on his blog, so you can click over there for a free preview.
Highly recommended!
Don’t forget Step 3.
First the bad news: ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! THERE’S NOTHING BUT BAD NEWS! THE HOUSING MARKET HAS COLLAPSED! GLOBAL MARKETS ARE IMPLODING! EVERYTHING IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL! THE FALCON CANNOT HEAR THE FALCONER! THE CEREMONY OF INNOCENCE IS DROWNED! THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION WHILE THE WORST ARE FULL OF PASSIONATE INTENSITY! EVERYBODY PANIC!
OK, now the good news: Hmmm . . . well . . . as long as I have a job, I can make enough to live on . . . I think . . .
I’m thankful that I have a job! A lot of people don’t!
I lost my last job a few months ago, along with 9,499 other people in the Orange County real estate/finance industry over the past year. We all got to compete against each other to find another one.
The Orange County Register ran a story yesterday on how some of these folks are doing . . .
Delia DeYulia, a grandmother, was recently forced to take her first retail job.
For the holiday shopping season, DeYulia, 53, is working part-time at Kohl’s, placing clothes on racks and cleaning dressing rooms. She resorted to taking the temporary work after not finding other employment. After 15 years with Fremont Investment and Loan, she lost her mortgage job in Anaheim Hills in March.
“I’m used to sitting in an office,” said DeYulia, who audited loans at Fremont, a firm from which she expected to retire. “Now, I’m on my feet all day. I’m carrying a lot of stuff and my body has to get used to it. It’s hard work for a minimum-wage job.”
The extra money will help pay the mortgage and car payment. Her husband can’t work because he’s disabled.
“I had always felt comfortable financially,” said the grandmother of two. “Now, I’m worried about the future.”
[Robert] Harrington, 31, of Tustin, was let go in September from Bankers Mortgage in Santa Ana. As its loan originator, he made about $75,000 last year. More than half of that was from commissions.
That’s why he thinks his best bet is to find a commission-based job at a luxury retailer or a store that sells big-ticket items.
So he has zeroed in on several shops at South Coast Plaza. He recently applied to Movado, Bloomingdale’s, Sony Style, Porsche Design and Allen Edmonds.
“I hope one of them calls me back this week,” he said.
He needs to help supplement the income from his wife, who is a waitress. They have a three-year-old son.
Corinna Vickers, 35, was let go a year ago from Secured Funding in Costa Mesa. Then two months ago, her husband Shad Vickers, 35, lost his job at Lending Tree in Irvine.
Combined, they had been making $200,000 a year.
Now they’re both unemployed and have been hunting for work to pay their bills and help them save for retirement and college tuitions for their four daughters. They have not had any luck and now the Vickers are both willing to take on holiday retail work.
Rhonda Struman of Laguna Niguel is not waiting around to get hired full time. Last month, she began working as a part-time salesperson at Nordstrom at The Shops at Mission Viejo. It pays $8 an hour. Before she was laid off in August from her underwriting position at Paul Financial in Irvine, she was making more than four times that hourly rate, or about $70,000 a year.
Her husband also got laid off from the mortgage industry. He was pulling in about $130,000 a year. Now, he’s working for $11 an hour at a Costco in San Juan Capistrano.
Because of their huge pay cuts, they’re having a hard time paying their $3,400 monthly mortgage. They sold off their boat to get rid of the monthly payments. They will soon sell their furniture.
“I cry all the time and I’m stressed all the time,” Rhonda Struman said.
By February, she and her husband will leave Orange County for Colorado to look for mortgage jobs or work that pays better than their current employers. They’ll rent out their Laguna Niguel house to help pay the mortgage and then rent in Colorado.
“We have no choice,” said Struman, who’s in her 40s. “There’s too much competition in Orange County. “There are too many people out of jobs” who are looking for new work.
Whew, tell me about it! I was this close to taking a job parking cars for $12 an hour . . .
Nor does the immediate future look bright for the local real estate market. Here are some of this week’s headlines from the OC Register real estate blog:
After three months on the dole, I got a job offer from the IT director of a local non-profit healthcare association here in Orange County. I start next week. As Gerald Ford used to say, “Our long national nightmare is over.”
It’s a small IT group — 8 people, including the director. I’ve got to admit I’m a little burned out on big corporate IT shops.
I got out of hands-on programming and into leadership roles because I thought I could do a better job than the people I saw doing it. I wanted to develop teams that got things done using their skills and their collective intelligence, but in practice, you typically get locked into some corporate process standard.
A process may be good for delivering consistent results, but they may not be consistently good results. Like at McDonald’s, every Big Mac is just like every other Big Mac because they have a process for making Big Macs. But is a Big Mac a high-quality dining experience? Not really . . .
A friend and former colleague, who was also recently let go by a local mortgage company, emails to say
I’m doing well… still spending a lot of time in Bakersfield, spending time with my parents. I’ve been looking for jobs, but haven’t applied for anything. I guess I actually need to apply.
She’s single, she can afford to be sanguine.
I was in contact with at least 100 companies in one way or another – sent a resume, called, phone interviews, in-person interviews – and got two job offers. So the upside with her approach is that I could have avoided 98 rejections.
Did I mention the job is with a healthcare organization? I was laid off from my last job, with a mortgage bank, when the mortgage industry tanked. Prior to that, I was laid off from a dot-com consulting company when that industry imploded.
I’ve got a knack for getting into industries at their absolute zenith, then riding them down the drain.
But healthcare — it’s recession-proof! Isn’t it? You can’t say, “I’m going to put off getting critically ill until I have a better read on the economy.”
The California Employment Development Department — aka the unemployment office — scheduled a meeting for me this morning at the Orange County One-Stop job center.
I thought it was going to be a one-on-one meeting to discuss appropriate employment opportunities for someone with my outstanding qualifications as a technologist.
Instead, I found myself placed in a room full of misfits and losers, none in professional attire, and many of them dressed for a day at the beach — shorts, sandals, Hooters T-shirts — while we listened to a presentation on how to make $50,000 a year selling cars.
(”Sounds pretty good,” my son says, and for someone with a junior high school education like him, it probably is.)
In the course of the meeting, three people asked to borrow my pen because they didn’t think to bring one.
Of course, I was wearing a shirt and tie, so I could very easily carry a pen in my shirt pocket. If I’d been wearing a Hooters T-shirt, I wouldn’t have been able to do that . . .
My son’s hockey team didn’t do so well at NARCh this time around. They got knocked out in the round-robin portion of the tournament.
That left us with some extra time on our hands, some of which we used to drive up to Tampa to watch the Angels get worked by the ordinarily hapless Devil Rays, 7-2.
We got good seats though! — right behind home plate about 10 rows up.
Completing the hat trick of futility, I arrived back in California to find that the mortgage bank I worked for had laid off 400 people, including me.
The good news is that I did get a severance package, unlike the last time I got laid off (from a dot-com company), when all I got was a handshake and an escort to the parking lot.
Oh, and I’ve got more time to read the last Harry Potter book. I’m really sick of Harry Potter but I do want to find out how the whole thing wraps up . . .
From a job posting for a Project Manager:
- 10 years of project management experience
- Full life cycle project management responsibility for at least 3 to 4 large projects (minimum 2 year duration, staff of at least 20 on each project, budget of at least $6 to $8 million per project).
I’m not a big fan of quantifying job requirements like that, because the numbers are just arbitrary.
For example, I can’t see how having managed 20 people makes you a better candidate than someone who’s only managed 18 or 19 people. Or even 17. Or 15.
Unfortunately, in the current job market, companies get a huge pile of résumés for every open job, and using criteria like these to cut the pile down to a manageable size simplifies the hiring process.
I know people — and probably you do as well — who meet these numeric criteria, and yet I would never hire them or work for them (again).
Because what doesn’t show up in the box score of their 2-year, 20-person, $8-million projects, is that the vast majority of the resource allocation was wasted and that the projects could have been brought in for maybe $500,000 by a project manager who had some idea about what he or she was doing.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
The Programmer has been out of work for more than two months now . . .
A recruiter called me the other day, and in the course of our conversation, he asked me which “business requirements methods” I’ve used.
I said, “I’m not exactly sure what you mean by that.”
After a pause, he said, “I’m not really sure what it means either. I’m kind of new at this.”
“Well, go ahead and read the next question, then . . .”
Thus spoke The Programmer.
The Programmer has been out of work for three weeks now . . .
I’m getting tired of trying to sell myself to people who don’t seem to understand what it is I do, outside of how well I “fit” into a narrow job description. I’m getting tired of working in a broken industry.
More generally, I’m sick and tired of people and their goddamn opinions about everything.
And I’m getting pretty sick and tired of myself, too . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.
According to the LA Times, software engineering is expected to be the number-one fastest growing job field in the years 2000-2010.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read something like this.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
I guess I should have seen this coming when they eliminated free bagels on Fridays. Or when we stopped printing things on plotter paper because the paper vendor stopped coming around shortly after we stopped paying him.
The retention list was heavily weighted toward young women with big tits and the managers’ poker buddies. Two of the laid-off developers had to be hired back within 30 minutes of being let go, when someone in authority belatedly realized they were working on the company’s only billable project.
None of us will be retiring on our severance package, since there wasn’t one. We’re now faced with the one thing we all feared enough to stay with this company so long in the first place: trying to find another job in the worst tech market in 20 years.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
For reasons that I can’t quite articulate, phrases like this in a job posting really depress me:
Time management and data organization skills are also required.
What kind of world are we living in where that sort of thing has to be explicitly specified in a job description?
Aren’t time management and data organization skills pretty much required for daily life, outside of, say, a jail or a mental asylum?
Thus spoke The Programmer.
