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! You can’t say, “I’m going to put off getting critically ill until I have a better read on the economy.” Well, you can say it, but you can’t do it.

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.