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: Academic theory (Quoting Dogbert) A bunch of obvious advice packaged with quotes from famous dead people A person who’s actually done something talks about what worked for them and what didn’t. 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! Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Jobs
How to Answer Interview Questions in 3 Easy Steps
Listen to the question. Answer the question. Stop. Don’t forget Step 3. Read more →
Good News, Bad News
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 . . . Read more →
Will They Pay My Relo?
What Am I Thankful For?
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… Read more →
Got a Job
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… Read more →
A Waste of a Morning
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… Read more →
Hat Trick
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… Read more →
High-Tech Turnaround
High-Tech Industry Employment Slowly Turns the Corner, Says New Report — Government Technology I clicked that link, only to learn that while high-tech employment continued to decline in 2004, it did so at a lower rate than the two previous years. Hence, the job market has turned the corner, if by “turned the corner” you mean “continued to disintegrate, but at a slower pace.” Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
Job Posting of the Week
6 Programmer Analysts with Java, J2EE, Weblogic, Websphere (before Java you should have programmed in C++ not VB or Visual Basic) I don’t entirely share the author’s view that programmers can be ordered up like pizzas — Java, C++, hold the VB — and I would point out, sadly, that the hiring path for developers is now littered with jackasses who don’t know that VB and Visual Basic are the same thing . . . Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
Talking to Recruiters
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. Read more →
Getting Tired
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. Read more →
Laid Off
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. Read more →
Job Posting of the Week
From an actual job posting: 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 prison or a mental asylum? Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →