I Gots Me a Job!

So, I haven't been really good at writing in my blog lately. I think that's always a sign of me being depressed. But, I now have one less thing to be depressed about. I have a job offer! I actually haven't received the paperwork yet, but it seems to be a done deal.

The job is with a company called Qortex. They are a consulting firm. They were the very first place with which I interviewed when I started this search. I had a great feeling about them after the interview and I'm glad that something is working out with them. They are starting me at a set base salary with the chance to increase it by $5000 contingent upon me receiving two Microsoft certifications. I want to get the certifications anyways so this will hopefully be just the nudge I need. Certifications are a great thing to have on the resume and will definitely help me in my next job search. They also will help with the training and cost of the test. So it's not like I will be out a ton of money to make it happen. I like the concept of working with a company that is interested in seeing me get training. It's really a win-win because it makes me more marketable to their clients and helps my career.

I'm kind of sad on some levels that things are winding down with MoFo, however. The reality is, I'm realizing my feelings toward MoFo are rather complex. On some levels I would like things to just continue how they were because it's easy and a known entity. On other levels I realize that MoFo hasn't really helped my career much. I've done a fair bit of development with them, but they run such a sloppy development operation that my experience has a lot of holes in it. They aren't using any development methodologies or frameworks and that is what a lot of hiring managers are looking for. Also, they don't really examine new programming technologies to see what they can make use of. It's a very lazy environment and that has caused me a lot of problems in my job search. So, I'm happy to be moving on to a new environment that will hopefully help me learn more.

I'm also realizing that my working from home may be causing me distress. I'm a fairly social guy and working from home really puts me out of the loop. For two years I've felt really disconnected and alone and that really gets to me. I'm glad that I will still have work going on with MoFo purely for the money but I'm also glad to be moving on. I guess I'm still a little melancholy while things work themselves out.

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Recruiter Interview Yesterday

I had a recruiter interview yesterday in downtown. I had to go there during rush hour and I slightly underestimated how long that delay would be. The trip was only supposed to take 30 minutes but wound up taking a full hour. The funny thing is that it was the last five miles that took the most time. It wasn't too bad, though. I only showed up five minutes late. As it was they used the first half hour with me filling out paperwork so my tardiness wasn't even noticed.

The actual interview portion went fine. The guy just had standard questions and things like that. On one level it would actually be nice to do a contract with them because they offer all sorts of online training once you go on contract. It may wind up being lackluster but I wouldn't mind checking it out. Free training is free training.

The guy offered me the chance to take a skills assessment after my interview. Basically a technology quiz. They had them for all different topics. He said that taking the assessment can sometimes help land a job because they use it as a marketing tool. Also hiring managers use it as a quantitative measure of a candidate's knowledge level. So I took the ones for ASP.NET and C#. It was multiple choice so that made it a little easier. There were some questions that I narrowed down to two options but couldn't decide between the remaining answers. Some of them were in areas that I wasn't familiar with and so had to guess. Frequently I guessed correctly because I chose the answer that LOOKED like valid .NET syntax. The more you work with .NET the more you get a feeling for the way methods are named and used. That came in handy a few times. After the test they showed me my results and how I ranked compared to others who had taken the same tests. I came out above average on both tests. 20+ points above on the ASP.NET and 10+ points above on C#. So, that was a good thing. Hopefully that will help them find me something.

The recruiter says they have two potential openings which look good for me. He's going to submit me this week and I'll see where it goes. Hopefully things go well.

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The Power of Blessings

I had an experience this week that really reinforced the power of blessings for me. We had our home teacher come over on Monday night to help me give Karen a blessing.

It's a funny story, actually. I had called him earlier to ask him to come over some time that night and he said he would be over around 9:00. We waited patiently until after 10:00 figuring that he just got held up with what he was doing. We finally called over to his house to see if he was still coming over. He had totally forgotten and was already in bed. We tried to tell him he could come the next day, but he insisted on coming over anyways. He lives just a few doors down so it wasn't that much of a chore to run over here.

Anyways, he showed up and we gave Karen a blessing. While he was here I asked him to give me a blessing to help with my job search. He did and all was well.

The next morning I started thinking about the interviews I had had to date. They frequently involve a technical quiz and that is something that I really hate. I always feel like I'm unprepared and that I don't present myself the best during them. I decided to put together a study sheet of all of the questions I had been asked in my recent interviews for which I didn't have a good answer. So I started researching and putting stuff together. Beyond putting stuff down on the study sheet I did a fair amount of reading in general and educated myself on a variety of topics.

I had an interview later that day and one on Thursday. Both involved technical quizzes and both had questions directly answered off of my study sheet. While there were still questions to which I didn't the answer, I came off seeming to know far more than I would have if I hadn't done the studying.

I know that I was inspired to do that studying and that I would have been much worse off without it. Even if I don't get the jobs I was interviewing for I know that it will help me in the long run and it has definitely become part of my testimony of the power of blessings.

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Phone Interview Yesterday

Yesterday's phone interview went pretty well. It accomplished its purpose at least. They are going to bring me in for an in-person interview.

The interview was actually very short. I think it was over in 15 minutes. The main point of it seemed to be a technology quiz. See my comments yesterday for my opinions on these type of quizzes. I actually wound up not doing too poorly. He started off asking me a bunch of questions relating to C# object-oriented design which I don't ever use. So I was in unfamiliar waters with those questions. Then he switched over to ASP.NET questions. I rocked all of those. That is, of course, because I use ASP.NET all of the time. I found his questions to be fairly trivial. Which is probably how I would have found the others if I had known the answers.

In the end he must have been pleased enough because he said he was going to recommend that they bring me in for the in-person interview. So, we shall see how it goes. So far it looks like a pretty decent opportunity.

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First Half of the Interview Quartet is Finished

In four business days (really three and a half because today is a holiday) I will have four direct-hire interviews. I don't really count recruiter interviews as real interviews because they don't really mean anything. They're just formalities for the people sending resumes out. My interview today is over the phone with TransUnion. They're one of the major credit reporting bureaus. Part of the interview process is drug testing so I get the joy of peeing in a cup and hoping there's no weird interaction between my toothpaste and hairspray. Tomorrow's interview is in person at a consulting house (I believe).

The interview on Thursday was with a small consulting shop. They do a variety of projects as needed for their clients. The interview went really well. The technical guy I interviewed with told me flat-out that he thought I would be a great fit for the company. He gave me a small programming task to gauge my thought processes and told me afterwords that he had never seen my solution to that problem before and that my solution was more efficient than the others he'd seen. That made me feel good. I was really happy when I came home from that interview. The only problem is that the company needs to wait to hire until they have projects come in from clients. They are expecting that to happen at any time, though. I have a really good feeling about this job and I hope it's the one I get.

The interview on Friday was for a large publishing company and it would be a management position. I didn't have a good feeling about this place at all. I had bad feelings about it before I even went to the interview. When I got there it only got worse. The whole situation reminded me of my time at Siebel, which isn't a good thing. I interviewed with two people, a tech guy and the manager. The tech guy asked me a couple of detailed technical questions which I wasn't able to adequately answer.

We will have a brief pause in the story for Jerry to whine...

I really hate when interviewers quiz you on programming theory. It's like they expect you to have all aspects of a programming language available off the top of your head. Are they expecting the job to be closed book? Am I not allowed to use Google when I run into some problem? I have been programming for years. Who cares if I don't know the exact execution order of methods between a web page and the user controls it contains! That hasn't stopped me from being quite successful in my projects for a long time. And, of course, not knowing makes me feel like a complete loser. It's the worst part of interviewing in my opinion.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog already in progress.

So, I felt like I came up with a big goose egg with the technical interviewer. Then came the manager. His one or two questions were soft-skill related. I don't feel like I answered them adequately, either. When he described the job to me, however, he described a nightmare. The team I would be managing is responsible for this out-dated web app that houses 90% of their web sites. It apparently goes down on a regular basis and is incredibly flaky. To top it off the internal customers are the worst type of whiners and complainers with no patience at all. And the manager is a self-proclaimed work-aholic who seems to expect the same from his employees. All of this translated to me really not wanting this job. While it's true that a job is better than no job; this job would only be slightly better.

So, right now I'm batting one and one in the interview quartet. Here's to hoping that the next two interviews go more like the first.

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The Job Search Begins

I started my job search today. I had updated my resume a few weeks ago so I, fortunately, did not have to do that. I started with my old standby web site, Dice. That is the first place I always go for job searches.

Dice is specifically geared toward IT jobs, which is good. It's also more specifically geared toward staffing firms. This is kind of a mixed blessing. Getting my resume in front of staffing firms is good because it gives me access to a lot of potential jobs; more than I would probably find on my own. But a lot of companies won't go through staffing firms so Dice is not as likely to have those postings. Regardless I started at Dice today. Next up is Monster.com.

I probably submitted my resume to 15-20 positions today. One thing I don't understand is how tough some places make it. Dice is really easy as a job board. You setup your resume and cover letter and then just auto-apply with them to the jobs that interest you. Dice takes care of the formatting and sending. Some places insist on dragging you through their submission process. Some are as simple as telling you to send an e-mail. Others want you to configure a whole profile. "You want me to create an account in your system and configure a profile all for one job submission? Sheesh!"

There were a couple that I didn't submit for because of their annoying submission process. If I don't have any luck with the first few batches I may change my annoyance threshold but it's there for right now. It's almost like they're discouraging people from submitting resumes. Maybe they are. Maybe they want to weed out resumes from people who aren't really serious about applying. I'll probably wind up going ahead and applying to those places, I just found their process ridiculous.

Regardless, the hunt has started. I really hate job searching. Wish me luck.

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First Post After a Long Hiatus

I haven't made any posts for a while. I don't know why. I just haven't felt like blogging. I think it's been a mix of a lot of laziness and a lot of depression. My laziness/procrastination is well known and not worth explaining. I've been really depressed for the last few months, however. I haven't felt excited about doing anything and I've been looking for excuses to not do things I normally have no problem doing or even enjoy doing. I'm guessing my depression has to do with my job.

At the end of January I'm going to be out of a job. It's through no fault of my own (except that I moved to Denver) and, if they had their way, my bosses would both like to keep me on. Everybody is happy with my work and happy with the situation but my contract is still ending in a month. It's all due to understandable-but-frustrating business decisions. There are a few if-onlys thrown in for good measure, too. If only the IT management had been okay with me working from Denver as a regular employee instead of as a contractor this wouldn't be coming up. They don't want me to go. If only the IT management would realize that my main boss' team is extremely short-handed and they need more people. If only firm management wasn't so tight on money for staff then they wouldn't mind paying for me as a contractor. Ah well. There is very little I can do about it. A part of me hopes that some magic will happen and that it will all work itself out. I know there's not much of a chance for that, though. It just makes me sad and depressed....

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Stupid Windows Long Path Names

I'm so !@#$ frustrated right now. I've been working on a program to export documents out of our portal and onto a file system. This is enough of a pain in the neck as it is because the documents are stored in four different places. The portal just contains links to the native document. Adding to the problem is that I have to replicate the portal directory structure on the file system. So, my app has to replicate the portal folder structure, figure out where the document that is being referenced actually lives and copy it into the new location on the file system. All of that would be fine (somewhat) if it were for how Windows handles path definitions. Because the portal didn't care how long a path might wind up being it let people create folder structures that stretched over twenty levels deep with folder and file names that were hundreds of characters long. Of course when I try to recreate this on a file system Windows barfs all over it. Or, to be more precise, .NET barfs all over it. In some way Windows can deal with the long path, but .NET can't at all. I say that Windows can deal with it in some ways because the reality is that it's very spotty in its handling of it. You can navigate through the folders. You can open the documents. You can even move the folders around as long as it is on the same drive. If you try to delete something or move it to a new disk then Windows starts barfing on it. There are .NET tricks to getting around these things so that you can build these offending folder structures, but it's not all peaches and cream. Copying from one location to another can apparently only be done if the source does not have the "long path" designator in front of it. Dynamically created shortcuts appear to vomit all over the long path issue no matter what I try. I even tried creating the shortcut in a path-friendly location and then copying it over to the final, long-path location but it doesn't seem to like that. To make matters worse, the methods you use for long paths from .NET are actually calls to the core Windows API. They apparently didn't write any useful error/debug messages into this API because all of the methods either succeed or fail with no explanation of the problem. It's not like a specific exception gets raised that you can work with to trace down the problem. No, the method just doesn't work and continues happily on. I'm left totally in the dark as to what the heck the actual problem is. It's driving me nuts. I've spent the last six days beating my head against these problems and they currently are only sort-of resolved. I think I'm about ready to say screw the whole thing. This is the best you're getting; deal with it and shut-up!

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Terribly Exciting Day

Terribly exciting day yesterday. Nothing very amazing happened. I worked late and we had IHOP for dinner. Then I was up late watching our friends' kids while they went to the emergency room. It gave me a good excuse to get a lot of reading in, though, so I'm not complaining too much. I'm working on an application to export documents out of our portal onto a file system while recreating the directory structure on the portal. This has caused me to bump into the dreaded path-length issue that I have been skirting during the last three projects. So, I finally have to deal with it. It's rather annoying, actually. I spent all day yesterday writing a class to handle the main file operations we need using p/invoke methods from the Windows API. It's not nearly as much fun as it sounds. The special part of the fun occurs when the method doesn't work for some reason but doesn't bother to give me any debugging error information. It just fails and moves happily along. I'm stuck with a big ol' question mark on my forehead wondering what to do now. I've actually gotten the primary part of the app working, so that's good. I just have to write the code to extract from a secondary source, but that shouldn't be too problematic. Oh well.... back to the grindstone...

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