Tuesday, November 24, 2009

More thoughts this week

So that interview back in October did not pan out, nor did the one that followed it. But then EMC called, and I will interview after the Thanksgiving holiday. Seems to be some kind of tools or performance analysis group, and some Java involved.

I am trying to do a better job of keeping in touch with a few recruiters in the hope they can get me an interview at places where I do not have my own personal contacts, since I have about tapped out said contacts now. I suppose I should alter a few words in my resume and re-post it, but the only result from that effort last time was a flurry of new emails from various door-to-door career change opportunities.

There really does seem to be some truth to the age discrimination rumblings. I am the oldest person from my former group, and I am one of only two or three (out of about 50) who have not yet found a new position (although a couple of folks took short contracting jobs). I have also been told that I made too much money - no one is likely to offer me a major salary cut because I am likely to seek a higher paying job.

Oh, my former company back-pedaled on the outsourcing and granted "immunity" to the 6 or 7 folks still on the payroll in the U. S. of A. Those folks were due to be phased out in October, but were then granted a 6 month stay of execution, which was followed a month later by a "permanent" status. My conclusion is that the overseas team is completely incompetent, and the customers screamed very loudly as the evidence of that incompetence reached their ears. You'd think after about 10 years of this out-sourcing pressure that such a large and seemingly technically competent organization would have figured out a smoother process for this stuff. Probably this mishap can be attributed to the VP who organized it.

And what the heck was my former employer thinking by buying a one-trick pony of a video camera company right before Apple started shipping iPods and iPhones with video cameras in them...and then they turn around and invest in another tired technology, video conferencing...I guess the money was burning a hole in someone's pocket and the tax advantages of a write-off outweighed the measly interest on the cash....I plan to unload my remaining shares as soon as feasible...


A colleague recently landed a new job right after finishing a Java certification, so now I am motivated to at least get the SCJP (Java programmer) rating. I downloaded the pre-test last week and slogged through the 120 questions. I did not score well enough to pass the real exam, but I was within spitting distance, so I am encouraged that I could perhaps get the SCJP book and study guide, and be ready to pass the exam within a week or two. The alternatives seem to be a multi-boat-buck web class or a full blown boot camp with hotel and meals in Dallas or Orlando (I missed the local class at the beginning of this month, sigh).

The pre-cert test was a depressing mish-mash of questions about how certain pieces of code might fail to compile. I understand that they are trying to teach me some subtle issues about the language, but there has to be a better way than asking me to think like a compiler. Why wouldn't I just look at the compiler errors and fix them? Do they really think that stuff that people type into an editor is supposed to compile and run with no errors?

The SCJD test apparently covers a whole bunch of Swing and other UI technologies, and the Sun web page says that the main part of that certification is to write a real JEE program, which is graded. There is also an exam, and an interview that attempts to determine if you really wrote the program that you submitted. This higher level certification is expected to take a couple of months to complete and another couple of months to be graded.

On to the domestic news:

The oak flooring is installed in the kitchen and it brightens up the kitchen a lot. This brought attention to the sorry state of the radiator, and also the shelving in the pantry. Said shelving turns out to be subflooring with a thin coat of urethane or some such, and badly stained and somewhat warped. Who knew. All shelving is since replaced with solid wood stained dark cherry. Wonder how long it will take the next owners of this house to notice the nice wood. Spousal energy was devoted to cleaning and painting the radiator a shining coat of white.

Here's a couple pictures:




We switched our internet and TV over to Verizon FIOS a couple of weeks ago. The TV really does look brighter but I am suspicious that the tech set the brightness to maximum on the TV when we weren't looking. Now we have about 100 channels, and basically still nothing we want to watch, except the coveted HGTV channel.

The Apple Mail program crashed repeatedly when I attempted to add the new Verizon email account manually. It did let me set it up "automatically" with several warnings that the password would have to be exchanged with the Verizon server in a non-secure manner. So if you all start getting spammed by a Verizon account, it is probably my fault.

We seem to have an infestation of moths in our area, what with the warm-ish weather the past couple of weeks. At least it was easy to get the leaves dealt with this year, since they stayed mostly dry and easy to vacuum up, unlike other years when an ice storm created blocks of leafy ice to pick up.

This may be the first November in many years that we skip the major snowstorm around the Thanksgiving holiday. Can't say we'll miss it.

Just finished reading the newest Terry Pratchett book "Unseen Academicals" in which he examines the nature of big time sports.

Hopefully the next update has some positive job news...

No comments:

Post a Comment