- Polish up that resume. This is everybody's first step in getting that next job. I'm going to have to look at what is trendy right now in resume righting. Of course, a computer programmer's resume must be bloated with all of the latest buzz words.
- Hold until late July. Make ready to get underway until then. Continue weight loss unabated. It will take some time to execute all the steps on this list. Give yourself a modicum of time to get it done.
- Get a custom tailored business suit. The cloths make the man. In SoCal, it's all about style over substance. The moto is "You are your image; you must control your image or your image will control you." It is an odious and egregious fact, but in the glamour capital of the universe, personal appearance means more than any skill or merit.
- Get a professional photographer to take executive portrait shots of you. In line with position #1, many employers want to look at you in the way casting directors do. Does this man look convincing in the role? If I take still shots of this guy, will he convince anyone he is the character we cast him as? I have been told that one way to land a big desk in a nice office is to have a Hollywood photographer do portraiture of you behind a big executive desk. First impressions are lasting impressions. If the first shot an employer sees of you is a man in custom tailored business suit behind an executive desk, odds are this will become the frieze chiseled in the mind's eye.
- Be open to a move out of state for new and better employment.
- Look in cities such as San Francisco, Miami, Dallas, Phoenix and Las Vegas.
- Get Bump. Bump is a little phone app that allows you to exchange business cards with people you meet by simply bumping your smart phones together. It automatically adds these individuals to your database of contacts and keeps their business cards in an orderly fashion.
- Get a FaceBook.com account. Folks, this tip comes straight from Monster.com. Why should they recommend another website other than their own? It is an odious and egregious fact that more and more employers are seeking information about their prospects from social media. If you don't have a FaceBook.com account, some treat this fact as a lack of ID and credentials. This is particularly true in the hipster-huckster bleeding-edge technology market. This is not entirely without merit. You can recognize a problem case based on certain key warning signs found in social media. Still, it is vastly more difficult to assign positive merit points based on what you see in social media. Regrettably, many employers do both today.
- Get a Twitter account. Regrettably, many placement agencies are using Twitter these days. They use it for communication purposes. I don't particularly like this idea, but it you will either play or pay for it.
- List yourself on Dice.com. Dice remains a leader in placing technology professionals. I am going to have to see there is something better these days.
- List yourself on Ladders.com. Most of us have seen the commercials for Ladders.com. Should we believe the hype? I don't know, but I think it is worth having a look at this site.
- Consider joining the Masonic Lodge. I know this going to sound wacky to some people. When all is said and done, the Masonic Lodge is just an old-boys network. This is a back-slapping club in which the men pledge to help each other in their careers. I have two uncles who made it to the 33rd degree in Scottish Rite. There is some power in this outfit. It is not what it used to be, but there remains something to be said for it.
Showing posts with label permenent employment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label permenent employment. Show all posts
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Positive steps towards a good change in employment
The employment market is very difficult today. Making a smooth & successful transition to a better position is far from easy. What does a man need to do to maximize his chances of success? I've given that some serious thought, and I have developed the following list of items:
Saturday, November 21, 2009
The joy of development renewed
During the time I was convalencing, after my athroscopic surgery, in my hometown Fresno, my father introduced me to a non-profit organization he has been working with for the better part of two years now.
The group is a non-denominational 501C3 that provides housing, medical care, financial support, foster care, and education for homeless children. The organization has been in business for 24 years, and the turbines are begining to flip on. Partially due to my father's grand writing skills, this organization has obtained several million dollars in new funding over the past year and half. They have expanded their services to 5 group homes, a medical clinic, and educational facility.
With all this growth comes all of the problems of growth. The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Control and communication are poor. There is a constant background terror that the costs are escalating and out of control, just because there is no easy way to run a balance sheet report. Doing a balance sheet manually, from paper and Quickbooks, is very difficult and labor intensive. You can do about one a month with 5 accountants working on it.
The founder and president of this mission is a very forward thinking lady. She has been pondering how much scalability would be possible if she had a fancy web-based database application that could coordinate all of the organization's activities, and give her an immediate balance sheet of assets and liabilities.
Imagine a system in which all of the intake paperwork you have to do when you recieve a new child happens on the web. It immediately goes into the central 501C3 database. All the medical services you provide that child go in the same database. Meal costs go into the same database. Housing assignments and resource costs go into that same database. School materials are recorded in that same database. If you have such a database, and your workers are dilligent about keeping up, you can draw a real-time, fully automated balance sheet for your entire 501C3.
Enter Dave. That is what I am working on right now. I was given the contract to do this project for her. I have been working on this off and on for several weeks now. With electro stim and an icepack on my knee, I sat here for many long hours today trying to button up a beta copy to show the boss during Thanks Giving week, when I will return home. The prospects look good. The database is finished and splendid. The Web app is a state-of-the-art Microsoft C# 4.0, .NET 4.0, MVC 2.0 app using the Entity Framework for data access. I even tossed in some JQuery 1.3.2, and boy was that an eye-opener! It isn't finished, but it is very nice. I have written a lot of test code, and my business classes are passing under much punishing stress. I am confident the pluming is very good.
Folks, I cannot tell you the joy I have experianced here at my workstation, calling all the shots, creating the entire system from Green Fields, with no legacy bullshit, no jack-ass managers, and no weak-ass co-workers to constrain me. I am using my ultra-badass Core i7 and my 30 inch Dell 3008WFP to do the work. This is not an out-dated weak-ass machine like my unit at work. I am working with SQL Server 2008, not the outdated 2005. As implied by the statements above, I am using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, not VS2008. All the reports are in Microsoft SQL Reporting Services 2008. The tablix absolutely rocks. There is no reporting technology on the planet that can compete with this; except maybe Excel 2007 if you know how to use it well. The tablix was born to pivot financial data, and it makes an A&L balance sheet pretty damn trivial. I could do it with the SQL Pivot, but this is better and more dynamic.
In short, this is the way it aught to be done if you are a Microsoft developer. No compromise. My one and only regret is that I am not using the Unity IoC in this project, but that is only because it is unclear how or whether Unity should fit into the scheme.
Best of all is the pay. I am not quite at twice the base-hourly pay I get from informa, but it is pretty damn close. I cut this 501C3 a big break because they do have a few cash-flow issues due to poor control. I am here to provide that control.
Now for the problem: This is spoiling me for nearly every other approach. I am remembering the glory days of 1998-2001 when I was a lone-gunman consultant who went into a fresh development situation, kicked ass for 6 months at a high rate of pay, and walked out with my pockets full of cash. I have weaped endless bitter tears over the end of those days that came with the Internet Buble bust and the 9/11 recession. I almost feel as if happy days are here again.
There is a serious problem with being a permanent-party employee developer. Often, you have no job to do at all. You are still chastized for not showing up at 9:00 anyhow. To say that I am unchalleged and under-utlized would be an understatement for the ages. Further, if you are not the lead dog...
There is an old funny saying that was quoted recently in The Taking of Pelham 123. Imagine you are a dog in an Alaskan Dog Sled race. If you are not the lead dog, the view never changes. Why? Because you are always staring directly into the asshole of the dog in front of you.
This is life as a permanent-party programmer developer. You are always given trivial, penny-ante assignments. You work on some piece of shit software that was originally developed by an incompetent 24 or 25 year old some 8 years ago. It is now a mazework of undocumented patches. The problems you are given to solve should never have existed in the first place. If the original developer had known anything about patterns and practices, entire categories of these problems would never have existed in the first place. This is legacy code, and by that, I mean code which is not under a suite of automatic tests. Ergo, you are terrified to change it. You know this piece of crap will break with even slight changes.
Folks, I have been gazing into the assholes of the dogs in front of me for far too long. I think one of my New Years Resolutions is going to be to drum up as much external moonlight as I possibly can in 2010. Let us hope that this will lead to a full independent consultant status once again. I can hardly bear the thought of continuing an unchallanged life of fixing someone else's giant errors.
The group is a non-denominational 501C3 that provides housing, medical care, financial support, foster care, and education for homeless children. The organization has been in business for 24 years, and the turbines are begining to flip on. Partially due to my father's grand writing skills, this organization has obtained several million dollars in new funding over the past year and half. They have expanded their services to 5 group homes, a medical clinic, and educational facility.
With all this growth comes all of the problems of growth. The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Control and communication are poor. There is a constant background terror that the costs are escalating and out of control, just because there is no easy way to run a balance sheet report. Doing a balance sheet manually, from paper and Quickbooks, is very difficult and labor intensive. You can do about one a month with 5 accountants working on it.
The founder and president of this mission is a very forward thinking lady. She has been pondering how much scalability would be possible if she had a fancy web-based database application that could coordinate all of the organization's activities, and give her an immediate balance sheet of assets and liabilities.
Imagine a system in which all of the intake paperwork you have to do when you recieve a new child happens on the web. It immediately goes into the central 501C3 database. All the medical services you provide that child go in the same database. Meal costs go into the same database. Housing assignments and resource costs go into that same database. School materials are recorded in that same database. If you have such a database, and your workers are dilligent about keeping up, you can draw a real-time, fully automated balance sheet for your entire 501C3.
Enter Dave. That is what I am working on right now. I was given the contract to do this project for her. I have been working on this off and on for several weeks now. With electro stim and an icepack on my knee, I sat here for many long hours today trying to button up a beta copy to show the boss during Thanks Giving week, when I will return home. The prospects look good. The database is finished and splendid. The Web app is a state-of-the-art Microsoft C# 4.0, .NET 4.0, MVC 2.0 app using the Entity Framework for data access. I even tossed in some JQuery 1.3.2, and boy was that an eye-opener! It isn't finished, but it is very nice. I have written a lot of test code, and my business classes are passing under much punishing stress. I am confident the pluming is very good.
Folks, I cannot tell you the joy I have experianced here at my workstation, calling all the shots, creating the entire system from Green Fields, with no legacy bullshit, no jack-ass managers, and no weak-ass co-workers to constrain me. I am using my ultra-badass Core i7 and my 30 inch Dell 3008WFP to do the work. This is not an out-dated weak-ass machine like my unit at work. I am working with SQL Server 2008, not the outdated 2005. As implied by the statements above, I am using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, not VS2008. All the reports are in Microsoft SQL Reporting Services 2008. The tablix absolutely rocks. There is no reporting technology on the planet that can compete with this; except maybe Excel 2007 if you know how to use it well. The tablix was born to pivot financial data, and it makes an A&L balance sheet pretty damn trivial. I could do it with the SQL Pivot, but this is better and more dynamic.
In short, this is the way it aught to be done if you are a Microsoft developer. No compromise. My one and only regret is that I am not using the Unity IoC in this project, but that is only because it is unclear how or whether Unity should fit into the scheme.
Best of all is the pay. I am not quite at twice the base-hourly pay I get from informa, but it is pretty damn close. I cut this 501C3 a big break because they do have a few cash-flow issues due to poor control. I am here to provide that control.
Now for the problem: This is spoiling me for nearly every other approach. I am remembering the glory days of 1998-2001 when I was a lone-gunman consultant who went into a fresh development situation, kicked ass for 6 months at a high rate of pay, and walked out with my pockets full of cash. I have weaped endless bitter tears over the end of those days that came with the Internet Buble bust and the 9/11 recession. I almost feel as if happy days are here again.
There is a serious problem with being a permanent-party employee developer. Often, you have no job to do at all. You are still chastized for not showing up at 9:00 anyhow. To say that I am unchalleged and under-utlized would be an understatement for the ages. Further, if you are not the lead dog...
There is an old funny saying that was quoted recently in The Taking of Pelham 123. Imagine you are a dog in an Alaskan Dog Sled race. If you are not the lead dog, the view never changes. Why? Because you are always staring directly into the asshole of the dog in front of you.
This is life as a permanent-party programmer developer. You are always given trivial, penny-ante assignments. You work on some piece of shit software that was originally developed by an incompetent 24 or 25 year old some 8 years ago. It is now a mazework of undocumented patches. The problems you are given to solve should never have existed in the first place. If the original developer had known anything about patterns and practices, entire categories of these problems would never have existed in the first place. This is legacy code, and by that, I mean code which is not under a suite of automatic tests. Ergo, you are terrified to change it. You know this piece of crap will break with even slight changes.
Folks, I have been gazing into the assholes of the dogs in front of me for far too long. I think one of my New Years Resolutions is going to be to drum up as much external moonlight as I possibly can in 2010. Let us hope that this will lead to a full independent consultant status once again. I can hardly bear the thought of continuing an unchallanged life of fixing someone else's giant errors.
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