Thoreau said...
AGuy: This is great news for you! I know you've dealt with a lot between your divorce, hard to deal with ex, taking care of your daughter, work worries, and on top of it all... UC!
I'm coming on the forum tonight a bit discouraged with my career due to a complete lack of certainty and steadiness. To me it was really good to read of your success in coming through a difficult time. I am very glad things are working out for you.
Thanks for posting and giving me some hope/mental strength.
Thanks everyone for the upbeat posts.
I feel a bit funny about
letting go of the work from home contract, it would be perhaps another 1000 per month pre-tax but again it could end abruptly or the end customer a mobile telecom company could ask me to conver to employee. I know WFH is great especially with UC but I think I need the social interaction, meeting people and maybe someday get a girlfriend again. With this gig I will make women friends in the office who have friends and can drop into Boulder for lunch and the women there seem friendlier than in Denver.
" a bit discouraged with my career due to a complete lack of certainty and steadiness"
I do have a tip for you. As for the career itself you may need to change course. I loved programming in Delphi because I could make really cool useful applications quickly - except it was dying and then visual basic stopped being so terrible and was kicking its butt. Eventually Microsoft hired all the brains behind Delphi. I could see it dying in the job adds less and less postings in the newspaper. A good friend had to move to a remote place to keep working with it and became trapped working for a bad boss in a small town. So while in Hawaii vacationing with another couple I realized my career was like a big ocean freighter on the horizon, it will take time to turn it around so lets get started right away. I had noticed these Database guys were always doing well and loads of jobs. I had a friend making mad money at it too. So I got my hands on anything Oracle and read it and installed it and got certified by passing 7 tests then went to work for startups where I touched it all as a one man team. That was 15 years ago and its still going strong. Yep Oracle recently missed back to back quarterly earnings which is a first and yep there are 100 free databases out there now as a backlash to pricey Oracle. Heck that's why my team got sacked we are expensive for a company not able to sell their own product. But now I am with an Oracle partner company specializing in Oracle's business apps. I *think* I can ride this for the rest of my career.
Before all of that I was a night freight pilot and with the economy stalled it looked bad so I jumped back into IT where they actually have to pay people.
So its good to recognize a dead end if that's what you face. Move on to greener pastures knowing it takes time to switch just get a plan and start executing it.
Now my tip is a book I go back to whenever I am rusty interviewing. Back in September I posted about
a work from home job that I had made to the 3rd round of interviews only I blew it. Not on prednisone, just saved the company 7 million by tuning the heck out of the system and slashing licensing requirements. But that does not matter if your inteview skills have withered. Mine had. When I went back to the book I realized the phone call was supposed to be a short 'screen interview' more or less yes or no answers and I blabbed and blabbed must have drove the woman nuts. So this time I set aside a desk dedicated to the book and I kept reading it and it told me what I needed to know at every turn. The examples in there sound great but he tells you how they actually blew their interview, how to gently take control and get to what they are seeking and on the fly adjust your stories to match that. Sometimes the job posting says one thing ( old and re-used postings are common ) but the current manager tells you he is now looking for A-B-C so you find that in your history and it tells you why some people have the manager exiting saying 'do what it takes to get me this person'. Its about
thinking on your feet ( well rested ) and talking smart about
your abilities, the best skilled for the job is beat by the best interview-skilled person. It describes the types of interviews, when to speak up and also when to yield and not put off the interviewer etc. Looks like he as a new edition and cover.
www.amazon.com/gp/reader/047125083X/ref=sib_dp_pop_toc?ie=UTF8&p=S00F#reader-linkAs a technical person the tendency is to try to cram a zillion facts in your head so you can be a walking talking knowledge base but that just makes you tired and unable to talk on the higher level the next day during the interview its a trap. Of course you have to clear the tech screen phone calls so I accumulate notes from my projects and do try to cram for those but you are normally told which one is the tech screen, for the others fuggetabout
it and focus on everything else.
Post Edited (aguywithuc) : 1/10/2014 9:09:33 AM (GMT-7)