On writing poetry

"Mary Oliver once told an interviewer her secret to success.Throughout her life, she says, "I was very careful never to take aninteresting job." She explains, adding, "Not an interesting one. Itook lots of jobs. But if you have an interesting job you getinterested in it." For Oliver, the only worthy interest was writing. "

My thoughts are with you

Today is the Big Day - the announcements went out. My thoughts are with y'all.  I know this is a difficult time.  I care and anything I can do to help, I will.

btw - inroads are being made on the medical subsidy / mobility eligibility service.  For some reason I was processed again, but I can forward you the info if you like.  Just email me.

Repeat after me

"I'd be glad to share not only my current earnings, but my whole salary history. But  think it's a bit too early to get into salary discussions.   I don't believe salary will be an issue if the fit is right. There are several factors  consider when evaluating the "fit" of a position: the challenge, the company culture, location, travel, career path, long-term compensation and immediate salary and bonuses. So, if the fit is right, I'm confident salary won't be a problem. "   (pieced together from an article by Marc Cenedella on The Ladders)

Everyone asks you for your salary and guess what - you will not get the answer correct, so you might as well work on trying to keep it private during the initial screenings.  Hey, I haven't gotten there 100%, but I try.  I honestly have.  Not so much with recruiters when I've got an hourly I want to make.  But the other jobs, the ones which aren't based upon an hourly contract amount - those I work on trying to find out if it would be a good fit first, if I even get called in, called back, or called forward.  

You read the articles and they're pretty clear :  You set yourself too low, you're a schmuck.  They drop you.  You set yourself too high.  You're a schmuck.  They drop you.  You do the industry search, you put in what you earn.  You've missed their target, or their budgeted amount is different.  You got it, you schmuck.  There is no right freakin' answer.

I've had only one HR consultant recommend filling in the blanks for screening purposes.  I'm opting for privacy because, what the heck, I do want flexibility in the salary. There are items I would trade dollars for.  But yes, I have broke down at times and put in $2 or my actual pay.

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Today's quickie interview summary:  I have all the right qualities, but I don't have clinical experience.  Yup.  And tormenting my lab partners, Tony and Mike and Nayerreh just doesn't count.  LOL

I'm not the best, I'm just very good

sidewalk cafe on a sunny Thursday afternoon in Seattle

I have to admit, today is a difficult day being unemployed.  My morning started out with a three mile walk along the Puget Sound.  All the images and sounds, the smells, and chill of this morning are not available in a photograph because I just did my walk.  Upon returning home, I hit the computer to begin checking for new jobs.  I followed up with one thank-you note to a screening interview I had last week and just a follow-up email to a job I replied to last month.  Then I began the process of looking at the "new" jobs which came through the transom.

Everything moves so slowly "out here."  Days pass and you don't hear from anyone.  Then all of a sudden you do.  There's a flurry.  Then you feel like a child forgotten at the bottom of a well.  There's no way to make "it" happen, whatever "it" happens to be.  This existential limbo kept me from leaving for many, many years - whenever I was disheartened by reorgs, frustrated with bosses, or just plain pissed off with the structure, I stayed - not because I was brave, or sure, or ambitious but because I was afraid of exactly this - what I'm going through right now.

But "right now" isn't so horrible.  Dave is outside working in our overblown garden.  I just finished
warming up some chicken wings.  I've been working on my letterpress poem layout.  I'm proud of what I was able to finish in my last class on Regression Analysis.  I bought three books today.  My mortgage payment is shockingly low.  I have health care and at this moment do not have hives, a sciatica episode, a cough, or the flu.

This job search / next career thing is uncomfortable and frustrating and - yes - at times exciting.  But the days when the powerlessness of NOT being able to Make Something Happen after having made things happen for so long feels like defeat.  And when salt is added to the wound, like an incident which just happened last week, it stings.

I had a pretty good phone screening with a company and I'm mildly interested.  That in itself does not bode well, but let's be real now, I need to start paying attention to how I feel about these jobs and these companies.  I did accept an offer of a second interview when the recruiter then mentioned they had a 40 question technical interview as part of the process.  Now this is for a job which had much the same profile as work I've done before.  It had some ETL, they didn't appear to have a centralized database, so there would be some small database development.  It's about accessing and joining information together to make sense of it using whichever scripting language they preferred.  As a matter of fact, I was looking at taking a pay cut - and being just fine with that - because I understand I'm jumping industries, I'm "junior."

But do I believe that I will find the 40 question technical interview a decent use of my time?  No.  Considering the fact I'm nearly entirely self-taught with my coding, I do pretty good.  Yet, when I read some of those prep questions, I just laugh at the idea that I could pass.  According to those people who are writing the questions, I should have never done the work I did and the company would have been better off if I'd just been slinging hash in some dive in the mid-west where they still believe dinosaurs are only 6,000 years old.

What does this make me feel about this company?  If I'd know that before I even had the first screening interview I would not have responded to the recruiter who reached out to me.  I don't see this as a "good sign" of an environment match.  This surprise just hardened my attitude.

Luckily, I had a salon appointment the following day to get my hair done.  I brought this up as a topic of conversation surrounded by women, foil, and the noxious fumes of hair dye.  One brilliant woman came up with this for my current dilemma:  Don't send an email stating you will not attend the next interview.  Go ahead, take it.  But once you get there, if you find it to be absurd, just put your pencil down, walk out, saying, "Thank you for your consideration, but I don't believe this to be a good match for me."

And so,  I'm about to start rejecting technical interviews. Some of the best articles I've read in rebellion of the technical interview are by a guy named Jon Evans who writes for Tech Crunch.  And while this guy is probably Don Quixote, I am absolutely going to tilt at this windmill.  His alternative does require the engineer to do some work and those of us who have had a very long career will find ourselves working overtime to get this done, he suggests making sure we have a project available on a site like GitHub where we have a project we've done ourselves and can share.

Here is what Jon suggests in his article, "The Terrible Technical Interview," from March of this year:

• It is time for engineers–especially excellent engineers for whom demand is high–to start to flatly refuse to do whiteboard interviews.

• Yes, really. Nothing will force companies to move on to better techniques faster than losing appealing candidates before they even get to interview them.

• But. This refusal must be coupled with a counteroffer: replacing the interview with a discussion / walkthrough of a side project the candidate has built themselves, in their own time.

Here’s the process I have in mind:

1. The interviewer takes 30-60 minutes to familiarize themself with the candidate’s project

I can't reiterate this enough to my friends - the time of hiding behind the curtain is over.  Unless you want to take up another career in poetry (which I am actively pursuing, I might add as a parallel stream), you need to make sure you begin to build your public presence:  LinkedIn, GitHub, and start modifying what you can of your work projects so you at least have some samples you can produce.

This Friday is going to be a big day for some people.  I'm wishing all my friends the best of luck, that the outcome is whatever they wish - be it the package or the job.  I certainly hope that those who are just a year or less shy of the Modified Rule of 75 for subsidized medical are not affected.

But even if you aren't affected GET STARTED taking care of yourself because I'm sure there's more to come.  You know there is.

AT&T engineers, lab rats, IT freaks, and yes - even our vendors...

I can think of a lot of names who should apply to speak here.  I went to their Data Day in Seattle, but never finished the blog entry to share with y'all.  This guy's legit.  The talks at Data Day Seattle were intensely detailed, but frankly, some of the talks were also just introducing people in how "they" were patching their data acquistion, parsers, and query structures together.

We deal / dealt with more complex stuff than a lot of what I've seen out here in the wilds with data swamps larger than most companies can imagine.  That said, they're catching up with things like "a billion searches a day," or "2.7 petabytes daily," "600,000 devices."  It's odd to me that none of the telecom providers - Verizon, T-Mobile, much less AT&T don't have any presenters in any of these meetups or conferences.  That's whacked.

I'd love to see someone speak to how network management layers are built, or element management layers.  The physicality of security would be a great topic too.  Everyone seems to be all over access control - Sarbanes Oxley seems to be catching up with people.  How soon will the intricacies of E-911 be pushed down to our personal wearable devices?

Anyways, here are their guidelines

Guidelines

Data Day Texas seeks presentations related to the following areas: big data, data workflow, data security, data science, internet of things, machine learning, predictive analytics, search, sentiment analysis, statistics, text analysis, time-series data. Talks are normally 50 minutes including Q&A. Workshops can be 1-2 hours.
If you are proposing graph-related content, check out our separate Graph Day site.
Case studies (not product pitches) involving multiple frameworks are especially welcome.
Proposals should include:
1) Proposed title
2) Talk outline and conclusion
3) Intended audience
4) technical skills and concepts required
5) Speaker biography and links to previous talks/videos.
Send all proposals and queries to proposals@datadaytexas.com.

Would you take it?

Best case scenario:
They don't want me, don't offer me the job.  Done.  Decision made.


Worst case is getting an offer:

1)  I might not be a match b/c with my first interview, if they're looking for the mechanical "follow the lead and only the lead," I might not be their girl.  But if the point of the position is more along the lines of 1)  deal with the immediate reporting problems now, but with an eye measuring & reporting the deployment atop the reporting like the other two conversations in futurish timeframe, then I would be someone who would be perfect b/c of my experience.

2)  Some of the conversations were right up my alley:  1)  how to measure, 2) defining business needs, 3)  documentation, 4)  lack of statistics (basic data) - possibilities for remediation.  I loved the business, metric, and process questions.  I so got into that (damn!!!)  I love that stuff.  Like really LOVE

3)  I really liked the people I met.  They were great.  I hate that b/c I'd love to work with them solving these complex problems.

4)  Vendor badge is one thing which makes me think I wouldn't be asked to participate in the most interesting part of the job...  How limited is the contractor role?

5)  Money isn't there.

6)  I really don't want to start work before September

7)  It's a big company.  I've done big before.  

8)  Everybody says "cachet" on the resume, but I don't really give a hoot.  I don't have the same kind of ambition which says I need to collect more big companies.

9)  Commute would really suck as in really suck.  No support.  No remediation as a contractor.