Okay, okay, it's been a while... But I wasn't ready to serve up disillusionment, disappointment, and distress. And since I fake about as good as I cook, the hearts and roses shit just adds up to a big smell. Things are getting better though and I've gotten pinged more than once about, "What is going on? How are you doing?" As usual, in the interest of expediency, I'll post a blog entry.
My Burpday week was The Wurst. Really. In fact, the whole month of March stank. It was so bad it was nearly cosmic. My project was cancelled, yeah, sure, but worse than that was Davie projectile womiting like Linda Blair without the levity. Somewhere along the line he'd acquired "vertigo" - source unknown. After his "not associated with a stroke" / Yes you will get an MRI, honey (I said with a smile), he was rear-ended a week later and the truck tailgate is doomed, but Davie was alright. Sore, but otherwise okay, still a week after that he strained / sprained a calf muscle and it blew up like a kiddie balloon. Yes. There were a number of miseries. Thank heavens, nothing serious, but ugh-y anyways.
Things began to get better in April. I started updating my profiles and getting calls. All I gotta say is that, no, I'm not a database administrator no matter that your job description calls it data scientist. Data scientists / analysts don't give a fuck what data architecture is implemented. That's the database administrator's job. We just want our data streams integrated, and rapidly please. And so here begins my sour grapes rant:
While there are many people interested in my profile...far and wide... mostly it's the big companies around here sending their hounds after me. Still, there is a lot of sexier competition than I, who are much more complacent and don't look a hiring manager in the eye and say, "Say what?" I'm tired of my own bad attitude and I've decided to play chicken: I'm working on a startup idea and if it launches and I get a paycheck before I get a viable job offer, I'm gonna stick with it. I'll talk more about it later, but the
current interview process would be hilarious if it wasn't so outrageous. Apparently there are so many zombie candidates out there that the tech interviews need to be insulting, time consuming, and just plain awful. "Write a sql statement which selects a sum of sales orders by month." uhm... what? I talk to so many candidates who are just plain t-i-r-e-d of taking these pop quizzes which don't reflect what they're capable of, or how they'd handle not knowing something. Then there's the "Rubik's cube" kind of question, to "see how you think." Uhm... those can sometimes take days to figure out. Then there's the technical ones which seem to be forced memorization of crap like "program a Fibonacci sequence". Worse, are those interviews for things like analyst positions where they ask questions about database architecture. W-T-F?
When I think of all the interviewing of others I've done in the past, I knew they wouldn't know my
networks, or what we did each day. There was no freakin' way. So it was all about trying to find someone who had something to say, had some personality, and gave a sense that they could fit with the daily chaos and figure out - by themselves - what needed to be done and how to get there. We also interviewed for people who were different than we were, who had skills we didn't have and didn't know about. Sure there were mistakes, but hey, that's life. Mistakes get promoted, and that's the way the world works. All that griping
said, my name is being floated for architectural level stuff, but nothing about that goes fast. So, who knows, I don't.
In the absence of a job which isn't bounded by a hamster wheel or a tiny idea, I've started working on building a new business plan for a company I'm calling Vizzy Solutions. The idea is to bring "Big Data to Small Business," and it's targeted toward the businesses which don't have the resources, or even truly the full-time need for an analyst, but could use help consolidating their data sources and combining the information for a holistic report view.
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| artist: Brenda Reid |
It's an idea I've had for awhile, but killed it because I couldn't find the correct target market. Then I was approached by someone who is working within a market I might be able to create a package for. Now I do have a target audience and I'm working to put together the package build, the business plan. I've talked to others who have deep backgrounds and / or I've worked with and they find the space and idea interesting. They're interested in playing in the sandbox if I can get it going. They are a Stanford PhD in statistics, a GIS analyst, a database administrator, and a civil engineer who just got a "data scientist" certificate through Galvanize.
They're all smarter than I am, but they don't think my idea is stupid. In fact they've all kinda wondered how to go about getting it going, or how to do the work on their own. For me, it took meeting with an independent marketing person who works with wineries who got all excited hearing I'm all about data, Excel workbooks, and analytics. I'm working with the marketing / sales person to see what it will take to put together package deals so the service model is similar to the Accountant or design firm. We're going to focus on offering the same type of value, except in data.
But yes, I'm still interviewing...
