elfs | Entries tagged with unemployed

Well, today was unproductive job-wise. I found one opening through a recruiter I'd already spoken with, so it was a different position and I need to get a job number from my contact at this recruiter. Otherwise, pretty bleak.

I did do a technical interview, and the engineer and I talked around all the development issues I did. I kinda flubbed the SQL "Inner joins and Outer joins" technical, but I confessed to using the ORM and taking the default recommendations. I was not aware-- and this was bad-- that ISAM isn't fully ACID, but then most modern installs don't activate the ISAM component anyway. But all of the development layer questions, especially about test driven development and acceptance testing and all that, I knew my stuff, so it was all good that way.

I find that when I'm using the earpiece I tend to pace all around the house, up and down the hallway between the living room and the bedrooms, using motion to activate portions of my brain.

Anyway, we'll see how things go. According to the guy I talked to, a lot of people use the Renton P&R and bus it up to Bellevue. It's faster than driving.

Current Mood: happy

Some days, it really feels like I'm just screaming into the void, and not getting anywhere on the professional front. I've been spending upwards of six hours a day tuning resumes and sending them out to employers, and thus far the callback rate has been .02. 50 resumes sent out: one callback. This just sucks. Today, I found a vaguely secret weapon, a list of Seattle-based start-ups, along with a calendar of when and where they hold their meet-ups, so maybe I'll go check those out and see what gives.

On the other hand, remember that little Wordpress customization job I did awhile back? I got paid for it, and like a good little drone reported my earnings to my unemployment insurance officer.

Today I get this letter from the unemployment insurance security enforcement office, with this incredibly threatening note at the top that if I'm now "self employed" and earning income as well as drawing unemployment insurance I'm committing FRAUD and could be subject to FINE OR IMPRISONMENT, and that I had better EXPLAIN that income report and how I could be earning money when I'm supposed to be LOOKING FOR WORK. (Yes, all of these words and phrases were capitalized in the original.)

I called and the nice woman at the other side said they had this come up "a lot," especially recently, and they understood that people were doing odd jobs, and yes, I was doing the right thing by reporting it, and that if I get an offer to do something like that again I should probably take it, as long as everyone understands that they're little patch assignments and I will drop it like a hot rock when the first full-time offer comes along.

So I won't get screwed. I hope.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Koji Kondo, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time Symphony

Well, I found three places to apply to this morning, one of which I don't trust, another of which sounds like a nifty startup. An opportunity I skipped says "This is a non-paid position," and looking closely it appears to be a charity start-up that's going through a funding crunch and is looking for a design haus that will support its web outreach until it starts to get money. The third position I did apply for is at The Mouse.

I'm told that working for the Mouse can be fun. I hope it's not one of those position where I have to remember all seven of the dwarfs, though; I can never quite get that right. Happy, Dopey, Sleepy, Sneezy, Doc, Grumpy, and Bashful, right?

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Nat King Cole, Unforgettable

In the past three days, I've received calls from young woman with thick Mumbai accents, asking me if they can arrange telephone call interviews for tasks for which I don't have the skillset. The dance goes something like this:

"Sir, can I arrange for someone to call you about your HTML and CSS experience? Microsoft has need of experienced PSD to HTML developers."

Since I'm bound by the terms of the unemployemnt insurance, I grudgingly accept. I get a call from a first-line interviewer, who soon realizes that I'm (1) way overqualified for what he wants, since I'm not just some HTML monkey, and (2) I don't have PSD to HTML conversion on my resume. (I can do it, it's just not on my resume for a reason. It's boring!) The conversation closes with a mutual agreement that he doesn't want me for the job.

Then I get a call back from Mumbai. "Sir, it says here that you were not picked up for this job, and the note says that the keywords were not appropriate. Can you tell me what keywords I should be looking for?"

Politely and trying not to lose my cool-- this is my time she's wasting, after all, whatever her employer pays her-- I tell her that I don't know what keywords she can look for since I'm not in the field she's interviewing for, that it's not my job, it's not my job to help her, and no, I can't help her. Thank you. Click.

The other one is that since I've done Rich Internet Application development for "industrial environments," and have the word "prototype" on my resume, I've gotten calls for "Industrial Prototype Design and Development." When it becomes clear that what they want is someone who does rapid prototyping of physical things, not software, I ask them why they called me. "It says prototype on your resume.'"

I have to sigh and tell him, "Prototype is a programming framework and language for web page development. It sounds to me like you've got a bad keyword lookup."

"Can you tell me what keywords I should be looking for?"

"Maybe you should see if the words 'industrial' and 'prototype' are even in the same paragraph?"

Ah, the adventure never ceases. I just worry that I might soon have to tune down a resume' to something small and inexperienced to qualify for one of those scutty webmonkey jobs.

Current Mood: annoyed

You know that stage where the recruiter calls you and says, "What kind of compensation are you looking for?" I discovered today something that works shockingly well: don't give them a number.

This was advice I took from a number of websites on negotiating for a raise during a pay review, sites I had bookmarked a couple months ago when I was expecting a contentious discussion with my manager at ${LAST_JOB} over my pay scale. Yeah, I really needed those now.

And yet, I did. It works well for negotiating an initial salary, too. I was talking to a recruiter and he gave me that line, and I said, "I dunno; it's not really like what I was doing at ${LAST_JOB}, so I'm not sure what I should ask for. Why don't you tell me what you think is within their budget?"

He was quiet for a minute. Some recruiters work on commission, so sometimes they're looking for a good commission, too. "Hmm. I think they're somewhere between ${SURPRISING_BIGNUM} and ${SURPRISING_BIGGERNUM}. How does that sound to you?"

I said, "Let's go for it with my resume', and see what they do."

It was just so weird. When you go in, they're looking for cheapness and quality all in one. You want the best price they can give you. Don't underbid yourself: let them tell you what their budget can stand, and go for it.

Current Mood: giggly

Sigh. I did the math. I sent out 27 resumes, got exactly three calls, one interview, and no bites in April. This doesn't count the in-face meetings and arrangements and so forth. I'm starting to get depressed.

I did a brief consulting gig, not for pay but just as a favor for a friend. The site I reviewed for them was pretty cool. Once they go live, I might use them for the next few brochure sites. (OTOH, since I have my own server, I'd rather base their code myself, but they're selling a service, not a product.)

Current Mood: depressed

Omaha and I got a surprise letter this weekend, announcing that our local, independent pharmacy, Manhattan Drugs, was going out of business. The letter was from the corporate grocer chain Safeway, informing us that the Safeway, 3 miles north of us, would be taking over their pharmacy records unless we elected to have them sent elsewhere. Safeway would, of course, be happy to have our business, and here's three $25 coupons for our next three drug purchases from their pharmacy.

I went over to Manhattan and talked to some of the women behind the counter. The landlord who owns the property has been raising the rates on everyone. It's pretty well acknowledge that he raised rates deliberately to drive the Dairy Queen out of business. The video store probably closed of its own accord. The florist shop closed up, too, when the corporate chain grocery store QFC (that I use all the time) started selling flowers "good enough" for most occasions. The teriyaki place is holding on by its fingernails.

The pharmacist, a nice older gentleman, had apparently negotiated with Safeway to make the move when he decided to close the business, and then sprang it on everyone last Monday. The pharmacy goes, the extra staff is, like myself, now without work.

There's been a sign up for years announcing that the strip here is going to be demolished and gentrified, with QFC and the new chain daycare center as anchors. I guess this is another step in that process. I wonder what the Starbucks will do.

This frustrates Omaha and I. It used to be that when we needed medicines, we could walk. Now, like everything else, our neighborhood's walkability has plummeted, trashed until a replacement comes in, because one of the major draws in this neighborhood, an independent local pharmacist, is gone.

Current Mood: annoyed

One of the other chaperons I met at the Musuem of Flight outing I took yesterday with Yamaraashi-chan has the most at-risk job I could think of: she was the recruitment desk for classified ads at a major city newspaper. Her job was to round up "Help Wanted" ads with which to bulk up the classifieds pages. She said that they were making a lot of outbounds, begging employers who used to post every week to give them something, anything, but most employers just didn't have any openings worth paying money to put a classified ad up.

I confessed that I used both her newspaper and Craigslist in my search. "No, don't use Craigslist! They just post the same job ads over and over. You'll never get anywhere with them!"

She confessed that she wondered every day if her job would be there tomorrow. I understood her clearly. I wondered that too.

Current Mood: giggly

Discovery #1 was that I got to eat bacon whenever I wanted. Discovery #2 is that my cast iron skillet has become perfectly seasoned.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Porcupine Tree, Shesmovedon

Weird. So, I filed for Unemployment Insurance today, actually going through the paperwork for the first time now that I'm completely severed from Isilon. I went through all the questions on the questionnaire, I brought a list of the eleven contacts I made last week, and they didn't ask for a single one.

I mean, how do they verify that anyone actually made contacts? That anyone went out and looked for work? That seems really stupid, just trusting people to fill out the information correctly like that. I suppose, sure, if I did show up on some taxation database they'd know about it, but it still seems a little too trusting right now.

Of course, they're probably way overloaded right now and don't have time to investigate various strange tics in the database, but this seems like a situation ready for abuse.