Wonder what other jobs are interesting around here.

[flexagon]

I am hating Colubrid again. A couple of weeks ago I was thinking I might stay indefinitely, and (although I wrote down the reasons: good boss, lots of vacation after I hit my 3-year mark, central positioning in the company) I can't remember what I was thinking. Right now it seems like I'm stuck in an annoying place just watching bad decisions be made, and feeling powerless to stop them. In the meantime I work on my shitty project, and my boss is promising to take me off but the shitty platform the shitty project is ON seems to be the wave of the future... so how far away from it can he really get me?

Dan the Cat just got rejected from the large, famously well-paying search company I keep thinking about applying to. So not only are they changing their policies on whether it's okay to work on projects not centered in the satellite offices (which sucks for me since I'm not sure I want to work on the projects they have in Cambridge), but as taegubcrusade said, now we know you can't get in based on merit. Dan the Cat has done me a favor though... knowing that they didn't want him really makes it sink in how much randomness and slant there is in the hiring system there. If I don't get in, now I will be able to remind myself that Dan didn't either (and for those who are behind on who my work-heroes are, Dan is the professional I want to be in 10 years). If I do get in, what the hell will they have been thinking?

"Perfect! You can code in all the right languages, but luckily you're not so great with memory management and you don't know French or Hebrew! Not like that one guy we had to turn down. When can you start?"

Oh yeah, everyone say hi to taegubcrusade... formerly known as TBC. Welcome, taegubcrusade.

Comments

Everyone is hiring, but they all suck

[taegubcrusade.livejournal.com]

Not to be too optimistic about all this, but there seem to be lots of places hiring. The problem is that all jobs suck. Seriously, if this was all fun, why would I be making (what seemed when I was a kid like) a delirious amount of money at it?

I'm also less cynical on the randomness of hiring practices, both at the aforementioned mega-corp and elsewhere. I think of our friend Dent, who interviewed while training for a marathon and puked his guts out. Even if you take a whole day to interview someone, there are all sorts of issues with the types of questions you ask, the person's biorhythms, the air pressure, their train/car/plane ride over....it's always a crap shoot, you just try to even the odds as much as possible. Also, megasearchcorp seems to be developing very group-specific hiring practices (or else the company is changing practices at random, short intervals). So, the Cat's rejection has even less to do with your performance (or mine) than it might already have seemed.

TBC

Re: Everyone is hiring, but they all suck

[flexagon]

Not only are you right about our friend Dent, you're catching on to my naming practices rather well. ;) But still, you're even more convinced than I am that it's a crap shoot and you say you're less cynical? I'm not sure that word means what you think it means.

The Cat's experience doesn't apply to ours 100%, I know. But adding that up with Chia's first time around, when every interviewer said "hire!" and the hiring committee still turned her down... yeah. I'm pretty sure that dice are involved in their process somewhere.

I'll still be trying to get in, of course.