live to work, work to live.
no, not really. come on, people, has nothing i've said about chasing your dream, finding your own meaning in life, and subverting the dominant paradigm stuck with you? work is not life! money is not wealth! tune in, turn on, and drop out! ok, maybe that's a little extreme too. i wish i had the answers for an easy and legal way out of the system that left you living (comfortably) in the first world, but i don't. the astute reader may infer from the previous statement most of the answers that i *do* have, which i consider suboptimal for the time being. however, if i ever turn up missing, you might come back to this post and start wondering which of those qualifications i decided was no longer important and then you might have some idea where to look for me =)

what prompts today's expedition down into the crevasses of the mind of this fool? job interviews, of course! i had two, both of which went extremely well and are likely to land me no job i want, and i had a missed connection ("i guess you can leave a resume...") which saddened me more than the thorough waste of time with the interviewing. actually, i misrepresent that. though i don't think either of today's interviews will lead to a job that has me any happier, both of them taught me something which will without doubt improve my future job application adventures:


interview #1 was with nike; it was ridiculously enough a phone screen with a woman who works within 500 yards of where i took her call. since i work in the vaguest of cube farms (it's more like a long, long table with 4 people at it, with another long table with 6 people across an open space to our backs. there is nothing to break the noise up, and we (mostly. except the woman next to me.) have a shared respect about not taking personal or long telephone calls while others are trying to work, and leaving our cell phones on vibrate and walking out of the area to answer them. so, i couldn't interview at my desk. i really just wanted to walk over and sit down to chat with her (why i needed to get screened when i am applying for *the job i am already doing* was beyond me, but bear with me since the story has a...not unhappy ending), but she insisted that would complicate things and so instead she reserved me a conference room which i occupied all by my lonesome for an hour. she was 15 minutes late in calling; it's fortunate i brought a book and that the chairs in the conference room are far more comfortable than our desk chairs. which are Not Great. but i can slouch effectively, so they work okay for me. aaaaanyway...

she called and took 5 minutes establishing that, yes, i was fully aware of the job needs, work environment, etc, since i was already performing them and experiencing them, respectively. she then asked me some pretty insubstantial questions like "what is it you do?" and "how do you see yourself helping nike?" those were easy enough, since i have been putting a lot of thought into what i do, and how i can work this situation to some advantage for myself and my group. she then spent a while kind of making me drool about the benefits, which are, frankly, really good. 5% 401k matching, 15% bonus plus an average 4% stock bonus plus a really decent employee stock purchase program on the money side, and a lot of time off, partial flex time, great sports facilities with trainers and physical therapists, etc. all stuff that i don't see at all, right now, save the flexish time. so, yeah, i was kind of thinking "all of that might offset some of my unhappiness" by the end of the interview. but i realized, i don't want any unhappiness in my job. i've really enjoyed all my past jobs and why shouldn't i really enjoy my next one?

the thing that actually made this not a waste of time is that 1) i love fairy tales, even if they don't have a happy ending and 2) she informed me that the next interview would be with my team (whom i have already interviewed well with) but that it will only be 25% technical. she warned me that the other 75% would be questions like "describe a situation you've been in where you had to reconcile two conflicting needs, how you handled it, and what the outcome was." i hate questions like this--but as i chatted with chicafantasma afterwards i came to the conclusion that i mostly hate them when i have to answer them on the spot. so now, instead of a really shaky interview where i say "uhhh....give me a minute to rack my brain and come up with a lackluster example", i can spend 4 hours of my precious free time racking my brain so that i hopefully emerge with 5-6 tales of terror in which i triumph in different ways, and, she recommended, one in which i fail, to demonstrate learning. my problem with these questions isn't that i haven't solved problems, or whatever, but that my memories are simply not indexed that way. i don't have a convenient "problems solved" drop down in my internal search engine. ask me about "problems with the mailserver" and i'll do better (but she said, non-technical, so i think i'll try to work in some stuff about mentoring and the texas 4000 experience), but still, i really need to preload those search results. putting me under pressure does not, in this case, improve results. if you wanted to be helpful, and your mind *is* wired in such a way as to make those results easily accessible, an example from your own life might inspire me to find some from mine. also, if you can come up with "5-6" different ways to ask questions along those lines, it would help me come up with responses that might answer the various shades of that question...

the thing that makes this good instead of merely torture (which it plainly also is!) is that other people will surely ask me these questions at some point in the interview process, and i do hope to have other interviews at some point soon, since i want...other jobs. so i'll call it a growing pain and time invested in something worthwhile, in the end. even if i lose a lot of respect for nike's interview process as a result (ply me with personality and applied problem solving questions, please! i love that shit!)



so then i bailed from the office and headed downtown to talk with "the nation's leading supplier of IT professionals".


i guess i asked for it a little--i mean, with a slogan like that, i should have seem this coming, right? and then i really stepped in it when i asked the guy "so, i got cold called [by some dude who didn't even show up to this interview--i was talking to his boss]. i don't exactly know why you called me. most recruiters who call have a job opening that they ask me to evaluate for fitness..." and he launched into a sales spiel about the company. "we invented contracting. we've been at it for 60 years. we are frequently imitated, rarely emulated." it is rather fortunate that the guy was extremely friendly and genuine (despite the canned pitch) and looked and behaved one heck of a lot like xomox, or else i probably would have zoned out and shut down. it's weird, because i don't think that xomox would have been that animated about the company and its amazing history and wonderful opportunities, but when we got into talking tech, life goals, etc, i totally zoned into thinking i *was* talking to my friend and not this guy in a suit, and actually had some fun with it. it was suddenly very easy to be honest and i like that a lot. and the guy was very accepting of, even interested in (or a good enough actor to convince me) the honest answers.

it turns out that they're part of the other side of the recruiter coin. the kind i've known have all been the "we are one of 50 people whom Company X told about this job and ran out to monster.com to try to find a candidate and make maximal money off them with minimal effort". they have a pretty decent system (ok, it was annoying as hell, but it was well-engineered and obviously very functional) for candidate intake, they meet all their candidates in person, and they actually profess to want to find you a job you'll be happy with. this is also a well-engineered concept which i'm surprised other recruiters i've talked to aren't really concerned about: will i enjoy the work? that's my number one criterion for wanting to keep a job--am i having fun? fortunately for me, fun can include the hard work, the struggle, the intractable problems, etc, but it has to engage and be in a good environment. and this guy actually cared to find me work like that. now, considering my tastes, i'm not sure they get work like that. but hey, i'm willing to chance it at a cost of an hour spent chatting with this incredibly happy man.

what was good about this interview (aside from reminding me that i could find an employer who wants me to be happy instead of just satisfied or tolerant...though i realize an increasing percentage of the workforce is lucky to even get that, i do not plan to be on that side of the statistical curve for long, or ever again if i can help it!) was that he took one look at my resume and said "can i be frank? this doesn't work at all." and while i'm kind of proud of my resume, being as i spent a long time carefully choosing what to emphasize about each job and describing it as concisely as i can manage, it looks like a man page. because i laid it out that way on purpose--i thought (and still think) it was clever and that it would resonate with a unix geek, which is who i want to work with. and that has served me well to some extent--i have gotten my last 3 jobs with it. however, he points out, that a unix geek is unlikely to be who i'll work *for*. and even more important to my quest, this resume is unlikely to tickle the person in HR who has to decide to pass it to the person i'll eventually work for. the meat of his point was that it's pretty darn dense and nothing pops out, so in a stack of a hundred, it's instantly marginalized since they can't even figure out who i worked for without deep reading.

i'm of two minds about it--one, on the idealistic side, i'd like to have my resume be a huge in-joke that only the people i'd want to work for would get. i hate keeping up appearances to/for people i don't care about (hi, that's you, HR!) however, i guess that in a corporate environment, that's the way i have to play if i want to win. and i'm losing at the moment. so i'll give it a try. and he is right--it's dense and you have to really want to read it to read it. right, kdaisy721? i might need some training in bullet lists, sad as that is to me. but thanks to your magic, i'll have more room to work with. so at least there's that. and i still have that fabulous cover letter that chicafantasma came up with. so i've got that going for me too.



the missed connection is short enough to leave outside the cut--i know i'm verbose, but you, too, can suffer a little, skimmers! my dream job would of course be...working at a university. and some time ago a poster in damnportlanders gave me the "in" to getting a tech job on the big campus here ( http://www.pdx.edu )--told me who to go talk to and where. since i was already downtown during a workday, i dropped by and asked for her...and she was out. le sigh. i told the human firewall why i was there and she invited me to leave a resume, but since the human firewall was a tier 1 helpdesker, and i was hoping to talk to aforementioned contact about positions elsewhere in the university as well...well, i need to go back and find her. in case i actually get a call or email about my resume soon from her, then yay! in case i don't, i'll try to find out enough info to actually contact her in some way that isn't "stop by at a very inconvenient (for me) time and hope she's around" and see if i can't schedule a meeting. because i'm very interested, now, in finding The Job, not just A Job. although A (different) Job might serve to keep me sane for a few months in the interim. who knows.

oh, and if you read this far, a boring unrelated bonus question! because i'm guessing you need some negative deinforcement for reading my entries in their entirety! er. nah, i just didn't want to start off with this:

godaddy having frustrated me to death, and register.com being evil incarnate, who the heck else is a decent domain registrar these days? thanks in advance for your help!