No, I’m not talking about Tibco Mashery. I’m referring to all the weird things we endure as we search for a job. In an era of identity theft we put our information out there in a lot of places. Then we have to deal with all the scummy companies that see an opportunity and prey on the unemployed, seeking to appeal to their plight. And also the spam mail and cold calls.
I started the process being somewhat methodical and careful but over the past 11 weeks I have put my information in countless repositories. Then there is this website. They call it branding. Really? I’m not a blogger so I won’t post here often, but I’m pretty tired of having my info out there. When I have reached my goal I’ll probably take down this website too. I’ll keep the domain name though. At least I own my name!
One of the surprising things I have found in the job search is that I needed to rediscover who I am and what I have accomplished. I think I’ve done a lot and covered a lot of ground in my career. It was a couple interview failures that got me thinking, hey, I know more than that. I just need to recap. I even considered doing a technology recap blog but that could be messy. One person asked me about J2EE and I just sat there going um, well… That’s stupid because the CRM application my team built for Nordstrom (called Personal Book) is totally J2EE, Spring framework, SOA, HTML5. And I know a lot about J2EE, I just didn’t have my vocabulary tuned up. So I have spent some time doing just that. Most embarrasing was my failure to adequately describe the architecture of our POS systems. I could do that in my sleep, but I had been so forward focused on Amazon cloud services and J2EE that I blew this simple question. Another fail: Oh, you were a Unix developer, what is the V tag used with grep? (answer: it’s the inverse of the result, meaning evrything but the result) Okay, that is just being out of touch for 11 or 12 years. That was the last time I had a Solaris machine.
Regarding the scammers and spammers. I have used my trusty hotmail so it’s out there. I have used my GMail account too. The hotmail account does a better job of putting things into junk where they belong. I wonder how long I’ll be dealing with all the crud that’s showing up. My phone has been cold called a few times just this week. That’s the worst. I’m not about to change my phone number - yet…