(Trying to work my way to 100+, baby! I want that userpic caption!).
Every week or so, I get one or two e-mails or calls from various IT recruiting agencies, either with HR/recruiter people with specific jobs that matched my Monster profile or who say "your resume looked really interesting, we should talk."
Up to this point, I haven't considered any of their offers. I felt that I should put in at least a year in my current job, so I'll get some more experience that future employers may find acceptable. Yeah, I know I probably know a lot more about developing software than the kid just out of college, but as far as an HR office is concerned, if you haven't gotten paid for it, and especially if you haven't gone to school for it, you obviously don't know it.
Before I took the job up here, I had doors repeatedly slammed in my face for hundreds of tech positions in NC, though it's not so much of a slamming as it is a "we'll call you back" and they never do. To paraphrase Woody Allen, I've found the computer job world "worse than dog eat dog, it's dog doesn't return another dog's phone calls." And that's before considering all the competition I'd have from all the people who make Raleigh-Durham one of the top ten info tech places in the country. In addition to local folks, I'd also get the stray e-mail or call from across the country about some job opening, and I pursued it will no better luck (till I got the one for up here).
What also goes against me is that I also tend to be a very honest person, or at least I try to be. And honesty really doesn't go over to well with HR people. I could lie about or overinflate my skillset, probably get hired, and quickly learn enough about the technology to do the job at hand (one of my superpowers) and the HR folks and boss would never be the wiser. But I'd rather get a job honestly, and that is a massive strike against me.
The final thing about these HR people that really screws me is that they don't understand anything about the technical stuff I've done or the challenges I faced and surpassed. It's very rare that I've ever been asked "what was a really difficult programming problem and how did you solve it?" or "How would you come up with a solution for this hypothetical situation?" These people want buzzword-compliant people, not innovative people who can actually solve problems.
And don't even get me started on the recruiters who look for five years of experience in a technology that has only existed for two years.
If issues directly related to employment weren't difficult enough, I also had to deal with some personal issues with the way that some people I was close to back in NC dealt with my employment situation. These people didn't understand anything about the computer job arena, and they said I was "too picky" despite the fact that I submitted dozens of resumes a day for virtually any programming job out there. These same people then called me "selfish" for going to job interviews instead of driving them to various errands they were not able to drive to for stupid reasons of their very own making. Then these same people busted on me for being a 30-year old man who didn't have a decent job (now they're undoubtedly complaining about me leaving them and coming up here, and asking me when I'm coming back). I still really miss those people, but dammit, they were a pain in the ass.
To summarize the last five paragraph of useless memoirs, my attempts to acquire employement in the computer field tend to suck in general, and they sucked especially in North Carolina. And I found the whole situation when I was down there very upsetting.
So back to the present, I'm trying to consider other options than the place I'm currently working. Some people in the company where I work prevent me from doing the best job I can, yet they don't balance their expectations in light of that fact. While I don't intend to leave anytime soon, I do want to know what my options are.
So for the first time since coming up here seven months ago, I call a technical recruiter who left a voicemail a day or two earlier. And dammit, the whole experience on the phone was just the same as it was 7 months ago in NC. I was honest about what I had done (big mistake), I explained the database technology I was currently working on (PostgreSQL, which he had never heard of), I said a lot of the programming I've been doing recently is for Apple stuff (which he must have interpreted as the only stuff I could do), and I told him that the stuff I'm currently being paid to do is a very small subset of the entire skillset I have (which he basically ignored). He ended with a variation on "we'll call you back"--"you're entered into our database. Go to our site and we'll keep in touch". That went really well--not!
I guess I need to look for the positives here. Firstly, it's been months since I last talked to a recruiter, so this exchange was a good refresher. Second, he also asked about why I wanted to leave my current job, which I was a little unprepared for; I've now formulated better answers for the next time around. Third, as my dad would put it, talking with this fellow is a step towards realizing that I'm not trapped in my current job by a contract, and that I can leave at any time. And finally, this experience has reminded me that my situation could be worse; some people don't have a job at all and they'd probably kill to be earning what I do (which is still not a lot, but it pays the bills okay).
Now to fill in the blank of my second blessing for
@carolinian #30 that I totally forgot include. For the last year or so, I've really started liking Neil Diamond, who in my younger days I considered to be "music for old people." So several weeks ago, I finally broke down and bought a Neil Diamond box set from Barnes and Noble. I really like it, and it's one of the best things I've bought in quite a while.
