"Orchid XP v8" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:4b4b435c@news.povray.org...
> Christmas is over, 2010 is here, and it's time to move my jobsearch 
> forward.
>
> As I've written previously a few times, I'm giving up on trying to get 
> hired as a programmer. (It's not like I can go work for Google writing in 
> Haskell...) Instead, I'm going to try to get hired as a system 
> administrator. At least that way I can say "hey, I've been doing this 
> exact job for the last 7 years continuously" rather than "well, I could 
> _probably_ learn this..."
>
> The first task, then, is to adjust my CV. I wrote it to try to demonstrate 
> what an awesome programmer I am; most of it is completely irrelevant if 
> I'm not trying to be a programmer any more. So in summary, I've just spent 
> an hour working on my CV, and it's now about half the length it was 
> before. o_O


interviews for a DBA with some programming exposure (In my case, I'm looking 
for someone who can at least read a stored procedure and have some idea of 
what it does).

When I'm going through these mounds of paperwork, there are certain problems 

one is plenty, and two is almost too much. I want to grab some of these 
people and shake them and say, "Look at the job description we posted, the 
one you're applying for... let me know if you can do THOSE things. While 
it's lovely that you can program in x86 assembler left handed while grooming 
monkeys, we don't use that skill here." It doesn't take a whole lot of work 

that a candidate read the job description and isn't just shooting out 
applications like water from a fire hose.

I really just want to know what you've been doing for the last four or five 
years. If you've been in the industry for 20 years, that's great, but the 
stuff you were doing then isn't likely to be relevant, and that company is 
probably out of business anyway. I *absolutely* don't care what you did or 
learned in school; I have never seen anything picked up by a student (myself 
included) that is useful for the real world. I am less interested in a 
candidate's GPA than the number of warts on his or her nose.


to HR and say yay or nay on calling the person up for an interview. If you 
have someone you trust who has some experience or knowledge about what you 

attention. Time them with a watch, and stop them after 20 seconds or so. 
Then ask them what they remember about the document. That'll be about what 
sticks out to somebody looking at a couple of hundred of the things, trying 
to pick someone to interview.

On a related note, I don't know what things are like in your neck of the 
woods, but over here in the middle of the U.S. the big needs seem to be .NET 
developers (about 30/70 VB to C#), and either MS-SQL or Oracle. If you don't 
have any experience with the MS tools but you do have a Windows OS, you 
might try getting the (free) Express editions of those programs and hanging 
out in some of the VB or C# newsgroups. Those tools aren't awfully hard to 
pick up, and it may get you in the door, anyway, where you can wow them with 
your boyish charm and eagerness. :-)

--
Jack

Post a reply to this message