Get your own Free Home PageThursday, January 31, 2002 12:25:21 AM I received a technical phone interview from the mid-peninsula web search and caching company. The caller gave me an overview of the company and of the position they were trying to fill, and asked me what qualifications I had that matched. Then he asked me if I had any questions. So far, so good. If I sounded good, I should get a call from the hiring manager. They have three candidates, and one of them is interviewing next week. It seems that the turn-on-a-dime internet-speed new economy companies are beginning to act like the old economy companies. I wonder where the next boom will appear, since the Internet is now acting like a mature industry. And in only five years, too! I remind myself I was in the computer manufacturing industry before the Internet became an industry.
Wednesday, January 30, 2002 12:15:47 PM My evening class is going well. I am reinstalling Solaris on a number of workstations in the laboratory, so the lab should be in good shape when the day class begins. My life is sailing on an even keel. The professional resume consultant has not shown me a new resume, but that is understandable -- she has a day job. She did give me some tips on how to improve my resume myself. I received a job description for a senior QA engineer in San Jose, which I forwarded to my 100+ alumni. Yesterday I forwarded a pointer to my alumni for the 500+ open job requisitions that Sun Microsystems is publishing in the Wall Street Journal.
Saturday, January 26, 2002 8:40:29 AM The hiring manager from the mid-peninsula web search and caching company did not call for a phone interview yesterday. On the other side of my life, I have rediscovered the joy of teaching, and the program manager at the school has approved 48 hours of software maintenance. Some cash flow is better than none, so I'll be at the school fixing workstations next week. In an interview Ray Bradbury said, "The Great Depression was on for years. The whole country was out of work for years. It was a very sad time. But I was so passionate about the future that I couldn't see how bad things really were. Passion hides the truth from you; sometimes that's a good thing. You must find that grand passion -- that thing that makes you want to get up and go to life every morning. It will see you through." Bradbury didn't mention money. The people of the nation didn't starve and die. I wonder where the food and shelter came from? What did his father call work? What was Bradbury calling "go to life?" There is more to prosperity than money. The big picture is larger than that. There is enough for everyone.
Thursday, January 24, 2002 11:12:52 AM I spoke with an account representative for the mid-peninsula web search and caching company. He'll forward my resume today. I also sent my resume to a professional career consultant and requested a critique. Yesterday I sent my resume to another brand name search engine company, but subsequent email discussions indicate they're not looking seriously for employees. Last night I started teaching a 4-week evening class in C programming. There is some software repair to do in the laboratory, so I'll be keeping busy whether or not a day job emerges.
Wednesday, January 23, 2002 2:28:33 AM Today's good news: The leading indicators are up 140% (from 0.5% to 1.2%). The production index has been up two weeks in a row. Median weekly earnings of the nation's 98.4 million full-time wage and salary workers were 3.4 percent higher than a year earlier. Yesterday I was contacted by a recruiter who was looking for a technical support person for a major brand name search engine and web caching company on the Peninsula. I expressed interest, and I sent her a copy of my resume. She responded by sending me a technical questionnaire.
Thursday, January 17, 2002 11:21:47 PM I got a call today from the recruiter that asked for the pitch on the 8th. The client has made an interview list, and I'm not on it. I'm beginning to feel that I am supposed to relax and enjoy my vacation. This evening I attended the Bay LISA meeting. Vicka Corey of Sandstorm Enterprises presented a technical overview of NetIntercept, a hardware and software package that snoops a network and analyzes it to a degree that ordinary packet sniffers have not thought of. It captures 7 Mbps in steady-state, and has the capability of identifying protocols running on the wrong ports, gzipped files, files that have been put into tar archives, jpegs, gifs, email, IRC file transfers and control information, and more. It has some very interesting reports, and it runs silently so there is no network signature. The captured raw traffic is stored in a FIFO log, and the post-filtered, interpreted data is stored in a mySQL database. The operating system is FreeBSD 4.3. At the meeting a revived dot-com "brought back from the dead" and a major university announced that they were hiring. They plan to fill quality assurance and development positions. I ran into a consultant I had worked with at Microsoft. He reminded me that there's an active job posting community going on at craigslist, and he said that he's seen some system administration jobs there lately. One side effect of attending this meeting was that I got a quick refresher course in commuting. It took an hour to get from my apartment to downtown Palo Alto, and an hour to get back, without any traffic. Perhaps I was right when I declared a commute radius that ended at Redwood City.
Wednesday, January 16, 2002 2:34:19 PM Today I got word that the resume I sent to a major film effects company in Palo Alto has been forwarded to HR.
Tuesday, January 15, 2002 11:00:14 PM Yesterday I updated my profiles on freeagent.com and dice.com. I copied some pages from the Book of Lists, from the San Francisco Business Times, for my personal use. I sent an updated resume to a recruiter in San Jose who is considering representing me to a financial company in San Francisco. I also sent my resume to a major film effects company in Palo Alto. Last night I started to review my notes on the Veritas product line. I interviewed with a recruiter in San Mateo this afternoon. The inverview was very pleasant, and the agency will carry me on their hot list for a few weeks. The recruiter said that the system administration market should pick up before the programmer market. This is completely contrary to the announcements I've been seeing on the web. Agency postings on the web are screaming for programmers, and for Microsoft system administrators who have some programming background. While I was interviewing with the recruiter she accidentally kicked the system unit under her desk, and we both watched her workstation reboot. Instead of going back to the on-line database, she began to write margin notes on her paper copy of my resume. This gave me some insight into her thought processes, as she did not go back further than three jobs in the job history. She wrote down keywords that arose from my discussion of the jobs, so I asked her how important it was to have a skills section at the beginning of the resume. You see, I always assumed that since a database search would work on keywords extracted from throughout the resume, that the skills section was redundant. But she was obviously working with the resume by hand, and she told me she would be taking her knowledge with her impressions of the interview to the account managers. She also told me that she uses the skills section as a quick filter when she's looking for something specific, and then she comes back to the short pile that passes the filter to look at it in more detail. End result -- I have to update my resume! This evening I attended the Bay Area Linux Users Group meeting. Sylvia Tidwell Scheuring and Jerome Scheuring presented a description of software they are developing to create gaming worlds. The company is called OtherGods, and they have a compute server farm that can lay out a fantasy world in about 18 hours. It's a mixed architecture distributed processing farm, which sounds to me somewhat like a Beowulf cluster. The software is written in Python, and they agree that they would never write anything in Java again. They said that Python has a very compact style, takes care of type automatically, has a rich library of templates, and handles the messaging between the systems in the processing farm. The meeting was attended by a good cross-section of the local computing community. The image of the tattooed, steel-studded twenty-something Linux hacker was nowhere to be seen.
Saturday, January 12, 2002 8:20:09 PM Yesterday Margaret and I had lunch with a senior system administrator from the peninsula, who told me that he had plenty of work and plenty of job security. Although I was somewhat bolstered by this report, Margaret did hear a tone of doubt in my voice. Yesterday afternoon I also followed up with an agent who is trying to place me at a major banking institution; she said the client was delayed and should pick up the selection process on Monday. I also called my favorite agency, who said that I was one of the two top consultants on their list, and when a position came in I would be contacted. That's recruiter talk for "We don't have anything, but please don't forget us." Margaret sent me a pointer to jobhub.com, which had a delightful variety of openings posted! She also showed me the Book of Lists, published by the San Francisco Business Times. Since not enough seems to be happening through agencies, she suggested I start my own direct sales campaign. Tonight I subscribed to the baylisa-jobs mailing list. I submitted my resume to jobhub.com, monster.com, hotjobs.com, freeagent.com, and to an agency in town.
Thursday, January 10, 2002 9:27:06 PM Yesterday I registered at Headhunter.net. The recruiter who has the position to fill by Monday forwarded my resume to the client. Last night I forwarded an opportunity announcement for a Senior System Administrator in Menlo Park to an email alias that should draw dozens, if not hundreds, of responses. During the day I read some email that directed my attention to Derek's Wal-Mart Receipts, and that blew any semblance of productivity. I wonder how anyone gets any work done, with sites like that to entertain them. Oh! Then there was the Yahoo messenger to install and configure because I wanted the little smiley face on my eGroups directory listing. All in a day's play. I'm beginning to understand what the Microsoft sales engineer calls the "futz factor." I know that what I am will be more important than what I do to get the right contract for my next adventure. Looking over the postings I've seen, I am tempted to think that I just know too little. I have complete sympathy for my students at this point. Should I run out and learn Weblogic? Yes. At the right time, in the right place. Should I take a formal course in Veritas high availability? Yes, at the right time, in the right place. Whatever am I qualified for right now? Once, when I asked someone if I should switch to programming, I was told "You do what you do excellently." I am an excellent system administrator and an excellent teacher. The excellence will speak for itself when the right client takes a look. There are clients all over the world, all over the Bay Area, and all over San Francisco looking for an excellent system administrator and an excellent teacher. When they meet me they will tell me how long it took to find me. Odds are they've been looking for a very long time already! I'm ready to talk with them, and to help them bring their environments and projects back in line and up to speed.
Tuesday, January 08, 2002 9:14:04 PM Today I posted my resume at BrassRing.com and Hire.com. A look at the open job requisitions drew nothing -- unless I feel like relocating to Austin, Texas. I had lunch with a consultant who lives in town, and gained an indication of rate trends. His rate dropped a bit near the end of last year; after he had signed, the client backed out of the contract. Net result -- he had a lot of time to deal with family matters. This afternoon I received a call from an agent who has a requisition to fill by next Monday. She asked me to send her a pitch, which I did. Let's keep our fingers crossed! From: An Alumnus To: qkstart@ix.netcom.com Subject: Some thoughts. Date: Tuesday, January 08, 2002 2:07 PM Hello David, I visited your website and I read your Blog of Tuesday, January 01, 2002 9:44:10 PM I have something to say about interviewer/recruiters. Some of the interviewers just don't have the patience and time to listen to what you have to say. They don't want anybody with ambition. They don't care whether you have the ability to learn and tackle the problem. They just want to have a "custom-built" candidate; 100% fit. Worst of all, some recruiters at agencies do not have the technical knowledge about computer, software, operating system platforms. They only know alphabet soup (C, C++, HTML, ... ). If they have the technical knowledge about hardware/software, they'll be programmers, technical consultants. Unfortunately, we have to go through them to get an interview from the hiring manager. Thank you for your time. Dear Alumnus: Recruiters like the ones you describe don't last in the business very long. Imagine that you decide to go for the big bucks, recruiting on straight commission. After all, the sky's the limit! So you get into the job and perhaps your agency gives you a starter portfolio: all the stuff the last guy who quit was botching. There are calls for VMS, MVS, CICS, PRIMOS, SNOBOL, PL/I, ADABAS, MANMAN, a zillion things you never heard of. How do you get a handle on it all? Now and then a recruiter will ask me, "What does this mean to you?" At that point I take the liberty to interpret what I hear in my own terms. Often the recruiter learns a little about the industry, and I learn a little about the recruiter. If he or she is any good, I know that I will be hearing from him or her again, and I know that he or she will remember that I have been helpful and cooperative. On the other hand, if I run into a recruiter who asks, "Do you know client/server? Do you have 6+ years' experience with XNS?" and is only interested in yes or no, I shrug off the call as part of the numbers game and look forward to the next one. I get hundreds of calls from recruiters each year; most of them are completely irrelevant to my experience. But they are trying to help me. They are trying to find a match for me, even when it looks like they are trying to find a match for the customer. It's an open market. I'm a player. I take the market as a field where everyone wants to help me with everything I do. Some succeed, some don't. The ones that don't will try again when they get another lead. By the way, there are some agencies where the recruiters have technical experience. Mindsource is one of them. When Taos was an agency it was one of them. Nowadays Taos is an outsourcing employer, like EDS, so they aren't playing in the same market as recruiters any more.
Tuesday, 08 January, 2002 9:23:11 AM Try writing! Don't know how? Check out "Train Yourself to Write in Only Five Days," by Adair Lara. Yesterday I posted my resume at unixtechjobs.com and registered as a guru at ugu.com. Let's take a moment to reflect on our prosperity. We have time to worship. We have time to look for new jobs. We have time to visit our friends and family. We have warm homes; clean, dry clothing; and a delicious and nutritious variety of foods. I remember the poor in Indonesia. They had no homes, one or two sheets of cloth for clothing, and only the food they could beg from the kindness of strangers. Even as a child I knew I could leave Indonesia when I wished; many Indonesians could only go as far as they could walk on their bare feet. The poorest of Americans are richer than 90% of the world's people. Let us take this knowledge with us, with a calm sense of confidence, when we present our skills and our history to those who desperately seek them. Yes, desperately. Recruiters have asked me, "David, where can I find such a rare skill set as a UNIX system administrator who knows C++ programming?" I have to smile -- there are over 100 alumni that I know of who can provide that. I walked into a software company in Silicon Valley once, and the interviewer asked me to read a shell script and tell him what it does. I followed it and interpreted it, and he said "You are the first person I have met who could read this script. I have interviewed a dozen people so far. Can you start tomorrow morning?" So reflect on your skill set. Reflect on its rarity. Think about how to improve it, but don't deny how far you have come already. Enter an interview with confidence. What seems like very little to you may be more than the potential employer has seen before.
Sunday, January 06, 2002 8:05:16 PM Today I let go of the past. All that has gone wrong is history, all that is now is a new beginning of correct action. I forgive my past mistakes, and I leave them behind. I have 20 shelf-feet of technical literature, and about 5 shelf-feet of self-improvement literature. The latter has been enhanced by Margaret, who is constantly reading such things, but I have noticed lately there are some very old tomes on this topic surfacing in my library. Books from as far back as the 1970s have reappeared to once again beg my attention. I have just cleared out 3 shelf-feet of books that no longer interest me, and I find the self-improvement books have just become more visible. How nice, that in my community I am known as a healer and a teacher, and I am known as one of the best. That is very reassuring, because I am currently practicing patience and persistence. I have been told, by several people and through several exercises, that patience and persistence will not be the only keys to success, however. Flexibility was mentioned on New Year's Day, and it came up again today. If I stay centered and balanced, ready to move in any direction, and if I act immediately when opportunity appears, even if the opportunity does not take the form I imagined, I will succeed famously. OK, then. I'm healthy, I'm loved, I'm smart, and I'm valuable to mankind. I'm ready.
Saturday, January 05, 2002 11:14:23 PM Today a most amazing thing happened to me. I went with Margaret to listen to Edwene Gaines lecture on integrity at the Oakland First Church of Religious Science. About six people I knew from Unity San Francisco were there, and two from the Human Awareness Institute. In the seminar we discussed blocks to prosperity consciousness, what was going right in our lives, and how we could all improve ourselves spiritually and economically. After the seminar I had lunch with three of them, and I was filled with the feeling that I was in the presence of three of the most aware, dynamic, growing, intelligent, and optimistic people in the restaurant, if not in the whole city of Oakland. Now, what do I find remarkable about that? Simply this: they were all women. In the seminar Edwene reminded me that I need to be open to accept prosperity wherever I should find it, and not close myself off to it because of some preconceived notion in the way that it should appear. I find that this is true not only about money, but also about friends, health, happiness, any number of aspects of life. Five years ago, the idea that I could converse with a room full of women or a close group of women on an equal basis, without self-consciousness, would have been unthinkable. There were so few women in the Silicon Valley engineering environments. There was so much animosity, so much pent-up sexual frustration, so much arrogance and misogyny. There was so little personal development, so little social grace. Now that I have made a decision to grow, and have moved into a community where all persons are deemed good and valuable, and have taken the training to communicate and respect, I find that the gender of the person with whom I am communicating has very little relevance. I realize that I have moved from limited thinking to unlimited thinking, from anxiety to confidence, from a feeling of lack to an awareness of abundance. All people are here to help each other, in one way or another, and I have tapped into that universal network. I have moved from self-consciousness to consciousness. I know that growth is a personal curriculum, and that I have been doing my homework. I also know that it has been much easier than I thought it would be, because of a person whom I have chosen as my study partner. Thank you, Margaret, for being a teacher and a fellow student, for helping me grow beyond my limits, for reaching out and walking with me hand-in-hand. You are a blessing to all of us, and you are a personal blessing to me.
Friday, January 04, 2002 5:03:10 PM Today I began posting my resume to the job boards that Patricia Lindsey identified last July. I started with Techies.com. This was no simple "upload your resume and be done with it" process. It was an actual job application, the same as I would file at an agency or an employer. It took me a couple of hours to categorize and rate myself, as well as review my recent job history, education and training. Since there are eight boards, it looks like I have some real work cut out for me! There's always more to the process than meets the eye. If it looks frustrating to me, it must look frustrating to everyone. I can remember the first time I saw one of these pigeonhole forms. I knew it would never get me a job. There were hundreds of pigeonholes. How was I to know all of it? It turned out I didn't need to know all of it, just publicize what I did know. This form will be a public record until I change it, so it will get a lot of exposure for the foreseeable future. Who knows, Monday a company may scan the database and find I have the exact mix of experience they're looking for!
Thursday, January 03, 2002 9:23:07 PM Today I researched, just for curiosity, a problem I heard about last year. It seems that a major film special effects company used Linux for its internal servers. It had a problem with its NIS servers hanging periodically. I spent part of the day looking at the descriptions of NIS in Red Hat Linux 6 Unleashed, and in Red Hat Linux 7.1 Bible, Unlimited Edition. For a cross check I took a look at the implementation in FreeBSD. My impression is that, while the programmers who implemented NIS were probably successful, the tips and tricks that system administrators learned on earlier operating systems were not learned. Linux and FreeBSD administrators without prior experience on commercial operating systems appear to be learning without any practical guidance. I can see why the company I was talking with was looking for a senior system administrator who had been around the block a few times. Practical advice that I dispensed for commercial vendors could be used to great advantage here. A system administrator without access to a commercial support database would do well to study Managing NFS and NIS. It's like bringing Hal Stern, the Sun Microsystems NIS expert, into your office as a personal consultant. What do I see here? Practical experience is important. Specific experience is important for a specific situation, but even more important is the ability to find specific reference material. A general reference for a narrow technical problem will not do; there is a need for specific technical expertise for each situation. Perhaps the company's existing system administrators needed to take some time out with a good book. I'll continue to build my portfolio of specific technical experiences, and I'll carry the bag of tricks I learned in other environments. I won't say "Hey, it wasn't in the Linux project," or "Hey, that's not in the certification course," and let it go at that. There's always room to learn. I know that UNIX principles are pretty universal, regardless of the brand name of the operating system that's showing problematic behavior. The brand isn't the most important aspect of the problem.
Wed Jan 2 22:54:41 PST 2002 Today I sent an email reminder to my list of 166 agents and agencies that my jury duty is over and I am available for interviews. I received automatic replies from 8 agencies saying they will be closed until next Monday. I received 8 mail delivery failures -- presumably agents or agencies that have gone out of business since November. Naturally, I updated my list. I received 4 responses from real agents letting me know their current status. I forwarded information about opportunities working with Microsoft and Novell products to my alumni. I sent email to a local university inquiring about teaching opportunities; they requested my resume and will circulate it among their Associate Deans. I had lunch with a Fujitsu sales engineer to find out what current market conditions look like to him. Sales in the midrange server category were not wonderful this fall, but they expect volume to pick up in the next quarter. He reminded me that salespeople for the major companies are quota-driven, and he said that midrange sales reps were working today. A consultant in the South Bay reported that he was two months into a six-month contract. This let me know that consultants were being sought in November, which was in the current phase of the business cycle. As Jack Horkheimer always says, "Keep looking up!"
Wednesday, January 02, 2002 3:22:57 PM From: A Recruiter To: "David Dull" Sent: December 2001 Subject: Unix Administrator Opportunity Dear David I am a recruiter. I am sending you this message to let you know about a new opportunity for a Unix Administrator. Experience: * 5-7 years experience. * Solid Sun Solaris experience. * Security experience. * Location - Dublin, CA * Contract to Hire at $45 per hour Sun Solaris 2.6 and/or 2.8 Operating System. Veritas Volume Manager, Foundation Suite, and Netbackup. Debugging utilities (i.e. Crash, ADB). DNS. NIS. Strong scripting skills with SH, KSH, or other. X terminals and CDE Desktop Environment. Administering and configuring Sendmail on both internal and external servers. Experience with complex TCP/IP networks in a routed environment. Strong security background and administration experience with PIX, Checkpoint, and Nokia Firewalls, as well as Cisco IDS and VPN devices. Experience with HDS storage devices, McData switches, and SAN technology. Regards, A Recruiter Doesn't ask for much, does he? ;-) On the positive side, let's take a look at what can be learned from this inquiry. First of all, it's a modern, straightforward Sun/Veritas/Cisco shop. It's an indicator that everyone isn't rushing over to Windows, AIX, and Linux. The client wants someone who can run the whole shop, without any training. These skills might be held by a person who has had the right career path in the recent past. The position is temp-to-hire (not a consulting contract). The rate is a 20% - 34% premium for a permanent employee, according to the SAGE 2000 Salary Survey. This is good news! It means the company knows it's looking for a hard-to-find skill set, and it's willing to pay a premium for it. If the company doesn't find a candidate in a few months, this may turn into a consulting position. It also means that salaries are still rising! Everyone come on, let's celebrate!
Tuesday, January 01, 2002 9:44:10 PM Let us consider for a moment truth in advertising. It's not just about being honest with customers, it's also about being honest with ourselves. When you find you have been wrong about something, did you not convince yourself before you went on to convince others? Or perhaps, in the process of convincing others, did you not also convince yourself? Let us pause a moment when we answer an interview question, or when we write a line in our resumes. Are we telling the public the truth? Are we telling ourselves the truth? Suppose, for example, the interviewer asks us whether we know C++. Do we? Did we put it on our resume? What actually constitutes "knowing" C++? Have we written any programs in it? In the classroom or commercially? Let us suppose we have actually written one or two C++ programs in school exercises. Did they compile? Did they run? Did we find some logical errors? Did we figure out how to fix them? Did this not constitute programming in C++? So, obviously, we cannot answer "no" to the question! Perhaps we are not confident that we could write a commercial program and sell it, but we do know the essentials of the language. We could work in a team and learn more. We will not be at a total loss as we would be, say, translating Greek to Latin (well, most of us, anyway--linguists also make very good programmers). So what should we tell the interviewer? Exactly the above. Explain our thought processes, and what we have done. Explain our ability to learn, and how much we have learned so far. Odds are the interviewer will respect our answer if we do not make a claim we cannot support, and if we do not deny our ability to do anything whatsoever. Even more, the interviewer may respect our willingness to accept a challenge. Let's be honest with the interviewer. Just as important, let's be honest with ourselves.
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