Downward trend

With all the doom and gloom in the media at the moment, I thought it only right and proper that I jumped on the bandwagon too.

After what looked like a good start, this week has been rather dreadful, jobwise. Things started to look up last week, with not only more jobs showing up on the searchs, but more that I could actually apply for. It started to look like I would be batting them away with my weighty CV.

A week later and I feel that this week has been at a total standstill, so I decided to tally up some statistics to see if it was really true (the offshoots of having too much time on my hands). It turns out that this week is pretty much bang on average in terms of job availability, but last week, which had the most jobs around, I applied for just one (which was unceremoniously withdrawn this week). So, it seems, that I'm suffering from last week's standstill.

Of course, the real issue is the lack of interviews. I still have a number of applications "being processed" including one that's been out for over 3 weeks. All kinds of excuses are offered, but the truth at the end of the day is that no one is in a hurry to hire at the moment. The problem with that is the longer the job is out there, the more likely it is that the budget will be pulled (it happens a lot at the moment) and then you're back to square one.

So I'm still in the unfortunate position of all my eggs being in one basket, which is good in that it looks really interesting, but not so good in terms of negotiating a salary, or if they decide to hire someone else. But - there's not much I can do right now other than grow a phD or three.

Suspiciously quiet

No more news on interviews

Following on from my previous post, there is still no word as to whether they want to interview me or not.

Back from a weekend away in Gloucestershire and into the old job hunting lark again, it's picked up a little today after last week being very poor. Still, the only agents that call are the ones that don't need to - either confirming that I'm _still_ OK to attend an interview, or telling me that they have no more news.

Since I spent half of last year trying to recruit decent software developers, I know what it's like from the other side. One has to draw the conclusion that there are jobs available and people well qualified to do them, but agents are totally hopeless at putting the two together. Maybe there's a new buisness opportunity here .... ho hum.

Academic Fanaticism

I've just endured one of those conversations that really annoys me (Caution, Rant)

An agent rang me and wanted to quiz me about my academic qualifications. "Do you have any?" she asked. "Yes", I replied, "I have an HND". Now, of course, this was rather confusing as I didn't say "Degree", "Masters", "PhD" or "Overlord of the known Universe". "So you don't have a degree?" she retorted. "No", I curtly replied, "Why not?" she asked.

At this point I attempted to explain what a totally pointless question this was. I have 20 years of experience, 20 years since I left a Midlands-based Polytechnic after only 2 years instead of 3, 20 years of actually learning something useful rather than the strange fixation my course had with Cobol (if you don't know what that is, be glad), 20 years of solving real-world problems, learning things the hard way, finding out for myself rather than being spoon fed, sorting out other people's mistakes and chasing impossible deadlines. But this means nothing, because it's an agent and agents don't understand these things, agents always say "I don't really understand that, I'm not very technical", they say "But you don't have experience with version 2.716, only version 2.715" ... it's a wonder anyone ever gets a job!

As you can tell, that touched a nerve. In fact it touched nerves on a number of levels and made me quite cross.

So, after my short outburst (somewhat shorter than recorded here, as you can imagine), she refused to take that as an answer and I had to admit, rather lamely, "I didn't get a grant", which was true - in my second year the local authority did not pay me a single penny in grant money (in those far off days when they generally used to do things like that), and if I'd decided to go on to a post-diploma course, I would have received a similar amount.

I didn't, however, mention that the reason I took a 2 year course in the first place was my dramatically bad A level results, or that these could probably be attributed to the amount of time I spent in the Red Lion or any number of other fine public houses in the area, or the fact that on a Friday afternoon I really didn't give two hoots about Physics and would much rather be playing some nerdy role playing game.

How is this at all relevant now?

We shall see, I'm still waiting to hear if they are going to interview me for the job.

It annoys me most because about 90% of what I learned on my course has been totally useless, I've never used Cobol, or SSADM, or used structure diagrams, or programmed a 6809, and I only spent 6 months writing commercial Pascal. The most useful thing my course taught me was the C programming language, and that was just 6 months out of the 2 years - I learnt far more in the folloing 6 months in a real job. But the academic standard makes it easy for people to put you in a box. It's easy to rank people based on 1st, 2:1 2:2, how "good" the University was, and so on. It's more difficult to look at experience and decide how relevant it is, and that is all, I believe, there is to it.

Breakthrough

Seems I have a second interview for the job.

Unfortunately it's not for a while, due to holidays and the like, so I'll have plenty of time to second-guess how to approach it. There are, alledgedly, a number of candidates involved, so obviously not everybody ran screaming from the building.

Knowing the situation they have themselves in, I think I've got a few pointers on what to research, so a couple of new software project books are winging their way from Amazon as we speak. I genrally find its good to get your mindset aligned beforehand, so I'm hoping they will do the trick.

Sign on day tomorrow too. I have to print out my 4 page job hunting log to prove I've not just been sitting on my backside whilst the government shells out everyone elses hard earned money. Fun.

Land of make-believe

I've returned from a job interview today.

It's the first interview I've had in a little while, and it was somewhat different from the norm. Usually you get asked a load of leading questions, answer them by selecting a situation, viewing it from the most favourable point of view and adding 6. It is then traditional to spout mumbo-jumbo about technology or processes or synergistic flangehandly doohickies and finally retire for coffee and contracts.

This interview started by being told in no uncertain terms that they were up a certain place without a certain implement, that the customers were banging fists on tables, the developers were delivering dodgey code and everyone was running, at increasing speed, around an ever-collpasing singularity of terror.

My first thought: RUN AWAY!

My second thought: Well you could hardly make things any worse, and it would be nice to have a job ... or more particularly, the money that comes with a job.

Don't get me wrong, I've been there before, with project falling around your ankles, code that just won't work and impossible deadlines for impatient customers. It's just that most people try and keep it a little bit quiet. To be faced with this in an interview was interesting, and, I must say, has piqued my curiosity about the company. It's probably some kind of self-harm urge brought on by unemployment, but I actually thought - yes, I could go and sort that lot out.

I am now waiting to hear if they want me for a second interview, so I may never get the chance to find out any more, but we shall see. At least no one will be able to pretend they didn't know what they were letting themselves in for when they joined.

Vista and the art of going to the lavatory

Hoorah!

After my dispondancy of yesterday, today is all fresh and new and technology is my friend again. Having downloaded numerous updates from Parallels and spent about an hour refactoring the virtual machine, Parallels now runs the 4OD player in Vista, hosted under OS-X.

I am quietly hopeful that this means I can get the video onto the telly, since it was very easy to get OS-X onto it yesterday (perhaps I'm being stupidly optimistic). Still not sure what the problem really was, but a good old driver update has done the buisness.

Shame it wasn't the same for the NVidia drivers for Vista, which are the latest ones, but still fail to drive the S-video output.

Technology

As is often the case with these things - it should be so simple.

I meant to record a programme on Channel 4 a couple of weeks ago, but for various reasons forgot. Never mind, I thought, I can use the 4OD catch up service - the on-demand video streaming service that has now entered the realms of reality and is free.

But, I thought, watching it on the PC screen is a bit rubbish, lets watch it on the proper telly. So I toddled off an purchased a lovely adapter from my local Apple reseller (for my equally lovely MacBook Pro) and set about plugging it all in to the telly to watch in glorious, old-fashioned, CRT-vision. But NO, Windows on my Mac refuses to accept that I have anything plugged in to the DVI port and gets into a bit of a tizz when you ask it to use the external display port. Whereas, OS-X works wonderfully without a whimper, but, of course, Channel 4 OD is not available for the Mac (for reasons which seem steeped in ineptitude and stupidity).
Ah-ha, I thought, time for Parallels, but alas no. Whereas iPlayer works fine under Vista in Parallels, for some reason the 4OD player does not.

So, I'm left at the end of a very frustrating afternoon with little chance of actually making it work. I shall spend some time in the next few days searching the forums and hope that there is some magic cure for this, but I generally feel that the PC (i.e. Windows, and more specifically NVidia) has let me down again. The platform itself and the people who develop for it always make too many assumptions, which is why it end up in things just not working properly. With a bit more care and thought, things like this just wouldn't happen and, other than putting armies of support people out of business, the world would be a much happier and better place.

Times pass

I stayed up especially to watch Morrissey on Johnathan Ross' show last night.

I'm not sure why, I guess I was just interested to see what he'd be like - I'd not realy been aware of him for years and, for me, he was still caught in a timewarp from the late 80's/90's.

I don't mind admitting that I was quite keen on quite a number of his works, especially The Smiths. He got quite a rough ride at times, became ridiculously pretentious and smug, but beyond it all wrote and sung some wonderful songs in his own, unqiue angst-ridden way. You always knew when it was a Morrissey song.

So what would he be doing now and what would he look like. Quite alarmingly, he was singing very similar sorts of songs in a very similar way. To me it sounded less edgy, more like going through the motions than really feeling every word and sentiment, and the voice had lost some of its raw power, but it was obviously him.

But when I looked at him performing, 20 years on from the big-time, it just struck me that he looked like a cross between an aging Country-and-Western singer and one of your mates Dad's from when you were a kid. It just didn't seem right that he was still singing these songs. I don't know if that's wrong of me or wrong of him - I know I still have many of the emotions I did 20 years ago, but I guess I can't pretend they are the same ones or that they still keep me awake at night. I think most of us find some way of finding some peace with ourselves later in life, which is a place we just haven't got to when we're in our 20's.

So, I felt a little sad. Sad that, as much as you might want it to, time never stands still. We all get older, we all change, and I think, if we're wise, we accept that this happens. There's nothing wrong with this, it's inevitable. But then, maybe it's not him, maybe it's me. When I heard his old songs for the first time, I was in a very different place than I am now. I like to think that I am happy with this and accept it, but perhaps from time to time I still like to think that I could change the World, just like we all thought at one stage in our lives.

To quote the man himself, has the World changed or have I changed?

Housebound

Looks like January's in the bag for this year and not much progress for me.

Job market has been decidedly sluggish until about the last week when several things all came along at once. Of course the big achievement was applying for Jobseekers Allowance (which I've heard I'm going to get).

It seems strange, but I feel I have less time to spare than when I'm working. Despite the fact I hardly emerge from the house on many days, I seem to fill the time up with a combination of (often futile) calls to agents, hunting through job sites and fiddling around on various epics of my own devising. Of course, I haven't mentioned Lego Star Wars, which is also consuming a degree of time, and proving rather compelling.

Motivation seems to go in peaks and troughs, but generally is not as hard to come by as I was expecting. I was starting to wonder how long it would be before I actually landed an interview, but I now have one lined up, albeit in a week's time, which seems like an eternity away. It's not that there are no jobs out there - I see them advertised every day - it's just that people seem to be very, very slow at progressing at the moment, probably hoping that all the doom and gloom of the economy will somehow nurture some small ray of sunshine that can be clung to like flotsam in a shipwreck.

Looks like my annual skiing holiday is off, much to my annoyance.

For some light relief, however, I've actually been and performed a demo for my old company. They are still trying to sell the edifice to someone who'll take it on and do great things. It's a strange situation, but somehow seems about as surreal as the rest of my existence at the moment.