I'm so grateful...

[susandennis]

It actually started a day or two ago and yesterday was a little iffy but today it definitely is... not hot. We are clearly working our way towards cool. Thankyoujesus.

I just don't feel good - physically or mentally - when it is hot. I've lived most of my life where it is way hotter than here. I have no clue how I survived it. I do know that every year I get older, the harder it is to take the heat.

So I want to be extra grateful when it is not hot.

I think I'd like to start walking again. Seeing what's new around the 'hood. Taking more pictures. I think I'll give it a shot once it's cool enough.

My Roomba hasn't been shipped yet. I called again this morning and the woman I talked to confirmed that it hasn't been shipped. Said that that department is running behind and said she would see what she could do to goose them along.

Sheri is supposed to be at the house today. There is an old never-hooked-up security system of two boxes that were hidden in the former closet that is now a window seat. When it was a closet, they were not a problem. Now they are out in the open and ugly. She is supposed to be getting them yanked out today or getting a box mounted to cover them.

I suspect that I will get home to find that neither has been done. The shelf guy was there yesterday made some more snail progress.

Sadly now when I think about the redecorating project, I get all pissed off because of the slow shelf guy and that Sheri has clearly abandoned any plans to ever finish the job. Tonight she will get an email requesting a firm date and cost for every remaining item and a finish date for the entire project. I want my keys back. I want my house back. I want to enjoy what has been done and not resent what hasn't.

My friend, John, keeps asking when it will be done so he can come visit (from LA). I keep telling him soon. He now believes I am blowing him off totally.

The job market sure seems to be hopping right now. I have edited two friends' resumes in the past week. They are pulling them out and polishing them up and setting them free... It's not 1999 yet but some of the people looking to hire are beginning to sound just a bit desperate. And there is a new world of stealth start ups around here. People are no longer making a big splash about what they are going to do, they are just gathering some folks and making it happen and then splashing.

I so love that I was picked to live in this particular era. I would have sucked at living in the days before indoor plumbing.

Comments

[unzeugmatic.livejournal.com]

The job market sure seems to be hopping right now...It's not 1999 yet but some of the people looking to hire are beginning to sound just a bit desperate.

Now this is the second time today that I've heard this -- folks on a system administrator mailing list I'm on have been discussing the difficulty of getting the right good people for jobs, both low and high level. I find this intriguing, particularly since my circumstances at the moment are somewhat uncertain and I spend time worrying a good deal about prospects. I'm scarred for life by my job search when I arrived in Minnesota, which was beyond strange in a number of ways, and by the immense difficulties some extremely topnotch folks from my department had when they were laid off three and four years ago.

In my case the problem is that people in hiring and HR positions don't have a notion of a clue about how to look for technical writers, so they fall back on bizarre filtering. I applied for my current job after I had been doing it on contract for a year, with a job description that was pretty much tailored to me, and the HR department at Cray did not forward my resume on when I went through the proper channels (as the HR deparment had told my manager I must do). My manager had to call HR and ask whether they had received an application from me to get it. In me the HR department had, quite literally, a candidate with perfect experience for the job who would require no training and, in fact, was training others in the area, and they decided that I wasn't a good candidate. Experiences like that make me despair. In some ways I think that the difficulties places are having finding good people is proper karmic comeuppance for such things.

But that's another issue. At the moment I'm just wondering what to make of this hiring difficulty bit. And, of course, what that might mean for me in the long run.

[susandennis]

Having been on both ends of the hiring stick at one time or another, I can tell you that the problem is the same it has always been.

Applicants have no clue how to 'sell' themselves. Yesterday a friend gave me his resume to edit. On it he has listed as one of his skills 'editing'. I am not that great an editor myself but even I can see a problem with things like 'for 5 of the six revolutions'. If I'm looking for an editor, I want one who takes the time to edit his or her own resume...

Employers make it impossible to even get in the door. This is because the doorway is crowded with idiots but also because even with the internet, there is no way to really, productively, cut the wheat from the chaff. They end up shooting themselves in their own foot when clearly it would be better for all if they could hire someone to do it.

And, as long as I'm already up here on my high horse, let me spout my three rules of job getting:

1. Have a good clear easy to read, error free resume
2. Have a willingness to be open to all possibilities (play the 'I can always say no thank you' when they offer game)
3. Persistence.

I may well live in lala land but I swear that anyone who follows those three rules will never be without interesting, gainful employment.

[unzeugmatic.livejournal.com]

The other rule is to already have a job you're not particularly interested in leaving. Last year a friend who sold his company to a company that then sold it to a multinational enormous company was trying to get me to work for what had been his company but was now a self-contained entity within a larger universe. Did that make sense? Anyway, part of the selling-the-company condition was that my friend stay on as consultant for two years, and (as I discovered), they worship him at his former empire.

In this case I sent a resume out on a Friday afternoon and by 9am(!) Monday there was a phone call from HR, email from my friend telling me the wheels were in motion, and an email from the guy doing the hiring telling me enough details about the job that I was able to go off and go through some Internet tutorials on object-oriented programming so I could speak his jargon at the interview. It was amazing. During the interview I wound up telling them how their approach to providing examples for their product might be improved (many similar self-contained copyable examples rather than one single big huge out-of-date example that demonstrated every feature). People want to copy code and replace a few key things, I told the interviewer. He laughed and said it's true, software is never written, it is only cut and pasted. That's the point he interrupted the interview to ask how soon I could start if he offered me the job.

Anyway even there, when I talked to HR to set up the interview, they almost prevented me from going. They asked me my current salary (which I thought a bit premature, but I've since found out that's more common now than it used to be, to talk about salary earlier in the process), and when I told them they told me that this job wasn't budgeted for that much. I assured them I wanted to talk to the group manager anyway. When I repeated this exchange to the guy I interviewed with he grew visibly angry, saying how upset he was that they had told me this. He said the figure they had came from him, that he'd never hired a tech. writer before, and it was something of a guess. He certainly had the authority to pay more, for somebody he wanted to hire.

So some of this (in my experience) is complete lack of coordination between the technical people doing the hiring and interviewing with the HR people doing the wheat-from-chaff selection.

[susandennis]

Oh, absolutely! Recruiting HR folks have the worst job on the planet - no contest. They never ever get it right no matter how hard they try because they do not report to the people doing the hiring. They report to the people who the hiring people hate.

This gets to be a little less of an issue in smaller orgs and in start up orgs. And so very much of it depends on the direction from the top.

[rsc.livejournal.com]

I would have sucked at living in the days before indoor plumbing.

You would have just loved our weekend (http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwg/38796.html).

[susandennis]

I read about it in your journal and in Pinkfishes and it sounded like exactly the kind of fun that I'm so grateful to have friends on LJ who do it and write about it so I don't have to kind of fun!

[geordie.livejournal.com]

My headhunter count is 3 for the rolling week, all wireless.

I was looking at the forecast for Monterey and SF for the next week and the temperatures seem to be on the slow decline. Too early to say summer is over since it's 78 outside right now, still better than the recent high 80s and low 90s though. I'm looking forward to October and November and wishing for an early rainy season.