Job/Career Update

[Gurm]

Ok first round netted me 2 "wait and see" and 2 written offers.

I rejected both written offers on the basis of the jobs being lousy environments or requiring too much of me.

The "wait and see" both fizzled out.

So now I'm back at it. Sadly, my company is getting worse and worse, and things are only looking bleaker. I have 2 more weeks, REALLY must find something.

Back to Monster I go!

[Gurm]

Aaaaand... anyone in the Boston area who knows of anything...

[rylan]

You sound like you work at my company with things getting worse! hahaha

What kind of job are you looking for again? I have some friends at various places that are hiring.

[Gurm]

Senior-level sysadmin or engineer. Mostly windows, but I'm not afraid of a little *nix (or a lot if they're willing to let me be rusty) or Mac.

Err... I'll post my resume back here in a bit (it's on the other machine).

[Jessterw]

Feel for you bud. Having to start the whole job search ordeal again myself. Amazing how bad things can go in five months.

And here Damian was saying I was the stable one...

[rylan]

I'll ask around. I'm on vacation for a week though, so I probably won't get much info until I'm back.

[Claymonkey]

you are the stable one JW.

FYI - the reason things suddenly got funky for the Gurmster is that I'm giving my two weeks on Monday (I'll give more details on Monday... just in case).

If you all recall I was the one that got Gurm his current job... it was a good opportunity for both of us at the time, until about a year ago I really enjoyed working there (as did Gurm). Things have just gone downhill since then.

So... Gurm is still on contract outside of the company. This made things insane for me on the 'home front.' We both starting looking (thanks everyone that helped with our resumes). I got jealous of his offers, then I got an offer this week. His contract and my two weeks end at the same time... probably leading to an unfun work environment.

[rylan]

Well if you have any suggestions on how to get rid of the site sysadmin that we have, I'd certainly refer you for the opening. The dude we have right now is almost useless. I think its only a matter of time before he gets da boot since my boss has pretty much had it with him.

[Gurm]

Ha. It's hard to get rid of sysadmins, isn't it?

You could always change company policy to require him to dress business casual and bathe regularly...

[Jessterw]

I almost miss not having to dress business casual every day. If decided to stick around here and managed to be hired by the outsourcing firm I would be overjoyed in being allowed to have to wear business (formal) attire every day instead.

Weee...

[Gurm]

You ... PREFER ... full formal?

I mean, my definition of business casual might differ from yours...

- Button down shirt
- Real pants (khakis acceptable, black jeans NOT)
- Real shoes (Doc Martens low-tops acceptable, Doc Martens high-tops NOT)
- Belt
- Tie optional

[Gurm]

Ok so maybe it's less "business casual" than ... uh ... "business non-formal"?

[Jessterw]

No, that's exactly what business casual is at Hertz. CGI, the outsourcing firm, requires their employees to wear the same attire as the managers at client locations and business formal otherwise. Which amounts to the same here.

And no, I don't prefer formal, hence the rolling of the eyes. Remember, I worked from home in my boxers for almost 4 years.

[Gurm]

No, that's exactly what business casual is at Hertz. CGI, the outsourcing firm, requires their employees to wear the same attire as the managers at client locations and business formal otherwise. Which amounts to the same here.

And no, I don't prefer formal, hence the rolling of the eyes. Remember, I worked from home in my boxers for almost 4 years.

Well, I actually do prefer preppie to be honest. Button-down shirt and khakis is pretty much my modus operandi.

[Claymonkey]

So I gave my two weeks this last Monday. The boss completely didn't expect it. Five minutes later Gurm tells me that he called him to setup a meeting with after work. He wanted to make sure he didn't have to look for two Engineers.

I accepted a Citrix Administrator position at one of the major health insurance companies based in Boston. They are currently still using Citrix in a test environment for a new revision of their internal software. They hope to go live to some degree not long after I come on board. The goal is to have over 3000 users using by end of ramp up. I was upfront that my Citrix experience was mostly limited to a single Presentation Server and Access Gateway. They seemed far more interested in the fact that I learned Citrix on the fly when I was handed the project for one of our clients, as well as assimilating new environments and software quickly. Thankfully this is both Gurm's and my strength, and has been key to our work (our company becomes the IT staff of numerous companies and we often have to clean up excessive messes when we get new clients). Initial setup is the difficult part of Citrix and load balancing is the 'easier' part of the equation, even still this should be a challenging and exciting job to jump into.