Recruiters and banging your head against the desk

[Sasq]

Hi All,

Roaming past.

Back in the job market after seven years of dealing with our local TiVo and Broadcast television made streamed, with a great deal of AWS thrown in.
*I left due to wanting to understand what time off is, and what a world of not 'being on constant 24/7' looked like.

I find the recruitment process incredibly frustrating, have had to get my resume professionally SEO keyworded to get past the automagic application systems, and in general disillusioned over same said systems not even kicking back an 'sorry not you' email.

Just wondering if there are any tips, or also feel free to grumble at the way it works now as well.

D

[UtwigMU]

Hi Dan, welcome back to freedom. I think it still works like in good old days with recommendations and experience. Another thing is that traditional type of 9-17 till 65 years old jobs are shrinking. A lot of companies would prefer to have you as contractor as it's less risky for them. Also getting through regular long formal application into large structured company will land you in dead end janitorial job (unless you get promoted internally but internal competition is hard). The key people in companies mostly get recruited on invitation and recommendation. It's good to have skills from different areas and be able to freelance.

When I lost job in 2010 I had more connections, experience, friends to call and I only got one interview, so after that I self employed. Now I work full time for one of my then clients (they gave me an offer I couldn't refuse) and do a bit of freelancing in free time (burn all my leaves for freelancing, except couple of days in summer). Freelancing goes from teaching computer webinars/classes to IT people to driving, translating and being personal assistant to wine-expert lady from Japan.

EDIT: if you want to get in gelato equipment business I can hook you up with our distributors in Australia.

おかえりなさい。

[VJ]

Hey Dan!

Sorry to hear you are back in the job market, but an understandable decision.

Not sure how if it is the same there, but here I'm surprised how well LinkedIn and even moreso ResearchGate manage to supply me with potential offers that does seem to fit my profile. The latter one is more for academic jobs, but through that one I managed to land a temporary position in Spain (nearly finishing now, I'll return to Poland after that). It also notified me about a position in Belgium. I also applied for it, but I knew they had an internal candidate which basically means I had no fair chance, but I qualified second (so the position shown to me by ResearchGate was accurate). I don't know if recruiters use platforms like that over there...


Jörg

[dZeus]

Hi All,

Roaming past.

Back in the job market after seven years of dealing with our local TiVo and Broadcast television made streamed, with a great deal of AWS thrown in.
*I left due to wanting to understand what time off is, and what a world of not 'being on constant 24/7' looked like.

I find the recruitment process incredibly frustrating, have had to get my resume professionally SEO keyworded to get past the automagic application systems, and in general disillusioned over same said systems not even kicking back an 'sorry not you' email.

Just wondering if there are any tips, or also feel free to grumble at the way it works now as well.

D

Hi Dan,

LinkedIn works great for me, using the current fancy SEO keywords and have the right location in your profile.
Not sure what you're looking at, but I'd guess that AWS, devops and CI/CD should work wonders for you.
Also consider passing an AWS certification if you haven't already.

On this side of the world, I find most of my big enterprise customers are switching to cloud, with the vast majority going for AWS (and some Azure for MS shops).
As already observed by Utwig, when I work with my customers, I deal mostly with contractors. It's the modern business' way to avoid legislation around employee benefits.
That doesn't mean you cannot make good money; if you're good at your job, you can make a lot of money in IT. In France, I see day rates starting 500 euros per day, all the way to around 1200-2000, depending on how specialized required skill set (of course, if you can sell days in bulk, the price will go down accordingly).

Play it well, and you can earn much more as a contractor than with a permanent position.

[Sasq]

Thanks all,

I recently passed my AWS Solutions Architect Professional exam, and I've been in that space a while, along with being able to design the full stack from data, to API to CI/CD to deployment (and write all of it I can't get senior management to give me budget for a coder)

LinkedIn and locally seek.com.au is working for me to an extent, I just got burned by taking a planned month off post leaving the broadcaster with a company that had more or less planned to employ me, but then swapped at last minute to someone closer (to the point where they had asked for and received glowing references) - threw my job hunt back by a month, then another 2 weeks on that to realize I need to SEO my resume and LinkedIn (been 7 years since I updated the resume)

I've been long-term contract for the last 7 years, and at least locally for what I do, the starting range is $800 a day, capping about $1200 a day (and the tax benefits are umm err useful shall we say)

I do have contacts in the broadcast industry, but they all involve jobs that involve overtime as the norm as opposed to the exception (and a normal day in broadcast tends to be 10 hour days as is)

As VJ noted about in-house, I am noticing a lot of jobs that are advertised appear to have a qualification wish list that only someone currently working for the company would have, either that or 'SAP', and SAP is a rabbit hole i've been avoiding

[UtwigMU]

Dan, how did that IOT control board, you were working on some years ago for server room go?

[Sasq]

We ended up shelving it, got most of the software and hardware there, but 'running your stuff on someone elses computer' aka cloud computing has sucked all the air out of the dataroom

[UtwigMU]

I'm going to rant about IOT and OZ a bit.

So your gelato machine has a full computer board and is an IOT device now. Since we have Italians programming and Slovenians doing the design (it should have been the other way ) our boards are supper ancient - some sort of 60MHz MIPS boards that still use telnet instead of ssh and still use 2.4 kernel. Because boss wanted to be like competition he got some IOT devices for server rooms and production lines on board. So instead of thinking of going with more capable board, every machine gets IOT device on it's own power supply (can't be powered from machine board PSU) that is connected with LAN cable to machine's board. Of course we need to be hotshots and pastry people don't like cables so we use wifi to uplink to servers of IOT company where we can access boards. This means every blody time someone wants to connect machine in Brazil, Indonesia or Australia, I need to be online with techie who connects IOT device to router with cable and tells me wifi details of the place. I then enter wifi details into IOT and the IOT device is online for about a week. About 4% of IOT devices remain online as obviously the gelatiere on the way to work sees poster for a free tablet if he switches internet provider and no one bothers or knows about IOT on wifi when changing password or router.

It's not important that it works or that it's efficient, it's important that we can advertise having remote diagnostics. Of course since Australia (our distributors and techies there are really good people, competent and hard working) has ungodly time difference they decided to ship all machines with IOT devices and the Australian techies have IOT device of their own which they take around shops if we need to diagnose. Since ice-cream season is starting there now, I have one support issue with Australians per week and I'm afraid this will eat more and more time. Since I'm the only IT guy for everything there and my time is already stretched this is very worrisome. I'm on paid leave this week and I already sorted out two issues with Aussies - one at 4am. On top of that they hired some Italian dude for Pacific region who wants to have his own special email domain, is using a Mac half the world away and always has some special needs.

I'm working on paying debts, saving, keeping in shape and getting my Linux skills up. Just in case.

[Sasq]

In good news, I have received an offer.

Not quite as much as I would like, but after tax, the difference isn't that great, however some great working conditions, comfortable with me doing 8~4 instead of 9~5 (greatly reduced commute time from where I live to the city), depending on client, work from home 1~2 days a week, and as long as no business conflict of interest, I can do personal work as well.

I have another in process that would pay more, be a step upward in my career, but a lot more stress and a lot less flexibility.

Being honest, the one on offer still would allow me to pay off the house in the next 8 years or so (not that I will, but I will get fairly close) and allow me to become the Australian equivalent of a Wallmart greeter at 50 with no more high-stress work...

[Umfriend]

Congrats!

[Dr Mordrid]

Congrats!!!

Take it from an ex stress-jockey, less is better and so is an early retirement to greeter-hood.

[UtwigMU]

Good news. A steady job with manageable stress and flexible work time is always good! Congrats!

[TransformX]

WTG Dan, looks like great news!