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I am dragging my unemployed lifestyle around again today. I think I need to start having deadlines again.
Without hard deadlines, I tend to ooze around in amusing but slow patterns, moving towards the nearest bright light
or most comfortable spot on the couch. When something needs to be done, though, I'm a punch card-regular, stereophonic, parallel-tasking
factory. This is why for the past three years running I have been given the highest possible rating in all evaluations of my performance by those who employed or worked with me. (note: I am
practicing for my interviews.) Interviews? Yes. Number one way to start having deadlines: get a job.
There are other ways, though. Towards this end, I tried out the "Memento Morty" feature on Brunching ShuttleC@cks and felt an
unexpected rush of motivation when it gave me a gif that said:
and that's if I'm really lucky. So I'm picking up the pace a little. Getting a job again. What else do I do? I guess I wrote all those test plans and made sure they got carried out.
I wrote a bunch of performance monitoring software and that fault tolerance blackbox thing. And the router stats webpage management thing, and that XML reader/generator, and I remember the time they
wanted me to write a thing which measured one way packet "jitter" and generated graphs, and I got it halfway done and they rearranged everything so I wasn't doing it anymore. Um... and... I also had to troubleshoot
that worldwide statistic gathering network and the database it ran on. Plus the legacy billing system was pretty much handed off to me as soon as I started working there, and it was written in lots and lots of awful perl, lots of which I had to rewrite.
Later we wrote some of this CORBA thing in C++ which was to be an NMS of some sort, but then it turned out that Riversoft already did it and their implementation was great. I interviewed a couple guys... and... did presentations on
our vital computer processes. Once I went to Budapest and met a whole bunch of European engineers, who were all talking about IPv6. I learned how to configure the Cisco 3600 series of routers to use SAA, once again to gather performance metrics. I updated socket
code to be able measure network performance with ToS implemented (it made almost no difference, our network was so overprovisioned). Finally, I learned how to stay funny in the face of financial disaster and share the wackiness with my
idiosyncratic coworkers (while still treating the normal ones as expected.) In short, if that's what you wat, I am the perfect employee. Except that you really do have to give me a deadline. I'll just sit there reading about "wexels" or whatever the latest demoscene graphics code fad is, otherwise.
Reading over the job listings, as always, elicits but one reaction from me: I see a listing for "software engineer". They want a person with 6 years of industry experience, proven record of excellence (whatever that is), total spaceship guy, PhD, whatever. And they want her to
work for them writing programs that write web pages. I mean, sure, that's great. But if I were that person (and I sometimes am), I wouldn't want that job. The person they describe in the description of the ideal candidate is always someone who would be bored out of their mind with
the position. Do they wonder why turnover is so high, still? It's because you're boring your employees to death. The upshot of that is: I apply for jobs that I think I would find challenging and interesting, so I never have all the buzzwords in the list of requirements on my resume.
Oh right. Another thing to mention when they ask about my weaknesses is my tendency to get preoccupied with bacon.
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