Hire Ground

If you are ever called to a meeting with your boss and you glance through the glass panel beside the door before entering the room and the only people you see are your boss and the HR rep, you can assume the meeting won’t be going well.

The dreaded “reorganization” had hit.

Thus began my search for a job. I believe I handled myself well. I didn’t fall shrieking to the floor. I tore no hair out (precious little to lose there). I think I behaved in a professional manner. My boss was very nervous and I saw no point in both of us having a really bad day, so I let him off the hook gently and he quickly fled the room.

After all, it wasn’t a real surprise. My previous company had been acquired and I had been the Director of Hardware Development for enterprise switches. Now I wasn’t and he was. There had been a few awkward moments where I forgot and he didn’t. I was over-qualified and was drawing a big salary. Like I said, it wasn’t a complete surprise.

The HR rep went though the exit checklist and then, refreshingly in this day and age, I was allowed the rest of the day to gather my personal things, organize a handoff to those picking up my responsibilities and to say my good-byes. These ran from less than a minute to as long as they wanted to tell me about their issues. Oddly, few wanted to talk about my situation.

I think they were embarrassed.

EDN invited me to start this blog to share my experience in hunting for my next job. The current plan is for this blog to survive my gaining employment. Someone else will be invited to take over and continue posting.

This is a long term experiment to give the out-of-work engineer/engineering manager insight into current job hunting conditions.

Please feel free to add your comments on your job hunting experiences since I imagine that my hunt won’t cover all the possible situations. The more pertinent the information that can be found here, the more helpful this blog will be to job hunting engineers.

Tip number one. Tell your kids to go into software. On any given day, there are about 50 times more software jobs than hardware jobs available in the Bay area.

Maybe hardware engineers are fifty times more productive that software engineers?

Let the flames begin.