Laid Off: Transitioning to Job-Search Mode

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Thanks for the vote of confidence Joe, I appreciate it.

Yo, Steve, seems like there's a lot of that "surplusing" going on, especially for we "mature industry veterans." Lotsa luck with the search -- whoever gets you gets one of the best.

From 1999 to 2005 I was an IT Contractor, which was golden when there was work. If not, then I had to get a day job. My top-down approach was to estimate the number of PCs in use (currently about 1 billion), the number of servers in use (around 24 million), and the way those servers were used (8 million web-servers, 8 million database servers, and 8 million "other" (file servers, email servers, domain servers, print servers, etc.)). From there, the question was "who is hosting these apps?" and do I want to work for them? ~~~ Invariably I would filter out certain groups of employers that were either a nuisance (anything involving a security clearance, for instance) or financial instability (banks, certain kinds of manufacturing, etc.) or government agencies that didn't like paying private industry rates. Generally what was left was service organizations that performed something 'mission critical'. ~~~ In general, I've had an aversion to 'pothole filling', which means being in a business that doesn't really improve life for it's customers over time. Computer companies are continually coming out with fancier boxes, commodities traders trade in, lets face it, the same thing they were selling 100 years ago. ~~~ One thing keeps popping up no matter where I'm looking: Database Administrators (DBAs) and Server/Network Administrators are a higher life form than software developers. 'Higher life form' means greater demand and a faster hiring cycle. Sometimes it also means more money. If I have a choice between writing code and setting up new users on a server, I'm going to be writing code. ~~~ Another thing that keeps popping up is Microsoft Access. From the top down, the Java/Oracle people are the most highly paid and hardest to find, then ASP .NET (Active Server Pages), then the Visual Studio (C# and Visual Basic .NET) with SQL-Server backend, then the more 'traditional' coding platforms, which at present is the 'classic' ASP, Visual Basic 6, C++, and Microsoft Office VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). 'Microsoft Office' from the programmer perspective is mostly Microsoft Access. Access is one of these things where a lot of people cobble something together, then they get in over their head, and scream for help. A lot of the time they can barely afford anyone to come in to help in any capacity. ~~~ A combination of CraigsList, Dice, and Monster would generally expose certain insights on the state of the market. I was looking for a number of markers: companies hiring a team instead of an individual; companies soliciting directly in comparison to companies hiring through recruiters; the specificity of the role; and companies that responded to candidate on-line resumes compared to companies that solicited resumes to their own websites. ~~~ One product that would get chronic ads was Microsoft Sharepoint. Ads would show up, fade away, show up again, fade, and show up again. These would furthermore oscillate between the direct employer, a recruiting agency, and the direct employer again. ~~~ Other companies were fixated on particular open source products, among them the 'LAMP stack' and Ruby-on-Rails. ROR, in particular, would be big hosting organizations with buildings full of servers, and a particularly narrow set of responsibilities for any particular employee. ~~~ Interviews where I met HR people first usually ended up badly. Whether this was due to the HR people not understanding IT or the IT organization being protocol-sensitive on some axis was never easy to figure out. Such organizations often hired a lot of production line workers or truck drivers, and lumped IT workers along with the people pushing pallets around on dollies. ~~~ One more than one occasion I ran into companies that looked like great places to work, only to be left with the impression that there was an arbiter of taste somewhere in the group that enforced some sort of norm. In one case the company was a start up, but it's owner was an old-line business that had been around for 100 years. ~~~ When a potential employer was simply 'Long established VAR seeks...', I responded with a 'compact resume'. This outlined date ranges, projects, product skills, but didn't name employers or anything more than a thumbnail impression of particular skillsets. Once I had a name and phone number, then I sent a full resume. On at least two occasions the compact resume was enough to trigger phone calls for meetings within 24 hours. In both these cases an offer was made within the duration of the meeting. ~~~ During particularly slow periods I would work on a business plan, under the assumption that I could put together a road show if I was going to have to create the company that would put me to work. There are angels floating around my hometown, but I never got to the point where I needed to see them. ~~~ Something I'd be interested in reading is how an engineer evaluates the overall market for their services. For most of the people I've talked to in IT, looking at the 'big picture' didn't occur to them or they didn't know how to sort it out.

Thanks for the vote of support, Paula. Steve.

I miss you already! You were (and still are) the best!