[lopsa-discuss] Career planning

[Brad Knowles]

At 7:15 AM -0500 2005-12-07, Andrew Maddox wrote:

>  Interesting, though - Brad mentioned Pencom and CT. Pencom is still
>  generally OK, I think. one of my "good list" recruiters is from Pencom,
>  and he works the DC market and Boston[0]

	I know the Pencom recruiters work only a given local region, 
although most usually cover both Pencom and CT.  When I was first 
hired by CT, I worked as the local sysadmin in the DC office 
(actually in N. Virginia), and I got to know the recruiters there 
pretty well.  They were really good at passing contacts on to a more 
appropriate recruiter in the group, if you were interested in working 
in an area outside of their region.

>  There's my problem - I like technology. I like making different things
>  work together, then moving on and learning the next new thing. So it's
>  looking like I want to be a high-level generalist with a specialty in
>  networking (and some security - an unsecure network is about a useful
>  as a bucket with no bottom).

	There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza,
	There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole.


	Sorry, that song leapt to my mind when you mentioned that....

>  That's not a job description, though, so we're back to "how do you get
>  the skills you want up to a high level and then convince employers that
>  they need you?"[1]

	If you want to be that kind of generalist, I think what you have 
to do is get to the point where the question is turned around -- they 
are the ones that are already convinced that they need you, and they 
have to convince you to come work for them.

	Now, how you turn that around is a different matter.

>  [0] Boston only because he's from there and has recruiter former
>  colleagues there. Anyone have some good folks in the Portland, OR area?

	The only time I was ever in Oregon, was when I was delivering a 
week-long training session on Norton Anti-Virus for Internet E-mail 
Gateways (NAVIEG) on Solaris for the top-level helpdesk people for 
Symantec.  They had outsourced the development to a company in India, 
and I had previously done a week at Symantec HQ in CA, helping them 
to develop much more rigorous testing methods and procedures in their 
QA department, so that they could get a much better idea of what it 
was that the Indian programmers were shipping to them, and where it 
had flaws and needed to be re-worked, etc....

	In actuality, it was much more like a very basic "Intro to Unix" 
course, but it was the first formal training in this area that anyone 
at Symantec had gotten in anything remotely related to this topic, so 
they seemed to think it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

	Oh, and I also talked to a number of people on the programming 
team in CA, all of whom had helped develop the Windows version of 
NAVIEG.  I tried hard to explain to them basic concepts like 
multi-processing and forking versus multi-threading and disabuse them 
of trying to effectively program in Windows while they were actually 
on Unix -- even Solaris didn't have good support for multi-threading 
at the time, and here they were trying to do everything in a single 
very highly multi-threaded process, just like they did under Windows. 
All that feedback was supposed to go into the next generation version 
of NAVIEG, because they were close to the drop-dead date and 
something had to be shipped, no matter how bad it was.


	That was also where I learned one of my first French phrases.  A 
good number of the helpdesk people I was training in Oregon were from 
the International offices, and one woman in question was actually 
from Paris.  I already knew that I would be moving to Brussels in a 
few months, so she was kind enough to give me a bit of her own 
training in the French language, as a way of saying thanks for the 
training I was giving on Unix.


	I wonder whatever happened to all that stuff and those people....

>  [2] The question about "how do I make sure I'm ready for the next time
>  the floor drops out from under me?"

	Assume that it will always fall out from underneath you, and try 
to be prepared for that from Day One.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  LOPSA member since December 2005.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.