At Last, a New Job
Published at 13:51 on 28 August 2018
At long last, I have a job. I’ve actually been pretty sure of it for some time, but the process of getting a sure-thing offer has been bureaucratic, so I’ve held off posting about it until it was indeed a sure thing. It’s at a Fortune 500 company, not a startup, so bureaucracy is to be expected.
All my past experience to date indicates there are no truly good matches for me in the high tech world, so I’m not expecting this to be a one. The one time I did find an apparently good match, it didn’t last. Realistically, that’s about the best I can expect from this gig: 2 to 3 years before the level of change accrues to make it no longer a match for me. At the least, I have every reason to expect it will be better than the egregious mismatch that led me to depart from my previous job.
My hope is that will be sufficient time to allow me to pursue opportunities out of the high tech world by then. I was faced with the task of attempting that transition right now, when things are just not quite to the point where I’m financially ready for it. Now it seems I will have time to prepare.
I did get the job by breaking my Taleo rule; even though it was at a firm that uses Taleo, I applied anyhow, because the listing indicated the job was a far better-than-normal match for my particular skill set. I figured that if I took care to use every last buzzword in the job listing someplace in the data I fed into Taleo, I stood a better-than-average chance of getting a phone call in return for my efforts. I didn’t actually bother to enter in my entire résumé by hand, because I could fill out the Taleo forms honestly for my past two jobs and end up using all the required buzzwords.
I figured that the hiring manager would be mostly interested in my résumé, and if my attempt at hacking my way through Taleo was successful, I’d have a later chance to amend that information and make it complete. The cost in time and effort would become worth it once there was a very good chance of being hired if I did so. (The cost in time and effort is not worth it otherwise.)
The moral of the story is that no set of hard-and-fast rules can always be applicable to all situations. One has to have the flexibility to make exceptions.
My start date is Tuesday the 4th. That means it’s time for a combination end-of-summer and celebratory camping trip, starting as soon as possible. I’m about to start packing this afternoon, and plan to be underway after breakfast tomorrow morning.
I plan to visit Neah Bay and revisit Lake Ozette. As the wording implies, I’ve never been to the former place at all, despite long being curious about just what the northwestern extreme of Washington state is like.
Neah Bay was actually the alternate destination for this trip; several weeks ago, when I came up with possible places to visit, the Mowich Lake area of Mt. Rainier came up at the top of the list. However, it’s supposed to be cloudy, rainy, and quite chilly at that altitude for a good chunk of the next few days. The coast will still be damp at times, but I can expect the temperatures to be milder. Mowich Lake will have to wait for another year.
So I’m about to head off. It’s unlikely you’ll see anything more posted here until I return.