Plan A - Job boards and placement agencies
Looks like Plan A was working, slowly. I had numerous interviews including a two hour telephone interview with Telus last month for a not-quite-optimal position. Seems they want people to work in Edmonton but can’t find anybody up there, and can’t entice anyone from Calgary or Burnaby / Vancouver to move to Edmonton for the contract. Go figure. I lived there for a year back in 1998. It was ok, but Calgary is home.
Plan A also netted me an interview at a place that was priding itself on being a Microsoft Beta Test partner or somesuch, to the extent that they were bragging about putting Microsoft Beta products into client sites. The job was about 60% windows server stuff (which I could figure out, push came to shove) and 40% Unix/Linux. If it had been more like 20% windows … no, nevermind. Who in their right mind would work for a place that actively encouraged Windows on the server side, and Beta versions of Microsoft products at that! (Isn’t that a violation of some beta partnership agreement anyways? Weird.)
I did get one not so bad interview on Plan A. A large international oil company needed to fill a hole left by a vacating contract systems administrator. It would have involved more experience on midrange solaris equipment and helping them along for a while on their multi year server consolidation and updating program. They have stuff running on Solaris 2.51 still in various capacities, as well as Ultra 10’s and such, to name just a few ancient technologies. Amazing what you can find in the dusty corners of server rooms, ticking away performing some service (possibly critical).
Yes, ticking like a time bomb waiting to go off at just the worst possible moment….
Plan B - Direct resume submission
Plan B actually worked out better for me this time around. I got my shiny new resume (more on that later) wound hither and thon and ultimately to the desk of someone who is up to their eyeballs in current and pending projects. Probably they didn’t have time to expend on a full blown formal position filling process, and basically just pounced when my qualifications came into view with barely any effort required by them.
Hey, cold contact sometimes works . . .
This is at a company that I did a little bit of research on and decided they would be an interesting place to work. Turns out that they appear to have the right mix of size of company, culture, people, technology (nice mix of bleeding edge and stable stuff, and open source stuff appears to also be involved in parts of it which counts lots in my books), office location (not downtown), and so forth. Looking forward to getting in there and rolling my sleeves up.
Just a little bit of negotiation on contract terms first, mostly about intellectual property assignments and limitation of warranty and exclusive remedy. Also setting up some commercial general liability and errors + omissions liability insurance. Something I should have had before, and will definitely be covering my butt with this time around. Not that anything bad ever happened at previous contracts, but most of those were via recruitment agencies that had me covered by their umbrella insurance while I was working thru them.