I should be happy instead of annoyed. I’ll brush off the “annoyed” part any minute now and get back to happy.
I got a call from a recruiter interested in my resume. She has a client, an old and venerable New York bank with at least two sites in the Wall Street area. (Get this, one location is at “1 Wall Street”!!) What’s profound about this is that I’ve been desperately trying to get a job anywhere near Wall Street, or at least on the island of Manhattan. But everyone keeps wanting me for jobs in fucking New Jersey or Long Island. NO! I want a job here. Every day hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people commute into Manhattan to work. I refuse to commute out anymore.
The other cool thing was that these jobs are management jobs. They aren’t coder jobs. I don’t want another coder job because my tendonitis wont take a lifetime of constant 12-hour days of pure constant typing. I keep getting coder jobs primarily because my resume is stuffed with coder work experience. If a recruiter sees a coder resume I’m immediately shuffled into coder interviews because there is really a shortage of capable coders.
But I don’t want to be a coder. I want to be a manager. (Project Manager is fine for now.) So I cut lots of the coding details out of my resume and highlighted everything I did that’s managerial. And don’t get me wrong: there’s a lot of managerial experience. Honestly, I’m a better manager than I am a coder. But the damn recruiters can’t get past the coding.
So this recruiter wanted me to come in for an interview. More of a meet-and-greet since she’s not the end-client. She just wanted to see me in person to see if I drooled or had some other odious personal habits that would make her look bad if she sent me on an interview. I would say the interview went quite well. We had a friendly chat as she described the two available jobs. Both were Project Management for a team doing J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) work. That’s the work I just finished doing for a company in London for two years.
Later in the afternoon, after the meeting, she calls me sounding very hesitant.
“The client wants someone with 10 years Java experience. You said you only have eight. You’ve got to understand, this is a very hands one position.”
She wants a manager to have 10 years Java experience. First of all, a manager with that much technical experience is almost always going to be a good technician and a gawd-awful lousy manager.
Second of all, Java hardly fucking existed ten years ago! Back in October 1996 (exactly ten years ago)…
- The beta version of Java 1.1, the first real bug patch, hadn’t been released yet.
- Only “applets” existed for using Java, and only a few thousand web sites in the world had any working applets. Most of them hardly beyond the “Hello World” variety.
- The first commercial software development kit (Symantec’s “Visual Cafe” for Java) hadn’t seen its first commercial release and was still on Developers Release 1. (I bought it the next year, but that doesn’t count as professional experience.)
- Servlets didn’t exist. Swing hadn’t been introduced as a functional replacement for the problematic AWT widget set.
Only tinkerers were playing with Java. It had no commercial use yet, just a bunch of hype. And she thinks she’s going to find some competent managers whose Java experience dates back that far? And isn’t it just absolutely and completely moronic that any employer would even want to set that sort of expectation, virtually eliminating most all of the possibly qualified people who would want the job?
GGAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!
Okay, I’m breathing…. I’m breathing….
I’m really fine. I didn’t externalize any of that. I told her calmly that I would write a one-page supplement to my 2-page resume that would go over my Java experience. (And if she’s not impressed that I’m a published author with my face on a Wrox Press book called “Early Adopter Mac OS X Java” then she’s just an idiot.) I’m sure it’s just a matter of glossing through that sort of thing, placating some egos and getting on to the interview. I’ll do fine if I can just get to the real interview.
(gah!)
But let’s get back to the important point. I was just introduced to two potential interviews for two jobs both of which would be perfect matches for what I want. They’re each about 1 year long, corp-to-corp payment. I asked for a pretty high (hourly) rate and she didn’t flinch. Not to get my hopes up, but these are exactly exactly exactly what I’m looking for. So I’ll calmly explain my only-eight years of Java.
Maybe I should think up some fake but small Java project that I could have claimed to have done back in early 1997. It’s really a stretch because there was hardly bupkiss you could do with it back then. But I could make it a footnote’s worth of experience to stretch that eight into a ten for the next moron who comes asking for ridiculous backgrounds.