Okay, anyone who has experienced anything like this, write a comment.
Have you ever felt like all of a sudden part of your brain started running a different program? Or that it was just processing information differently? Are you aware that your brain—specifically how it processes information—one day is significantly different from how the information was processed a month, a year, four years earlier?
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I feel like a kid staring in the window of a candy store, but the store is closed. Since Friday I’ve had a cold. It’s not a bad one (thank God) but I’ve got a pretty strict code of ethics and hygiene that says I don’t go spreading my cold to other people if I can help it. So although I’ve been dying to go out and carouse in these first evenings in New York City, I’ve been stuck in this apartment.
I’m so antsy though, and I’ve got reason to celebrate. My condo in L.A. finally sold, three weeks late, and I’ll be seeing that money soon. And from the previous entry you can see I had my first exciting job leads. Now just give me some flirtation and romance and I’ll be in heaven! Well, the cold is mostly over, so I’m going to go see my good friend Dale host his comedy show Super-Ego tomorrow night.
What makes in incarceration in this apartment even worse is that the Internet access is just barely usable. It’s Time Warner Cable and outages happen about once an hour and at least 1 in 5 web pages I try to bring up die of communications errors before they can load. Bob (my friend on whose couch I’m crashing) has called Time Warner and they just say that the circuits in this part of the city are overloaded with too much traffic, and they are desperately trying to beef up the infrastructure. So for $60 per month we’re getting something that’s more or less as good as dial-up? I tell you I’m in pain here.
I’ve found DSL service that’s about half that price, and today—by the grace of God—I hope I’ll be able to find a cheaper and more reliable replacement. The phone company guy came by last week, but Bob didn’t have access to the phone box in the basement so we had to reschedule for today. (And that was a hair-pulling experience that took I-kid-you-not 2 hours of being transferred to different calling center people, wading through automated computer menus, etc.) Please, today let me get reliable broadband access going. Please!
There is a reluctant bright side to my little incarceration here. I do have a lot of work I need to do. I have to get a huge “co-op board application package” together by Friday if I want to be able to interview with the board on the November 1st meeting to apply to buy the apartment I want on 22nd street. For most people out there that last sentence will make no sense. Suffice to say buying real estate in New York City is the most complicated process you’ve ever heard of and leave it at that. The crux of the matter is that if I don’t get this package together by Friday (which requires I get 5 letters of reference written by friends and employers and work colleagues and my CPA, among other things) then I wont be able to interview until December 1st which would mean I probably wouldn’t be able to buy the place before the New Year.
The other thing I have to do is my “homework” for my career coach. At the suggestion of some (rather well-informed) friends, a person in my level of experience can really benefit from hiring a professional to write my resume. At first I thought this was about spending a lot of money (and it is a lot of money for the professionals) to have someone format a Word document, but this is actually a hugely involved process where I work on articulating my strengths, creating a “personal brand” to set myself apart from others in the job market, creating a value proposition (I’m doing that next) and much more.
I’ve been working for a week now on a rather painful experience of writing up my “Top Achievements Per Job” document where I dig out every remarkable thing I did at every job and translate it directly into bottom-line statements of how I brought the client or employer value. It is a painful experience, and to a great degree it is a nit-picking exercise in marketing, but you know what? I’m not even done with the exercise, but if I went into an interview tomorrow with a potential employer I would be completely prepared to talk about the achievements I’ve had at previous jobs and how I brought the employers and clients real solid value. Had I not done the exercise I’d have mostly forgotten the details of these past jobs, all the valuable anecdotes lost in my hazy memory.
Can you tell I’m trying to keep a positive attitude about all this? I am. I’m not going to kid you: I have that cynical voice in my head that is laughing at all this double-talk and telling me that I’m wasting a lot of money. After the past several years I’ve felt so battle-worn. From the wonderfully jobless Bush economy to politics to the painful painful L.A. condo sale I just experienced, it can be really hard to stay chipper.
But I’m looking at all this quite simply: what do I stand to gain and what do I stand to lose if I do or don’t keep this (positive) attitude up? The up-side of staying positive might be landing a really good job that pays wages I haven’t seen since 1999 before the Dot-Com computer industry crash. The down-side would be looking like a fool. (And wasting some money on the career coaching.) The up-side of staying cynical? Well, I could not get a good job and feel smug about how right I was after all.
See? I’m trying to prop my spirits up with a half-decent logical argument. So I’m going to keep up that suspension of disbelief as long as I can.
I’ll be anxious to do a post-mortem on this entire experience once it’s all over. Writer Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the famous Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) getting By in America has recently written a new book called Bait and Switch : The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream where she exposes all the career-coaching scams that prey on desperate job hunters, and how there aren’t any white-collar jobs in the marketplace or how the employers are trying to constantly screw applicants.
I’ll concede now that there do appear to be a lot of predators out there. Had I not had a personal referral for this particular coach from a friend (who got real payoff from the experience) I would have never spent the money. Oh and by the way, I do think Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed was a really good and insightful read, if not a little depressing.
Well, enough rambling. As I said, I’ve got a lot of work to do today as it is, and the stakes for not getting it done are rather high.
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)…
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.
I’m back in New York City. Back in Manhattan for that matter. I’m back I’m back I’m back I’m back.
There’s still a bit of that “pinch me!” quality going on. Reality isn’t really sinking in because this place doesn’t share very much with reality. It stubbornly defies reality, and somehow seems to continue to get away with it.
The other thing that shocks me is how readily I adapt to life here. Walking through a rapid river of bodies along 34th street or doing laundry at a laundromat where you just about have to climb over other bodies to get to the washing machines to say nothing of finding counter-space to fold your clothes—all of this I take in a casual stride. Most of the people in Los Angeles, when I told them I was returning to Manhattan, could not believe I would take on such an endeavor of my own volition. They shook their heads, saying “I just couldn’t handle the intensity of it all.”
And at times for the past eleven days I’ve sort of glimpsed through their eyes, or at least how I imagine their eyes see things, and I admit I’m amazed—not at how crazy and intense New York City is, but at how little it affects me. Honestly, I’m intimately comfortable and secure here. Much more so than I had been during the last four years in Los Angeles.
I’ll add to the commentary and maybe provide some back-story, but first priority is finishing getting a functional WordPress configuration going so this website is marginally functional.