Re: [tlug] Looking for Summer Internship in Japan

[Benjamin Kowarsch <trijezdci@example.com>]

On 17 March 2015 at 01:14, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:

What you're missing is that drone work is advertised and farmed out to the 

headhunters, and so *that* "drone" market (and its failure to hire you) is very visible.

You are assuming I am looking for dev work through headhunters.

But that hat route is not even open to me because no headhunter would consider introducing me anywhere for development work -- my CV says project manager for large public infrastructure projects with complex resource allocation, telecomms, railways, utilities, that sort of thing.  Software delivery has become a more and more prominent component of that and my background sets me apart from most of my PM colleagues as they tend to regularly underestimate the software components and view them as "how many engineers does it take to change X lightbulbs in Y locations over Z time" or if they are software folks they don't know anything about the engineering (true engineering of physical assets).

If I wanted to produce a CV that shows my software development skills I would have to rely on stuff that lies many many years in the past, or sporadic lend-a-hand activities when I had projects with small companies where everyone has to wear multiple hats, and for the bulk, the work I do outside of paid work, which is instantly dismissed as hobby and thus amateurish and therefore doesn't count.

Nobody looks at the true skillset, no matter how you present it unless you can claim that you have written code in the asked for language for many many many years and even more so that you have not done anything else in between or in parallel, for if you did Java as well while you were working with Python (fill in any two languages there it does not matter what they are) then you are obviously not working 100% of your time with just the one asked for and that means you are not an expert.

When I have been introduced somewhere it was typically through somebody I know who know somebody or knew somebody who knew somebody. It makes little difference.

When looking for work, the most promising approach is to only focus on what you have done during your last three years of work and try to remove all else. Industry often matters more than anything else. If you have project managed the delivery of a CCTV system for Swiss railways, you cannot possibly be capable of delivering a CCTV system in a car factory, you have no auto-industry experience, you're a railway guy now. I have seen the very same kind of situations with friends who still do software development as their main job. If you have worked on an asset management system for telecom assets, you cannot possibly work on an asset management system for oil platforms.

I had just delivered a telephony platform for a big multinational serving 70000 employees in 170 countries. The main focus was on specification of the solution, writing the tender documents, running the tender, select a vendor and manage the vendor to build and operate. The system that was ultimately put in place was a platform from Cisco with a version number of 7.5.

Right after that a very similar project came up but in the meantime Cisco had found a few bugs which they fixed in an bugfix upgrade with version number 7.5.1. This bugfix had only been released several weeks prior. You would only get an interview if you could answer the question "But have you done a project based on 7.5.1, not 7.5?" positively with a confident "Yes, I am a 7.5.1 expert, I know virtually nothing about 7.5 at all, never even knew it existed, for me the universe started with 7.5.1".

This is the kind of subject matter idiot demand out there today.

I don't know about
you, but I watch my friends in Python and distros hire each other all
the time, and I assure you they're not hired for their Python skills
alone.  But this is not visible unless you're already (fellow-)
traveling in those circles.

If you only do a python project every five years because you needed something from an open source software that needed a contribution from you but otherwise you never touch python, then you are quite obviously not "travelling in those circles". And if you have been doing project management of a telecommunications infrastructure nature, then all your friends will be unemployed and look for a job, or they are at some shop where there is a hiring stop and they are doing the work of three colleagues who have been laid off and they want out and are looking for a job themselves.

And if you attempt to change industries, then you lack the so called "industry experience".

The subject matter idiots have it.

regards

benjamin