Landed a Permanent Job

When I left my last permanent job last May, I had contract jobs through the summer, until in August, I landed a contract-to-permanent opportunity at a startup. I was supposed to contract for three months, and then get converted to permanent status. Unfortunately, in November, the company was not in a financial position to hire me permanently, so they renewed my contract for another three months. In January of this year, they went out of business.

I got a week's heads-up that my contract was ending. I updated my resumes on LinkedIn, Dice and Career Builder. I took down and deleted by account on Monster.com because the laziest, sloppiest recruiters troll there. Four business days after the company I worked for went out of business, I had three permanent offers and a contract-to-permanent offer from the company that bought the intellectual property of the company that went out of business.

One company that made me a permanent offer was willing to pay me the same as I earned last time I had a permanent job, but I wasn't very interested in what they were doing, or the technologies they were using. One company was offering me more than a third more than my previous salary, but I was worried that I would have to travel too much, since I am working on getting another dog, and as as the Worshipful Master of a lodge, I need to stay in the area at least when my lodge opens. The third company seemed like they were hiring in a panic. They were annoyed by my insistence on low travel, and finally, the CEO of the company called me personally, and kept jacking up the salary until it was nearly double my last permanent salary. That much panic is unattractive, and so I turned them down and went with the contract-to-permanent offer, in the hope that once I was in the door, I could possibly jockey my way back to my old project.

I was working on health insurance software, a new product that they were launching. The product was very popular, and they did not have enough internal resources to handle implementations of all the new sales. So they hired an army of contractors, gave us minimal training and sent all of us out in the field after a few weeks on the job. I was on a client site after ten business days on the job. The following week, they flew me out to the West Coast to a client site. I was supposed to lead discussions about the technology behind their product, but I did not feel prepared, and was criticized by a supervisor for not knowing enough about the product. A recruiter called me that week, and I realized that I wanted out. I called her back during a lunch break.

On the following Monday, when I got back to the office, the head of the project criticized by performance and threatened to fire me if I didn't do a better job on a different client site that week, where again I was supposed to be the tech lead on implementation discussions. I went back to my desk, turned my Dice and Career Builder profiles back on, called every recruiter I had worked with previously, and called one of the companies that had made a previous offer in January.

Last Tuesday, I had an offer letter for a permanent job as an implementation engineer with a local software company, making a physician's point-of-entry system, with zero travel. I think this might be the first time that I was hired out of an unsuitable job by a better job. It feels pretty good. I offered the old company two weeks notice, and their response was to have someone meet me at my cubicle, take my pass, and escort me off the premises. So be it. I found out later in the week that the company fired people on my project right after I left, so I most likely dodged a bullet. I start my new job this coming Wednesday.

I learned something about my tastes as well. I love working on the hospital/clinic/lab side, because I get to feel like I'm helping to heal people. I don't really like working on the insurance company side, because too often I feel like I'm denying people the care they need. Also, the medical systems are the same all over the world, but insurance systems in the USA are unique to us because our insurance systems are more complicated and stupid than those of the rest of the world. Being an expert in medical insurance in the USA pretty much kills any chance of foreign travel.

A few notes about how to land a job quickly: time is not on your side. If you haven't worked in three months, you become less attractive to employers and recruiters. This is unfair but definitely the case. If you haven't worked in six months, you drop out of consideration. Unfair, but true.

Use LinkedIn. Keep your profile up to date, and fiddle with it weekly so that it stays new. On any job, if you are willing to have a drink with a co-worker outside of work, they should be a LinkedIn contact. If you know you are leaving a company, request to contact every person there that you respect. Do not request via LinkedIn. Do it in person, over the telephone, or by email. LinkedIn punishes you if your request is denied. Know in advance that your request will be approved.

Dice and Career Builder are good resources for recruiters to locate you. Create resumes that are loaded with keywords the recruiters are searching for, and edit them weekly. For example, I work with HL7, X12, XML, a few different integration engines, and I am comfortable with Ubuntu Linux, bash scripting, Perl, Ruby, and JavaScript (which is used as a glue language in integration engines). I list every technology I have used at work, with a few exceptions. I don't list SQL even though I know basic SQL queries. If you list SQL, they expect that you are a competent database architect, which I am not. I also list every major project I have worked on, and how my work on that project added value. I list everything I've been the lead on.

There are call centers in India filled with employees who Google every term that an employer is looking for in a job description, and call everyone who matches their search. So you will get a lot of calls from people with Indian accents who have either Indian or Muslim names who will call at all hours and launch a memorized sales pitch. If you interrupt them, they lose their place and you can weed them out. Their jobs are almost never a match. If a company wants someone to move to Lansing, MI for a three-month contract position, they will get an Indian call center to scatter-shot their search across the USA. It doesn't matter if you don't want to move to Lansing for three months. It doesn't matter if your profile says maximum 25% travel, or no relocation. The best thing to do is to interrupt them, demand your requirements, and if they cannot deliver, hang up.

It is a serious mistake to reject anyone with an Indian or Pakistani name, since it is bigoted and because IT in the USA has a large representation of people from the Indian Subcontinent. But the call center people tip their hand pretty quickly, and should be weeded out.

That being said, I get cold calls all the time that match my skill set and are viable options. Right now, in IT, and especially healthcare IT, there is a shortage of skilled professionals, and there are a lot of opportunities out there. If you are in IT but not in healthcare IT, it might be worth checking out the field.

New Job Again

The company I was working for went out of business last Thursday. I got word that Monday that it was my last week, without giving the reason why. I started looking that evening. On Thursday, the CEO called us all into a conference room and told us that that day would be our last day; that the company was shutting down.

I was able to find a contract-to-permanent job in the same building with another company that my company was intending to work with on a software project. I had an interview Tuesday morning, and was approved the next day. Yesterday I filled out the paperwork, and I start on February 6th. It took me four business days to find a new job, which isn't bad. I actually received three other permanent offers, one of which was exceedingly generous, but I want to work for the company I chose, doing the work I find most interesting. It will be lean for me until work resumes, but I'm actually getting a slight raise from my last job. I'm very pleased about this turn of events.

Working again; Valley of Guthrie, AASR SJ.

I was hired nearly two weeks ago by a nearby hospital to help them communicate with other hospitals. More medical IT work. The commute is longer, but it is a reverse commute (rush hour going in the other direction). I was unemployed for 3½ weeks this time, down considerably from the 3 months the last two times I was out of work. I am grateful to Providence for such swift relief.

I'm surprised I forgot to mention my adventure back in April, so I will mention it now. In the first weekend in April, I and three friends from the Valley of Boston in the Ancient & Accepted Scottish Rite, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, responded to an invitation to visit the Valley of Guthrie, in the Orient of Oklahoma, Ancient & Accepted Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction for their Spring Reunion. Every Spring, the Valley of Guthrie convenes in their beautiful Scottish Rite Temple, and confers all of the Scottish Rite degrees, from the 4° through the 32°, in a long weekend, from Friday through Sunday. You will recall that in previous posts, I had rhetorically offered to turn in my 32° Pocket Jewel until I had attended all the degrees up to and including it. I can now wear my jewel with pride, knowing that I have earned my title of Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret.

This adventure deserves more description than I can offer today, so I will write a future blog post describing my visit to the Valley of Guthrie. I should mention that I petitioned for membership, and received it, so I am now a dual member of the Valley of Guthrie. It gives me great pleasure to be a member of both obediences, that of the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, and of the Southern Jurisdiction, the Mother Jurisdiction of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.

UPDATE June 28th, 2011: The project I was working on has been indefinitely postponed, so I am unemployed again. Easy come, easy go. Back to job hunting.

Job Hunting Again; My Dog Passes Away

I return to the corn portion of this blog, as my current job ends on May 13th, and I am now in very acute job-hunting mode. I have been at this current job since February of last year. I work in healthcare IT, and I get contacted by recruiters fairly often, including cold calls. I'm not too worried about my long term future, but I am taking the short term very seriously, and I am very eager to find an arrangement as soon as possible, be it temporary or permanent.

My remarkable Mastiff dog died eleven days ago, at the age of 9½. Those of you who know me know that I was absolutely devoted to him, and I am very heartbroken that he is gone. My dog, Hagrid, was a rescue. He was thrown out of his original home for showing signs of defensive aggression, where he was overprotective of the baby in the home. I found out the details when I adopted him. The family did not give him sufficient obedience training, and by the time he was a year old, he was very big (he was 205 lbs at death) and very headstrong and stubborn. They had a baby when he was a year old, and without external guidance, he took it upon himself to guard the baby at all costs. He would sleep outside the baby's door, with his nose jammed in the crack of the door so that he could smell her all night, with his paws pushed up against the inward-opening door to make sure that nobody got in. If anyone besides the parents walked down the corridor, he would bare his teeth and growl at them. There was one neighbor whom he never really liked, and after the baby was born, he would refuse to let the neighbor into the house. The family decided that he was excessively aggressive, and surrendered him to a Mastiff rescue. The dog was profoundly insulted and hurt to be rejected for doing what he thought was his job.

The woman who ran the Mastiff rescue was a 19 year old single mom with three kids, four cats, and eight Mastiffs running around a 30-acre farm in West Virginia. She had recently divorced, and had moved in with her father on his farm, and he had issued an ultimatum that she and the dogs had to leave. She was frantically placing all the dogs, except for my dog, whom she wanted to keep. She sent me his picture in case she had to give him up with the others, and I fell in love right away. It took me six weeks to convince her to give me the dog, and she ended up driving him to me in North Carolina herself. He was a year and a half old.

It took the dog, whom I renamed Hagrid, a while to realize that I was his forever owner and friend. I got him started on obedience training right away, and in three months, he received his Canine Good Citizen award from the American Kennel Club, and two months after that was a certified Therapy Dog through Therapy Dogs International. We worked with kids with Downs Syndrome, with emotionally disturbed girls at a residential facility, and we once worked with a severely burned child from the Shriners' Burn Hospital in Boston. I think he loved the Downs kids the best. Whenever he met a person with Downs Syndrome, his attitude would change and he would become very gentle and focused. He adored the kids he worked with, and I was very proud to show him off to others.

He followed me as I moved from North Carolina to Virginia, and from Virginia to Massachusetts, and we made friends wherever we went together. He was the big Totoro, the Chewbacca to my Han Solo, the Harvey to my Ellwood P. Dowd, the greatest wingman I've ever had. In North Carolina, you can go bar-hopping with your dog, and he was a regular at the Orange County Social Club in Carrboro. He was a big hit at the Grand Master's Fair in Charlton, MA, when I took him in 2009. When I moved in 2009, I deliberately moved to an apartment on the first floor, with only three front steps, as he was getting too old to climb several flights of stairs. Mastiffs live typically from six to eight years. Hagrid lived longer than I ever expected, and I was warned by other Mastiff owners that they decline very rapidly when it is their time to go. Hagrid fell apart over about a week, and had to be euthanized.

It's strange watching my daily routines change as I no longer have to feed and water him, and walk him. I don't have to shut the door to my bedroom to keep him from climbing into my bed and trashing it with hair and drool. I don't have to shut the bathroom door to keep him from sleeping in the bathtub or drinking out of the toilet. I don't have to put chairs on the couch to keep him from sleeping on the couch. But I miss him terribly, and I probably will for a very long time.

Rest in peace, Hagrid. You were as good a dog as you could possibly be, and I am awed by your life of service and generosity. I never really deserved a dog as magnificent as you, and I did everything I could to make myself worthy of you, until your last breath.

Job hunting again: LinkedIn for Masons

My work contract ends at the end of October. I'm in job-hunting mode again. I work with Health Level 7 (HL7), a data protocol for transferring medical data over the Internet. In my last two jobs, I built and maintained data routes that pumped HL7 ADT (admit, discharge, transfer) data from hospitals and medical clinics to data centers.

I have a BA in Creative Writing and Literature, and an MS in Mathematics and Computer Science, with a Pure Mathematics focus. I have taught math at the high school and college levels, edited math textbooks and websites with mathematical content, maintained and customized document recognition software before doing what I currently do. Even though medical data skills are in high demand these days, I'm willing to consider other career paths.

I'm going to make a plug for LinkedIn, a website that helps with job networking. I have a profile there, and I've already found a few nibbles. One feature that really helps with networking is their Groups feature. Join as many groups as you can. Here's why.

On LinkedIn, if you add someone as a contact, but they reject you as a contact, you get a black mark on your record (they think you're a spammer). Get enough black marks, and you can't add contacts without presenting their email addresses. Get more, and you get kicked off the site. Thus anyone you add as a contact without their permission can hurt your reputation on the site. That's not a bad thing, but one has to be careful cold-calling people, even people who might be good to network with. If your target is a contact of yours, you can freely communicate with them. If they are a contact of a contact of yours, or a contact of a contact of a contact of yours ( 2 or 3 deep), you can get an introduction through your contracts. Otherwise they are out of reach.

But if you both belong to a Group, you can contact them within the group. There are dozens of masonic groups, Scottish Rite groups, Shriners groups, Jewish groups, Therapy Dog groups (my dog is a Therapy Dog through Therapy Dogs International), alumni groups, professional groups, even fans of different operating systems, computer languages, sports teams, you name it. You can search for people in your field through your group connections. You can even look for jobs, and see if anyone from your groups or contacts works there.

Masonic etiquette: I've heard other masons say that they add any mason as a contact who asks them to. This is commendable if due trial, strict examination, and lawful information has been gathered about the contact. The internet has its cowans, and the Recession has people looking for any angle to get a new job, so brothers are advised to be careful. If you see a network target who has masonica on his LinkedIn page, and you share a group together (especially a masonic group), it's not unreasonable to send him a message like "Brother A.B.: I am a brother at <lodge> Lodge #n in <town>, <state>, and I noticed that our career interests overlap. Please consider adding me as a contact. If you know of any employment opportunities that match my skill set, I hope you will consider me. Sincerely and Fraternally, Brother <you>."

Some groups ask you state your lodge, your office in that lodge if any, and maybe answer some questions from the lectures before allowing you to join them, or they might write to your lodge secretary to see if you are a current member. That's a good thing. You want them to tyle their group properly. The group might take a week or so before adding you. That's not cause for alarm.

If you want to add me as a contact, use the email form on this blog page to contact me. Good luck and good fortune to all of us.

Busy week

Wow, a lot has happened since my last post. I've worked six days on my new job, visited another lodge in my district, and performed the 6th Degree with the Lodge of Perfection cast in a one-day class for the Scottish Rite. I still haven't found a Passover seder for Wednesday night.

I'm in training at my new job, learning the presentation I'll be giving to new clients, learning my way around the user interface our clients use, and how to handle the various errors that happen during setup. The official training schedule has me learning new things for at least another week, then sitting along with an experienced analyst through each step in the setup procedure, then I'll be doing it solo. I'm really excited, and feel really confident that I can do a good job here. The commute is manageable with public transport, and allows me easily to go to my lodge, my synagogue, and Grand Lodge after work.

I had to leave early the third day of work for rehearsal at Lodge of Perfection, and got outed as a mason. I bought a gold and onyx masonic ring on eBay. It was a steal: a 1930s estate piece, retailed for $1499 but I got it for $160, and they would only deliver it to me if I signed for it in person, so I had to have it delivered to my new job, and everyone saw it.

Please understand that I'm proud to be a mason, but don't really want to tell everyone I work with that I'm in the Craft before they know anything else about me.

The Valley of Boston meets on the 7th floor of the Grand Lodge building downtown. It's easier to get to Grand Lodge from work than it is to get home from work. I only had a walk-on part, credited as "Tribesman" in the program. The dress rehearsal was pretty much flawless, and I was really excited to put on the actual performance.

The next night, I visited the lodge of a few brothers I met at the Grand Lodge communication. My District Deputy Grand Master is still the Worshipful Master there. I came straight from work, taking the subway there. The building is old, late 19th century, and was built to be a York Rite building, and still has an active Royal Arch Chapter there. I'm not yet a York Rite brother, but I intend to be in the future. The walls are full of Royal Arch and Blue Lodge memorabilia, some of which is nearly 150 years old. The lodge is the oldest of five that meet in the building, which has two lodge rooms. The larger one has a working pipe organ, and is enormous. This is the mother lodge of my lodge's organist, and he's the organist there, too (as well as being the Grand Organist).

It just so happened that they were electing on five petitioners and an affiliate member, had a huge chicken dinner, were raising four brothers to the Sublime degree of a Master Mason, were awarding a Past Master's jewel, and had a birthday cake for the lodge secretary, so it ended up being a long night. That being said, it was a delight to sit with a great group of brothers. I knew the brother who was affiliating, because he is a Past Master of another lodge I have visited, and a friend. I got to talk to the four Fellowcrafts before their raising, and I liked them all very much. The ritual was expertly done, and even though I was totally exhausted by 11:30 PM, at the end of the night I was happy and exhausted. The brother who drove me and the new affiliated member home was taking the Scottish Rite one-day class that weekend, along with another brother at his lodge.

Two days later, I awoke at 5:30 to be at the Grand Lodge building by 6:30 AM to wolf down breakfast before rushing upstairs for costumes and makeup. At breakfast, the brother who sponsored me in the Scottish Rite, a police officer, noticed my antique jewel. It turns out that a jewel just like it was stolen around the time I bought mine on eBay. We brought it to the Consistory secretary for him to examine, and it turned out not to be the missing jewel. I would have happily returned it, but it was a different jewel, so I wore it proudly for the rest of the day. It looks a lot like a modern Masonic Service Award (MSA) jewel (think of it as a 32.5°), which caused a bit of confusion, but nobody objected.

We hit the stage at 8:30, and by 10:00 I was out of makeup and my costume, back in a business suit, and ready to celebrate with the cast at a nearby restaurant. I came back afterwards for the other degrees. My DDGM was in the cast of the 18th Degree with Rose Croix, and one of the brothers who had a speaking role in my cast was the lead in the 23rd Degree. The Consistory cast did an excellent job. When it was over, I went home on the subway with the brother who drove me home two nights previously. I love these one-day classes, but they are exhausting. I can only imagine what they are like for those who are in more than one degree, or more than one Scottish Rite body. Our valley does two of them a year, and the neighboring valleys do a monthly or bimonthly offering.

There was a Shrine recruiter with a card table at the Collation, and I signed up for a nite for potential Nobles, on a night I probably can't make. I'm interested in joining the Shrine, but I'm wary that it will take up even more of my life than I'm already giving to other branches. But I really want the fez. If my girlfriend bought me a fez, she could wrap me around her little finger. Good thing she doesn't read this blog.

I start my new job tomorrow

Work starts tomorrow. There's no place to park, so I have to take public transport. They have a shuttle that picks up their employees at a subway stop and drops them off at their building, and vice versa, so hopefully I'll find that shuttle tomorrow morning.

I'm an extra in the 6th Degree the Lodge of Perfection is doing for the all-day class at Scottish Rite next Saturday. We have a full dress rehearsal on Wednesday beforehand. I've notified my work that I have to leave work a bit early for the dress rehearsal, and they're okay with it. I'm excited about being part of the work, and I know two brothers who will be doing their Scottish Rite degrees for the first time.

I bought a 32° pocket jewel on eBay that is the 1890s version of the pocket jewel they use today. It's from the Massachusetts Consistory, which is my consistory, and it denotes my level, so I can wear it next Saturday. It's beautiful, and it will be fun to wear. I'll bring the one I was given as a back-up in case anyone gets tetchy about me wearing the antique version.

I also plan to visit another lodge in my district on Thursday if my work schedule allows me to. I've met a few brothers there whom I've befriended, and they have invited me. Five lodges meet in their building, but I've never been inside it, even though I drive by it all the time.

I'm excited about starting my new job. I will report how it went.