Thursday, January 16, 2014

"New Jersey" Recruiter Strikes Back

Some recruiter apparently calling from NJ [favourite DID termination for offshored agencies] calls my Canadian recruiter line [not protected with the usual anti-recruiter spells & enchantments] and says that he's got an opportunity [they always call it that] in San Diego, CA with Q*alcomm.

So I started to reel the usual info out of the dunderhead: salary? "80 thousand a year is the budget". Status? "f/t".

Right after my name the masthead of my Resume has spelled in big bold block red letters in the language known as English the warning "only call for contracts". I tried to keep it as simple as messages found in airplanes or subway carriages. Also my Resume on Monster.ca carries in the masthead the message "do not call for US jobs". Hmm.

I should have cursed the heaten at this point but I just hanged up. Must apply enchantments to my Canadian line if calls come from outside Canada but my VoIP provider is too thick to provide such a filter.

-ulianov

Friday, January 3, 2014

Ode to a Failed Perl Interview

I've been put in touch with S*mantec network ops by a nice local agency and they set me up for a phone interview for today (very considerate of the agency as I had no wish to trek around the metropolis to Markham for a screening).

The interview was geared around support of network monitoring systems in a network ops environment. The have mountains of Perl code that need maintaining/fixing and that was cool. All well except at the end I queried them about how much Python they want and they said perhaps & possibly a lot and that was the end of it as that's a "P"-word for me (Python).

The other steps that I did not take were solving a non-trivial problem in Perl and a face-to-face with the team.

This is a comical situation: they have a pressing need for a Perl guru (which are not as easy to find as people may think) to keep their code base alive and they go thru a lot of trouble to probe a candidate's Perl knowledge yet they forfeit that for a nebulous future need of a Python minion.

-ulianov