So that's the first week of Copious Free Time out of the way. Did I achieve anything? Nope.
I started on the nms article. Tinkered with some updates to Array::Compare. Read a lot of newsgroups. Hung out on IRC. But mostly I seemed to email agents about jobs. The fact that I'm not findind work seems to be effecting my ability ot concentrate on one task.
The market seems to be picking up a bit. JobServe now has two pages of jobs that match my "unix perl contract london" criteria, but they still all have some requirement that I just don't quite meet.
Ah well, it's the weekend. Let's try and put those kinds of thoughts out of my mind until Monday. Let's switch off and have a proper weekend slobbing in front of the DVD player :)
As Damian said in his interview w/ pair.com (too lazy to link), the most important thing is knowing HOW to program. Obviously, you're in touch with that... so any aspect that they're looking for you could quickly learn, prolly even before you start work.
Jason
Re:You should apply anyway...
davorg on 2002-01-12T08:22:07
You're absolutely right about that and I do apply for every job where I match 75% of the requirements.[1]
The problem is that the the recruitment market has changed. Bear in mind that in order for my CV to end up on the desk of the technical manager who wants to employ me, it needs to go thru at least two non-technical people - the recruitment agent and the company HR person. Both of them act as gatekeepers and try to prevent unsuitable CVs from getting thru. Now in the past, they'd have taken a risk on a 75% match, but now they have 40 people going after each job so they hold out for a complete match. And they'll find one. Someone will have all of the necessary skills. They might not be very good at all of the necessary skills, but they will legitimately be able to list them on the CV. And the non-technical gatekeepers can't work out that someone like me would be a better bet than someone with all the buzzwords but a good deal less experience.
If my CV ever got past these two gatekeepers and onto the desk of someone who understood technical CVs then I'm sure I'd at least get an interview. Anyone running a team of Perl programmers in London stands a good chance of having heard of me. They may even have read my book[2].
So my energies would be best applied to creating a CV that would get me past the non-technical gatekeepers. And I'm not sure that I know enough marketing-speak to do that.
If anyone is looking for a decent Perl/Database/Internet developer in London and wants to cut out the middle-men, here's my CV.
[1] In fact, last week I applied for a job as a "Kitana specialist" even though I had no idea what Kitana is. I said as much in my email. And the agent called me back (which is unusual in itself) and told me that they were going to spend another week looking for someone who had heard of Kitana, but if they didn't find one they'd consider applications like mine.
[2] Which may, of course, be either a good thing or a bad thing
:)
