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Everything Work RelatedThursday, September 22, 2005
Another wasted job interview
Bloody Hell! What’s a guy have to do to get job around here? I didn’t post about this before because I wanted to try not to jinx myself but since I’m now pretty sure I didn’t get the job then well who cares. They were supposed to call yesterday if I had the job. If not then they’re going to mail out rejection letters. No one called yesterday so.
I found a “Technology Specialist” position at a county ESC (Educational Service Center) that I applied for. They made it sound like a support position in the job description. Here’s exactly quoted what I knew of the job. This comes from an education job mailing list:
Position: Technology Specialist
Qualifications: Degree in Technology preferred. Ability to troubleshoot, maintain, ESC computers and networks.
That’s it folks! I read that and I see tech support for public education. Easy sell baby!
Once I get into the interview and start listening to them it became clear they really wanted a Technology Coordinator. They’ve been without a Coordinator since May I guess. They just didn’t want to pay a Coordinator salary so they concocted this BS position so that they could lowball the salary. How does 23,000 to 36,000 sound? Like a pretty good scam for what you wanted to person to do!
Back to the story. Very quickly they replied and asked for me to send them my college transcripts. Well last Wednesday at 9PM, of all times, the guy called me and said they wanted to bring me in for an interview. There was an opening Monday at 10AM. No problem I said! Except, they are doing things a little different. They want me to do a 20 to 25 minute presentation on the technology that I know. No problem I say again. In my mind I’m saying, “Wholly shnikies! A 25 minute PowerPoint presentation by Monday!?!?!”
So, I spent all weekend working on what I believe is a very good presentation for a support position. Come Monday I go in and I think I did a bang up job. But then the Q&A part of the interview wasn’t perfect. Now I know it’s not kosher to say bad things about a potential employer but I want to get this off my chest!
First off, you have my Resume. You know exactly what my work experience is. Don’t ask me questions that you and I both know I cannot answer! Asking me to tell you about the last in-service I ran or participated in is completely pointless. My only job experience is working as a freaking package handler at UPS. I load boxes into trucks all day.
Seriously folks, if you have to interview someone just take five minutes and compare your questions to the person. Make sure they’re relevant. It makes both of you look stupid when the question is irrelevant and cannot be answered.
Second, you’re interviewing for a technology position. You know, maybe you could try to ask some technology questions. Look, I know you’re not a techy and don’t know anything but at least try. Asking me a dozen generic questions about how I deal with stress, go above what is required of me or work in teams doesn’t exactly tell you anything.
It’s not all problems on their end though. I sort of dropped the ball and didn’t ask enough questions. That probably alone was enough to kill the deal. I can’t help it. I’m shy and nervous so I forget to ask questions.
Anyhoo, it’s all bugger so might as well forget about it. Time to move on and get working on my Church’s website like I had planned to do last weekend.
Monday, September 05, 2005
Happy Labor-Free Day!
He He He 
Well it’s Labor Day which is suppose to be a day to celebrate or remember something about American Workers. All I know is it’s a day I don’t have to work and I get paid for it! Thank you UPS!
Ironically, ok maybe it’s not irony, this is the very day that most people end up working anyways. Doing yardwork, housework, etc.
I’m pretty busy myself… I have a nice todo list for today.
- Mow the lawn
- Start writting the Letter of Intent for my promotion at UPS
- Start researching and drawing up ideas for my Church’s website I’m going to make
- Anything else I come up with today
Anyhoo, Have a nice day off everyone. It’s back to work tomorrow. Which probabbly means we’ll all have extra work to do for taking a day off. I know UPS will! There’s an extra day of boxes stacking up for us to move. Whoopie!
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Working at UPS day... Heh, Like I'm Actually Keeping Count!
You know I haven’t written about work in a long, long time. So, let’s do a little update on things.
First off, I’m still a loader. No promotions yet. Although I’m working on that!
I was given a raise in August. Well, everyone was because it was time for yearly raises. I got another dollar an hour so that means I’m now making $10.00/hour. Not bad pay but it could be better. When you only get 20 hours a week even 10/hour doesn’t mean that much pay. Take home has been about $170.00 a week, give or take.
I’m still in PD-6 which is nice. It’s a pretty tough area to work but I like it. We’ve cycled through a bunch of people this year. Only a core group of us are still around. We are the real hard workers that bust our humps day in and day out.
Lets see, new news…
I’m very hopeful at getting to be the Area Safety Rep comes this Thursday. The current guy doesn’t want to do it anymore so he’s offering it to me or another guy. I have more seniority than that guy (well I’m pretty sure I do) so I’m going to pull rank and just take it. I’ve been in the area since I started working there in October. This guy showed up in like March. I think he switched shifts so he might actually have been working at UPS longer than me but I’d say the fact that I’ve worked in the area longer is what counts. Anyhoo, we’ll just see…
I’ve also have to get off my rear end and get around to writing a letter of intent for promotion. See at UPS they do not promote people. You can run around and be the best darn loader there is but they won’t do anything. You have to write a letter of intent which states that you want them to look at you for a promotion.
Basically, there are two jobs you can usually get promoted to. An Area Supervisor, which is the guy that runs each of the PDs or a Training Supervisor, that does the actual training of new hires.
I’m sort of leaning toward the Trainer right now. Running an area is a lot of work. It’s easy I guess but just a lot of annoyances. Dealing with employees not showing up for work, keeping boxes flow, calling trucks, all the freaking paperwork they have to do, etc. I mean I wouldn’t mind doing it some day. Right now however I think I’d have more fun training new hires. I like to try to help new guys out when they show up. Give them the 411 on how things actually work, give them positive support after managers yell at them for missloads, etc. I really think I’d be good at working with the new hires and getting them off on the right foot. I’ve managed to stay here this long when so many others have come and gone, so I think i must know something about how to be a quality worker for UPS. I’m sure I could have some of that rub off on the new hires. He he he…
I guess that’s it. I think I get another raise come October so we’ll see if that does happen and how much I get. I have my fingers crossed for another dollar/hour!
Monday, June 27, 2005
Three questions to ask an engineer at an interview
Joe Kraus, founder of JotSpot and Excite, posted a little entry on his blog about three questions that should be asked at an interview for an engineer. These are not questions about technical skills as a programmer. These are questions to find out about intangibles. Those being communicating, tinkering and passion for coding
Without future ado here are the three questions:
1) Do you have a blog?
2) What’s your home page?
3) Do you contribute to an open source project?
The first question helps answer the need to know how well the person communicates. A person with a blog obviously does have the ability to communicate their ideas. They’ve taken the time to publicly write and express.
The second question shows if the person is a tinkerer or not. This might seem kind of odd but it does make logical sense. If the person makes their own custom home page, as opposed to just using yahoo or some other portal site, it shows they are not satisfied unless they get their hands dirty and do things better.
The final question is a way to test for passion. A person that takes time to work on a open source project shows they aren’t into coding just for the money. Not to say people that want to get paid to code are bad. On the contrary! It’s just a good way to find a real geek/coder vs. someone that became a programmer because they heard in high school/college that computers were a great industry to make money.
You know Joe might just be onto something here! I’ve done plenty of interviews and in so many of them they do nothing but ask the usual generic questions. Tell us about yourself, where do you want to be in five years, how well do you deal with stress, do you like working in groups or alone, etc, etc. There’s nothing wrong with these questions but they’re standard fair that they really don’t tell you much about a person really. As far as how well the person will actually do their job.
Well here are my answers just for the record.
1) Yes I have a blog. You’re reading it right now!
2) My homepage is custom made. You can see the sanitized version here (I removed any links that could cause security and/or privacy issues)
3) Well I don’t contribute any code to open source projects but I do follow several very closely including FreeBSD, Subversion, Haiku(openbeos) and SQLite. I monitor mailing lists daily to keep updated on them.
on 06/27/2005 at 09:34 PM
Computers & Technology • Work • (0) Comments • Permalink
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
UPS looses Citigroup customer information
Well that isn’t good!
It’s been in the news today that UPS managed to loose a package containing computer tapes of some 3.9Millon Citigroup customers being shipped to Experian, a credit reporting company.
Not good at all! As an employee of UPS it pisses me off that someone managed to loose the darn thing. UPS is very good about tracking packages. They should have been able to track down exactly where the box was last seen and where it didn’t show up and then find it.
For a box to just vanish off the face of the earth is strange.
I feel sorry for all those people having to worry if some evil person is digging through those tapes and using their info. Of course I feel sorry for every employee of UPS too. Lord knows that we’re probably all going to hear about this at work all week. Supervisors and staff will probably go on and on about how we have to work hard and be the best package handler service in the world. How we need to treat each package with equal care and importance. Something tells me this week is going to suck…
OY!
Friday, April 08, 2005
Getting back to what I like... Coding!
I’ve been in sort of a rut lately. Well honestly, I’m in ruts a lot. I must have a rut personality or something but anyways.
For a while now I’ve been doing some deep contemplating about myself. Trying to figure out what I want out of life, well as far as work and employment goes. My personal life is another story and I’m happy as a lark right now.
I have a Computer Science degree but I’m currently working at UPS as a truck loader. It is steady pay and at the end of the day that’s what really matters. Well as steady as 20 hours a week is. However, let’s be honest here folks! This type of work is beneath me. I could be doing so much more.
I guess the main thing is I need to start looking for a better job, one that’s actually in my field.
Besides that, well duh, aspect I realize that I need to do something more for myself. I decided I should start my own part-time business.
The problem was decided what part-time business to start. Basically, I came up with four options. Well really three and one my mother keeps telling me I should do. Here are the pros and cons to each.
Option 1: Build and sell custom computers on the side.
Pros:
- I like building systems
- I’m good at building systems
- It’s fun to play with the parts
Cons:
- My systems wouldn’t be cheap
- I couldn’t compete with the likes of Dell or even high end game system makers like Alienware or Falcon Northwest or the gaggle of popups in the last year.
- I don’t like to do tech support!
- Margins are low so not much money in it
Option 2: Do in home tech support / computer installing / etc (this is my mothers often suggested idea)
Pros:
- I’m pretty good at general technical support
- Get to play with lots of computers
- Get to help people which I like to do
Cons:
- Lots of traveling
- Dealing with morons
- Having to work around other peoples schedules
- Did I mention that I don’t like to do tech support?
Option 3: Web hosting / Web design
Pros:
- I’m pretty knowledgeable about server administration
- I know internet technology very well
- Hosting is a pretty low effort job long as everything works right
Cons:
- I’m really not that good at web design (I can do basic html/css layouts and php/perl web programming but don’t bother asking for graphics, flash, etc)
- Low margins because of the large competition
- People demand 24/7 tech support which I can’t provide
Option 4: Write my own software and sell it
Pros:
- I love coding!
- I’m good at coding
- Freedom to do what I want, when I want to
- Get to be creative
Cons:
- Doing what I want and making what will sell are two different things
- Writing software takes a lot of time
Well anyways that was what I came up with. Out of those 4 options I feel writing my own software and selling it is the best option. It provided the freedom to work on my own schedule which is a major requirement for a part time business. Plus the freedom to do what I want which is a major, major plus for me.
I’ve already come up with a few ideas for things to create. I’m sort of all over the chart on what I want to do but I might try to focus on certain core customers like say system admins or developers. I don’t really know yet but that’s ok. I’m just getting going on the idea. The main thing is finding something I like to do and doing it.
on 04/08/2005 at 11:11 AM
Computers & Technology • Work • Entrepreneurship • (2) Comments • Permalink
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
We are finally live!
Well after a lot of hard work and some slacking I’m happy to announce that my girlfriends new and improved website is up and running.
I present you with Ninkybink Boutique!
Rebuilt from the ground up this is a full e-commerce website. We are running Zen-Cart for our shop and payments are being managed with Paypal.
Now the shop is shut off right now because I still have to run a test order to make sure everything is configured properly but I wanted to get the word out that the site is up and running because after a month of work I’m excited to show it off.