Find a job for next year

The job search is finally over; I got the offer letter, and still need to agree on some details, but I’ve got a job lined up. Overall, it took two rounds of sending out resumes, and a bunch of persistence to keep looking for job openings at a few companies I was particularly interested in.

Done.

Whew.

I’m in the midst of the second round of jobs. After a month of talking with recruiters and doing screening interviews, things are finally moving. My first interview with my former employer went well, so now both teams I interviewed with want me talking with more folks on their teams. After a few attempts to get my resume to the right place at Google, they’re now interested in interviewing me. At the third place, I finally got my screening interview with a second-line manager, and he wants to have me visit too.

Google was the annoying one. For all the talk about hiring for the long term, there’s still the problem that someone has to want to bring you in for interviews. In my case, the recruiters kept pointing me at teams that either didn’t have room to hire or that were looking for folks expert in things I wasn’t expert at. I finally got to a recruiter who heard my suggestions about relevant jobs and pushed my resume over to the right teams, and things went much better. Fingers crossed the interview goes well.

After the “You two are on fire!” comments at Santana Row during post-interview cocktails, I think we’ll be visiting Santana Row after every interview from now on. If we get there before 4pm, then Sino, the Chinese restaurant, is still serving dim sum. Nothing like pork buns and mojitos!

So, none of the jobs from the first round panned out; there was one that was nice, but the commute just seemed way too long. I kept holding out hope that I’d be able to get back to the place I left, but finally heard back that they’re not hiring. Of course, I did the usual over-analyze; did I burn bridges? Am I not as good as I think? Who doesn’t like me?

I had lunch with a friend on that team, and he told me that yeah, they’d like me, but there’s hiring issues, and certain folks definitely ask “wait, didn’t he leave?” (Yeah, because I was sick and stressed and burned out after eight years. Best thing I ever did, leaving.) I left feeling pretty sure that I’d pissed off a certain manager, and there was no way I’d ever be working for that department while he’s there.

Til lunch Friday. At the hobby lunch, one of the usual crowd works for my former employer. “Yeah, the whole company’s on a hiring freeze. Everybody staffed up really fast, realized they were over headcount, and THEN made the mistake of showing the CEO their planned headcount. Result: no hiring.

Guess I’m self-centered. I kept thinking it was all about me…

Ok, the job search seemed fun at the beginning, but now it’s getting annoying.

My favorite job: hiring freeze, they’re hiring from within instead. Grrr.

Job best fitting my skills: hour commute one way, not easy to do on public transit. I’m leaning heavily towards turning them down; the idea of working long days and having a painful commute just does not seem fun.

Most offbeat job: turns out management’s completely psycho in ways I never could have imagined.

I’ve still got other options, and I’ll be ok if the job search goes on a couple more months, but it’s starting to just get annoying.

Research job talk and full day of interviews. Check.

Ask intelligent questions about the organization. Check.

Enjoy the very easy commute home. Check.

The interview went ok, but I’m still not sure if it went good enough. I’ll find out in a few days.

I’m just happy the research talk went well. I still wasn’t happy with some of the slides last night and I was going a bit over time, but it all seemed to work out fine today. I got a few challenging questions that made me wonder whether my very ad-hoc and shaky results just angered them, but when I asked the hiring manager, he told me it was just the right talk. We’ll see.

And now I can stop obsessing over getting the slides right and the talk smooth. Time to get some sleep, do some fun projects for a change, and prepare to hear how the interviews went.

One of my promised “things to do” during my time off was to give a research talk. At this point, I’m very glad I spent a week or two in April preparing that talk, and then flew down to visit my grad school advisor and give the talk. I didn’t think I’d need to give a research talk for the job hunt, but now that I’ve got one coming up on Friday, I’m really glad I can borrow from that talk and from all the advice I got on how to make it better.

The only problem, of course, is that preparing for the talk’s taking a ton of time. For my plain interviews, I’ve got to write a couple cover letters, surf the web to learn something about the company and the team I’m talking to, and then spend a day in either fun or intense interviews.

The research talk, by contrast, just sucks up time. Is it polished enough? Does it flow right? Do I need more material, or which slides do I cut? I’ll probably spend several full days just preparing for the one interview. Of course, if I manage to get the job, this would be part of my day job… but at least when it’s part of work, I’d have time limits based on all the other things I’m doing, and won’t have quite as much at stake on the talk.

For all the blood and sweat, it does have its fun aspects. I’m enjoying the chance to think about the projects I’ve done in the past and how they connect up, and I’m remembering what life was like in grad school. I even invited a bunch of friends from grad school over last night for a practice talk, and got some great feedback. All it took was the promise of dinner, free beer, and a chance to savage the speaker. The talk’s not quite there yet, but it’s close.

The job search is a roller coaster. First, I talk with recruiters and get the “oh wow, you’d be great!” story, then I get all the attention of interviews and sharing stories, then I hear from someone that there’s no openings at their place, then a job offer, then someone who hadn’t been responding to mail suggests a phone screen interview, then…

It’s up and down. Last week, I would have said that I was enjoying job hunting. There were the challenges of trying to interest and impress folks on phone interviews. There’s the extrovertish feeling of going off and meeting new people, sharing stories, trying to impress them, trying to figure out if I want to work with them. Then there’s the days where it feels like each of the jobs has some significant flaw, or a place that I thought was a safety isn’t hiring.

I’m starting to realize that two of the places I’m checking out don’t have pleasant commutes—almost an hour driving, and longer by public transportation because of poor connections and express train service. Driving up towards one of the potential jobs this evening, it hit me just how unpleasant the commute could be. I really don’t want to lose two hours a day driving…

One of the jobs I applied for is in an industrial research lab. Now, many research labs (like universities) expect you to give a job talk—a presentation describing your previous work and future directions. They use it to see how you communicate, understand your research area, your previous work, and your proposed future work.

There were no comments about a job talk during the phone screen or when the HR person started trying to make plans for a real interview, and I didn’t have a good feel for whether this place tried to behave like a good old fashioned research lab, or whether it tried to be just another engineering group and didn’t follow the old ways. I hadn’t really thought about this much, but at some point last weekend, I started thinking “gee, they’re not going to want a job talk, are they?”

The recruiter called this afternoon. “By the way, we do job talks here; I think at your last employer, they didn’t do that. Would you be willing to do a talk?”

Uh-oh. I’d given them Friday as a potential interview date. Wonder if I can put together a talk in four days?

Luckily, a bunch of people are out on vacation, so they don’t think they’d be interviewing me til the week after next. So in between other interviews, it’s time for me to prepare a nice talk describing what I’ve been doing throughout my career.

If nothing else, it’ll be a good way to test whether I really want to be back in that research world, and it ought to be fun to think about what I’ve been up to for the last fifteen years.

Geez, this is worse than actually having a job. Two days in, and I already feel like I’m spending all my time on the job search. It’s midnight, and I’m poking around at the current state of web development tools for a phone screen interview tomorrow, and I’ve got another phone screen with a startup tomorrow for which I should be doing other preparation. (Yes, it’s nice to have phone screens, but the fact that they want to talk with me does not mean I’ve got the skills they want.) There’s several other appointments on my calendar already. I’ve also got a bunch of friends I hoped to talk with about where I was looking, but I haven’t yet arranged to talk with them as the schedule fills up. Whoops.

I feel like I’ve gone from sitting out in the hammock to juggling firecrackers.

And it looks like Silicon Valley is desperate for good programmers, regardless of where the economy’s going. I had a conversation with a high school teacher last month where he said that his kids aren’t very interested in computers because they keep hearing about how all the jobs are being outsourced. There may be jobs getting outsourced, but there’s still a lot of work to be done…

Well, it’s started.

I’d promised myself time off thru the end of June, but just started feeling last week like I need to start the job search. So yesterday was the first day of the job search; I gathered up a few headhunter cold-call e-mails from the last couple weeks, and started calling around. (No, the cold calls don’t imply the job search will be easy; usually, they’ve matched some keyword on a job req to something on my web page. It’s always a surprise to see what free associations got made.)

I’m a little surprised how stressed even this minor step made me. I’ve been away from work for a while, and I’ve really loved the chance not to be stressed. Now, I’m trying to figure out what order to contact people, angsting whether the cover letter will be well-received, and mourning all my free time I’m about to lose.

So far, the folks I’ve been talking to have all been positive, but then they’re headhunters and recruiters, and they’re supposed to be. At some point, I’ll start hearing the “sorry, you’re not right for the job” responses, and then I’ll need to work at reminding my ego that a bad fit doesn’t mean I’m a bozo.

It doesn’t help that Dear Wife is starting to realize her personal chef’s looking for another job. She keeps suggesting that we’d probably do fine if I did my job search slow, but it just seems like it’s the right time to start. That doesn’t mean I have to like it, though…