Monday, September 05, 2005
The forty-third week in review
Ten months without a job! And no immediate prospects in sight. I know some Canada Lifers that were out of work longer, but not many.
Job prospecting turned up operational/support positions at BMO and the Health Agency (I think this application prompted a belated turndown for a previous application). I found a consultant job in my specialty at CIBC, but it's way over my head. That didn't stop me from applying. There was a junior/intermediate admin (no development) position posted on MQSeries.net so I fired off my resume. This is the first TO position I've seen posted there. The jobs's at a "large financial institution" but working with a contractor. He sounds cool. I looked at a process specialist position at The Dominion more than once. I knew the manager at CLA but decided that it would be too boring.
Thursday I had my interview with CBC. I sweated through most of it. The position was posted as UNIX programmer and mentioned content management. The platform is actually Linux, and there is a release management component. It was too technical for me (would have been good for the Linux anarchist, but I'm no coder/scriptor,). We had to meet at a coffee shop because CBC is on strike. I arrived about five minutes early, and they were still interviewing another candidate. The flies were buzzing around at the beginning. There was the difficult client question and a problem to analyze (mismatching user and group numbers between servers). I'm supposed to give them some references but I think I'm going to tell them to forget it.
My sister, the enterprise DBA, has now started her job search (she's been off since the end of November). She's been asking me for help (websites, sample cover letters), but I wonder if I'm the best person to be doing this considering my lack of success thus far.
D.
Job prospecting turned up operational/support positions at BMO and the Health Agency (I think this application prompted a belated turndown for a previous application). I found a consultant job in my specialty at CIBC, but it's way over my head. That didn't stop me from applying. There was a junior/intermediate admin (no development) position posted on MQSeries.net so I fired off my resume. This is the first TO position I've seen posted there. The jobs's at a "large financial institution" but working with a contractor. He sounds cool. I looked at a process specialist position at The Dominion more than once. I knew the manager at CLA but decided that it would be too boring.
Thursday I had my interview with CBC. I sweated through most of it. The position was posted as UNIX programmer and mentioned content management. The platform is actually Linux, and there is a release management component. It was too technical for me (would have been good for the Linux anarchist, but I'm no coder/scriptor,). We had to meet at a coffee shop because CBC is on strike. I arrived about five minutes early, and they were still interviewing another candidate. The flies were buzzing around at the beginning. There was the difficult client question and a problem to analyze (mismatching user and group numbers between servers). I'm supposed to give them some references but I think I'm going to tell them to forget it.
My sister, the enterprise DBA, has now started her job search (she's been off since the end of November). She's been asking me for help (websites, sample cover letters), but I wonder if I'm the best person to be doing this considering my lack of success thus far.
D.
