poobear22

Very nice post. To me, it always seemed like antidotal rules and observations. It is right until it's wrong, my bad.

Where I find him very useful, when professional people suggest or reference his books. It tells me I am not going to use these people or their services.

Oh! I hate linked-in. Never used it and am now "retired". Never did not work a day in my professional 39-yr work period. What do I hate about it? the resume embellishment, the spam recruiter's, and my observation (poking around without a linkedin account) of people in my work group who hated each other but were linked together on their individual linked-in accounts. If you don't like someone at work, perhaps you do not need to recommend them on social media.

I have seen that, where I want to just cut and paste the response but the return content has something like a one liner that states ("the rest of your code here") and I can't cut and paste it. I ask for a full return of content, but don't always get it.

I'm still finding value in the FT comments. There are a few strange ones, but they do not get much of my time. Ranking may have some value. FT is fairly expensive, it strange to see see the equivalent of flat earth comments in that type of publication.

I still value my subscription to The Economist, and Financial Times. A bit pricy but I feel caught up and the content is minimal compared to something like WSJ that is overwhelming with content I do not want to look at. I look at the price premium as freeing up my time searching and reading other material.

Splunk was so expensive we could not use it to monitor our servers used for weather modeling. Seriously. The log files generated were at times too voluminous and you frequently blew thru your bandwidth cap.

Great product, but completely useless utility value with financial considerations for environments with high volume.

Hard to beat FT and The Economist, gets to the point quickly. I do not like the weekend section in FT about "how to spend it"

The WSJ is too heavy, takes too much time to read and overwhelming. Barrons is not the publication it used to be.

Bloomberg Business Week looks interesting, but where I spend my money & time is limited and think my subscriptions to FT and The Economist are better spent.

I'm not sure I would avoid the war coverage and potential conflicts down the road.

I found $50 for a month of resumeworded.com helped optimize your resume based on their provided objective function. Just make multiple copies of your resume, like in my case, lastname_first_name_x89_y92_z95.doc and based on the ATS feedback, adjust your resume by making the incremeental changes and updating the file name for the new scores that they pass you. Eventually, you will get to lastname_first_name_x99_y99_z99.doc or thereabouts and have a nice ATS resume. The other part of your question, the skills. My approach was to decide what field I was working in and review various job postings making a list of the desired skills in that field. Then summarize and list those skills for that that targeted field. Its a little work, but I have never had to wait more than a very short time for a nice job.

Thank you! Love R.

I used one of the popular resume services, i will not mention their name. Used their template. The service provided five or six evaluation categories, similar to an objective function for each criteria. I received a score for each of the six areas. Say 80-percent. I made my various resume adjustments until the scores were significantly higher. (This is the involvement to improve iCMS ATS scores) Then sat on my resume for a few months. I then retired from my job, shot out the resume to one employer, and received a slightly higher paying position offer within two days. I actually moved form IT Supervisor position to a Machine Learning Engineer, but i have skills. The feedback engine uses the standardized resume scanning SW that most companies seem to use. I removed everything from my resume that was not important for a modern day job. Nothing there for my ego. My resume was tuned to the position I was seeking and the position i was applying for. No linked in, no social media.

Previous to this, I used a $200 service to write a resume for me. i was unhappy with their resume and did not use it. (No sense of ICMS ability) I really liked the service of getting categorical scores for the resume and being able to modify it myself. I think this cost me $50 for a month of access. I probably made 100 versions of my resume for the various "adjustments" in my score evaluation.

This happened in ~1993. Crazy. People flew from Salinas to Monterey (<20 miles) as the Peninsula was cut off. Shortly after that, I had a business flight and flew out of Monterey and passed Watsonville (35 miles away), where ~1000 "trash" cans (used for storing Strawberries for making jam at Smuckers) had floated away and into the valley. In Carmel, people got their houses fixed up after the flooding, and got re-flooded in March the same year.

Step back and ask yourself (objectively) how well you work with the team. I had a co-worker (really smart, but a bit of a narcissist and perhaps very mild asperger syndrome) that was a little too aggressive in telling everyone how smart he was. It did not go well, and in the end, people did not take the person seriously. It was sad and self-reenforcing, the more he told them how smart he was, the less they trusted him. Then we were at the point that people were afraid to give him anything as they thought his direction would be deliver something unexpected. (My observation)

I think a bit of a mystery is nice. You are a SW engineer, tell them you are a geek and will find yourself involved in the details of XXXX. If they probe, deliver, but keep a little mystery. When you surprise them, you will build a solid and well earned reputation.

work two consecutive days from home. Then spend one or two nights in your car or fine a cheap room/deal in a house where you work (or sleep in your office - "I was working late..."). If you can work two ten hr days the day you pull an overnighter, maybe you can work three days from home?

Nice post!

Two 2-year stints with a 74-mile one way commute into Silicon Valley, CA.

a) The first was 1989-1991 (before highway 85 was built and 3/4-lane sections of Hwy 101 were 2/3 lanes. (heavy traffic, slow commute) b) The second was 1997-1999 just going into the dot com boom/bust.

So, no real internet nor telework options at the time.

I drove every day, and had to fill up my pickup every other day. So, I got 1.5 full commutes (74 miles * 3) before I felt I needed to gas up. (When you need to drive a lot, little things like taking care of your car do consume much of that precious time out have remaining). And when your car breaks, you need to fix it quickly.

Part of my long distance was driven by buying a house.

I was not a book-on-tape person. I found it too distracting with interruptions to stay focused. I found foreign language tapes/CDs worked really well, they kind where simple vocabulary is played (e.g. English/Russian). This helped me build up a surprisingly large vocabulary. I also liked the time to think, but it did get boring after the 2-hr commute on a 5 day basis.

My social life was challenged, as my friends were in the Bay Area, and I needed to get home on a regular basis.

Things i would have done differently (given the constraints of the 1980s and 1990s:

I would have gone up early on Mondays, slept in my car that night, worked Tuesday, and drove home. That night, I’d have worked out at a gym (expensive back then, so maybe just personal exercise). I’d try to repeat that Thurs/Friday. This would return me about 5 hrs of commute time, two full rounds (gas and wear and tear). My social life would be a little better back then.

In my last role, as a Supervisor, I had a few people sleeping in their offices, and as long as they were discrete, it worked well and one guy, 75 yrs old, still working, was living in his office. But you have to be discrete, and can’t be walking in your underwear to the bathroom at 3 AM and have a security guard see you. No. No. No.

I regret the amount of drive time, as your health slowly suffers simply from the lack of exercise, and the poor diet items due to lack of time and driving. You gain weight. There are difficulties with the social factors also, it is harder to meet people. Also, the wear and tear on the vehicle is high, 348,000 miles on my vehicle when i needed to get rid of it for safety issues.

Positives, I saved money, bought nice property, and was able to stay out of Silicon Valley.

Your dad may be wrong about “never leaving your job”, but if you have a nice position, do not be caviler about it and see about making it work until something better comes along.

One other idea, may not be good, get a part time care giver role where you get highly discounted space to just be present in an older person’s home at night. One of my former co-workers has this set up. He is a geo-bachelor at this time, but he stays in a room, close to work, basically checking on the older person who lives there.

You can use the time to study for an area that will allow you better opportunities down the road. IT jobs are really coming now-a-days. I don’t like to study for “work” on my spare time as I feel I am giving a little too much to the employeer. But, if I study something that helps me at work, but better yet gives me more opportunity to leave work for a better job, that suits me well.

Good Luck!