Post Academia Job Searches
I had a miserable time trying to find a job after my academic career collapsed in the early 90's in the middle of a recession. This was before the Internet boom where there are services that can blast your resume to over a dozen job search portals. Weeks turned into months of fruitlessly mailing out resumes via snail mail. I did do one local in-person interview; State Farm is probably the most prominent employer in the Normal/Bloomington IL area (my last position was a temp gig at local Illinois State). I think State Farm was just window shopping, and it was an insulting waste of my time. The HR person made the talking point that "we promote from within" and I would have to compete for an entry-level position like my former students. And, of course, I was overqualified for an entry-level position.At one point I heard someone trying to slide a paper under my apartment door. I opened the door to find my arch-nemesis, the ISU ACS department chair (mentioned in prior posts) who avoided eye contact while handing me a paper. I think a Michigan school (Oakland University?) had a temp opening; I don't recall the context, if an existing faculty member had a medical issue or whatever; like ISU, it would be a temp offer, not a tenure-line position or multi-year contract. I had been academic job-hunting for 3 years straight, and it was an enormous sinkhole of time and effort. Maybe if they had left open the hope of a second-year contract, I might have gone for it. I don't think I even contacted the school. (I also wasn't crazy about moving for the third time in 3 years for a temp gig. Of course, in hindsight, knowing I would not get a job for several more weeks and living off my savings, I might have done it differently today.
Ironically you would think even if professional recruiters weren't impressed with the PhD, they might have been impressed with the MBA. In fact, I've mentioned in a past post that the UH Alumni Association had until a few years back been referencing my MBA vs PhD. Finally, I asked why and was told that was the preference of most dual degree holders, that the MBA was seen as the most marketable. I had started my MBA part-time while working full-time as a programmer/analyst. I had already been accepted to the PhD program before finishing up my MBA, so the MBA was almost anticlimactic as I was now a full-time doctoral student and finished up the remaining degree requirements. So I never went on the market as an MBA.
The PhD was more of a liability than an asset when I attempted to revive my IT professional career. I was privately advised to drop mention of the PhD. How do I erase 8 years of my full-time life in academia? From a recruiter standpoint, which gave ZERO credit for academic exposure, it was like I had been unemployed for 8 years--and they considered whatever IT skills I had (I had done work mostly with APL, an IBM interpretive computing language, very much a small niche market.) had probably atrophied during the absence. Of course, a bigger factor with recruiters, beyond the obvious overqualified problem, was the fear I would be using them as a refuge from academia's hiring slump, and soon as the economy improved, I would jump at the first academic job to be offered, taking whatever training or other investments with me.
I would eventually take an APL programming position with an IBM subsidiary in north Irving, and I finally got my toe in the door of an Oracle DBA career by a government subcontracting gig at the US EPA labs in Chicago (the pay was low, but it was a stepping stone.
I've had a long but volatile career since then with a number of employers or subcontracts. I won't go into an exhaustive history, but in multiple instances, I worked for businesses that would (eventually) go bankrupt, I've taken jobs with expiring contracts (e.g., in WV and SC), I've gotten laid off (e.g., CSC Consulting hit a dry patch of landing project work; I had been assigned to an initial temp gig in Michigan, and this was after my hiring manager assured me their DBA's had utilization rates over 100%), my favorite employer, a small private company, got acquired by Equifax, which made it clear they would raise my salary a maximum of 2% over the coming year when I was making 20% below market. I could go on and on.
There were some office political issues that varied by context. For example, when I worked for IBM, I reported to an older Indian immigrant. Part of our business including off-shore maintenance overnight in India. The basic idea of my business unit was to provide cookie-cutter Oracle EBS (ERP applications) services, where a lot of routine tasks like patching and backups could be handed off to commodity DBA/trainees (and IBM had a hard time holding onto these). I inherited a well-known tax advisory service. We had agreed to take over operations from a consulting company with the client's apps being hosted at another IBM outsourcing unit. What my boss and his colleagues never realized was the consulting company had not done a single patch in 18 months and had implemented the database in a nonstandard way (which, among other things, affected patching). There were other things, including a one-time-only daily bank download which had to be implemented (sort of the equivalent of doing a crossword puzzle in ink). My boss freaked out when it turned out I had to apply something like 26-39 megapatches during a planned brief go-live turnover. He wanted to have the clients and consulting company to do the patching before go-live. I know the client would never go for that; just getting the time for the go-live turnover was the only thing the client would agree to.
To this day, I have never met another DBA capable of doing what I did. I considered what the former consultants did as sort of a poison pill. I had to invent a way to migrate their implementation into something our business model could support. But my boss never realized the nonstandard implementation, the consultants' failure to maintain patching, etc., in effect, I had to do a lot of custom work that should have been billed to the client.
I ran into a number of issues with Indian colleagues:
- I got into an issue with the Indian manager of the maintenance group in India. He had been pressuring me to come up with cookie cutter tasks for his "DBA's" to work on the project, so they could bill. There were no cookie-cutter tasks. I was dealing with a semi-structured context, missing documentation, etc. I basically would have to solve a problem before delegating it for the sake of delegating things. So then when it came to a successful cut-over, the SOB tells my boss his folks are not going to support the database because his people didn't work on it and hence had no confidence in it. He should have been fired for cause.
- I had a techno-functional Indian colleague who worked at client headquarters; after I finished the infrastructure setup, his job was to check functional aspects as a QC before turning over the system to the clients. It was his intent to work remotely from his apartment; I asked him several times to check for remote connectivity issues. So I work furiously to get the system ready for QC by that Saturday noon. And guess who can't connect from home? IBM's skeleton crew can't resolve his issue. I tell him to go to the client site. "No, I've never done that on a weekend; I have to get the client manager's permission." "Do you have the number? [Yes.] Call him." "No. It'll wait for Monday." What the hell? He just cost us 2 days during the outage. Another jerk who should have been terminated for cause.
- Not to mention the [Indian] project manager in name only. A week before go-live, whatever the hell he is doing didn't include lining up the client production infrastructure for me (like servers, disk allocations, etc.) I'm having to push to get the resources allocated. Later, during go-live, I'm finding the server/network configurations by our OS group have been done incompetently. Tape downloads are taking forever (I actually had to have data overnighted.) File transfers between servers were absurdly slow. (I could mention other issues with the OS group. For example, I once had a database crash because the sys admin used a nonstandard deployment of storage, and when I escalated the issue, the OS manager actually tried to blame me for not checking his employee's setups--and my boss AGREED: I shit you not.)
I have had a number of pet peeves with job searches and recruiters (particularly Indian) over the past several years:
- Too much busy work. Almost every resume processing software I've had to deal with direct employers or job sites SUCKS. I'm not going to spend a half hour or more correcting parsing errors in my job history. You have my carefully written resume which most professionals find compelling, not because of fancy fonts or other gimmicks but from organization, brevity, etc. And a lot of Indian recruiters use the same bullet list of questions, including name and contact information, work status, potential start date, compensation range, linked-in/Skype IDs, etc. I've worked on an explicit section which includes these and other (e.g., certifications and clearance information, etc.) Don't ask me for information already in my resume and you can copy/paste in 5 minutes. And job skill matrices are particularly aggravating, e.g., identify a skill/technology you've used, how much time you've used it, when you last used it, rate your degree of expertise in using the technology, etc. (Quite often these things are like 8 pages long.) This is basically a waste of time. It's one thing if my employer is paying me to do this, but don't ask an applicant. Nine times out of 10, employers are looking for my Oracle DBA experience and skills. Now often I exercise other skills, like shell scripting, Linux system administrator work, and development. But don't try to quantify that.
- Minimize excessive, unnecessary contacts. Indian recruiters in particular are notoriously bad for this. In one recent case, I had at least a dozen emails and phone calls over a short period of time. Some of them were of a nagging nature, e.g., "you haven't responded to my email yet". In a number of cases, I'll get a cold call before I've even had a chance to read the email (and a large percentage of the jobs are irrelevant to my background). Most American recruiters will minimize the number of contacts, e.g., 2 or 3 contacts to a phone screen.
- NIGGYSOB/stump the professor screens. I don't have an issue with screens which provide a check the validity of one's stated background. I do have a good, fairly detailed memory (the IBM example cited above was 13 years back), but for example, I've done professional DBA work from versions 6 through 12C R2. I've dealt with literally dozens of Oracle software products/versions, including Data Guard and RAC, E-Business Suite (from 10.7 character mode through R12). I recently had an Indian interviewer ask me scattered, very detailed questions over specific error messages, various parameters, and features, almost nothing routine or practical in nature. (Believe me, I can design tests almost every experienced DBA would flunk. Over 8 years of college teaching, not a single student scored a 100 on any exam or quiz--and I never had to resort to trick or obscure questions.) But really I've worked for some very selective employers like Oracle Consulting and IBM. For Oracle, I interviewed for 2 different business units, each requiring about 3 rounds of tech screening. The first time I went through the screens but could never get to the last step, an interview with the hiring manager who was always out of time--so in the interim another employer made an offer. The point is, some verifiable prominent employers had already tested my knowledge and skills (never mind academic credentials). Treating me like some novice DBA just out of school is frankly absurd and insulting. But to give another example I've published in the past, I remember when I interviewed for a data warehouse DBA contractor position at USPTO, I got asked a highly complex technical question. After I accepted their offer, I asked my colleague where the hell that question came from. He shrugged his shoulders and said, "I've been researching the issue for 2 weeks. No harm in asking if you've seen it before." Seriously? You don't know the answer yourself, but you're basically asking for someone to resolve your issue off the top of his head?
- Don't send an irrelevant job listing. There was a time I did SAP Basis work (think of a DBA/system administrator role) for a company in in southwest suburbs of Chicago. This was back in 1996; this was a time when SAP was white-hot, and experienced SAP personnel were making 6-figures (not me). So the company had an internal Basis administrator they had trained from the ground up, probably over $30,000 in expensive training courses (SAP, Sun, Oracle, Veritas, etc.) So basically I was hired as an insurance policy, e.g., if this employee decided to test the job market and take his training with him. Part of my deal included a commitment for SAP training (their classes were white-hot, starting at over $4K) (Familiar readers may recall an incident I posted some time back; my boss at the last minute decided to have me shadow a couple of Deloitte consultants when I was scheduled to take a SAP class. Rather than lose the $4K plus, he sent our full-time senior Unix administrator in my place; his junior colleague called my Basis colleague during lunch. The latter, without thinking what he was saying, "At Sun school they told us whenever we saw that message, reboot." I sat there, shocked, because he had just opened Pandora's box. He suddenly realized what he just said and added several seconds, "Don't do it now...." His face turned pale, said, "Oh, ahit!) and raced to the server room. There's more to the story, but basically the hard reboot corrupted Veritas mirrors which had to be rebuilt, and I correctly estimated it would take 3.5 hours before Oracle would be able to start up. Over 75 employees who needed SAP to do their jobs couldn't access the system in the interim. There's more to the story, but it's beyond the scope of this discussion.) So, in reality what happened after I was hired, I basically learned on the job and became the de facto administrator, freeing up my partner to attend business meetings and the like. When I left that job (I communicated to the CIO the real story of what happened above), I tried to find another Basis job but lacked the multi-year exposure recruiters needed, so I ended up doing other Oracle DBA work. To this day I've never done another Basis gig, but I've got another 9 years or so of competitor Oracle E-Business Suite work; I'll still get emailed at least 2-3 dozen unsolicited SAP job listings (often for irrelevant developer or functional roles) and all of them requiring 8 years or more of recent SAP exposure, which is not listed on my resume. It's like they simply look for resumes with "SAP" listed somewhere and just blast out a listing. Now you can repeat this for any technology I've dealt with, often in just one position or so, e.g., Maximo, Manugistics, Banner, Business Objects, etc. Not to mention I've done ancillary role tasks, e.g., as a Unix/Linux or Windows administrator or a developer. (I haven't picked up certifications from Microsoft, etc.) Not to mention competitors to Oracle relational database, such as IBM's DB2 or Microsoft/Sybase SQL Server.. And I've made it clear there are certain locations I will never relocate to, including the West Coast, Chicago, and the Northeast, and for some reason I'll get routinely get spammed for listings from these places. Quite often I'll get cold calls from Indian recruiters who clearly haven't scanned over my resume. And I still get multiple emails asking if I want to look at being an insurance agent, a rideshare driver, blue-collar occupations, an accounting clerk, etc.
- Don't misrepresent the position! I've been recruited by multiple companies that, say, wanted to present me as part of a government bid; they don't actually have an open position.(And they leave out that fact early in the process.) I've seen too many cases where the bid fails, the award is deferred; I've had contingent offers that never materialize. In one case, I was asked to do an in-person (for an Apps DBA gig) at the Department of Education in DC. I never drive into DC, so you end up fighting traffic to a suburban Metro station, spending $10 or so in fares, only to find out 5 minutes into the interview that the position hasn't been awarded yet, but they are hopeful. That is simply dishonest and unforgivable, a waste of my time and resources.
- Don't ask for special favors. A common one is asking me to reformat my resume. My resume is up to 8 pages long and has been written taking into account questions from recruiters over 20 years. I include explicit details of product versions and platforms Some third-party recruiters will want me to adapt to the end client's preferred format. This almost always ends up in the "busy work" category. I may have blogged in the past over one classic example. There was a USPS IT contractor operating at a Woodlawn (Baltimore suburb) facility. A third-party agency had contacted me and after qualifying me, haggling over rate, etc., we were almost at the stage of my doing an in-person, they said they had one remaining piece of paperwork, which they promised would take me a maximum of 90 minutes--and it turned out to be a resume redesign for the resume, including all sorts of details (like former employer addresses, contact numbers for past supervisors, etc.). I mean, for instance, I've had at least a handful of past employers which are no longer in business, have been acquired, and/or have moved. 90 minutes my ass! We are talking days. And let's be clear: the prospective contractor or the government isn't really interested in the work I did using Oracle 7 RDBMS. I tried to negotiate with the third party: what if I do this format for the last 5 years? Nope. All or nothing. It was bad enough they had earlier had me do the painful government background paperwork (most of which the government had on file from prior gigs). So I had already done all this work prior to consideration of an interview, and then they dumped this other mandate. It was worse than Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown to kick. At the time the job meant a convenient commute , but it just wasn't worth my time and effort in pursuing. They took a hard position and dropped me.
- Follow up! This seems like common sense, but it turns out common sense is not common. And it's not just Indian recruiters. There will be times I've done tech screens, in-persons, etc. Take the above example at the Department of Education. The contractor wasn't in touch after the visit. I tried contacting every couple of weeks or so. Eventually they wouldn't return my phone calls or emails. When I've invested time and effort into the process, I deserve periodic status checks. If it's bad news, fine.
- Provide end client information! More often than not, especially third-party recruiters will mask the client ID for fear I might cut my own deal with the client or tip off other recruiters. The problem is I'll often get clusters of contacts over the same position, often with varying details. I have always been wary of multiple/duplicate presentations; it never works to a candidate's advantage. The client doesn't want to get caught in the middle of a vendor conflict and probably develops a negative opinion of an unscrupulous candidate. The problem for the candidate is that sometimes listings can appear weeks apart; sometimes there are some weird rules, like a vendor may be capped, e.g., a quota of 2 candidates, and maybe they didn't present you. Sometimes it's easy to detect; for example, there was a recent ad in the San Antonio area for a federal contract. I've been looking at the San Antonio area for some time. (I have 2 siblings and a parent in the metropolitan area.) There aren't many DBA, never mind EBS DBA gigs in the area. I've probably been contacted by nearly a dozen different recruiters over the past month, with varying descriptions. But the canonical example was when I lived in the Chicago area. I think it was an IT position at the American Bar Association. Their DBA was promoted to a managerial position, and he wanted his replacement to have spent the previous 5 years at a Fortune 500 company (not me). (I don't think I knew that in advance; I think it came from recruiter on feedback for the rejection.) So I knew about the client and the rejection. Another recruiter approached me with a dissimilar job description. I gave a tentative OK to present me. Later the recruiter called back screaming at me for 15 minutes. Apparently the client manager recognized my name and blew up on him, saying (paraphrased), "Who the hell is this asshole? Is he contacting every recruiter he can find, spamming me with his resume in the hopes I'll hire him?" WRONG. I knew one recruiter submitted me, and I had been rejected. Another recruiter presented me without my knowledge or consent. This recruiter never identified the client. Personally I think the client's preference was stupid and arbitrary, but I'm not going to force someone to hire a great DBA. It's their loss. Which leads to my final point.
- Don't submit me without my knowledge and consent!
