Waiting for "the" job and not settling for "a" job

I've gotten a little more serious in the last week or two about finding a job, because I think it's about time. Getting CoasterBuzz out last week was kind of like finishing up on a consulting job and looking for the next thing.

I've said all along that I wanted to hold out for "the" job instead of just taking "a" job. There are plenty of the latter where I live, and I learned years ago that you've gotta do what holds your interest or suffer from soul suckage. Nobody wants that! What I find difficult though is not believing in my qualification for various gigs, but getting the right message to interviewers. They really come in two flavors.

The flavor that I work well under is the kind who are most interested in accomplishments and the details of how you made them. One that I'm talking with now started with the owner of the company, a small-ish consultancy, and he is somewhat technical at best. His CTO understood programming more, but even he would concentrate more on practical, real world technique. These kinds of talks are more interested in how you're designing things, and how they performed in production.

The other flavor is the computer science stump interview, and I hate those. I don't have any formal education in computer science. I still can't explain polymorphism eloquently. I can't tell you about how memory works and is allocated, because I'm not that interested in our managed code world. It doesn't mean I wouldn't endeavor to gain a deep understanding if a situation would merit.

I've been thinking about how I can get around this, and my first instinct is a "25 cool things I've done with .NET" list or something like that. I have the distinct advantage of having more of my own code not owned by a former employer than most. I can show stuff like an AJAX control like Facebook's tokenized text list (what you use to add names to a message) or data-driven page mapping frameworks or, ugly as the SQL may be, my own text search engine.

There's still very much a divide between the computer science types and everyone else in some places. I'm not suggesting that it's some personality flaw with anyone, just that it's a cultural challenge. There are too many developers without the formal education who produce results as good as, if not better, than their lifetime computer science counterparts. Cutting through that barrier continues to be a challenge.

4 Comments

  • You can start by talking some CS courses, you may know somehting or two, and also will help convince the client that you have the desired background.

  • No chance of that. I'm not going back to school because I'm not going to get anything out of it. My very point is that the education gap is very nearly completely irrelevant as it relates to skill.

  • I related with your post so much. Especially your comment to "not getting anything out of going back to school".


    Glad someone else feels my pain.

  • I don't think you're understanding where I'm coming from. I've very much been there done that at this point, and there isn't a shortage of jobs, as I said. I've been using .NET since it was beta.

    I've interviewed a lot of cats with CS degrees who were very nearly useless in every way. In my former profession as a broadcast monkey, I experienced the same thing. As I've said before, there's a certain respect I have for computer academics, and I'm not trying to take anything away from them. But once you get a step down from those big thinker types who invent things like C#, we're essentially doing a trade for really clever people. Everything can be learned, and I know this from experience and from mentoring others.

    Long time readers know this is near and dear to my heart, that the profession in the general sense sucks at peer to peer training and enrichment. .NET isn't nearly as bad as some areas (think Java), but it also doesn't have the rapid knowledge transfer of something like PHP. (Say what you want about the "script kiddie" language... those kids are owning us.)

    Education is not indicative of ability. Smart interviewers know this.

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