Category: Job Experiences

It’s resume time again

It’s coming up to the end of my contract. My boss’s boss’s boss asked all the contractors for copies of our resumes to help him get approval to renew the contracts, as we’ve all been here far longer than is allowed by company policy, and so he has to do whatever crafty tricks he does in order to keep us. But I figured a good resume isn’t a bad thing to have if his tricks stop working, so I spent some time on it and asked some friends to review it.

My old resume was, in the words of one person who looked at it, a “bit last millenium”. He suggested that I find a nice template somewhere and redo it. The problem is that I like having the resume there on the web both for portability and accessibilty, and most of the templates you find are Microsoft Word. But in googling around, I stumbled across a pretty nice looking resume that was implemented as an XML file with an XSL file to translate it into html. Now that is 21st century! Unfortunately, I lost the link and the guy’s name in my rush to stealadopt his technology. The XML has optional “hide=’true'” attributes so you can leave out different bits for different applications, although I haven’t made use of that.

The new resume looks pretty good. Have a look. Offer me a fulfilling job with lots of money.

Oh Google, you are so devoid of any semblance of clue

As I wrote about in Rants and Revelations » Hey, Google, Google still hasn’t reimbursed me for my hotel, cab and food while I was in New York City. Today, I discovered why. Evidently when one of their recruiters leaves them, instead of arranging some sort of orderly transfer of her unfinished work to somebody else, they just throw all her email into the garbage and mark any mail that she hasn’t dealt with “Return to Sender” and send it back. I got my reciepts back, over a month and a half after I sent them, which means that undoubtedly they fished them out of her inbox rather than just refusing them at the front door. So I wrote to the only other recruiter there I have been in contact with, and he gave me the name of a third recruiter that I need to send all my stuff to, including the claim form that I’d emailed to the first recruiter on July 21st.

You know, if their tech departments were run as well as their recruiting organization, Microsoft could stop worrying about them.

Hold me, I’m scared!

A few weeks ago we had a “lessons learned” session where all the developers, QA people and field circus engineers got to talk about why development cycles are getting longer, we’re finding more and more bugs, and people are getting more disgruntled. It was amazing how many people thought that what we really need are clear requirements that don’t change from day to day, proper development methodologies, design review meetings, code reviews, etc. At the end of the meeting, our boss’s boss came into the meeting and the meeting facilitator gave him a precis of what was going to be in his report. On the way out of the meeting, a developer who is just as experienced and cynical as I turned to one of our younger colleagues and said “You realize that now that we’ve had the meeting and had a chance to vent, management will think the problem is fixed”.
Continue reading “Hold me, I’m scared!”

Not a good idea

This morning I was investigating a problem at a customer site where their Manager (a program I wrote most of) is hanging. Thanks to “kill -3 pid” I discovered it was building a tool tip. Thanks to a database query, I found that the tool tip it was building was trying to display 430,000+ identical date ranges. Hmmm, looks like we’re going to be a while, and probably a little short of screen real estate at the same time.

I did a few database commands to remove the 430,000+ records and put back one copy of it. (I’m sure somebody has a command that will do both in one step – I did a “delete” followed by an “insert” because I’m lame.)

The Field Engineer at the customer site wrote to ask if I could tell him the database commands in case this happens again. I politely declined. I told my boss that this would be somewhat like giving handguns and tequila to a bunch of 9 year old boys. Repeat after me:

I’m sorry, you appear to have totally hosed the database. You’re going to have to wipe the database and re-injest all your content. You’ll probably be up and running again in two days or so.

And every day you’re in this place you’re two days nearer death

One of the “joys” of working in a large, old, poorly maintained and shrinking chemical plant is the constant barrage of dangerous chemical smells. I used to walk from the parking lot to the entrance under a pipe bridge that carried a bunch of pipes, one of which was labelled “Ketone”. There was often a strong smell of aromatic hydrocarbons under that bridge.

Today, just after I’d posted my previous posting, three company firemen were standing in front of my cube, wearing breathing tanks on their backs (but thankfully not using them). One of my co-workers came by and said he’d reported a nasty smell and something dripping onto his desk from the ceiling above, and they’d come out.