Things are heating up...

The job front is starting to look good, or at least it's not looking disheartening, but first let me give an update on my Ubuntu trials.

I was able to get 10.04 installed in a Sun Vbox but then was stymied by the same problem with mouse capture and the vbox additions not installing correctly. A quick spin using my friendly neighborhood search engines ("Bing vs Google" a Firefox add-on by Kanapaua) and I find out that I am not alone and there are known issues on that. It looks like I may be able to get it working if I upgrade Vbox to the latest version and install 10.04 again (and add a manual workaround to /etc/X11/xorg.conf) but I need to hold off on that because I am upgrading my Ubuntu 9 install from 04 to 10 so I can't upgrade Vbox till that is finished. Meanwhile I am downloading the Windows 32bit version of MongoDB so I can take it for a spin on the Windows/C#/C++ stack and compare and contrast with the Linux/Java/C++ stack when I get one of my Ubuntu distros in good working order.

The saga continues...

Now, the job front news.

Over the past two weeks I have had several phone pre-screens and technical screens and most of them have gone well and as a result I am moving to the next phase which is in-person interviews. I have an interview scheduled at a Local Online Book and Shopping Giant on Thursday and with the Search Arm of a Local Software Giant on Friday, and should have an interview through a vendor company for a Buisiness Intelligence and Internal Tools group at the same Local Software Giant early next week. I have a couple of other conversations going that are not as advanced in the pipeline but hopefully they will start advancing very soon.

Phone screens in the past have been a hit or miss thing for me, but currently I am having a bigger string of hits than misses except for the first one which was an unfortunate miss. This Local Casual Gaming Company has a lot of open positions right now, and my initial conversations with the recruiter there went great and moved me forward to the technical phone screen. This was my first technical call of this round and I was not really prepared for it psychologically and probably not fully technically either.

The person screening me ask me a question that caught me off guard about defining a commonly known concept in object oriented programming, the first thing that went through my mind was that this question took me back to my college days, unfortunately my filter was not on so the first thing that went through my mouth was "this question takes me back to my college days" which was THE WRONG THING to say, especially since right after saying it my mind blanked and I couldn't for the life of me define the concept, even though I had referred to it, without naming it, earlier in my conversation with him.

It was one of those concepts that we use and refer to, without naming it, every day when we develop software and like trying to remember the name of the band that sings that song that you loved for that one summer and you can't remember it right when you need to in order to make a good impression, no amount of thinking about it can make it come off the tip of your tongue and save the situation. The call went mostly sideways if not outright downhill from there and I am sure that at the end of that interview the screener decided that I was not technical enough, it's what I would have thought if I was on the other side of the conversation.

That was a good wake up call though, if you are a job seeker you should take nothing for granted, brush up on the things you did back in your college days, concepts of OOP, Data Structures, Classifications of Testing Domains, the works and while you are at it the kitchen sink.

Let's face it, it's still a buyers market out in the IT/Software Engineering job market, but if you have the skills and experience to make you a prime property the worse thing you can do is sell yourself short by not touching up the paint job (ok, enough with the Real Estate metaphors already).

On another note, one of these posts soon I will get around to explaining what I think a QualityMaster is and why I think it needs to exist in the Agile and Scrum world, in the meantime I will keep applying my skills the best way I can, hopefully soon for a new employer.