Job Hunting

TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Got a strange call today.

Did an interview for a job awhile ago that sounded cool. Got an offer but when they told me that I'd have to be in the office 2-3x/week I noped out on it. They called me today and asked me why I wasn't in the office for my first day?

I was all... uhhhhhh wuuut? I didn't even agree to the job. Well we have it down here that you did, we did our background check and expected you to start today. I didn't know what to say and just kind of hung up.

Weird.
 
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Lendarios

Lendarios

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Slaanesh69 said:
Well, boyz, I have had my first official interview with an oil and gas company since I started seriously looking for work in September. By the by I was laid off in January 2021 and was trying to wait out the pandemic at first, but by September realized that wasn't going to happen. I won't lie, I enjoyed spending quality time with my son this summer, fishing and biking, no regerts for sure. Not often you have the opportunity to spend tons of time with your kid in his developing years when he still loves and respects you and hasn't yet turned into a psychotic teenager.

I was told that they wanted to throw away my resume because of my 25 years of experience, but in the end held on to it.

Even better, I interviewed with three managers, and an HR person, for 3 possible positions, so it was about as ideal an interview as I could have gotten. Edit - on the flip side, if I don't get any of the jobs, I may as well never apply to that company again lol.

Anyway, not sure how I did, but I did the best I could so I guess that is all I can. It was my first real interview since 2013.

Edit - Good lord, lol, never mind. I was just debriefed and apparently I wasn't "detailed" enough in most of my answers. It's hard to remember that one $12 MM project I did where I saved $300,000 per well and produced 1 mmcf/d more gas per well for a xxxx metric increase. I guess they are looking for that 10 year guy that remembers every detail because he's only done 2 big projects in his career, and that was yesterday. Welp, back to the job postings!
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No offense, but if you are going to highlight something as important as that, you have to be prepared to provide more details.
A portion of when you are interviewing someone is to detect when they are bullshiting you, and what you did was a red flag to an interviewer.
"Yeah I saved the company millions of dollars".
How did you do it?
"I don't remember".
It smells like you didn't do it, or you don't remember, or you did not prepared well enough for the interview.
Work on those answers so you can provide specifics next time.

Interviewing is a skill, work on it.
 
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TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Lendarios said:
No offense, but if you are going to highlight something as important as that, you have to be prepared to provide more details.
A portion of when you are interviewing someone is to detect when they are bullshiting you, what you did was a red flag.
"Yeah I saved the company millions of dollars".
How did you do it?
"I don't remember".
It smells like you didn't do it, or you don't remember, or you did not prepared well enough for the interview.
Work on those answers so you can provide specifics next time.

Interviewing is a skill, work on it.
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This is why I do a handful of interviews every year.
 
Nija

Nija

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Kirun said:
Anybody know of any good "resume writing" services out there? The only thing I hate about job-hunting is touching up/organizing my resume. Merit season came around at work and my company lowballed the fuck out of me. I love a lot of the perks about my job, but I'm just so underpaid at this point that it's just time to move on.
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I’m using RP Stivers Consulting | and enjoying it so far. I paid a little more to have the main guy do it.
 
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Nija

Nija

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TJT said:
What price did it run you if you don't mine me asking?
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$500. He had a black Friday sale which a friend of mine used, so he paid $250. This person went from a coding bootcamp to Jr dev, dev, to technical project manager in the past 3 years. The TPM role is at over $200k in total compensation (unsure exactly), with this last role being something close to a 100% bump in pay. Using this fancy resume service.

Great, I thought. I talked to him, and once he got details from me, with my dual income setup, he said I would be extremely lucky to replicate that. And that I'm already very well paid at my existing gig. I'm about 4 revisions in and it's looking pretty good. Better than I could have done.

$500 seems expensive but I'm looking to go from ~180 to ~240 in order to make the uncertainty of changing jobs worthwhile. That's worth it, at least to me.
 
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Kirun

Kirun

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Ugh, I forgot how fucking "buzzwordy" shit is in the world of job applications now. I feel obligated to throw 47 acronyms into my resume just to hit all the stupid fucking buzzword filters. I really can't fucking stand tech "culture".
 
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Slaanesh69

Slaanesh69

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Kirun said:
Ugh, I forgot how fucking "buzzwordy" shit is in the world of job applications now. I feel obligated to throw 47 acronyms into my resume just to hit all the stupid fucking buzzword filters. I really can't fucking stand tech "culture".
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Yeah, the first real obstacle in getting traction on your resume/cover letter is buzzword/keyword matching your content to the job description to game the algorithms. It is disgusting.

It may be different, I suppose, in an industry that is rocking like information/data, but in the general scheme of things, HR has a hard lock on the first wave of screening and have computers do much of the leg work.

By the by I was lucky enough to have an outplacement service provide a "branding expert" to help me update my resume and LinkedIn profile when I was laid off last year.
 
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TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Slaanesh69 said:
Yeah, the first real obstacle in getting traction on your resume/cover letter is buzzword/keyword matching your content to the job description to game the algorithms. It is disgusting.

It may be different, I suppose, in an industry that is rocking like information/data, but in the general scheme of things, HR has a hard lock on the first wave of screening and have computers do much of the leg work.

By the by I was lucky enough to have an outplacement service provide a "branding expert" to help me update my resume and LinkedIn profile when I was laid off last year.
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In Tech World HR doesn't do the recruiting. There's recruiting/talent acquisition who does all of that. HR doesn't get to naysay anything. Recruiting does.
 
Slaanesh69

Slaanesh69

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TJT said:
In Tech World HR doesn't do the recruiting. There's recruiting/talent acquisition who does all of that. HR doesn't get to naysay anything. Recruiting does.
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In the Oil Patch, HR rules the roost, and it is pathetic. They've made an entire side industry for themselves, with all the diversity and equity accoutrements. It is pretty insipid in the larger corporations.

Every major group meeting in my last company needed to be opened with a Safety Moment and a Diversity Moment. And some of the latter were as bad as you would expect. Some were actually decent, and entertaining, but then you got the typical hardcore progressive whining about why their female tech voices were not equally heard in meetings/presentations with executives/upper management.
 
Nija

Nija

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I can start to trickle in updates as I go I guess.

I had a call yesterday with a company. Guy on chat gave me the comp ranges for senior and staff positions, 265-475 is the bottom of senior, 475 is the top of staff. That's in my range, great. So I get on the call yesterday with his recruiter and she's upset that he gave me the ranges. She said they are a fintech company, they are HYPER organized, and they adjust comp ranges based on state. I ask how that makes any sense. Where I am the median income is 48k. 2 miles away it's 83k. Both are in the same state. Why not go by metro area? Why adjust at all, it's the same job. Everyone is working remote at the moment.

Anyways. Just the "senior" role, the floor of the pay range became 135 for this position because I'm in Arkansas. Since I'm the blunt kind, and this was obviously at an end, I let her know that Simmons wanted me to go do integration specialist, coding role, a squarely boring, low/mid range position, for the same amount of money (135k). She asked who Simmons is, and I said a food processing company. Your hyper organized fintech company is trying to pay me the same amount as a mid level position that is on site at a place where live chickens go in one side and cooked, frozen chicken comes out the other side. Not a great look.

(Literally, the Simmons position would be at this plant which has offices in front of an actual working processing plant!)

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I also made it about 3 minutes on a call with our future chinese overlords, Tiktok, but they are going from remote to hybrid (3 days in the office) and I ended that one quickly.
 
Deathwing

Deathwing

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I'm a bit worried how drastically the media narrative shifted on WFH. At least from my perspective, they completely skipped vilifying the lazy WFH employee and went straight to shaming people that don't want to commute and "socialize".

Admittedly, I don't have much directly to lose. I live 15 minutes away from my company's office. But I want to keep those 30 minutes each day. We were able to get rid of one car because of WFH. But I think most importantly, I think that implicit option that I could easily find another remote job was very reassuring.

It would suck if this whole thing was killed in its infancy.
 
Cutlery

Cutlery

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Of course it's gonna be killed. Theres an entire class of middle management that needs people in the office to justify their existence.

There's no way THOSE people are losing their jobs, so the plebes need to come back to the office.
 
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TJT

TJT

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Nija said:
I can start to trickle in updates as I go I guess.

I had a call yesterday with a company. Guy on chat gave me the comp ranges for senior and staff positions, 265-475 is the bottom of senior, 475 is the top of staff. That's in my range, great. So I get on the call yesterday with his recruiter and she's upset that he gave me the ranges. She said they are a fintech company, they are HYPER organized, and they adjust comp ranges based on state. I ask how that makes any sense. Where I am the median income is 48k. 2 miles away it's 83k. Both are in the same state. Why not go by metro area? Why adjust at all, it's the same job. Everyone is working remote at the moment.

Anyways. Just the "senior" role, the floor of the pay range became 135 for this position because I'm in Arkansas. Since I'm the blunt kind, and this was obviously at an end, I let her know that Simmons wanted me to go do integration specialist, coding role, a squarely boring, low/mid range position, for the same amount of money (135k). She asked who Simmons is, and I said a food processing company. Your hyper organized fintech company is trying to pay me the same amount as a mid level position that is on site at a place where live chickens go in one side and cooked, frozen chicken comes out the other side. Not a great look.

(Literally, the Simmons position would be at this plant which has offices in front of an actual working processing plant!)

View attachment 407985

I also made it about 3 minutes on a call with our future chinese overlords, Tiktok, but they are going from remote to hybrid (3 days in the office) and I ended that one quickly.
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That kind of comp range decrease "because Arkansas" would rustle me pretty hard lol.

Get fucked Fintech bros.
 
Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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Sanrith Descartes said:
Just throwing this out there. I did the corporate grind for 25 years up to middle management. Was just tired of the meaningless grind and the unending incompetence that comes with working for a megacorp. Took a leap of faith, bet on myself and opened a business consulting company. Later, I found a business that was floundering due to mismanagement and absentee ownership and bought it with a partner. Never been happier. Even on my worst days its still light years better than doing the corp routine. My wife eventually did the same route and opened her own accounting/tax business.

tldr: If you have a bankable skill and experience, perhaps doing your own thing might be the right answer for you. Not gonna lie, it can be scary jumping into the deep water.
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I am now considering this as well. Got a call from a really good friend yesterday that is looking for someone to help consult on a $200M project and needs a wireless engineer. We talked it over for a few hours and it was something that was my goal previously. At the time, after leaving my first engineering job, I was going through my divorce, loss of a brother, and other things so didn't feel capable of taking the risk. In hindsight it may not have been that bad since I had nothing left to lose haha.

But now seems like a good opportunity. Branch out on my own, handle my business, and see what we can agree on billable wise.
 
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Sanrith Descartes

Sanrith Descartes

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Intrinsic said:
I am now considering this as well. Got a call from a really good friend yesterday that is looking for someone to help consult on a $200M project and needs a wireless engineer. We talked it over for a few hours and it was something that was my goal previously. At the time, after leaving my first engineering job, I was going through my divorce, loss of a brother, and other things so didn't feel capable of taking the risk. In hindsight it may not have been that bad since I had nothing left to lose haha.

But now seems like a good opportunity. Branch out on my own, handle my business, and see what we can agree on billable wise.
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Its a deep ass pool to jump into, I ain't gonna lie. But, that being said, if you never get rich but can make a living that keeps you at the standard of living you desire then working for yourself is the best thing ever. There are also a fuckton of various things to consider and some of them you may not think about on your own. There is being good at your trade, but also being part salesman, part accountant and finance guy, part IT guy, part janitor, you name it. especially early on.
 
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