alone

So after the first day debacle at my new job when they confirmed my start date at 8:30am on the day i was supposed to start, and then expected me to just waltz straight into the office without a pass and without telling reception who i was there to meet, i tried again and emailed the recruiter who i got the job through to ask who i should ask for. He assured me that i would not need to ask for anyone and to go to the office and just tell them i was going to the 4th floor to pick up my laptop. errrrr.....OK, are you sure?. yes, i am sure. 

I then turn up at the building and they ask me who i am and the name of the person that will be hosting me. I told them i did not have a name and was told to just go the 4th floor. obviously that did not work and they said they cant let visitors in with a host name, which is how every single company in the city of london operates. I then called the recruiter back and repeated to him what i said before, and he expressed surprise that London offices dont just let strangers walk through their buildings. after 45 minutes of waiting like an idiot in reception he manages to get someone from the london office to come down and escort me up. fuck!, why is this shit so difficult. even the woman on reception said it did not give a good impression of the company on the first day. 

so I get the laptop and set it up and did pretty much nothing for the first week as i had no access. am now in my 2nd week and i have a daily 1 hour session with the techies in India who are taking me and 3 other new starters (1 in Dallas, 1 in Pittsburgh and 1 in India) through the environment, but the guy doing the session talks so fast and with such a thick accent that its really hard to understand him. 

Its always the same when you start a new job. people who have been there years and are taking you through the network just fly through it because its so familiar to them, but do not realise that they are talking to people who have come from different places and have no knowledge at all of this place. 

I should ask him how do you restart the solaris server for flight dynamics at my last job. its simple.  you just have to ssh into the DMZ jump host using the sccadmin account and then from there you have to ssh into ESA1 using a different sscadm account and from there you can just list the status of the solaris zones it is hosting and just do a zoneadm -z <containername> reboot. everyone in every firm working in IT know knows that, dont they!!?. everyone at Goldman Sachs or Google knows that you have to ssh into the DEFMAIN server first before ssh'ing into ESA1. 

In the last 4 weeks of my last job i had to take some techies in california and arizona through the network and what i did. I spoke slowly and gave as much as documentation as i could write and find. I held multiple sessions and tried to make them interactive so that they would get confidence in logging into the systems but also have the backstop of having me watch and guide them through some of the processes so they were comfortable and there was no danger of making mistakes. I even recorded the sessions so they could go watch and listen to them again if they wanted to review or clarify something. The sessions are i am going through are the complete opposite. rushed, illegible and incoherent. Please let me get something over the next few weeks and months so i can escape. 

A private equity firm interviewed me the week before i started my current role. they said it would be a 2 round process. They have not given any information to recruitment agent as to whether they will call me back or have rejected me. Its OK, if you dont want to call me back, but at least be polite enough to let me know. instead its been silence. 

its hard having to deal with idiots. thank goodness the cure exist and are fantastic. 

Harbinger

So 4 weeks ago when i accepted the role at the London office of a large US financial institution, they had said that my first day was due to be today, 28th October 2024. They sent me some requests for documentation like Insurance number, proof of address and some forms to fill in and I was supposed to then get confirmation of start date and what to do and who to ask for on my first day in the office. Instead i got 3 and a half weeks of silence. 

Getting a little worried last week about not having any information or confirmation, i found the email address of the person who interviewed me and sent him a mail just asking him if 28th was still my confirmed start date and what the dress code in the office would be and who i should ask for when i get into the office. I heard nothing back and no confirmation of any details. I figured maybe they have not completed all their pre-employment new starter checks and things have been delayed. no problem at all. that is fine. 

This morning at 8.30am, i get an email from a HR person based in the Philippines confirming my start date is today???. what the fuck!!. I then replied to her who i should ask for at reception and which department i would be working in and where should i go, to which she replied she would find out. 

midday, i get a reply saying there is nobody in the London office from the cloud support team and to just to go into the office and collect my laptop and get my IDs sorted. OK, but its my first day, so WHO THE FUCK SHOULD I ASK FOR WHEN GET TO RECEPTION??!!!. I dont know what chicken shit operation they have in the phillipines or India, but in London you can not just walk in off the street and go to the reception of an office and be handed a pass and just let into an office building to roam around as you please and to pick up random laptops lying around. 

Jaysus!!!, why is this so difficult?!.

This new job has already gotten off to a frustrating start and this first day has been a shitshow. they seem reluctant to give me the most obvious information, so i wonder how forthcoming they will be to give me information related to actually doing the role. if this is a harbinger for the future it does not look good. 

Dont treat new starters like this. confirm their start dates more than half hour before you expect them in the office. have somebody assigned to meet them in the office on the first day and to show them to their desk. this is all basic stuff and they seem to be taken by surprised they i mentioned any of this. Anyway, i am not in the office and at home. 

Did they really think i was just going to turn up to a new office and have reception ask me who i was there to see, and for me to reply 'i dont know', and for reception to ask me which department i was in, and for me to reply 'i dont know', and for reception to ask me which floor i worked on, and for me to reply 'i dont know', and for reception to ask me who my colleagues werre and for to reply 'i dont know'. come on man, i am not going to make a fool of myself on my first day despite the HR and the hiring team having done so already. some of us are professional and have worked in London before. 

It might just be a bad start and it could be a really great company to work for, and in 6 months time i could be really happy and settled, but i really have doubts about it. I give it a 75% chance that i am not there in 6 months. I am planning to leave already. its a joke!. 

call bullshit

so the place that wanted someone who was a network engineer and a devops specialist and a vmware engineer and a windows engineer and a linux engineer and a citrix engineer and someone who would take calls escalated from the helpdesk, have asked to interview me. This interview could either be a shit show or it could turn out that they show some semblance of being reasonable in the skills they are looking for. it dont matter. they money is very good but i also have accepted a job that i am due to start in a weeks time, so whatever happens, i will be OK. 

Just as a bit of prep before my interview at the firm, i did a bit of a linkedin search to see the backgrounds of the people already working at the firm, and one of the profiles stood out. Some guy that graduated 6 years ago, and who was working in IT but also working in a supermarket until 3 years ago suddenly seems to have become a kubernetes and devops and terraform whizz whilst also creating and configuring CI/CD pipelines?????. Nah, sorry, i dont buy it. 

He has also listed 2 basic azure certifications and whilst he has not bothered to post these as approved and verified credentials he has for some reason given the test score????. who gives a fuck about the test score. its a pass or fail thing. Sorry, but i call bullshit on that. his career just dont add up and there is no way you can have accumulated the breadth and depth of experience he claims to have in just 3 years. 

I will go to the interview. i wont bullshit. i know what i have done and dont need to use my vivid imagination to embellish it.   

I have worked in lots of places and worked with lots of talented people. I have also worked with people who thought they were 'the shit', but were actually 'just shit'. after working in nearly 2 dozen firms and with hundreds of people, i think i have developed a good bullshit detector, and its going off loud with this dude. maybe i am wrong but i really doubt it. 

la la land

Until I turn up in the office on the 1st day of my new job, I consider myself to be available so i have still been applying for a few jobs that i have seen. 

I suspect the hedge fund that was offended by my interest in cloud technology is still hiring for the role, nearly 4 months later, and also i saw this job at another hedge fund. 

the spec says they want

infrastructure experience – 2nd / 3rd line support and engineering - Yeah I can do that. 

Great Networking skills – Routing and Switching, Firewalls etc- I am OK, if you want someone great you should hire a network specialist. 

Great server / platform experience (Windows, Linux). Yes, we get it. you want someone 'great' and i can actually support Windows and Linux and that is quite rare. 

Good Azure cloud experience - On-prem to Cloud migrations - I have migrated from on-prem to AWS and migrating to Azure wont be rocket science. 

Strong Virtualisation skills – VMWare, Citrix etc - I have used VMware a lot, but not so much Citrix. again, maybe hire a Citrix specialist if its that important. 

Automation, Containers and Infrastructure as Code knowledge (Terraform, Kubernetes etc) - Yes i have done Terraform and a little bit of kubernetes as well, but i aint no specialist. Maybe hire a DevOps specialist. 

basically they are looking for a Networking expert and a DevOps engineer and a Windows engineer and a Linux engineer who can also do VMware and Citrix and who will also take general support calls from the helpdesk when they escalate it and do 2nd and 3rd line support. 

They have adverstised this role a few times over the last few weeks and i have applied to it repeatedly and yet they have not got back to me because evidently they believe that they can find candidates that are a better fit. They wont. 

This is where recruitment consultants let themselves down. they do not push back on their clients unreasonable technical specifications and do not tell them that this person does not really exist. people who are managing Kubernetes clusters do not also do Citrix. People configure networks, routers and firewalls tend not to also do general 2nd line support. There are not that many people who can support Windows and Linux, let alone also support VMware and Firewalls and Kubernetes and that know Terraform and Azure. I have worked with some fantastically talented and clever people on my travels across IT departments in London, but i have never met anyone that could or would be able to do everything they are asking for. these people are living in la la land. 

i did speak to another agent about this role and they said they dont want anyone with general Cisco routing and switching experience but specifically Fortinet firewalls and Meraki and Palo Alto. 

She said they really want a network specialist who specialises in configuring those devices....but who will also do 2nd line support.......and Windows.....and Linux.......and VMware.......and Citirx......and Azure.......and Kubernetes........and Terraform. 

Fucking clowns. 

This clip below is The Gaslight Anthem performing in Los Angeles at the Henry Fonda theatre on Hollywood Blvd in September 2009. I was there. what a great night. 

clown

 Had an interview 2 days ago which was a plane crash. It really did not go well because the interviewer just focused on networking and VPN and Load balancing and just went more and more into detail, despite me saying that i had little experience in deploying load balancers and VPNs in AWS. 

Anyway, i wrote the whole thing off and was certain i would not get a call back. Then today i do get a call from them and they said they wanted to offer me the job. eh.....why..!!!!!??????. 

anyway i accepted and we are aiming for me to start in about a months time. I have had interviews where i thought i did quite well and did not get call backs, and this interview was easily one of the worst i have had and they offer me the job. what is going on?. 

maybe they figured from looking at my resume that he knows a bit about a lot of stuff and he will pick things up that he does not know. 

I am still a bit salty about missing out on that hedge fund job a couple of months ago and the more i look into it, i realise that the guy who interviewed me was a bullshitter. On his linkedin it lists a bank that i used to work at, and he claims that in the 7 months he was there he migrated their exchange mail servers to a new version AND migrated their virus scanning application to a completely different product AND upgraded their Windows 2008 DFS servers to Windows 2019, even though Windows 2008 had been out of support for 8 months before he started working at that firm. he also claims that whilst he did 3 major migrations in 7 months he also did regular BAU server support as well. that is utter horseshit.

In other parts of his linked in he bizarrely states the forest and domain functional levels of the AD in the firms he worked at and even more bizarrely it appears as though he he too had not used Vsphere 7 in any of his roles, despite wanting me to explain why none of the firms i had worked at did not use it. 

I strongly suspect the reason he was so focused on me not having used vsphere7 exposure is because that is the version he is currently trying to migrate to, and having problems according to what he said in the interview. a few things to point out about that. 

firstly Vsphere 8 was release almost exactly 2 years ago, so the only reason you would be migrating to vsphere 7 is if you started this project a long time ago before vsphere 8 had been released in Oct 2022. that means this migration project is taking a very long time. you really are struggling and yet its really not very difficult at all. 

secondly, vsphere 7 goes end-of-life in a year from now, in october 2025, and so the clock is ticking and you could be running a virtualisation platform that is no longer receiving updates which is quite serious. VMware release a new version number every 3-4 years, so at the rate he is going, Vsphere 9 could be out by the time they are finished migrating to Vsphere 7. then when they migrate to it, some asshole can ask him why he has not used Vsphere 8. 

thirdly, its surprising that it has taken him than 2 years to complete a virtualisation platform migration, when he claims did a complete Email messaging upgrade and migration AND a virus scan deployment and migration AND a DFS migration in 7 months. 

Maybe i am wrong, but i think anyone who interrogates a potential candidate about not having used a particular old version of Vsphere, which is not the latest version, is just someone being difficult and looking for any excuse not to hire them. You did not want to hire me, for fear of potentially being compared and found out as a bullshitter. 

I am an average skill techie and have met lots of people much more skilled and knowledgeable than me.....but i also have worked in investment banks and hedge funds and private equity and with actual rocket scientists and have used Vsphere and Windows and Terraform and AWS and RedHat and Ansible and lots of other stuff..........and did I not struggle using VMware converter to perform virtual to virtual and physical to virtual migrations. 

The bullshitter did not want to get found out. carry on with your old on-prem shit that is about to become obsolete. I got a job at a large US financial services company that wants to hire me to support the infrastructure they run in AWS. I dont know it, but they still hired me because they have a feeling i can learn it, and that is what he was afraid of. all the things i have learned and could learn.  

 

you's a clown to me.

Idiots authority

Had a telephone interview today and was asked this scenario question. 

You have a Windows EC2 instance and users say they can no longer connect to it via RDP. 

I would log onto the instance and check that RDP was enabled and running on the server by checking the service and permissions and see if it was listening on 3389 by running netstat -an, and I would check the AWS security groups to make sure RDP 3389 was still allowed?. 

-Yes RDP is running on the server and nothing has changed on it and none of the security groups have changed and allow RDP. 

OK, I would check any firewalls that might be restricting access. 

-No, they are all fine as well, what else. 

hmmmm, OK, so the server is running RDP and SGs are the same and no firewalls have changed. strange. I might need some more time to trouble shoot. 

- The server is down and has a Blue Screen of Death. 

Oh OK....???? 

What the fuck!!!. you just said that my netstat showed that RDP was enabled and running on the server when i checked it and now you say its crashed with a Blue Screen. you cant have it both ways!!!.

How i my supposed to diagnose a problem on a server that you say is running services but that has also crashed with a blue screen at the same time. eh!!!???????. 

i think this role has been open for a few weeks and they have not filled it. I did not apply for it and was approached on Linkedin by the senior tech recruiter of the very large financial firm that has this vacancy. He also said they needed to fill the role by Friday and seemed to be in a rush given that he was messaging me at 8pm last night arranging an interview for 10AM this morning.  

No wonder you are in a rush and have wasted weeks finding candidates. your techies are asking questions and coming up with scenarios that dont make sense. its not the answers that you are receiving that are wrong, its the questions that are wrong. I suspect you have interviewed good and competent candidates that could have filled that role and were knowledgeable, and they have been rejected because they did not give the answers you were looking for in incoherent scenarios they were presented with. 

fuck!, its tiring dealing with idiots. 

Get your Brits out

that role at the hedge fund has still not been fillled. this is the job spec. 

Comprehensive platform engineering and support experience biased towards the Microsoft server technology portfolio, including On-premise bare metal hardware deployments (preferably HPE), Advanced virtualisation design, architecture and support with VMWare, Microsoft, and containerisation with Kubernetes. This should also include enterprise integration experience with security, high availability, networking, load balancing aspects to deliver applications and infrastructure.

Experience and proficiency in translating requirements through to providing and supporting solutions and environments for both proprietary and commercial software

Platform engineering and support experience with public cloud platforms, preferably with a major Hyperscaler like Microsoft Azure or AWS.

Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code methodologies with On-Prem and Cloud IaaS, achieved through automation and orchestration of cross-platform services using tools such as Source Control, Ansible, Jenkins, Terraform and ServiceNow.

Demonstrable scripting or programming skills in languages such as PowerShell, Python and familiarity with APIs and data structures in JSON/YAML or similar.

Experience with GenAI technologies on-premise using Nvidia GPU or via Public Cloud, OpenAI, AWS, etc

I was asked a question about sites and services in Active Directory and to explain how replication works between Domain Controllers in Active Directory (KCC and ISTG nominating a bridgehead server in each site to create replication connections). I was asked about VSphere and why i had not used VSphere 7, but had used V3/4/5/6/6.5 and 8?????. 

I was asked about managing on prem SAN Storage, namely Compellent.....which i dont give a shit about. Who the fuck ignores EMC, NetApp, 3PAR and chooses Compellent?. the same kind of idiot who thought Hyper-V was better than VMware for the last decade but who has now decided in 2024 to migrate to Vmware, but not the latest version of Vmware but an older version which is due to go out of support in 12 months time. Vsphere 7. Brilliant stuff. Keep up the good work.  

I also threw in some examples of work i had done to migrate on-prem Windows infrastructure in AWS EC2 but that was ignored. I mentioned deployment usingTerraform but that was ignored. I mentioned source control using Git and automation using Ansible but that was ignored and he seemed completely disinterested. 

WHY have you not used VSphere 7, which came out 4 years ago and was superseded by VSphere 8 nearly 2 years ago???!!!!. 

What are you most interested in, on-prem or Cloud???!!!. 

- errr.....Cloud please, 

NO!!!!, WRONG ANSWER!!!!. We want people who are only interested in Windows 2016 running on premises on our own servers connected to a SAN, or running on Hyper-V connected to a SAN, or VMs soon to be migrated to a 4 year old version of Vsphere (not the latest version 8), running on our servers in our own DC connected to our own SAN storage!. 

After the interview i recall him being almost annoyed when i mentioned anything Cloud...ish, and then I started to wonder if I had read the job spec of another role and got it mixed up with these fellas. I had not. It mentions Cloud and terraform and IaC and Git and AWS through it and multiple times. 

no wonder they have not filled the role in 3 months. That idiot needs to read the job spec for the role. There is a disconnect between what he is asking, and what the job spec is asking. He must be wondering why every candidate keeps mentioning Cloud tech.....and its probably making him feel rather inadequate. I might as well be speaking Gaelic. 

all us mf'ers are sorry techies and still trash

so last week i get another call from a recruitment agency and it turns out that the hedge fund i interviewed with a couple of months ago, still has not found anyone that meets their exceptionally high technical standards.....in a firm that for 15 years thought that Hyper-V was better than Vmware, and nobody met the exacting criteria of their infrastructure platform manager who has a grand total of zero professional certifications in a 20 year career. No Cisco certs, no Microsoft certs, no VMware certs, no AWS certs, no Hashicorp certs, no.....

i told the agent that i had already gone to see them weeks and weeks ago and they did not call me back and surprisingly he asked me how i found the interview process. I have in the past slated recruitment agents and sometimes unfairly because its probably not their fault a lot of the time when it comes to no communication or not having the right information, and as a contractor i rely on agents and just like in every profession some of them are fucking useless but many of them are very good and doing their best. 

anyway i recalled my interview experience to him. i noted that the job spec contains cloud and related tech like ansible and terraform, but that the interviewer did not ask me a single question or enquire at all about how or where i had used them or anything about AWS or Azure. I told him the interviewer questioned why i had not used a single version of Vmware Vsphere 7, despite me using every single version except that one, in the last 15 years, and being certified in 4 previous versions upto VSphere 6.5. Even the recruitment agent said it was a strange thing to pick up on a single version of VSphere which is not even the latest version, and question why someone had not used it. I also told him that the interviewer seemed annoyed about my enthusiasm for Cloud tech, given he concluded the interview by asking me if i preferred it over on-premises infrastructure.  

I ended the call with the agent by wishing him luck in filling the role. 

...........and then today i see the hedge fund has just reposted the role on a recruitment board because they still have not filled it. surely they must have seen hundreds of CVs by now, given that is being recruited for by at least 3 recruitment agencies over the last 10 weeks. They must have interviewed at least a dozen candidates and it seems everyone in London has been shit so far, and the whole process was startlingly reminiscent of this previous shit show. that was another hedge fund looking for an infrastructure engineer that only was interested in on-prem old technology (despite their job spec) and being in a firm filled with stale techies that have been there for a decade and are protecting their salaries and bonuses and who have not learned anything new in a decade.

anyways, i bought a CD a few weeks ago for the first time in at least a decade, and ironically it was an EP that was released a decade ago. this is fantastic. 

all y'all still trash

had a recruitment agent message me on linked a couple days ago. turns out that the hedge fund i wrote about in my last post, still has not found anyone in London that is competent or knows anything about computers and IT. Everyone in London is still trash. 

This firm know lots about computers because they are running Hyper-V in 2024, and are only this year starting the process of migrating to Vsphere. the interviewer even mentioned they were having trouble with the migration of VMs. Clearly this clown has not heard of Vmware converter, which makes it so easy and seamless whenever i have used it to migrate VMs or convert physical servers to VM. Maybe he cant get it working or does not of its existence and is trash. 

I have heard it with my own ears where a senior techie at a firm I used to work at and who has attained a certain status and position, deliberately sabotaged interviews with candidates. He would walk back to his desk gleefully telling the rest of the table that he had 'barbecued' another candidate, which was a bit rich coming from someone who i heard explain how he thought single instance storage was implemented in MS Exchange but it was completely wrong. clearly he had never read about how it worked and was just making shit up. 
A bit rich coming from someone whose misconfiguration of a windows server caused an outage of the Exchange messaging system because its time went out of sync as time settings were not configured correctly and the whilst some VM guest and were getting time settings from Vcenter other physical servers were getting it from their own BIOS clocks. He would ask candidates obscure random shit they he would google, but clearly had no idea what function or usefulness NTP servers served amongst servers in a network. 

I dont know but i suspect something similar is happening at this place as well.  

London is a desert

so about 5 weeks ago i interviewed for a hedge fund who then did not call me back in and quite rightly so given that they run Hyper-V in 2024 and some obscure on prem storage system that i heard of once about 15 years ago which nobody runs. y'all trash. 

Also despite the job description claiming they wanted someone with AWS or Azure knowledge and other related tech like Terraform and Kubernetes, they guy interviewing me asked zero questions about them. i now suspect they only included those cloud requirements because without them the job description would look like it was from 2008. 

anyways, a few days ago i get a message from a recruiter saying he is hiring for a job at a hedge fund, and sends me the exact same job description. evidently every single candidate that was interviewed in the preceding 5 weeks, including myself, was trash and London is a desert of talent. 

fucking timewasters at these firms using the recruitment process to gauge the level of talent and then boosting their own egos by telling themselves that there is no one that reaches their exceptional standards and skill levels. i recall he asked me a question. 

It says on your CV you have used Vsphere v6.5 and v8. How come you you not used v7?. 

Err...because none of the firms i worked at happened to use v7. At my last job we went from 6.5 to 8 and in the role before that we were at v6.5. I dont v7 is fundamentally that different from v6.5 or v8 from an operation level. 

hhhmmmmm!!!!!. 

you run Hyper-V in 2024 for fuck sake and you are asking me why i have not supported VSphere7!!!. i have used and have taken the certification for v3, v3.5, v4, v5, v6, and have used v 6.5 and v8 while you were and are still running Hyper V. what versions of vmware and which certifications in it have you got you mate?. according to your linkedin certifications list you have listed none!!! along with no certification or experience in terraform or linux or kubernetes or AWS or Azure or docker or..... 

keep running your on-prem windows shit and keep telling yourself that anyone who has not used Vsphere7 is trash and not up to your exceptional technical standards. keep wasting peoples time and keep protecting your salary and position by making sure you hire someone that might not one day start talking about things you have no fucking clue about. 

got back from holiday yesterday. forgot to collect one of the suitcases from the carousel in arrivals and then exited. had to stay behind in the airport from an hour and managed to get let back in to baggage hall to collect it. absolutely knackered. 

Held by a shiver

 Had another interview at a hedge fund today, and it was a place that interviewed me about 10 years ago, and did not offer me the role at that time. I remember that at the time they ran Hyper-V and some obscure storage system i had barely head of, because clearly they thought everyone else was wrong running vmware and EMC or Netapp or 3par or HP. 

anyway i had my interview today with the head of the windows team and it lasted about 30 minutes and we covered things in very broad overview. at one point we were talking about my current role and i was explaining their vsphere setup and how they did not run DRS at my current place, because they have plenty of capacity and prefer to have their servers allocated to each host manually. he seemed incredulous that they did not run DRS, which i thought was a bit rich coming from a firm that runs Hyper-V in 2024!. Hyper-V was trash a decade ago and its still trash. 

he also asked my if i was more interested in on-prem infrastructure or cloud, and i said i was interested in both but that the level of innovation and services in the cloud was something i found very interesting. i don't think that was the answer Mr Windows-running-on-Hyper-V-but-soon-to-be-migrated-to-Vsphere was looking for. 

after the interview i looked up the guy who was interviewing me on linkedin again and his career has been nothing but on prem infrastructure and zero cloud exposure or certifications. in hindsight he was never going to like my answer. 

about 3 hours after the interview i got a message saying they would not call me back. i could not care less. you did not ask me about AWS or git or terraform or containers or ansible or docker or kubernetes or anything modern or new or interesting. 

i am off on holiday in 2 weeks and i will see what i can get when i return and if i am out of work for a period of time, i will learn more linux and kubernetes in my spare time. keep your job and keep doing that old shit. 

you are probably right in that i would not be a good fit in your team. i might start talking about stuff you have no clue about and i would lose interest quickly doing noddy work and i would probably leave in a year. 

this song is amazing. 

Acrobat

 

Last December i get a call from a headhunter telling me he is representing a hedge fund and they would like to interview me for a role. We have a brief chat about money and when i tell him how much i wanted, he paused and then told me to add 30 grand to what i said. its a shit tonne of money. 

so i have a zoom call the following week and it seems to go OK, because they immediately want to arrange another on-site interview the following week. by now its mid december when everything is usually getting quiet, but they were in a rush. i ofcourse say i will go in an see them. 

Meeting the manager in person, i realise he is very direct and blunt, which is not a problem a for me, but it just comes across a bit like an act. the he asks me a question about how i would reconnect to an esx server if it had fallen off the network in vcenter. i said i might enable ssh and connect and then restart some relevant daemons, or when that happened to me a few months ago, i would just restart the esx server, and that might bring it back. the exact same thing had happened to me on the first day of my current job, and i did exactly that any it came back to normal. 

he said that was not an option and what the keyboard short cut was to get the console up locally on the server. its not something i would do every day, so i could not remember and would just look it up. i told him as much and said it might be one of the F function keys. if you google it, you find out in 5 seconds its Alt-F2, but whatever. 

Then we were talking about Active Directory authentication, and i explained what the mechanism was when a client authenticates, but he disagreed with me and said it worked a different way to how i had said. i told him that i read it somewhere but that i must have misunderstood it, if that was the case. 

anyway the interview carries on. he asks me questions about Linux, and AWS and Git, but I notice that whenever the conversation drifts towards a subject adjacaent to a technology he asks me about, but is not specifically about a particular app or tech, he ends the discussion and moves on to something else. we talk about GitHub, and when i talk about AWS Code Commit, which is Amazons cloud based git system, he is not interested. When i talk about WinFSx he loses interest, or when i mention CodeBuild and CodePipeline he ends the discussion quickly. same happens when talking about secrets management and we go from talking about Hashicorp Vault and i start talking about AWS Secrets manager, which he clearly shows he is not interested in. 

anyway the interview finishes and i hear nothing for 3 weeks, after which i chase the headhunter to ask what is going on, and he said they had not been given any feedback so it would seem that they are not going to call me back. 

it got me thinking about the interview again. i actually looked up the AD authentication question which he 'corrected' me on, and i found the microsoft article which i had read and which i had not misunderstood. i was right and he was wrong. i also think he had a certain experience with certain vendors or apps or tech and whenever the conversation drifted to alternatives or things that were similar, his disinterest and cutting off of those discussions belied a lack of knowledge in those areas to. 

anyway 3 months have passed and he still has not filled the role, because i saw it advertised a couple weeks ago. I might be shit but surely not every candidate in London is shit. i suspect he is looking for a candidate that gives his the answers he is looking for, but that he does not know what he thinks the answers are, is actually wrong. It reminded me of that twat i worked with a private equity firm who also the that particular type of arrogant confidence that only ignorant people have. 

Jaysus!, its hard being a contractor in London. i constantly have to learn things in the evenings and weekends and have to do exams, and then i have to constantly open myself up to scrutiny and judgement as i move jobs every year and have to be interviewed. i do enjoy learning things and whilst i get hired for what i know, i am interested in what i dont know, and that is why i move jobs so often. curiosity is a good trait to have, but i suppose for some people it can get tiring.  I dont tire of curiosity, i tire of having to be interviewed by people that posses no curiosity or that see it as a threat to their positions or status and something that has the potential bruise their fragile egos. 

so i missed out on the lottery win salary. fuck it. i dont need to work with people i can learn nothing from. you have to be a certain type to be a long term contractor in London. lose the ego. keep learning, ignore the ignorant and have a thick skin to be able to tolerate idiots who think they are geniuses, when in fact they are too dumb to know they dont know. 

you need to be an acrobat in this game. 

i wouldnt want to be you.....

The hedge fund that turned me down with the asshole interviewer last summer, re-advertised the job in July. evidently amongst the dozens of candidates they must have applied the second time round clearly they must have been all shit........because the same job is being re-advertised for a 3rd time. 

surely not everyone you have seen can be shit.....but i do know that he is!.

In other news i am now Terraform certified. some at that hedge fund may think its not as cool as managing Exchange server hosted on prem, or managing disks and LUNs on a SAN in a datacentre, but i think its cool.  

I wonder when the penny will drop for him when he realises that the reason he cant find people with the skills he is looking for are because those skills are quickly becoming obsolete, and that proper techies with an actual interest in tech have moved on. its not that they are not good enough, its precisely because they are good that they dont do all that old shit that you are still doing. 

 

no one is good enough?

 So evidently everyone one that was interviewed by the hedge fund that turned me down a few weeks ago, turned out to be useless as well. good to know i am not the only one they thought was shit. 

........but really?. in the whole of London paying a 6 figure salary and being able to attract talent from investment banks, hedge funds and tech firms, you still did not find anyone good enough?. 

........or maybe the people at the firm are not good enough. maybe candidates show no enthusiasm for managing windows servers on old tech like vmware. maybe people are no longer interested in managing disks on a SAN. maybe some people dont give a shit about running on prem Exchange. 

..........maybe the guy interviewing felt threatened by contractors with experience across dozens of firms and projects and who were interested in learning new technology and not upgrading old technology. 

..........maybe he was looking for someone good......but not too good. 

who knows. but yesterday they re-advertised the role looking for more candidates. 

Bob Dylan is pretty good. 

All Talk

Fuck!!, it happened again and i saw it coming. 

I have landed a new job already at a US owned payments processing firm and its all the stuff i am interested in. AWS and terraform and containers and kubernetes......but i got a call about a job at a hedge fund and it was paying silly money, so i thought why not go for it and see what happens. 

I get sent the details and time of the interview and i do what i always do and look up on linkedin both of the guys that will be interviewing me. oh, thats odd, they have both been there exactly 10 and a half years. Oh, thats weird they both worked at the same firm before they started at the hedge fund. alarm bells are ringing. 10 and a half years at the same place!. are these guys just buddys who are comfortable and are they really going to be open to some outsider coming in?. 

the interview starts with the first guy and his second sentence after saying hello, is he would appreciate if if i was honest in my responses as he does not want to waste his time and he would not want to waste my time either. what the fuck!. that is how you start an interview, by telling someone not waste their time????. i had 4 and half hours of interviews at goldman sachs and they did not tell me to not waste their time, but you are annoyed about interviewing me for 45 minutes. 

anyway i knew it was going to be a shitshow from then on, and it was. he barely asked me anything and there were no technical questions at all. all done in 25 minutes. i thought you said you were not going to waste my fucking time dickhead!. 

he asked me about Exchange server. He asked me about managing and administering Windows servers and VMWare. the job spec for the role had mentioned they wanted someone who knew about terraform and AWS, but he did not ask me a single question about either?????. 

Towards the end he asked me what tech i was interested in, and i said AWS, Azure and terraform because lets be honest, managing storage and hardware and windows servers is really dull. i did not give a shit at this stage as its basically all the shit he does and has been doing for a decade. he dismissed it and said the linux team use AWS and terraform and look after it, not his windows team and changed the subject swiftly. 

at another point i was telling him about my work history and mentioned i had been a contractor for 12 years, at which point he immediately shot back and said, yes, he had been one as well and was familiar with working on lots of different projects and moving from one firm to another. weird thing is, he has not been a contractor. according to his own linkedin profile he has worked in 3 places over the last 15 years and none of them were contracts,  why lie?. feel a bit threatened do you?. yes, i could do that!. been at loads of firms and used all kinds of tech!!. no you have not sunshine. 

Oh, i get it. just like the asshole who had been at the private equity place for a decade that i worked at a few years back, you feel confident talking about old shit that you know, but feel threatened by new shit because after 10 years at the same place you are putting all your energy in just protecting your position and keeping the lights on but not learning anything new. you lack the confidence to start something new from zero again technically in a new field, or professionally at a new firm.  

anyways i did not get the role. unsurprisingly i saw it re advertised the next day. hey, maybe everyone he interviewed was not good enough. maybe we are all shit......or maybe its just you. 

so i will be earning a bit less money in my new job (and a bit more than i earn now), but i will work in an environment that runs AWS upto their eyeballs and processes $300bn worth of transactions a year. i think i might learn something interesting. no they dont run vmware. no they dont manage their own storage on site. no i wont be managing on prem hypervisors. that is for donkeys, its 2022 not 2012 for goodness sake. 

[HD] PearL Jam - Release (Live Holland 1992)

i'll wait up in the dark

for you to speak to me.....

Wussy - Teenage Wasteland (Live on KEXP)

Golf

Jesus Christ is London full of twats. was out driving with my little boy in the car after taking him to the library and some idiot in a VW golf starts tailgating me. the speed limits have all been set to 20mph where i live, and its a good thing if it prevents accidents and saves lives.......unless you happen to be an under-educated pleb in a 2009 dark blue VW golf. what the fuck are you doing?. what is the point of driving 6 inches away from my bumper you cockney cunt?. 

I know you hate immigrants and it must sting you inside that you have drive behind the son of an immigrant in a Benz, but its not my fault you are angry with your life that its left you having to drive a 13 year old diesel Golf. You did not work hard enough at school, you are thick as shit and you now do a shit job despite having opportunity and advantages, so be angry with yourself, dont be aggressive with me when you are driving your piece of shit. 

hey maybe he was in a rush and needed to get to work quickly. all those cocks aren't going to suck themselves.  

Asymmetrical power?

having spent most of my professional career as an IT contractor, i switch jobs and get interviewed probably more than most people and with sites like linkedin, i can now see the the backgrounds and experience of the people who will be interviewing me. 

In the same way people make assumptions based on my work history, the firms i have worked at, my funny foreign sounding name and how whis all adds up into how i would fit into their firm and their projects, i also do the same on my side. The difference is the assymetry of power in the process, with them interviewing having the power to hire me or not, and me not really having as much decesion making power in the process of choosing who to be intereiewed by and getting hired or not.......except i do and have been exercising what little power i do have. 

A couple of recent examples. I am currently working for an investment firm but i want to leave as its gotten a bit boring and they gave me a piss poor raise aftre praising my work. sorry, but i think i can find someone else who will give me more money. this is not JUST my hobby. so I get a call and a job spec for a role at a Japanese bank. first thoughts even before reading the spec or meeting them are that its going to pay very well but will be stale, boring and easy, but hey!, getting well compensated for being bored for 6 months is fine by me, and then i will move to the next thing. 

I have worked at a Japanese bank before and that is how it went. the agency sends me details of who will be interviewing me and its obvious within in 30 seconds of looking them up that this shit ain't going to work. the head of IT is someone who has been there for 20 years and worked their way up from heldesk. they also have no degree. sorry, but that is whack.  i started doing support and helpdesk type work early in my career, but then i moved to get more exposure to other tech and more experience. you dont stay at the same firm being promoted by default as everyone else leaves. I also look up the other techie who will interview me and once again the degree is non-existent and he had been at the firm 14 years. A 3rd person who will be on the call had been there 9 years. coincidentally they all seem to be from Essex. alarm bells are ringing!. 

I log into the zoom interview and the IT manager is a middle aged woman, who is sat in her kitchen, looking dishevelled and appears to have just rolled out of bed and has 9 year old kids running around behind her. really?, that's how you log into a online video interview with a candidate as the IT manager?. very unprofessional. Then the other 2 guys start talking and they are asking me about Microsoft Access issues????. I used MS Access in the late 1990s and have not been anywhere near it since. that is for helpdesk to deal with, even if you are running it 2 decades longer than you should have. i nearly interrupt them and ask them if they have heard of SQL server, but 2 minutes into this interview its just reinforced my preconceptions about Japanese investment banks in London and also the type of people who would stay for a decade or two, in one. they then start asking me about Microsoft Exchange. Cool, i know about Exchange, i used to support it in 20-fucking-12 but its now 2022 and you really should be using Office 365. its a bad reflection on the environments and estate you manage that you are asking me about old shit like this. do you want to ask me about Novell 3.12 as well?. i used to support that a couple of decades ago. 

I really am not interested in old shit. we are very luck to work in technology and are lucky to be in a sector in which the pace of innovation is so fast where stuff from 5 years ago looks antiquated. my mono syllabic answers and shrugs of shoulders let it be known i really was not interested in them, their firm or their job. these peoples heads are going to explode when they discover Office 365, Amazon Web services and terraform. 

Also, why is it that there is a almost always a requirement of having a Computer science or science/engineering degree when i apply to jobs in finance and yet i constantly come across people in the industry that do what i do or at even higher positions and do not have what i am always being asked for?. None of the people that interviewed me at that Japanese bank had a degree and yet i wont be considered unless i have one. fortunately i do happen to have an engineering degree, but i do wonder if that requirement is just a selective excuse to be used as a bar to prevent some people getting even the opportunity to be considered, because the amount of people i have seen that do not have a degree in these organisations is quite high........as long as you are of a particular ethnic group. Have NEVER met a Chinese/Indian/Asian/Black person working in a bank that did not have a degree. have come across plenty o cockneys who appear to have left school at 16 and then just managed to land jobs at investment banks some how. how the fuck does that happen....?. i recall leaving uni and struggling to get a job with an electronic engineering degree and physics, chemistry and maths A-levels. the half wit PM of the UK is a thick as shit, clown with a classics degree. which sort of proves my point. read an article the other day about Tony Blairs son doing an ancient history degree and landing himself a job at Morgan Stanley trading derivatives. why the fuck would you hire a history grad. surely there are enough maths, economics grads out there that could pick it up faster. oh wait.....Tony Blairs son. i get it now.....

the other interview i had was at a very prestigious US investment bank, which i described to a friend as like Goldman Sachs but without the scandals. Here i was being interviewed by a graduate, who had worked at a handful of other firms but had now been at this bank for about 9 years. that is what experience is supposed to look like. not just one name on your CV and still being at your first firm for the last 20 years. 

Anyway he starts telling me about the role, and 2 minutes into it, i realise they are looking for a different skill set than mine. i politely interrupt him and tell him so, and he seems surprised. he tells me its the first time anyone has said that they might not be suitable for a role and effectively asked not to be considered for it. He even amusingly says, that i did not even attempt to 'waffle my way through' his questions and pretend to know it. I told him, i could have but there really is no point and it does not serve either of our interests to do so. 

we end the interview and he tells me that London tech scene is a small world and he will keep me in mind if anything closer to my skill set comes up in his team. 

we dont have much power and as contractors we realise we are just a resource for a firm and to be honest, i do my job mostly for the money, but we do have choices. i have wasted far too much time in boring jobs doing easy work just playing along in the pantomime of work that everyone else has, and i know how frustrating it is. i been doing this shit for too long and now i know what i can do, what i want to do, and what i want to learn. hopefully the US investment bank calls me back 6 or 12 months down the line. if that Japanese bank calls me, i am not available....ever. 

in the meantime i got a new role doing AWS and terraform for an online payments provider. interesting technology on a massive scale. less money than the Japanese bank, but not career suicide as i figured out why they have all been there at the Japanese bank for so long. they cant leave because who the fuck is still using Access and Exchange!!!. 

a friend of mine who was a contractor in the early 2000s and made a fortune doing Lotus Notes at a bank for over a decade, recently told a mutual friend he had 'retired'. he is not even 50 let alone 60. he has not 'retired' from tech. tech retired him. dont do old shit and just cash in on it as long as you can. yes, he is rich but now he just sits at home. i took my little boy to the park a few weeks ago and saw him trying to jog. holy shit, people get fat in retirement!.

 

R.E.M Country Feedback live on Jools Holland 1998

A Pandemic of idiots

i have started running a few months ago because i could feel i was getting very unfit and sedentary during lockdown. i usually run around my local park but i have also started to going to nearby running track. its much nicer running on a flat track in lanes.........except for the fact that despite it being written down on the rules, some people walk around the track in lane 1. lanes 1 -3 are for runners and lanes 4-6 are for walking and for the real dumbasses, yes, you go anti clockwise. 

today some silly woman was walking slowly in lane 1 and was talking to her phone. i ran past her at least 6 times and despite me spitting, blowing hard and passing within a few centirmers of her, she just carried on strolling in lane 1 like a fucking dumbass. i was not the only person running. this track is for exercise you daft cow, if you want to gossip on your phone, you can do it in lane 6. 

then to top it off, i am running up the back straight and there is a guy walking in lane 1 in the opposite direction. well done mate, you are even dumber than the dumb cunt on the phone, who is at least walking around the track in the right direction. evidently the scowl on my face, the fact that i started running faster towards him and my clear intention of running into him if need be, made him suddenly jump out of the way. fuck me people are stupid. 

then on the way home some cunt, in a BMW 5 series starts waving his arms at me because i had the nerve to give way to a bus. giving way to another vehicle was clearly was intolerable and he started tailgating me and waving his arms like someone having a seizure. if only he really was. as soon as the road widened up a little he floored it and overtook me aggresively, only then to get stuck behind a bus. fucking dickhead, and oh, you BMW is shit. you did not even get the M-sport version, but just got a 530 SE. it looks shit. 

last week i was in the car with my wife and driving down a narrow road a car comes speeding towards me in the opposite direction like an idiot. he had a place to pull in and let me by but being the cunt he was, he passed it by 5 meters and then we just got stuck looking at each other. either i back up 100m or you back up 5m. what will be quicker you fucking low IQ dumbass?. well done, you dick head, it will be quicker for you and me, if you back up 5m which he did. as i am going past him, he winds his window down and shouts "say thank you then you twat". my wife turned to me and said, "he seems angry.", to which i replied, "well if you look at it from his perspective, you would be angry too if if you were fat, ginger, drove a nissan on a lease and had an ugly wife".  

RIP DMX

All Eyes On Me -- Bo Burnham (from "Inside" - album out now)

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band - Land of Hope and Dreams (Live in...

Fool in the Rain (Remaster)

drifting

finished my last contract at the end of March. i was doing a server patching project for the European offices and there was someone else doing the same in north america.
for the year i was there, i managed to get all the European servers done, and automated it all as well. after all, it would be stupid to not automate and schedule this type of task.

i found that the 2 people in the north america office were reluctant to put in any sort of schedule or automation. it was obvious that they were deliberately doing it slowly and manually just to extend their contracts. anyways, i finished up the european servers and once that was done, they did not need me any longer and my contract finished. that is fine. i am not going to deliberately work slowly just to string out the project in the hope of doing mind numbingly boring work for another year. the 2 people in the north america stayed and got contract renewals. Europe patching was a slick process able to managed by their regular support guys, needing maybe 15 hours a week of working time. North America still needs 2 full time people to do the same job (80hours/week).

this week i started a new contract. its a windows server migration. there is a guy there who has been on the project for a year and over the last week he has been showing me what to do. its blindingly obvious that he is deliberately going slowly. i was watching him work this week and he seemed to be doing everything so slowly. shit!, not this again.

if i am honest, i dont like working. i dont like going to work on the train every morning. i dont like moving jobs once or twice a year. i dont actually work very hard. but fuck me, these people are taking it to a new level. it must be a real effort to work that slowly. its easier to just do the work, than to string it out needlessly for that long. i can see why they have brought in another contractor in.

given the rate at which this guy is working, the sun will have expanded and consumed the earth by the time they get the servers migrated over. humankind will be floating through space looking for new habitable planets and galaxies by then, and they cant take the risk that they will still be running windows 2008 then, to do so. hence i got the call.