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.
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.
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.
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.
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!.
