they be tweaking

 so the asset management firm that ended up rejecting the powershell wizard, who turned out not to be a wizard, and then asked to keep me 'engaged' in the process, ended up interviewing someone else last week. I know this because the agent who is finding them candidates called me today. the feedback on this new candidate was that they did not think he was better than me, and so they rejected him, and want to still check that i might be available. 

Yes!!!, i am still available!!. grow a pair and make a decision!! put up or shut up!. 

what on earth are these people playing at. why are they wasting peoples time. we have interviewed lots of candidates over the last 2 months and none of them have been better than you, but we are not going to hire you and are going to find someone else. 

what exactly is the criteria you are hiring on. did you not like my face?. do you not like my name?. you clearly cant find anyone else better than me, and yet you dont make me an offer even after you get constant reinforcement that there are not that many people better. 

clearly knowledge and skill is not enough. 

In the meantime i am still at my current place, and its still pretty shit, but i have learned a little bit more AWS and its been nice to see how it is configured in a large mission critical environment of thousands of instances and load balancers and FSx and S3 and dozens of VPC's and peering and transit gateways and the rest. the people are still unhelpful, but i like browsing the environment trying to figure out why they did certain things in a certain way. 

keeping my head down and just trying to get through each week. something is going to come my way soon. hopefully a firm that is interested in utilizing people with skills as opposed to a place like my firm that does not want to utilize staff or the other firm that is looking for something other than someone with the most skills. these people be tweaking. 

proficiency

The Asset Manager firm, that had put me on the back burner because they had found a powershell wizard, did not end up hiring that guy. in his second interview, i suspect they found he was not quite the guru he had claimed to be, because the recruiter that got me the interview there, called me and asked if i was still available in case they wanted to take a contractor on board, and then see how it goes hiring a permie. 

I am not special, but i dont bullshit in interviews either. if someone asks me how i am at powershell i say i am OK, but not expert. i can get my head around scripts and paste bits together from github or stack overflow to make it do what i want. 

i have worked in a lot of places, and i compare myself to the best people i have seen doing powershell, and i am not on their level and can admit it. I suspect some people have only worked within their own firms or in a couple of places and then think because they know more than anyone else at their firm, they must be great. 

if you play football in the park with only your friends, you might be one the best players, but it does not mean you are anywhere near a top level baller. its when you play with real talented players, that you can measure where you are. 

I have worked with AWS experts and powershell experts and Linux experts and Messaging experts and lots of people who are way more skilled than i am in each of those skills. what i bring is that i know a bit about a lot of stuff.  its like the person i mentioned in my last post who put up a website giving arbitrary percentage scores of his own proficiency in various tech. 95% proficient in Kubernetes, you say?. not thought of actually taking the certified Kubernetes exam though, have you?. why take exams when you can just give yourself a score!. 

will see if the recruiter manages to convince the AM firm to take me on as a contractor whilst they search for a permie that knows everything about everything. the AM firm seem a little unrealistic as well. they seem to want a powershell guru, and a SQL guru and were asking me about routing protocols and Network OSI layers. i know a bit about all those things, but they seem to want a world champion. 

hopefully i get to escape my current place soon. its a new year. hopes are high.   

New Year, No Clue

I posted about having an interview at a Private equity firm in October last year, and it seems they have still not found anyone in the whole of London who might be good enough, because they are re-advertising the role. 

As Mentioned before, they want a Cisco networking and Meraki networking specialist......who will also do 1st line service desk and Active Directory administration as well as setting up PC's and installing software for Users and who will also maintain the VMware infrastructure. 

They even had a breakdown of the role and it stated 75% Networking and 25% Windows/VMWare and 1st/2nd/3rd line support. Is this department run by a clown who has never worked in an organization before?. No serious network specialist, which is what I was told was their priority,  is going to do 1st line telephone support resetting someones password or installing Powerpoint for some rando. 

Also, they have a guy there who worked in Tesco's 3 years ago, but who according to his own personal website, is now '95% proficient' in Azure, Entra ID, Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, Ansible, AzureDevops, Octopus Deploy, and '70% proficient' in AWS, Bash and Cloudflare, but is '90% Proficient' in Nginx and Datadog and '80% Proficient' in TeamCity. He literally has a personal website stating how 'proficient' he is with a percentage value in particular technologies. Fuck me, i cant believe people actually fall for this shit. I am not making this shit up. it literally says on his personal website 'Hover over a skill for current proficiency'. 

This is the same guy who posted his test score percentages of the Azure exam????. If you want to show others people how proficient you are, maybe include a link to your Github repo which has dozens of projects and code for things you have worked on, and also show how you are contributing to other projects in other repos. 

Nah!, i will just make a website with icons and as you click on each icon it will tell people how proficient i am. 95% on Helm!. 95% of what!?. cool, you are almost there. just 5% more to learn and then you have cracked it. 

It also leads one to wonder, if they have already employed people with such high 'proficiency' in Entra ID and Ansible, then why are they looking for a Network engineer to spend 25% of their time administering users and access and installing software. surely if there was an issue with access, you would go to the 95% proficient in Entra ID dude and they guy with 95% proficiency in ansible would have packages already created to install software for users, rather than the network specialist. 

they still have not filled the role. time wasters.