A Perfect Ending
Yesterday was my last day at Cingular and it was great. Most people would be freaking out that they are unemployed but this was a textbook ending for me and I couldn't have scripted it any better. I came in, completed my project in the time allotted (extremely rare in telecom engineering) and left with having made some new friends and rekindling an old friendship. I had a great boss who I don't think was ever wrong, not even once, good working conditions and a task that was well within my abilities. And about the task, if anything, it was a waste of my talent, but I knew that going in and I had my reasons. And you know what? It worked.
I would have liked to stay (albeit in a different role), but this tidy ending is almost just as good. My one regret is that I didn't get to know my team as well as I would have liked but I take comfort in the knowledge that we'll likely work together again someday (this industry is weird like that).
So what's next for me? Who knows. And I'm totally fine with that. 2007 is going to be an interesting year, that's for sure.
Nah.
Pittsburgh ain't gonna happen. What in the hell was I thinking? I'd only been looking for a week and have no desire to move across the country. So I told the dude thanks but no thanks and then all the sudden, he's willing to bump me five on the rate. I chuckled and told him I'd ask some friends if they'd be willing and pass his contact info along. I pulled down my resume off Monster and will start all over this weekend.
Pittsburgh
At 8:30 this morning, I tentatively accepted a consulting position in Pittsburgh, PA with a major wireless carrier. At 4:30 this afternoon, an opportunity was presented again, in Pittsburgh but this time with the company I am currently contracting for (and much prefer). I don't know much about the second position yet and I've asked for the hiring manager's name so I can do some background work before I even get to any interviews but it sounds pretty promising. Funny though, my Monster.com profile said I would move to almost any city except Pittsburgh, lol. Ok, there and any state south of Kentucky.
Surprisingly, after a whole week of no calls from recruiters (this was after a summer where I had to take down my phone number because I was getting 15-20 calls a day), jobs have been coming out of everywhere. One trend that really disturbs me though is the number of recruiters that are recruiting for positions in the U.S. but the person calling is not from the U.S. I had a relatively heated discussion with a woman this morning that ended with me saying I didn't feel comfortable submitting my resume to her client. She couldn't even say their name right let alone mine. It was awful. When I pressed her on it, she confessed she was calling from Bangalore. She had a 425-xxx number but we all know how easy that is to fake. I've had at least half a dozen of these types of calls (all offering jobs in the $60+ an hour pay range with Fortune 100 companies) so I hope this isn't going to be normal. I can't stand repeating my name and the company I work for more that 10 times in the first 10 minutes of the interview.
Oh and for the fam back in Ohio, I won't be making it back this Christmas. Though our project and my job was supposed to end on 12/8, sadly I didn't finish and have been extended until 12/29 and I will really be working this time so it won't be like the past few years where I could roam from coffee shop to coffee shop directing the troops with a latte.
Stay tuned.
Restless
I woke up at 3:30 this morning and realized that my project is ending in less than two weeks and I haven't done squat to look for another job. That thought led to another and then I wondered if I want to stay in Seattle. I get calls and/or e-mails from recruiters all the time with job opportunities in cool sounding places and sometimes I wonder if I should move. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Seattle but I've already been here six years and I'm feeling pretty restless. To give you an idea of how restless, I actually entertained the idea of moving back to Columbus for an engineering job that pays six figures plus per diem (that goes pretty far in Ohio) before realizing it was pretty much in the same building I used to work in at Qwest. That was ok and all, but I'd get bored there in six months. And I'm pretty sure all of my friends have married and moved on.
So that leaves Colorado, Northern California and Alaska. There are lots of opportunities in Southern Cal, and Arizona (what's up with that!?) but I'd get sick of the constantly warm and sunny climate after a single week so the pay would have to be astronomical (READ: $250k +) for me to even think about it. And that ain't gonna happen. The Denver/Boulder market has just imploded since my days at Level 3 so that's pretty unlikely. Northern Cal is so outrageously expensive that I actually turned something down that paid $68 an hour + per diem! Alaska sounds really cool until I think about all the air travel I'd have to endure to get anywhere else. I've sworn I'd not take a traveling job after the Level 3 gig.
So maybe I'll stay in Seattle. The climate is perfect when it's not summer and the job market is pretty good for my skillset. Why am I always so afraid to stay in one place?
Exciting New Job Inquiry
Job: Project Manager for a large wireless comapny in Bellevue, WA
Compensation: $65-80 per hour depending on experience and availability
Hours: 8-5 PST
Description: I won't put this here because I'm considering a different position with this company after my current gig is up at the end of Nov.
Minimum Requirements:
(text emphasis added by me but otherwise unchanged)1) MS Office Tools (Word, Excel, Project, PowerPoint, Visio)
2) Sound understanding of infrastructure and software development project lifecycles within company.
3) Ability to effectively manage time, prioritize work, multi-task across many assignments with no direction.
4) Proven experience in producing results with varying requirements and ambiguous directives.
5) Strong communication skills, both written and oral.
I literally laughed myself out of my chair at home after bullet number 4. Decent pay, but no friggin' way. Talk about a recipe for failure. I couldn't believe they actually put that in the job description but at least management is being honest. There is no way to win in that job. I've been a project manager and managed them and let me tell ya, they are really there only for blame. If a project goes well, the executives never hear about it genrerally don't care. If the project fails, it's the project manager's fault and the manager is spared.
This might have been a slightly more accurate description:
Candidate will manage a highly technical project of which he or she knows nothing about. The candidate will be responsible for, yet have no requisite authority of a group of engineers who do not understand said project either. Candidate will be humiliated on weekly conference calls and meetings with executives who do not understand said project. Upon failing to deliver the unreasonable, under funded and vague deliverables in a timely fashion, the candidate agrees to take all blame for failure.
Thanks but no thanks dear large wireless carrier based in Germany. That's a damn funny job description though!
