Posted on 2008-10-07 13:00:00
Tags: Jobs, Moving
So I left BarNet in July 2008 and of course the first thing I needed to do was to find a new job. That is easier said to do for a person whose interests lay in FreeBSD, networking and DNS/SMTP services.
First I tried the HR people at Google again, but the person who I spoke to two years ago said that my file was with the software development HR and that therefor I couldn't apply for a network or system administration role. Needless to say that such a "dynamic" company isn't what I was looking for.
I applied for a role at AAPT in the network / systems monitoring group which was responsible for the internal application accounting software, something which sounded like what I did at BarNet with regarding to the telephony accounting. After two interviews and a silence of two weeks they decided that the role wasn't properly defined and that it would become available again later this year.
TPG Development in Canberra is a group which does do, besides internal accounting, also telephony based on the Asterisk PABX, something I have been doing for the last three or four years. A month after the interview and the appearance of a similar ad in the papers I had to call them to hear that they wanted to keep my resume on file for later.
A systems management role with Yahoo! in Australia had two interviews and a dead silence, only to hear later that I wasn't chosen because of my "online precense", which after some further questioning was regarding to "how I present myself in online forums". Examples were not given, but I think that there are some old players from the Fatal Dimensions MUD, who never have reached the hero level and still let their life be miserable about it, now working at Yahoo! in Australia.
Macquary Telecom had a role as system and network escalation engineer, which was given to somebody else due to my lack of knowledge of the Windows operating system, despite that they explicitely said that it was an Unix / Linux environment and that knowledge of DNS was essential.
But finally the hunt is over, I have an offer with Riverbed as an level 3 escalation engineer! Riverbed makes WAN acceleration products based on data compression on the payload of the protocols itself. So it knows how to compress the chatter between Outlook and the Exchange server, between the Windows desktops and the SMB server and, not kidding, between the CVS server and the CVS clients. At least that is the stuff which everybody knows them from, they do much more these days, something I will find out soon! The start date is 20 October 2008, and I'm really looking forward to it. In the first month I will be visiting their head offices in San Francisco and Sunnyvale, so if you want to meet up somehow let me know!
Posted on 2008-07-08 12:00:00
Tags: Happiness, Moving, Jobs
The rumours are true, it is official: I have quit my job at BarNet. For the last seven years I've worked in a couple of great projects, learned a lot more about networks, systems and people than I already knew.
A couple of highlights and learned lessons:
Of course, I could bitch and moan about the bad things which have shown up in the last year but let's keep it positive.
Now I'm in the handover phase... Which of course totally doesn't go as I had hoped for. We had two months time for it, in which we could do one month for handover, then two or three weeks for the last items which were missing or not clear or where the new people needed their hands to be held. But it was decided that it all should happen in the last two weeks...
Next step? Nothing set in stone yet, just talking. Want to talk to me?
Posted on 2007-04-26 08:00:00
Tags: Moving
I had a brief touch of intimacy with Google. Well, with Google recruitment that is. After three interviews in three weeks, they decided that I wasn't good enough for them. To be honest: their loss.
What has this experience taught me? One thing is that I even more believe that phone interviews are not really working. Look at my work and internet history, look at the documents and articles I've written. And then they ask me to write down a regular expression and judge me on that.
So, now I am a mark in the "number of recruitmentments interviewed", but has Google or I gained anything from it? Not really, except for the recruitment department which is now closer to its monthly targets.