Ok so now what?
I’m still looking for a job. I was extremely lucky to have a severance or funemployment as my friend Kirk called it. I am waiting on the results of a few interviews, but at this point I’m not holding my breath.
Its a strange time. The economy is in the toilet and my job prospects look bleaker and bleaker. At the same time, we are at the cusp of an incredible change. Obama swears in tomorrow. I believe!
So, I play fiddle…and find myself in fairly rednecky parts of Texas from time to time. In late November I was in the middle of Texas during the peak of deer season at a bar where EVERYBODY was wearing khaki or camo or some kind of combo of the two. While waiting to play my set, I overheard a group talking about our President elect. It was about 10 minutes of jokes really. Most were rehashes of jokes that had been floating around forever involving watermelons and food stamps and whatever. The interesting thing was when they ran out of jokes to tell…the redneckiest, whitest (except for his teeth) and hickiest of the lot said “You know…to be honest….I voted for the guy and I think he really can do something about this fucked up shit.” Several of them all nodded in agreement and acknowledged that they had voted for Obama as well. Maybe some of them did vote for him, maybe they didn’t. Who knows, but I feel that there was a bit of solidarity and hope for our nation at that point. Pretty amazing considering the proximity to Crawford, Tx! I Believe.
I So I’m pretty positive for the most part. Unfortunately, Nortel has declared bankruptcy so those severance. In my case, its was pretty close to being up anyway. Not a big deal except for the rather abrupt stopping of medical benefits. I don’t have any medical issues that are a problem…I’m just kinda accident prone. Thank God that’s not a pre-existing condition.
What sucks are the poor folks still at Nortel who will NOT see a severance at all. If your really interested, a pretty good discussion can be found at www.allaboutnortel.com. I know a few people that were just laid off before Christmas and they will not see a severance at all. Considering all that, my timing was optimal. The prospect of a severance was the only thing keeping folks on board. Now that there is zero incentive to stick around, you can bet the best and brightest of the bunch will be jumping ship. I seriously lucked out.
I feel that I used my time off wisely. I gained two Java certifications. SCJP and SCWCD. I had hoped that this would give me an edge in my search. I’ve been happy with my progress so far. It has helped keep me on my toes and I have tons of info at my fingertips. Im a quick study. I’ve never been modest about that, and I feel like I’m at the top of my game right now in respect to my coding/designer skills. I got SCWCD in 6 weeks. And all that over the holidays. It is kinda addictive really. Its just a matter of learning stuff…something I’m good at.
I feel like I could write a whole blog on the interviews I’ve had. But…ya know…that’s one of those things that you cant really blog about these days without it coming back to bite you. Remember kids, the Internet is forever. That picture of you and the donkey lady CAN and WILL resurface twenty years from now. Emails get forwarded, pictures get reposted and google caching lasts longer than you think. My only tips are to use Google extensively. If your going to interview for a job that requires Swing, Google: “Swing interview Questions”. Don’t be surprised when you hear the exact same questions in an interview. OK, at least ACT surprised.
Concerning the job market, the pool of jobs gets smaller and smaller. Thousands of folks are getting laid off and there are maybe dozens of jobs on the market. So I’m at a crossroads at figuring what kind of tech I should acquire next and that’s where I’m at.
What next? The two obvious J2EE paths are Web services and EJB. I’m leaning towards EJB. I hear the web services is a lot of work and to be honest, the cert is a little out of date. Other areas are Struts, Spring and Hibernate. In order to learn those, my best bet would be to pretty much make my own site from scratch. This is a Wordpress site with a few PHP customizations that I did because I could. Not enough to base a resume on.
Maybe I should start giving Violin lessons.