The Results of My Job Search

My job search was rather fruitless. I applied for one job, and had contacts with people about many others who found my resume online.

I had interviews with three companies:
KEI: Kapor Enterprises Inc.
This company is owned by Mitch Kapor, one of the founders of the EFF. The company is for profit, but they do work for Mitch’s various non-profit foundations, as well as several other cool organizations like the Mozilla Foundation. They provide IT and HR services.

The position was for desktop support and system administration. Mostly Linux, some Windows. In San Francisco. I interviewed with them on the phone two Mondays ago, and he said he would get back to me in the middle of the week. The middle of the week came and went, and then the week came and went. So this week I’ve sent two follow-up emails and have not heard back.

HotOrNot.com
HotOrNot.com is a dating website that draws their visitors in by displaying non-nude pictures of people like you and me, and letting people rate them from one to ten.

This job would have been sweet. This is the only one I actually applied to. I would have been the sole system administrator responsible for about 90 web servers. Very relaxed hours. Very nice neighborhood that I could have walked to. Very small company.

I managed to get an interview, but unfortunately I did not get the position. I don’t hold anything against them though; I honestly wasn’t qualified. Also, they actually got back to me on the results of their hiring process. I wish them the best.

VMWare
VMWare makes virtualization software that lets you run multiple servers on one computer. They are located in Palo Alto.

The position was for Support Engineer I. The people that worked there were highly technical, and it would be a great environment for learning. I interviewed there this past Tuesday.

The interview went pretty well. I could have done much better with the Linux questions but I nailed the networking questions. I am not sure if they are going to offer me a position or not, but I’ve decided that if they do offer it I won’t take it. The office was super cool, and the people were super smart, and I think I would learn a lot, but ultimately I don’t want to go to Palo Alto every day and I don’t want to work in support any more.

So what have I learned from this process? I’ve learned that I probably could have nailed one of the two “dream jobs” (KEI and HotOrNot.com) if I had more technical experience. I also learned that there are lots and lots of jobs out there, but that I don’t want to settle for another job that I want to quit after a year. So the solution to this is to learn more, and get more certifications.

From experience, I cannot very well learn and have a full-time job at the same time. My second semester in school, when I did not have a job, I got three B’s and an A. My best semester. And it took me a long time to get my CCNA. The weekend that I crammed before the exam was the hardest I have ever studied. And I seriously burned myself out.

So if I am going to learn and improve my resume by getting more certifications, I am going to have to focus on that task alone. To accomplish this, I have decided that I am going to take 2-4 months and not work. I will just concentrate on getting my CCNP. This is my goal for these several months, and as an extra-credit assignment for myself, if I can fit in some learning about DNS, Apache, and scripting, that would be great.

But I know that the biggest risk with this plan is that I’ll not be motivated to study. So to lower this risk, I am going to treat my studying like a job. I will leave the apartment at 8 or 9 every weekday, and go to the library to study for 8 hours. And then I’ll come home and forget about studying. Also, I am very interested in the subject matter. The CCNP exams (there are four of them) cover in-depth routing protocols, remote access, multi-switch networks, and troubleshooting. If I were studying something I didn’t care about, it would be very difficult.

The next few months should be interesting. But I think I’ll enjoy them.