Chronicle/Verbiage: Looking for a job

Journal Chacham's Journal: Chronicle/Verbiage: Looking for a job 6

Journal by Chacham on Thursday June 07, 2018 @01:36PM

Well, i'm looking for a job again. I have been pretty much since i got back in the country almost 5 months ago. Well, i waited a week or two before started, and it's not 5 months until next week, so i guess just 4 months.

Everyone told me the economy is good and i would get a job right away. Well, i called an old boss at Ford who has hired me three different times in the past, but he no longer hires people outside of India. A great deal of jobs here are for the Big 3, or tier 1, 2, or 3 suppliers. But when it comes to IT, GM's staff seems to be mostly in another state, and although i've worked for DaimlerChrysler years ago, i rarely see listings for Chrysler anymore.

Quicken loans hires a lot, but they do not seem interested in me. I've applied for a bunch of jobs, but other than a few staffing firms, i've only gotten one call from a company, only to be told that the SSIS and SSRS requirement was very important to them, and therefore i did not qualify. I mean, i feel like if you know SQL Server, having a requirement for SSIS and SSRS is comparable to requiring how to drive a car, and 3 years experience in turning on the radio. It's so ridiculous. I've seen only one listing so far with the words that they'll train you in those tools. As if they needed training.

But i'm getting ahead of myself. I'm a database developer. Or, shall i say, a developer who specializes in databases, with all recent experience being almost exclusively in Oracle and SQL Server. I write queries and fix other people's queries. Reading other people's queries is a painful experience, as they usually know nothing about databases and just "do it wrong". Another skill i have, though not really something i can list, is that i understand many programming concepts. I do not just know them, i understand them. I have helped other's with their code in languages i don't really have experience in. Good programmers can do that, right? Why do good programmers seem to only exist online?

So, i search every day (mostly) for "database," "oracle," and "sql". That ought to cover the terms used in database development: sql, t-sql, pl/sql, oracle, sql server, etc. I have my searches saved and open up some 30 tabs every day around noontime. Michigan Talent Bank (local government site) is pretty good, my only complaint that you have to save a search to refer to it directly, and can't just use the url. Indeed is not so bad, though rarely relevant. Career Builder usually doesn't find anything for me. Dice is terrible. It "updates" listing nonsensically, making finding things with the last 24 hours being mostly wheat you have seen the day before, and the day before that, and etc. Their search is also somewhat slow. And, you can't change your email address, so, overall, i think dice is a terrible site. Glassdoor is fancy, but is slow, only only shows 30 hits at a time, limits filter usage by the month (unless you use the url instead), and mostly shows garbage results for "database" (though oracle and sql are much more relevant). Google careers shows me nothing, and LinkUp hardly has anything for me. Monster, where i search for "database developer," "database engineer," (both of those with quotes) and sql, doesn't have many results, and the sort is weird. USA Jobs is about as confusing as the government, so i only search for "database," but their job descriptions are tons of noise to signal, and then applying is a pain. Kelly services is rarely relevant, and google jobs (where i add "-administrator -dba") shows few results, though they seem the most relevant, except when they shows me results for other states. All the searches are limited to 1 day (or 3 on Monday) where possible. I take about half an hour to an hour to search each day, first finding what looks interesting (and new), then reviewing the results to see what applies, and finally applying. I maybe find 1 or 2 each day, but often 0 as well.

I am wondering if i should just offer my services on something like craig's list. That is, write or tune queries, design data models, and that sort of thing. But how would even go about that? Maybe i need to switch careers instead. I don't know. I think i just spent more time writing this JE than i did looking for a job. Maybe that's my problem. Along with the rambling in this JE, my punctuation is terrible.

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