Tuesday morning I interviewed with Norfolk Southern RR for a conductor (forced promotion in about a year to engineer) position. Pay would in about 5 years would be about double that of one of the best paying former jobs of mine (it starts at 80% of that pay and goes up yearly) but alas I'm "over-qualified."
Apparently they read grad school on my application and think I'm just going to up and leave the job (they invest nearly 80k in training new hires, not that I'd really need that much, but I'd still have to jump through their hoops) when an IT position opened.
And for some reason I gather there's this "Oh, you're educated, that must mean you want a family and don't want to travel." Ummm, I'm un-wed, no kids, and no plans to ever have kids. I'm willing to work entirely on-call, I have no traffic violations, would pass drug-test with flying colors, and no convictions ever.
I can't seem to shake the grad school thing, and I can't lie on their application as they do a full background check and any omissions and you're out - and I think leaving out grad school would be a rather large omission. Plus how do I explain the period of unemployment?
Then there's the jobs in the paper that are entry level computer stuff, I get the same shake down there - over qualified to work a help desk. Yet, I'm underqualified for those seeking 5-years experiened Sun admins. I don't have 5 total years of Sun admin experience, several years NT, several Unix, not 5 total of each, thus I'm not qualified enough for those jobs. And I have yet to find anything middle ground - all 5+ years or "Just a BS is fine!"
Learn something from this kids, don't go to grad school.
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I'm just a O(n) person in a O(log n) world.
Be seeing you...
