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What job do I want? Part 1: me
Skills
It's got to be C or C++, pretty much. Shame to throw away twenty years of that. I'm best on some flavor of Unix but am comfortable enough with Windows and Visual C++ that that'd work well also.
I can also claim some Java, some CORBA, a tiny bit of SQL, some Perl... but those are all minor. If a job says those are handy to have, great; if they're the main course, not great.
Strengths
Mostly, I am smart and I learn fast. I will get to know really complex stuff quickly. In previous jobs, I have plowed into the learning for a while, then eventually surpassed my coworkers in depth of knowledge. Not counting Spice and Stretch, where *everyone* was pretty smart, it would usually be about four months between my start date and when I became my peers' default Question Answerer.
This confidence in my ability to learn means I'm unusual in my willingness to ditch entire areas of previous experience and strike out into something new. The good side of this is that there is probably a lot out there that I could do. The bad side is that it does not play well on a resume. People are much more comfortable hiring experience than raw smarts. Once I get to the interview I'll probably be fine.
Motivation
I want to do something that makes a positive difference to someone somewhere. I want to know that my work made someone's job easier, made someone's hobby more fun, made someone's office run more smoothly, made someone's health better, whatever.
Being motivated this way (rather than by intrinsic coolness of a technology) helps narrow it down.
It's got to be C or C++, pretty much. Shame to throw away twenty years of that. I'm best on some flavor of Unix but am comfortable enough with Windows and Visual C++ that that'd work well also.
I can also claim some Java, some CORBA, a tiny bit of SQL, some Perl... but those are all minor. If a job says those are handy to have, great; if they're the main course, not great.
Strengths
Mostly, I am smart and I learn fast. I will get to know really complex stuff quickly. In previous jobs, I have plowed into the learning for a while, then eventually surpassed my coworkers in depth of knowledge. Not counting Spice and Stretch, where *everyone* was pretty smart, it would usually be about four months between my start date and when I became my peers' default Question Answerer.
This confidence in my ability to learn means I'm unusual in my willingness to ditch entire areas of previous experience and strike out into something new. The good side of this is that there is probably a lot out there that I could do. The bad side is that it does not play well on a resume. People are much more comfortable hiring experience than raw smarts. Once I get to the interview I'll probably be fine.
Motivation
I want to do something that makes a positive difference to someone somewhere. I want to know that my work made someone's job easier, made someone's hobby more fun, made someone's office run more smoothly, made someone's health better, whatever.
Being motivated this way (rather than by intrinsic coolness of a technology) helps narrow it down.
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I've been trying to deal with that one also. My IT experience was learned on the job (small office, 10 workstations, 4 servers) or at-home (for my own Mac or my mother's Mac). But I have no certifications, and there are holes: I worked with Linux, configured some DNS, but I have not done any Linux installs. I set up a diagram for a wiring and pulled cat-5 under desks for setting up our small LAN 2x, but I didn't do the configuration on the NAT firewall / router. I have HTML experience and some of our pages were dynamic, but I didn't write the perl code... and I have no experience with C (which is what the BADGER map / aerial photo display software written by Lockheed in conjunction with NASA was written in). Others in the office worked with the SQL, I just contributed spelling out some of the major categories to put in the database.
Whatever you find to do, good luck! ...Here, I am juggling various things, figuring out the "what, where, and how" of a better job being one of them.
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Ooo. That just crystallized a BIG difference between my last two jobs, something I hadn't been able to put into words. Spice hired smarts. Stretch says it hires smarts, but I realize now that they don't. They take no chances. They hire experience.
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