Another attempt at interviewing... sigh...

Well... I should have known better than to try to interview for a new job, but it was a Windows Phone gig... and could have been a career-extender.

Not to even think about the crap that's going on at work right now, this would be a sweet deal.

But... I don't interview well. I've proved that to myself and others multiple times. I work on .NET 2.0 web database software connected to Oracle, Oracle Stored Procs, and Microsoft Access 8 or 9 hours a day. The stuff's not tricky by any means, it's mostly a sort-of DBMS to the data populated by other processes.

So, I don't know the tricky shit about C# or .NET. This is 93 webforms a lot of which were there when I inherited the job and I just don't need all that to do this work. So even though I'm programming C#/.NET most of the day, you can play stump-the-band with me quite easily.

However, how many devs interviewing for a Windows Phone gig know how to build a dynamic query in an Oracle Stored Proc, get the results in an output cursor and then manipulate that into a DataSet that you can bind to a control, huh? huh? ... oh well...

So... I got past the phone interview this time, got all the way to a face-to-face with two guys late on a Friday. Both were very nice. The first is quite a good liar (in the nicest way)... he actually had me convinced while I was there that it was ok that I didn't know much. The second one kept saying "no worries" sort of like you'd tell your kid "no worries, just try again 'CAT, CAT' ... what makes the 'Tuh' sound?"

They validated my parking stub, so at least there was that. Sort of like losing the old Space Quest game and getting the screen that says "Thanks for playing, as usual you've been a real pant-load"

If you think about it, and I *did* mention this to them yesterday... at my age, being able to actually get another job is tricky, so I would not put myself at risk of being out of work unless I thought I could produce the work required, and I can.

I suppose the fat lady actually hasn't sung on this yet, but I swear I can hear her clearing the phlem out of her throat as I type...

Since I mentioned it above, I may as well say what's going on at work... I'm the only .NET dev that works for my company, servicing this contract at my client's facility. It's a big lumbering government outfit. Their customer for this gig is actually paying the freight, and is a couple of the acronym-named government agencies.

Like all large companies, someone got a wild hair and decided they wanted to do something and ran with it. In this case, the finance department decided to get rid of all contractors. That includes me even though the only thing the company covers for me is a crappy chair, a warm room to sit in, a very nice PC, one crappy monitor, and one very nice monitor.

Someone outside the department I work for mandated that I be gone and gutted the hours out of the purchase order... to the point that I came within 1/2 hour of being gone last Tuesday at 4:30 when I got a 'stay of execution' to continue through the 27th. So I have been training my replacements.. yes that is plural.

5 years ago when I walked into the building, a certain gentleman (and I use the term very loosely) told his devs to not support me when I needed assistance in finding information about Manufacturing data coming from a segment of Oracle that I do not have direct access to.

Karma came full circle, jumped up on his desk, and took a nice warm dump about a week ago because he was the lucky winner that got tagged with supporting this project that not only didn't fail without his support, but has flourished. So they have me talking to 3 of his people... one that studied .NET in school, one that may or may not do the Access work because none of them have Access experience, and one that is to do the database work even though the type of things I've asked them questions on (under the covers) over the years, they haven't known the answers to anyway.

It's bad news for the project and the many people that use it because in my opinion it's going to wither away from lack of support.

And me... on the 30th I show up at the office that I haven't been to since October 26th of 2008, and I know for a fact they have no .NET work ... so I'm thinking the plan is for me to work on some embedded C even though I've been doing user interface work for the last 33-1/2 years. I suppose I might also get tagged to help the guys at the other building review design documents... that would be 'fun'. My boss is an ex military colonel and believes the KFC thing about parts-is-parts, so we're all just pluggable entities... I'm a 'programmer', so hey, assign him there.

Honestly, I have no clue what I'm going to do if I really am assigned one of those two jobs... since I don't interview for shit, I may end up the only Silverlight MVP that's working the door at Wal*Mart. Posted on Saturday, August 21, 2010 1:35 PM General , Rants | Back to top