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New Re: So... you have made it impossible for me to...
you're right - you CAN'T answer my question, which makes me wonder why you jumped into this thread in the first place. Really, all you said was "keep learning stuff", which I said that I am. Were you assuming that I just sit at home downloading porn all day long?

What I asked for was specific suggestions on what to focus on so that I might get a leg up on the competition when my resume joins hundreds of others on a manager's desk. I know that C# is fast becoming the language of choice since Microsoft, for reasons unknown, seems determined to kill VB, so I taught myself that. Now I'm digging into a "teach yourself Java" book.




"Chicago to my mind was the only place to be. ... I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle, and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and peddlers and the boom and clank of freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn't hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up to the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built--a place for trade, of course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from."

-- E.L. Doctorow
New I *CAN'T* answer because of your conditions set out.
First off, take a deep breath and take this for what it is, not a personal attack, but a truly heart felt observation that you don't/won't want to read or hear.

I would have rather given you some constructive answers, but you are very antagonistic and pissy and down right being an ass.

Since you can't *WON'T* change your attitude... it will come through on *EVERY* phone interview, every Face to Face, every skills evaluation... Any interaction with real people. If someone is looking for a reason to not call you back, the attitude projection gives them that excuse.

Trust me when I say this. You have an attitude that is keeping you (at least a big part) from making headway into getting and, finally when you get one, keeping a job.

Please don't keep brushing off my advice here. Your attitude is what is the main sticking point.

But beyond you attitude, make sure you DO indeed volunteer, or do some side jobs for peanuts... (I'm serious there). Try to work on a community/FOSS project, contribute code or documentation or even support users of the project.

I hate to code, I hate to document, but I sure as hell can help people fix things when they are having issues. I did that for years on Debian-User and Debian-Devel. I also helped write docs and break through some of the SAMBA issues about a few years ago (I think Barry will remember that). I helped John Terpstra work through some issues using Barry's system to fix/change/debug them... but not exposing Barry's systems to the world at large. I also help the EXIM team do some config planning (and then it got tossed along with Debian's way of handling the exim.conf).

IOW, pick up a torch and start working it. You only have you to rely on. Nobody else really and truly gives a damn about you in that respect, Brian. You have to help the change come from within to the outside. Attitude changes are only the first step.

I still have a serious problem with authority and it shows when I get pulled by the TSA for additional searches. Nearly every time I go through a TSA scanning point... I get nabbed for additional searching.

So, don't think the world isn't out to get you... because it is out to get you. Just not in the way you think it is. Because if you don't watch out and make a real concerted effort to stay ahead of the game... the steam roller that is slowly following you *will* catch up and squish you like a bug.
New I give up
I've asked two questions in this thread, and NO ONE has answered either one.

All but one person responding here has said "I have a bad attitude", etc., and they're people who I have never even talked to in a social situation, let alone as part of a telephone or face-to-face interview. If they're going only on what I've written here this week then they are truly full of it. To say that my "attitude" must be coming out in interviews is a total crock of horseshit because I haven't had any interviews since I lost my job. That is why I posted the two questions, to get ideas on WHAT TO ADD to my resume so that someone will consider talking to me!

As I pointed out more than once: I have recently taught myself C# since it's much more popular than VB.Net currently; I'm picking up Java; and I'm doing a web site for a friend's side business. She is not in any hurry so I don't have a completion deadline and can spend the time writing it in C#, so that I can add it to the resume. Let's see: teaching myself new things? Check. Doing volunteer work for free to gain experience? Check. Advice that was given by Another Scott that I'm already doing. I thought that mentioning it made it blatantly obvious but it appears that some posters missed them both times. Funny thing: when you get laid off near the tail end of a recession you find that most everyone else are already doing what has been proposed. I was looking for advice that was fresh and different.

Greg, if you had posted something like, "I'm a Linux sysadmin; I don't know as much about GUI development tools or languages in the Windows world, so I'd recommend learning Ubuntu and software X, Y or Z", then I might have let you slide. But you didn't. You say that I set conditions regarding my questions that prevented you from answering them. I'm calling bullshit on that - we all know that you're too smart to use that crutch. Based upon your earlier posts, if you want to go off on that tangent, then start up a new thread and let's jump onto it there.

This community is weighted heavily towards Mac users and Linux professionals. Nothing wrong with that, though we used to have a larger variety of skillsets in our last incarnation. Linux in the networking and data centers rocks, but out front, in my opinion, the business world is still a Windows shop. That's where my bread is buttered and until the economy improves significantly. that's what will continue to be my forté. I asked my questions to see if there was something that I had overlooked, any tools or languages that IWETHEY members are using in their places of employment. Again, they went unanswered.

I know that the world is out to get me. I just want to add some new and effective arrows to my quiver with which to defend myself.

This dead horse has been more than beaten to death. The funeral is over, the casket is closed and it's time to go to the restaurant and get drunk.




"Chicago to my mind was the only place to be. ... I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle, and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and peddlers and the boom and clank of freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn't hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up to the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built--a place for trade, of course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from."

-- E.L. Doctorow
New Awesome. Now that you have finally come to the...
ropes end, you have finally given me the full story.

You have never coherently explained things, just intimated the issues. You've never came out and said *WHAT* it is you really wanted, just side-swiped it and told us to look at the impression it left on the side of it. You finally gave me the meat of your argument, rather than complain about it without fully backing it.

Now that you've finally done this... now we (at least *I*) can start answering your questions. This is an full explanation of what I do and what I am and some advice at the end... please don't just skip it and go to the end.

First off. I'll tell you what I have, what I use and what I do.

I have about 60 machines (from real hardware to virtualized machines). These machines are *ALL* Linux, either RedHat v5.2 though RedHat v7.3, a couple of Fedora Core Machines, and CentOS v3.x through CentOS v4.x through CentOS v5.x.

For various reasons the older machines have become static machines devoted to specific tasks but updated as needed to appease the PCI gods. The still maintained distributions are kept up to date in an ad-hoc manner due to PCI (Payment Card Industry) and least amounts of downtime requirements.

We basically have 5 type of machines:

Type 1) Firewalls: we technically have 7 of them. Two Firewalls in hi-availability mode also doing gated load balancing as part of the hi-availability role, one VPN server which operates only Site to Site, network to network connections. Two firewalls that operate as routers with access rules and exceptions and two web applications firewalls using squid, apache and mod_security.

Type 2) Database machines: We have 10 of these (one with two mysql instances), 3 pair with master-master, row-level circular transactional replication. 2 slaves (one for reports and one for backups) off one of the main master-master, and one slave (to the same other machine for backups) from another master. 1 standalone machine for stats logging related to webservers.

Type 3) Dedicated Webservers: We have quite a few of these. We have a modperl instance backing a reverse proxy plus webserver (port 81 for the modperl, port 80 for the proxy). These setup vhosts are served by 2 triple clusters, they all run from a shared "runtime environment" and all run the same apache configs (multi configs per vhost for all the machines and only the affected addresses work for each machine). These webservers also use the same DB machines (one set as master the other slave, the newer ones use either as failover write or read only) and use DB caching which speeds up the large setup like we have. These machines are access through the Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) which also load balance them. The WAFs are them selves load balanced through the gated firewalls using least busy connections selection. This works relatively well and can be very robust.

Type 4) Application Servers: These are the meat of the system. This is where our Software product shines. We use a heavy mixed of C, Perl and Shell. These application servers host our API daemons, SOAP servers (both CGI and persistent Perl), Restful Services, Reporting frontends, SSH terminal access to our "legacy" terminal application and also allows access to our new "GUI" pointy clicky client which is a cross platform Windows, Linux, OSX application written in Perl and wxWidgets. (More on this in a moment)

Type 5) Miscellaneous Servers: These range from super old single use single task machines (ie 500MHz 256MB ram... automagically throttles throughput to an acceptable level) for bulk sending of e-mails. To very fast and powerful machines, that some are used for Reporting, for monitoring (with nearly full instrumentation for the deployment process, but not yet for QA, Development or testing processes) or for things like Centralized logging and LDAP, DNS, TIME (NTP), log analysis, machine IDS logging, or for Virtual Machine hosting duties.

A word on our "GUI Client" for our software. It is written in Perl and uses wxWidgets. It runs on Windows (now using Active State Perl vs Strawberry Perl). It runs on OSX using Perl. It runs on Linux using Perl. Its fast, communicates very gracefully over bad connections, vs SSH which is *very* connection oriented and very susceptible to disconnect.

Now, a word on Staff requirements, which also apply to me:

Windows (XP, Vista, 7) is only a testing environment, preferred method of the machine == VM. It cannot be used as a Primary Workstation, it will not be paid for if its in the cost of the monthly reimbursement and you are not using either OSX or Linux or *BSD. As a VM OS you can buy a full edition.

Staff preferred OS == OSX. Acceptable OS == Linux or BSDs. Private/Public Key Authentication is the only method to get into our Login relay machines for Staff, a PCI requirement.

I administrate, deploy and maintain the deployment and stability of these machines. These machines also are my charge, I have to make them work right. I have to setup the services properly (from Firewalls, to DB machines to Reporting machines etc...). I grasp all the backend parts and how things work together and am able to recover from catastrophic problems relatively quickly... but actually explain our software stack... ummm no.





Now a word on your real question, which is *WHAT* can I put on my Resume to "guarantee" a phone call from a recruiter or HR type persons?

Answer: Nothing, Everything. The real question is, making sure your resume/CV represents you and your aims and wishes... not what you will settle for.

My "recruiter" resume... well was kinda jammed into one page. If you want to look at it, I don't care if you do look at it. Its kinda plain and very stark in my opinion and really SUCKS.

It got me exactly BUPKISS, no interviews or face to face, a couple of recruiter calls giving advice to compress it even more:
http://www.gregfolke...olkert-resume.pdf

Now, the one I traditionally have is full and very detailed and stylized (but not comprehensive). This helped. A lot in fact. I don't care what Recruiters tell you, they are only looking for easy picks and obviously you ain't one (not a BAD thing about you, but it is a BAD thing for you as == no job). I'm not one either and I got passed over for MANY "Enterprise" Linux jobs through recruiters as they assume nobody good is in Grand Rapids, MI and all have to come from Detroit or from New York or Raleigh North Carolina (etc).

This is the resume that got more interviews than *ANY* recruiters combined ever got me. Its located here:

http://www.gregfolke...FolkertResume.pdf

I've not updated it since 2007. But since its in Open Office and not in Word... I export to PDF just to piss off the recruiters, its the one thing they don't quite get.

All this to say: You have to make sure you do what *YOU* need to do. I stopped listening to so called Hiring recruiters as they have one thing to do... fill a position as quickly and as cheaply as possible for the customers so the recruiter can get the biggest bonus for coming in under the stated maximum. They don't care about you... only themselves. You have to start cold calling places, even if they don't like it... it lets them know you really would like to work and are making your it your job to get a job. That is a big plus no matter what the recruiters tell you.

I hope you get what I am trying to tell you and have been the whole time... change what you are doing to make yourself more desirable. Stop making excuses and just do it.

I had to change, a divorce was in the making, I had to change to the extreme.

Good luck and do it.
New Hey Greg (just saw this thread)
Love your 2nd resume'. Really. I only got your "official" one years back.

But, one word scares me.

"Promoting" open source. I know in the 2nd one you demoted it to "promoting". But really. Can't you find a word that signals your endorsement of open source while not making it seem that you will ignore perfectly valid non-open source solutions? Or be prejudiced against them somehow? It's a no win word.

The word will be a disqualifier for some people, and won't get you that many brownie points with the people you care about. You already got max brownies based on tech skills with them.
New Well, its true... I *DO* prefer OSS stuff over
equally as good Proprietary systems.

Key word there - equally. At least equal in places where it matters to the application of said product/system.

I guess you are right... promoting would be better said as: Favoring where applicable

So, you are right.
New Don't give up. It's just getting good. :-)
I know this job market is terribly frustrating. I have a great deal of sympathy for what you're going through.

But I think you're missing an important part of the story.

The job market doesn't work the way we were taught when we were in school. Especially these days.

In the vast majority of cases, there is nothing that you can add to your resume that's going to get you job interviews. Resumes are an important part of the hiring decision, but they're down the list in the process.

Where I work, nobody gets a job interview based on a resume received in the mail. Filling out an SF-171 won't get you an interview either. That's simply a mountain of paperwork that doesn't open doors.

You get interest and interviews and job offers by networking, or by getting your foot in the door at an entry-level or trainee-level position. (Unless you're willing to dramatically change careers, trainee-level is probably out, so you've got to network.) Employers have to know you before they'll take a chance on you.

It's great that you're doing a web page for a friend's business, but that's not what I meant by volunteer. You need to be part of something that's like a job. You need to be part of a formal team. You need to show that you can meet deadlines, that you can work with others, that you can follow instructions, that you can think on your feet. Your work for your friend isn't going to tell a potential employer that you can do that work in a real-world environment that has stresses and deadlines. It won't tell them how efficient you are. It shows you're willing to help a friend, and it shows you will take the initiative to learn new skills. But that's not enough.

You need to treat your downtime as a job. Not just searching Craigslist and Monster, not reading language manuals, not sending out hundreds of resumes, but mostly getting out and meeting people who knows someone who knows someone who will help you find a job that you want to do. I know that family gets in the way, but you've got to do it. Supposedly, there are at least 6 people looking for every job opening. You've got to stand out as a person, not as a resume.

There's nothing wrong with coding in VB if that's your passion. If you're still interested in VB, connect (ideally in person) to a VB users meeting and work on a project with a group. If you want to move into C# or Java (but remember your experience and be careful about getting locked in again), connect to a users meeting, find a group project, etc. If you're already doing that - great. Keep it up, and network more.

You only need one job. You need to find out what you have a passion about and find someone out there who has the need for a person with that passion. That's how you'll get the interview.

If you don't know what you feel passionate about, or you feel that you just want to make a contribution and be treated with respect and earn a decent living but it doesn't matter much what the job is, well, in this job market, you're guaranteeing more weeks of frustration. Companies want to hire what they think are the best people, and that means a level of genuine enthusiasm. Companies that are hiring can have their pick. If a company just needs someone who is a middling performer, they can use an agency or even hire someone in Bangalore. You don't want to compete with them, do you?

If you were starting over, what would you be passionate about working on? Not as a hobby, or for relaxation, but what do you find stimulating intellectually? Find someone who works in that area and talk with them....

None of this is a magic bullet - it's still going to take work. But it gives you a leg up on everyone else out there who thinks that the resume is the key.

HTH a little. Hang in there.

Cheers,
Scott.
New if you are thinking java join the local SUG
sponsored by Sun in large cities and tend to have a lot of java type free demos, white paper. You dont care about that because you are networking with people with jobs that you can leverage like scott sez
New That would be strike one.
Volunteering for experience is a good thing.

Putting something together like a website that you can demo..good.

You spoke of adding things to your resume that will get you in. Any more, your resume should be customized to the job every time, just like the cover letter.

And to Greg's point, jobs go to folks in the NETWORK. Going to the hotel bar and drinking (unless it is a bar crowded with people in your field) will seal your fate to NEVER get another job.

This is the environment we are in today. In my little town here you can't even get into McDonald's anymore unless you are referred by someone already there or at least someone who knows someone. It is that bad.

Will it improve? Certainly. But not anytime soon.

Also don't know about your location flexibility...you really do need to be able to move to where jobs are if you are in a location where jobs are not.
I will choose a path that's clear. I will choose freewill.
New Advice from a career counselor.
http://andrewsulliva...er-counselor.html

Good advice.

Hang in there.

Cheers,
Scott.
     Conficker it out? Here's a detailed account - (rcareaga) - (38)
         Mostly good ... except ... - (drook) - (37)
             Missing two of the biggest issues known... - (folkert) - (36)
                 Oh, forgot to come back when I finished the article - (drook) - (34)
                     I don't want to run Windows Vista or Windows 7 - (lincoln) - (33)
                         Where did I say I desired anything? - (drook) - (26)
                             Correction - (altmann) - (1)
                                 Ahh, my bad -NT - (drook)
                             Then show me - (lincoln) - (23)
                                 Two things - (drook) - (21)
                                     Re: Two things - (lincoln) - (20)
                                         Keep ignoring advice... - (folkert) - (19)
                                             And you're ignoring reality - (lincoln) - (18)
                                                 Re: And you're ignoring reality - (folkert) - (17)
                                                     Indeed. - (pwhysall) - (3)
                                                         I guess Hell has frozen over - (lincoln) - (2)
                                                             Shrug - (pwhysall) - (1)
                                                                 Re: Shrug - (lincoln)
                                                     Project much? - (lincoln) - (12)
                                                         http://www.redhat.com/certification/rhce/ - (boxley)
                                                         So... you have made it impossible for me to... - (folkert) - (10)
                                                             Re: So... you have made it impossible for me to... - (lincoln) - (9)
                                                                 I *CAN'T* answer because of your conditions set out. - (folkert) - (8)
                                                                     I give up - (lincoln) - (7)
                                                                         Awesome. Now that you have finally come to the... - (folkert) - (2)
                                                                             Hey Greg (just saw this thread) - (crazy) - (1)
                                                                                 Well, its true... I *DO* prefer OSS stuff over - (folkert)
                                                                         Don't give up. It's just getting good. :-) - (Another Scott) - (1)
                                                                             if you are thinking java join the local SUG - (boxley)
                                                                         That would be strike one. - (beepster)
                                                                         Advice from a career counselor. - (Another Scott)
                                 Volunteer somewhere doing what you like/want to do. - (Another Scott)
                         With recent statement from you... - (folkert) - (5)
                             Yeah, a Linux distro from a few years ago - (lincoln) - (4)
                                 Not so - (pwhysall)
                                 For someone who claims to know very little about linux - (crazy)
                                 I'm running... - (folkert)
                                 Definitely not so. - (static)
                 'Ring 0' says it all.. - (Ashton)

Seriously, for someone who shows some signs of intelligence, the consistency with which you misunderstand anything inconvenient to you is quite amazing.
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