# A job hunting adventure



## drhowarddrfine (Jan 17, 2019)

Some of you may know that I sold my web dev business and restaurants recently. I've been tinkering, studying, learning, goofing off since. My wife could tell I was getting antsy and encouraged me to look into finding a job or doing pro bono work or something. I can work for someone else if I'm in charge of my area of work and I'm not so good at being a grunt but I can't help it if I see a web site that struggles to be a web site and I saw a job listing for a web developer for a manufacturer near me and I feel like I'll be a knight in shining armor coming to the rescue.

Now, I say "near me" because it's actually just under an hour drive away in the middle of nowhere. I am positive they aren't going to get any professionals who would want to go to Podunk Hollow for this unless they already live near Podunk Hollow so I applied thinking it might be fun coming in on my white steed and plates all glistening in the sunlight.

That was on December 4th and I hadn't heard anything until the first week of January when I got an email asking me to come in to take a mechanical test. I could come in, any time, Monday through Thursday from 7AM to 4PM. Unannounced. Just show up.

Huh.

I was wondering if this was some kind of automated response to my application but I'm a professional and I wish to be treated as such and, no thank you, I will not respond to such requests. However, two weeks later, I get a phone call from HR lady. "We sent you an email asking you to come in to take our mechanical test. Did you get that? Won't you come in?"

"Er. Why am I taking such a test?", I asked.

"Oh, it's company policy. Everyone takes it. For example, our previous web developer decided he could make more money working in the plant and he needed to show mechanical aptitude to get that job."

Huh.

I told her I'm taken aback from such a request and would have to think about it but, a few days later, I went to lunch with a former client who was near said Podunk Hollow and I figured, what the heck, I think I'll go by this place and take the test for fun to see what it's all about. Maybe it's 10 questions and I can get out of there or the real person in charge of hiring a software guy will get it and ignore it cause it doesn't make sense in the first place.

It was two tests of 120 questions total about things like bending sheet metal patterns, pulleys, loads and I don't care to the point that I just wanted to get out of there and I clicked on my best guess and left. The HR lady handed me her card with a date on the back of it. "If we think you fit the job, 'The Recruiter' will call you by this date." That was the fourth time I heard of "The Recruiter" as if he was some god behind a curtain to be feared but, surely, he wasn't so dumb to think I needed to pass a 120 question mechanics test--did he?

I went home and found a couple of online tests similar to what I took though they were only 10-20 question tests. One I only got a 60% grade on, again, not trying too hard. The other I got a 70%.

Would "The Recruiter" care? I don't know but today is the last day for them to call me. If the previous developer of their site went to the factory floor for more money then I don't think they can afford me. If they need me to pass a mechanics test to do their software development, I'm not sure I'm interested. I guess we'll know in about nine hours from now.


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## Sevendogsbsd (Jan 17, 2019)

Very interesting! Curious to see how this turns out...(and good luck)


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## Vull (Jan 17, 2019)

Good luck! Hope it all goes well.


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## tommiie (Jan 17, 2019)

I can't believe this is for real... And yeah, if someone on the factory floor makes more money than the web developer, I wouldn't take the job. Or do all those factory floor workers drive in big cars etc?


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## twllnbrck (Jan 17, 2019)

Good luck with them , really! And keep us up to date on the "progress"


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## Datapanic (Jan 17, 2019)

It's good to know the business and other workers' roles on the job, but that place sounds strange.  

It could be that they want to hire someone with no mechanical ability so that they wont be able to go to the floor like the last guy.   So, a poor score on those tests would be what they were looking for...


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## Phishfry (Jan 17, 2019)

I think what you are experiencing is a HR department that is totally detached from reality.
That does not  mean the whole company is, but HR is the gateway. You must get past them.
In the machine shop I can usually walk to the back of the business and look for big bay doors.
Walk in and present myself. But in todays 'protected world' you will find many locked doors.
All the meanwhile you hear about worker shortages.
Now you know why.
What I really wonder is why an EE is doing websites!!! The shortage of engineers is large supposedly.
I would think a well seasoned EE could pull in 6 figures.


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## BSD User (Jan 17, 2019)

Phishfry said:


> I think what you are experiencing is a HR department that is totally detached from reality.
> That does not  mean the whole company is, but HR is the gateway.



Agreed 100%

Happy Hunting!


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## Crivens (Jan 17, 2019)

Wasn't it Dennis Ritche who could not check in code at google because he did not take the C test there?

But your story sounds on par for the iron mongers. When dealing with VW, you have to fill out forms asking for how many train carriages you gonna send your delivery in and oh it better not gas off anything which messes with the laquer physics... It's a bloody mail attachment!

And I concur, HR is usually clueproof.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jan 17, 2019)

Phishfry said:


> HR is the gateway. You must get past them.


Here's an old trick of mine that may be more difficult in today's privacy enriched society. A week or so after you see a posted ad, call and ask for the engineering manager for the department you're interested in. You may only be able to get someone in HR. Tell them you are calling because someone told you about a job and you were out of town and missed the posting. You want to know if the job was still open and who you should send your resume to. The times I did this I was able to skip over a few people and get right to the hiring person. Once, I was invited to come in for an interview right then and there.



Phishfry said:


> What I really wonder is why an EE is doing websites!!!


Well. Let me tell you this about that.

I completed the computer design for a medical computer which made this large corporation lots of money and it's architecture, at least, is still in use today. I delivered it twice as fast as anyone expected. It had 10K traces on the circuit board and I knew what everyone of them did. I was looking forward to being handed the opportunity to immediately start on the next version which would be more better and gooder. The project manager came into my office and told me my next thing was to put together a solenoid controlled by a transistor.

*The project manager came into my office and told me my next thing was to put together a solenoid controlled by a transistor. *

I had a television engineering background and was always interested in computer graphics. I knew who Silicon Graphics was and Pixar so I flipped open the Yellow Pages (this was 1991 or 1992) and, to my surprise, saw that SGI had an office in town. I thought, if SGI had an office, did Pixar? And, sure enough, they did! Both companies sold systems to McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft, specifically their flight simulator department which was also in town.

So I called them up. SGI wanted to hire me for my video experience. I interviewed with John Lasseter in California and helped Ed Catmull load a Pixar box onto the airport shuttle (Pixar used to make their own hardware. Did you know that?). Both offered me a job. I really, really wanted to work for Pixar but I had a newborn son and responsibilities that worried me about Pixar's future.

Pixar shutdown their hardware division two weeks after I would have started there. Some time later, SGI re-org'ed and my new boss in Dallas, who looked and acted a lot like a lot like J.R. Ewing of the TV show Dallas, decided he wanted a Fortran programmer and I was out of a job.  

Shortly after, my wife and our general manager were going toe-to-toe and the manager quit. She asked if I wanted to run things till I found a job. The "till I found a job" part took far longer and killed more brain cells than I care to mention. But I had some ideas. Like how about a cash register where the keypad was removable along with the flourescent display and you could take it in the back room, like a pad of paper, and do inventory on it? Then, when the restaurant opened, you just pop that pad back on the register and you're good to go. You could call it an InventoryPad or something like that.

Anyway, we got someone else to manage, I was looking for something to do and we noticed some restaurants were putting their menus on that internet thing I heard about at SGI years before. I had less than zero interest in such things until I built up an annual airsoft game--120 players and one of the largest in the USA--and we needed a way to promote the game, show directions, and all that. Thus begat my first web site. Which begat a web site for my restaurants. Which begat a regional web site for our franchise. And I got phone calls from other begat-ers. Which begat a web dev company.

And now here we are. Being an EE in the Midwest can be like a ship's captain in Kansas.


Crivens said:


> Wasn't it Dennis Ritche who could not check in code at google because he did not take the C test there?


Bjarne Stroustrup couldn't get hired at one company because he "didn't fit the culture" meaning he was too old.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Jan 17, 2019)

They aren't used to dealing with Professionals.

In that setting they consider themselves the Professionals. You may even represent a threat to them.


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## jrm@ (Jan 18, 2019)

drhowarddrfine said:


> Some of you may know that I sold my web dev business and restaurants recently. I've been tinkering, studying, learning, goofing off since. My wife could tell I was getting antsy and encouraged me to look into finding a job or doing pro bono work or something. I can work for someone else if I'm in charge of my area of work and I'm not so good at being a grunt but I can't help it if I see a web site that struggles to be a web site...


Am I recalling correctly that you considered volunteering to revamp freebsd.org?  How about now?


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## drhowarddrfine (Jan 18, 2019)

jrm@ The problem is that the generated HTML is far too convoluted to make it more presentable using CSS alone. Warren mentioned to me that changing the HTML site-wide might not be possible and I'd have to work with that. I made a mild attempt some time ago to see what I could do with the existing HTML but the current structure is just not workable.


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## phoenix (Jan 18, 2019)

Guessing they never called back?


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## rigoletto@ (Jan 18, 2019)

drhowarddrfine said:


> jrm@ The problem is that the generated HTML is far too convoluted to make it more presentable using CSS alone. Warren mentioned to me that changing the HTML site-wide might not be possible and I'd have to work with that. I made a mild attempt some time ago to see what I could do with the existing HTML but the current structure is just not workable.



Hm. It feels like re-start from stratch would be easier.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jan 18, 2019)

phoenix said:


> Guessing they never called back?


Didn't really think they would.


rigoletto@ said:


> It feels like re-start from stratch would be easier.


iirc, it's all dynamically generated with Java. If someone would work with me on re-ordering things then maybe lots could be done.


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## jrm@ (Jan 18, 2019)

The sources are Docbook Xml.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jan 19, 2019)

jrm@  Well, I'll be. I did not know the source was there. It's all XML and XSL, which I haven't dealt with in a long time, but this just might be worth looking at.


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## Datapanic (Jan 19, 2019)

So go back to work!


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## rigoletto@ (Jan 19, 2019)

drhowarddrfine said:


> iirc, it's all dynamically generated with Java. If someone would work with me on re-ordering things then maybe lots could be done.



I would volunteer myself if I was not completely retarded about the whole web development thing.


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