May 26, 2003
More blog rolling
Martin Fowler has a blog now. Nope, he didn’t call it a blog, it’s a combination of blog and Wiki. It’s bliki. And via him, more my favour authors’ blog discovered: Dave Thomas, Andy Hunt and others who use the same blogging tool RubLog. RubLog is developed with Ruby. Dave and Andy are both authors for The Pragmatic Programmer and Programming Ruby. Both are excellent technical books, one would definitely benefit you no matter you are start learning how to program or you got years of experience (read: it’s pragmatic); the other one would be the best buy if that’s the only book you’re going to buy for learning Ruby. I was once enthusiastic for Ruby’s elegant and neat structure.…less time to pratice it later though
Reading regularly only a few blogs (check my right blogroll column), it might be time now to survey and get a decent RSS reader/aggregrator for my increasing blog reading. Guess it’s good to link more blogs too, that I’d get more chance to read good article, bigger possibility to know more people, and getting more popular?
Sneezing
Oh, no.…I can’t stop sneezing.…I used to have light nose allegy, and really really hate it!! Remember I was sick a fews day ago, here it come again…
Interview
About 1 month+ ago, I was pretty fed up with my working environment. I thought why not start my job search engine again, after 2 years engaged with this company. Well, then I went to Jobstreet and submitted a few job applications, without keeping much hope. Why? Because it seem I didn’t stand much chance with age over 30, because younger programmers are cheaper, because you ain’t get a manager position if you aren’t a manager yet.… In Malaysia, you didn’t much chance if you want to stay technical-focus/oriented and maintain your salary growth path.
And one month passed, last week that’s one response came suddenly. So I went for interview this evenning. The office looks good, bright and quiet environment, probably it’s due to off office hour. We didn’t go into details since the interviewer telling me it’s just a brief interview to know about candidates and they would shortlist suitable one for second round.
I asked him how he judged who is the suitable candidate since most of the resume looks quite similar? The interviewer is a kind and honest guy. He said obviously a properly written resume would get his eye balls first. There are tons of job application sending through email nowadays and worse, they’re all looks alike, they use job agency’s formatting (e.g. Jobstreet). It’s hard for a company to do resume filtering and profiling, and diffcult for them to know how good you are in particular area. Said for technical strength, everybody has the I-have-to-push-myself attitude and putting high score on everythings he/she could possibly handle/study or even just heard about. That’s how the current technical job market scenario.
However, it ain’t easy to skip away the hassle. Most of the applications still come with the same formatting and you couldn’t simply ignore them. Applicants still stand a chance to get interviewing. That’s how I get it. The guy said working experience is prioritized for such senior position. That’s great (but in my mind, I was wonder: well, it’s luck). For technical job, what I most worry is being interviewed by someone who couldn’t judge how good you are, instead of just depend on the submitted CV, which, probably happened in 8 out of 10 cases. While you are in that situation, what the heck possibly the interviewer could differentiate better among good? By document writing skill? Promoting skill?
What’s the morale? In short, if you want to find a job, you’re still obligate to prepare a resume properly, try to stay easily noticable by your targeting company is always the first step. Be cool, be nice, and prepare well for interview. And then, just wait for your luck. Yes, I am still believe it’s about fortune anyway after reading lots of article about smart interviewing.