Kirkman Enterprises

For those who are curious, yes, I am still looking for work.  I've been focused on looking for work in the Austin to San Antonio area to save myself the hassle and expense of moving.  I realize that may limit my options and it is a decision I will be thinking heavily about over the next week or two.  Finding full-time professional work over the last several years has seemed to be difficult for me.  I know some of the reasons why that is so (and I may discuss them at some point on here).  But there are other reasons which elude me.  The current book that I am reading makes mentions of nerds and geeks, like me, trying to live life as if there are a set of rules and objectives.  When the current objective is trying to start my career, sometimes, unclear rules are very frustrating for me.  One thing that is sometimes frustrating is the issue of industry certifications versus raw skill and talent.

A recent Infoworld article made it to the front page of Slashdot.  That article, titled "The IT certs that no longer pay extra -- and the new skills that do", discusses the issue that industry certifications that were incredibly popular starting in the mid-late 1990s are losing their glamour.  It may be that the industry is catching up to what geeks have known for a while.  Certifications such as CompTIA's A+ and Network+ as well as a number of Microsoft's certifications (including the now retired MCSE) were really useless to determine the skills a person really possessed.  Passing those tests simply meant that someone could consume a bunch of information and spit out the correct answer on a multiple choice exam.  Personally, back in the day, I managed to pass many of those exams with no studying.

What many of those certification tests lacked and that only a few possess (such as Cisco's CCIE certification) was having the test taker demonstrate the actual knowledge and skills to perform a task as opposed to simple regurgitation of facts.  The attempt to hire someone with skills versus someone who has a lot of paper to tack to their cubical wall has been an interesting process to participate in over the last few months.  Some companies and managers have very straight-forward methods for determining what knowledge and skills I, as a job candidate, posses.  Other companies are a bit.... different.

While I have a section of this site with a portfolio of my work, mostly focuses on classwork over the years, I am under no false illusions that prospective employers are actually looking at this.  So when the President of a start-up late last year asked me for samples of my software engineering design documents I wasn't surprised.  Actually, I was encouraged.  To me, this was a guy who was very interested in seeing what I could actually do versus what I claim to be able to do.  I am generally overly critical of my own work, so I think that the papers and assignments I've done in class could use more work.  However, they are likely not bad for a student without professional experience.  So I have no problems sharing them.  It is a shame that the start-up put the position I was being considered for on hold until the summer.  That would have been an interesting job.

Another company for that I was one of the final candidates under consideration had me do classic white-board problems during the on-site interview.  The first question had me silently groaning: Write an algorithm to sort an array of numbers.  "Collections.sort(arrayOfNum);" wasn't good enough.  (Come on, does anyone industry actually write their own sorting algorithms except in very special circumstances?)  I muddled my way through a bubble sort using an undefined swap function.  When the manager asked what swap() did, I told him it take the first number, puts it in the second variable, and takes what was in the second variable to put it in the first.  His next question is if I could write the swap function without using an intermediate variable.  In less than a minute I had that written on the board as well.  It was somewhat fun, though more fun would be if they had elected to hire me for the job.

The other significant test(?) of my skills was by a rather large tech company who has been around for 100 years or so.  (That narrows it down quite a bit.)  Their preliminary, job application process exam involved logic puzzles.  It included a series of number sequences where I had to figure out the next number in the sequence.  It also included matrices where I had to follow a series of instructions to manipulate the matrix (such as replace all "A"s with "1"s); after the instructions I had to answer questions about the resulting matrix (What is the sum of the numbers in column 2).  I'm sure there is a method to their madness, but I'm not convinced that being able to decode the matrix with a ticking clock in the corner is a good assessment of a person to be able to program their way out of a wet paper bag.

In the end, I do enjoy seeing what tests, trials and tribulations come about from the application process, even if I do dread the actual interview process.