As a former contractor who had VERY little experience, I found fuzzy math to
be the only way I could get past the recruiters and into the interview. Not
the most ethical approach to finding work, but I also knew that you didn't
need a VB programmer with 3 years of experience to do most VB work either ;)

-----Original Message-----
From: Don Harrop [mailto:don@nis4u.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2000 12:10 PM
To: plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
Subject: Years and Years and Years of experience..


That's true about being able to fix a problem in 5 minutes rather than 5
hours if you've experienced it before.  How many of us remember everything
we've ever done on a computer before though?  If there's any one on this
list that has ever gone to tackle a problem that they have had before and
couldn't remember what they did to fix it the first time, I'd like to know
about it.  I think that your problem solving abilities is worth more than
the "been there done that" approach.  I also think that it's really
important to have a team because everyone has something to contribute.  
Nobody knows everything.  That's why I'm a member of this list.  The only
problem with the person employing you is that they wont know for sure what
kind of computer wizard you are until they hire you so the "years and
years and years of experience" is the only benchmark that they have.  My
background is pretty broad.  I've been into computers professionally for
about 10 years now.  I've delt with routers, switches, hubs, cabling
(coax, cat5, token ring), DOS 3.3 up to Win2k, most of the unicies (no
Solaris though) IIS, Apache, DNS, SSH, FTP servers unix/windows,
automation using cron (unix) or at (NT) and scripting, disaster/data
recovery, yadda yadda yadda...  I've contracted for over 2 years now for
mostly the City of Mesa and an ISP and eight years before that with other
employers.  Right now I'd like to find another "GOOD" employer and I'd
like the job to be unix based.  Yes, all you employers out there need to
realize that your being interviewed as well.  The last thing I want is to
end up with another company that can't even deal with their own management
issues which is why they keep loosing techs in the first place!  Sorry for
the rant guys..  It just sucks when your trying to find a place and people
keep telling you that you need X number of years experience as "insert job
title here" in order to be conisdered.  But hey, who said life was fair..
:-)  I think I've found a place running HP-UX that's going to hire me..  
With all these Solaris posts maybe I should have them buy a Solaris box
for me just to play with and change the job title to HP-UX/Solaris Admin
so I can start to develop the years and years and years of experience..
:-)  Or maybe I shouldn't be so truthful..  Maybe the fuzzy math theory
has a big part in finding a job these days... ;-)  j/k

Don


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