IT / Tech Support Industry Dead

OP did you look at the jobs I posted and are they in your field?

Stop. Whinging. I'm not your friend but I'm also not trying to offend.

If you have the same attitude in interviews as you have in your posts here then it's no wonder you're not being hired. We work with our colleagues for upwards of 40, 60, 80 hours a week. There are 168 hours in any given week and chances are you'll spend at least 40 of them - almost 25% - in close proximity to your line manager and colleagues. I personally would not like to spend 40 minutes around someone so negative, never mind 40 hours.

How about this: you get a job in Tallaght, you move to bloody Tallaght. Don't want to live in Tallaght? Move to somewhere along the LUAS line or a good bus route.

So, you worked for the Financial company for "over a year" and the Telecoms company for "over two"? Let's be generous and say 5 years experience altogether. You have a diploma in ElecEng which let's assume took 3 years to get. We'll also assume you went straight from school to the diploma. So, that puts you around 26 years old although I have a feeling you may be a couple of years younger.

You say up until six months ago you had people contacting you offering jobs - well, those jobs are probably filled now but chances are the people that filled them haven't passed their probation periods yet. Get back in contact with these people and tell them you're on the market again and looking for work. It's fairly easy to get rid of someone who hasn't passed a probationary period yet and at the end of the day we're all selfish individuals. Hopefully one of the people that they hired isn't working out. They'll probably be kept on if the employer has no viable alternative - become that viable alternative.

You say your expertise is mainly in the areas of your previous jobs? So, financial and telecoms line of business applications and consumer products it is. That's a pretty big area. You have some "C++, HTML, CSS, Javascript" knowledge? Everybody and their dog "knows" HTML/CSS/JS but they don't really. The guys who actually know it have been working with it full time and they know every bloody IE6 exception and hack they need to use to get their stuff displaying right in IE6+, FF2+, Chrome, Opera and Safari.

Get rid of that crap from your CV now, it's taking up valuable space advertising the "fact" you know something that you really don't. You have some C++ knowledge? Build on it. Go and learn C# or any .NET language. Look into iPhone development or work with Python. But, that's probably all pointless as from the sounds of it you know sweet FA about programming. And there are a whole lot of unemployed programmers out there.

What is your thing? What do you know most about? Not the most about compared to anyone else but what is you strongest area of expertise? Maybe it's Windows networking, maybe it's Cisco gear, maybe it's whatever IMS you were using. Doesn't matter what it is. Get out there and find companies that use it and aggressively, but politely, advertise yourself to them.

I have done a lot of UAT testing, and beta testing of internal systems in the past, normally as I have a tendancy to pick up very little things, minor bugs that others may miss and am always happy to give feedback rather than sitting and ignoring things. However I have not done a few years solid of this, mostly a few months here and there as part of my job rather than a specific role which is why I don't think it gets me anywhere.

This interests me. You know what software development companies can always use? Bloody good testers. You have a tendency to pick up on minor bugs? I can think of 5 in Firefox 3.5.2 off the top of my head and I'm useless at testing. Go and file every FF3.5.2 bug you can find in Bugzilla and become an advocate for getting them fixed.

Become an incredible bug reporter - the best testers not only find bugs but reproduce them well and dump an INCREDIBLE pile of information on the developer who has to fix it. The more information a dev has when he or she sits down to fix a bug the quicker it will be fixed. The best devs have a lovehate relationship with the best testers because although it's the best testers that will poke the most holes in a devs work they will also provide the best reports and repros so they can be fixed easily.

You were working 10+ hours of overtime every week? Big whoop, I worked over 90 hours last week and 70 hours the week before. But guess what? Nobody made me. Mandatory overtime is, by definition, not overtime. I chose to work those extra hours and will be remunerated accordingly. Like it or not, business is business. Working long hours at a young startup might get you good vibes and good will but in an established corporation, well, nobody cares.

It will be noticed and certain people will think better of you for it. Others will think less of you for it. At the end of the day you can only get done what you can get done. That sounds strange but think about it like this: you are never finished. You could work 168 hours of the week... every second of every day... and in 99% of jobs there'd still be something to do the next second. There is always something to do. Working overtime doesn't stop that. It's not like you're going to work 50 or 60 hours one week and then suddenly "be finished". That's it, job done, time to go home.

Working overtime is, and always will be, a sign of mismanagement. Maybe it's you mismanaging your own time and resources or your business unit or manager mismanaging their resources. Either way, if you're working overtime to beat a deadline then that deadline should either have been set for later, there should have been more resources allocated to the project or someone has been dossing along the way.

Regardless, point is, you worked 10+ hours overtime? You got paid for it. That's as much as you can ask for and I assume you got it. If you didn't, well, that's a different thread.

Guess what? I can train any eejit off the street to do call center tech support in a couple of weeks. They might not be brilliant at it and have the passion for it that others will but they'll do the job until I can find someone truly passionate. I can not train someone to be a native German, Spanish, French, etc. speaker in two weeks. So, I need a German helpdesk tech - which is going to work out better? Hiring you and teaching you German or hiring them and teaching them how to log an issue?

I know that's not pretty sounding but it's the way of the world. They have a skill which is in more demand than the skill you have. As such, they can do less (e.g. doss and be lazy) and still be kept on because they come from a much smaller pool of workers (in Ireland, I'm sure there is quite a large pool of German-speaking workers in Germany so they can't just be lazy all day).

You worked for a telecoms company yes? They generally are not small companies, the cost of entry to the market is too high. Guess what... you know their P+L and Balance Sheets at the end of each year? They don't have a little footnote on them saying "Would not have been possible without J" on them. If you feel like you not staying late or working longer will make everything fall apart then you are grossly overestimating your importance to the place.

I'm not saying that you were useless and it's entirely possible that you were providing an excellent return on your salary to the company - above and beyond all of those lazy techs you mentioned - but at the end of the day, you took one or two days off per fortnight yes? And things did not fall to the ground no? Exactly.

Maybe things piled up and you had a bit to deal with the morning you went back in... but guess what... if you dropped dead tomorrow the company would still go on. And after a few mornings of things piling up and going to **** somebody higher along the chain of command would have gotten wind of it and sorted things out. And then, and maybe only then, would they have realised the true value you were providing. Pity you were dead by that point.

Your next couple of posts are a bit more upbeat and you sound a lot like me in terms of doing a good job simply for the sake of it and proactively getting involved with pointing out where other business units decisions were going to affect yours and how the best way to proceed was - that type of stuff is hard to quantify on a résumé but is absolutely invaluable in a "real world" workplace. Make damn sure you're highlighting this point in interviews.

This is getting far longer than I imagine it being but with such a juicy thread title I couldn't resist! Baseless claims for everyone!

Okay, getting to the end... you mention somewhere that you're being told you're overqualified for some jobs and underqualified for others? I really, really hope I'm wrong here but are you using the same résumé for every job? You bloody better not be!

I haven't looked for a job out of necessity in a long, long time but I regularly apply for and interview for jobs both as a way of keeping my options open and networking. It's also a lot easier to negotiate a salary increase / role expansion when you know you have another offer still available.

If you are told you are overqualified for a role that means one of two things: either they don't want you but they're people pleasers so are lying -or- you've fscked up with your résumé. Dress your résumé down for the entry-level jobs. Point out your qualities that suit those jobs. Once you're there and have your foot in the door then you can open up a bit and make it known to your line managers and colleagues that you maybe know a bit more than most others in your position. This makes you an excellent candidate for internal recruitment / promotion.

Your résumé is not designed to get you a job. It's designed to get you an interview. Always remember that. The first thing you need to do is get your invite-to-interview ratio very high (I get invited to an interview for about 4 out of 5 résumés I send out) and then you need to work on your interview-to-offer ratio. That's a lot harder to manage as there are many more variables but you need, absolutely need to be getting called to interview for more than half the résumés you send out otherwise you're doing something really, really wrong on them.

Why not post your résumé here and let the forum critique it? Or email it to me and I will look at it for you personally. Obviously you can sanitise it of personally identifiable information but leave the guts of it as it is.

You seem like a nice guy who has a lot of good qualities - especially your communication and testing skillset - but it sounds like you're just not playing "the game" well enough and are maybe a bit too quick to come up with an excuses.

Best of luck with the job hunt dude.

ntlbell wrote: »

There is jobs, make yourself more employable

There ARE jobs, learn the basics of english grammar.

qwytre wrote: »

There ARE jobs, learn the basics of english grammar.

Did this enhance the conversation in any way, shape or form? (The answer to this rhetorical question is, in fact, no.)

qwertz wrote: »

There are jobs, learn the basics of English grammar.

Well played.