Last update I reported I some how got caught in a miscommunication and lost my job over it. Since then a few things have come to light. Primarily, that no one replaced me in my position, and that the company has officially announced plans to phase out the use of the software they had hired me to use. In other words, because I was hired when the company was planning to expand the use of this software, when they instead decided to stop using it, I was no longer needed, and they had to get rid of me before they invested anything further in training or equipment.
This explains a lot, and I can't blame them for making the decision to let me go. In an ideal world, they would have just told me that plans had changed, but sometimes that won't work. In this case, I am guessing they were not yet ready to announce the decision to back away from the tool software, but knew they didn't want to waste any more money on the matter. I'm sure when people who knew me found out they had to get rid of me it became very difficult from an emotional standpoint. After all, I had relocated for the job and they had told me they were looking for potential long term employment after the current project was finished. No human with half a conscience is going to find it easy to face someone after that and say "Oops, sorry never mind". It's so much easier to try and justify the persons removal in some way. This explains the list of things I had "been doing wrong" that I had never heard a word about.
In addition to the above, I found out the list actually threw my co-workers off gaurd as well. When they saw it, they were as confused as I was because the list didn't make any sence to them. I also found out that they felt I was very good at some of the things the list had said I was bad at. This evidence was sort of the final piece of the puzzle. In the end, while I no dought made mistakes, and I feel the lessons learned in my last post are still vital for growth, I was just another corporit casualty in the greater scheme of things.
That said, I do have to say I think they made the correct choice in stopping the use of of that oddball development software. It just had too many critical flaws, especially with memory management and animation.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Since loosing my job I've been looking for a new one. I've had no shortage of places interested in my skills, but I don't like to have too many on the table at once. I've been focusing on a small potential group, and I actually really like the company that I spoke with just a few days after I lost my last job. All of the groups move at a fairly slow pace, and I've been interviewed, waited for programming test, done programming test, waited for response to programming test, interviewed again and so on and so fourth for all of them.
Currently, I am again waiting for news, though one company decided they don't have space for a Jr. programmer right now, and that is what I tested in as. Personally, I think that was a nice way of telling me to get more experience. Had I known they would hit me with a programming test designed for Unix, I could have saved them the trouble.
I did actually find a way to kind of make it work and finish the thing on a Windows machine, but it was no easy task. I think I only spent about 4 hours actually programming the answer, the rest was just getting the blasted language editor stuff to run properly on my machine. Since I've never touched Unix before, I would obviously have to come in at a Jr level if I was to be working in it.
I have to admit though, it was a really fun test using a functional programming language called Clojure. It was my first time messing with this language family, and it's pretty cool. Though I don't think I'd use it for the type of project they asked me to build with it (I'm pretty sure that was the intent, no one would have experience doing this because it is silly).
Most of the other programming tests were pretty basic ones, but the one from that first company was pretty cool. Really, I think they did an excellent job choosing it because building a project like that gave me a chance to sample most of the core functions needed to work on their systems.
The test was more of a "Hey, go make this thing and see what you can learn and if you even like this kind of work." than a "Show us what you already know." type. It was a lot of fun and I learned an entirely new IDE (Visual Studio C# Windows Forms) while doing it. Even better, they met with me to go over the project and taught me a few tricks of the trade. I was able to go back to my original project and apply what they taught me to make it a better product, though I don't think I'll ever release the thing given it's a programming test, and it's not nice to give the details of those away.
Right now is kind of painful. I have to wait to hear back. I don't want to apply to a bunch of new places and then be all like "Oop, never mind, I got hired by these other guys." or worse, get quick hired by some new company and then find out one of the ones I really like right now actually wanted to hire me after all. So I have to be good and wait to hear back, no matter how much I want to grab the bull by horns, sometimes it's wiser to let the bull settle itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment