Re: Aspect questions?
Patricia Shanahan wrote:
Lew wrote:
Novice wrote:
The key thing is that you were already known by your colleagues and they
were confident that you would pick up the required skills in a timely
manner; you weren't an unknown outsider.
That makes perfect sense. I thought you were saying that you had gotten
into a firm where no one knew you and had somehow persuaded them that you
could learn the shop language in no time flat. I was wondering how you'd
managed that ;-)
I've done that. I'm doing that on my current job.
I've been interested in how you do that.
I got one job by responding to a newspaper ad without knowing anyone, as
a new mathematics graduate and trainee programmer in 1970. Through 2002,
when I left work to go back to college, all my subsequent jobs were with
people who already knew me, and knew I would quickly learn whatever I
needed to know, because they had seen me do it.
Now my former bosses have retired or moved out of town, and I don't want
to move away from San Diego, so if I ever get bored with retirement, I
would have to get a job cold. I have a fairly impressive resume but much
of it is specialized skills like performance modeling of servers during
development. The things I have done do show that I'm able and willing to
learn, but probably not that I already have the specific skills for an
arbitrary job.
In my current job as a software engineer in test, they were looking for skills
in test automation in related areas. That I've not worked with Objective-C
before, for example, was of no concern to them. Someone who knows C, C++,
Java, Javascript and such isn't going to have a heart attack over Objective C,
but it's harder to find someone who can design and implement an automated test
suite.
Skills do translate, and many employers know it.
--
Lew
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Friz.jpg