Re: can anyone offer Lisp job?
- From: Tim X <timx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 13 Aug 2005 18:53:59 +1000
Robert,
We have all been seeing your posts here for some months now. Lots of
people have offered advice, but you have rejected all of it. I've
looked at your web site and it is NOT a good advertisment for your
skills or abilities and will do more harm in your attempts to get a
job than assistance. Things that your web site should have are
1. Your CV. If its on the site, I couldn't find it or its in a format
which is not recognized as a CV. You have a section "Please hire
me!" which is poorly laid out. Your "skills" look to be equivelent
to what I would expect from a high school student who has an
interest in PCs or a hobbyist or just likes to play around with
them. There is nothing there which looks like it was done by a
professional with 22 years experience. There is no well laid out CV
which gives me
- Contact Details
- Employment History
- Technical Skill Summary
- Training History
- Hobbies/Interests Summary
Some of this does seem to be buried within the text of your pages,
but its not clear and easy to follow. Remember that anyone lookinig
for someone to employ is not going to spend ages trying to work out
if your any good - they want to be able to see a high level summary
which tweaks their interest to find out more.
2. the page you have showiing what you have done and talking about the
software you have written is not at all impressive or
convincing. Again, it looks like something put together by someone
who has played around with a bit of programming. Particular
problems with some of it include
- The software projects you talk about are less than
convincing. All of it has been done and done much better
already. The stuff you have about anti-spam projects you are
working on shows no real grasp of the issues, is something which
is already available in various forms out there for free and
despite the amo9unt of time you appear to have spent working on
it, does not appear to ever have been completed.
- You list courses you have done in the last 5 years on C, C++,
Java and Data Structures. The big question is, if you have been
a programmer for 22 years, why are you doing these introductory
courses? Most descent programmers I know don't do introductory
courses on programming languages. When a new language comes
along, they just learn it. As for a course on data structures,
you have to wonder why a programmer with 22 years of experience
needed an introductory course on data structures? There is
nothing I could find that even indicated what your real
experiences were in - I mean, what did you program in for 22
years if your only now learning C, C++ and java? What sort of
problems/projects to you successfully complete in that time and
who did you work for?
- Employers are less interested in your knowledge of language
syntax than in your ability to analyse a problem, identify the
right data structures and algorithms and implement it. There is
no evidence you have these abilities in any of your pages.
3. There are some potentially interesting/original small hacks you
have done, sush as the emacs and java stuff. However, this works
against you as there have been packages freely available to do this
for a long time. When I was programming in Java during the late
90's, I was using emacs JDEE mode, which uses beanShell to do
essentially what you have done, but also has a lot of other nice
features. The obvious question anyone would ask when seeing what
you have done is "Why has this person gone and re-invented the
wheel?". One thing employers want is people who are able to find
and use existing tools/libraries/etc and who don't waste time
re-inventing stuff which is already available, but instead use what
is available to make them even more productive and put their energy
into dealing with new and as yet unsolved problems.
4. Some of your demo applications do not work correctly. According to
your software, my IP address cannot exist - not a good advertisment
for what you can do. Most of it also looks to be unfinished or
buggy - again, not a good advertisment for your abilities.
I'm sure you will have lots of justification for why my criticisms are
wrong or unfounded. However, what you really should be doing is making
changes to your site to address these changes because the criticisms
I've raised are very similar to what many prospective employers would
raise - though they probably won't tell you so. Instead of getting
definsive and spending time explaining why I'm wrong, spend the time
improving your site to address the criticisms - if you have the
skills, then do what is required to make that obvious. I would suggest
you also remeove the "Please Hire Me!" link - it comes across too much
like someone who is begging for a chance and will make most employers
feel like they are dealing with some sort of charity case. Employers
are arely interested in being charitable - they are primarily
interested in finding people who can provide a positive contribution
to reaching their goals. You need to convince employers that you will
be an asset - sometimes, employers will take a chance because they
feel you will eventually be an asset, but most of the time, they want
people who will be an asset to them within weeks of starting.
I also think you need to start targeting employers which are more
within your league. To even imagine you could ever get a job with Sun
working on Java when you have only recently completed some basic
introductory courses is not even within the realms of reality. Don't
even try and get work programming CGI applications - there are
thousands of high school kids with more CGI experience than you. This
is not meant to be rude, just honest. There is nothing on your website
that makes me think you have any great skill at CGI programming - the
bottom line is that most CGI programs are extremely basic in that they
are not much more complex or require any more skills than old style
DOS batch programming. However, there are some very interesting things
which can be done with CGI programs - try and come up with something
along the lines of new or interest catching applications of CGI -
remember, CGI is really just a gateway - the server just passes off
some data to some subprocess (which might be a shell script, java,
perl, python - anyting which can read from stdin and write to
stdout). See what you can come up with which might catch someones
attention - you want someone to think "Hmmm, thats an interesting
idea, this guy might be worth talking to". The stuff you have
described and have demos of is extremely basic - I use to give weekly
exercises to my students which were equivelent in both complexity and
the time necessary to do. CGI programs which are able to tell the user
what their IP address is or take any details from the data made
available to the CGI program from the server are nothing spectacular.
To be honest, unless you have a lot of hidden ability and experience
which is not reflected in your web site, I seriously doubt you will
ever get a programming job. Both your age and apparent lack of
commercial experience or tertiary degree in computing science are
working against you. There are plenty of younger and more experienced
programmers out there and your just not in the running. This is sad if
it truely is what you want to do and possibly could even be defined as
unfailr, but the world is unfair and we just have to live with
that. If you really are determined, then you need to get really
serious about it. You need to define a personal development plan which
will move you towards having the necessary skills and qualificaitons
to get you a job. If you haven't got the money to do this, then your
first goal shouuld be to get the money. Forget about a programming job
at this time - get any job you can and save every cent you can and
once you have enough, then find the right course (either a degree or
diploma or whatever) and complete that and then try again to get
work. However, I think your age is working against you and I wouldn't
get your hopes up.
Personally, I'd give up the idea of a professional life as a
programmer. In reality, 90% of programmers are poorly paid and have
pretty poor job security. Its unfortunate that programming is
considered to be worth a lot less than its true contribution
value. Sales people, middle managers and even business analysts are
considered more valuable than those who actually write the code and
develop the products. In many ways, the idnustry has developed this
unfortunate attitude in which programming is seen as what you do to
get a foot in the door as a young graduate and is only a stepping
stone to a real career as an analyst, manager or sales executive. This
means that at 40+, not only are you competing with young energetic
recent graduates, you are also often perceived as either not very good
(since your still a programmer at 40+) or have no real drive or
ambition. I don't personally agree with this, but it is the reality we
are faced with. To be 40+ with very little commercial experience (and
non for the last 13 years or so), means your well and truely out of
the market and are extremely unlikely to ever get a job in that area.
Essentially, you are left with only a few choices -
1. continue trying, but will little chance of success
2. Possibly find work in a related area
3. Come up with something original AND useful and either sell it
or make if available for free (to help develop a reputation).
4. Leave programming as a hobby and find some other occupation.
I actually find it amazing that after 13 years of not being able to
get a job as a programmer, you are still trying to. For whatever
reason, you are failing to convince employers of your worth. Despite
lots of advice from this group, you constantly just reject it all. You
have done everything from blame it on cheap labor from 3rd world
countries, your inability to sell yourself because of moral and
philosophical reasons, the inability of others to somehow magically
percieve your worth, your lack of money, lack of friends or people to
network with etc etc. At some point, you need to do a bit of honest
self reflection and consider that perhaps the problem lies with you
and accept responsibility for your situation. This is not meant to be
nasty or objectionable - it just seems from all your posts that you
have a real problem with being able to acknowledge your part in your
situation. I could well be wrong, but then you should ask the question
"Why does he think that?" and try to address the cause of such
perception.
Tim
--
Tim Cross
The e-mail address on this message is FALSE (obviously!). My real e-mail is
to a company in Australia called rapttech and my login is tcross - if you
really need to send mail, you should be able to work it out!
.
- Follow-Ups:
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- From: Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
- Trying to get a job, any job (was: can anyone offer Lisp job?)
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