[lug] Linux jobs in Boulder/Denver?

[Nate Duehr]

On Wed, 2002-04-17 at 01:43, D. Stimits wrote:

> I've been unemployed here now for over a year.

Ditto on the crappy job market.  I took a job at a pay scale similar to
the first year I was in the telco/IP industry recently just to try to
pay the bills... 

I'm a sysadmin with a "reasonable" amount of general knowledge just
starting to specialize in higher-end stuff (admin'ed about 200 servers
basically by myself with help from a developer and our security guy for
the former employer for about a year, had another admin helping the year
before that...).

Now I am working for a small retail/wholesaler watching batch jobs run
in Oracle and monitoring systems -- heh, no root anymore... but learning
as much as I can about Oracle (hard to do from a distance) and Veritas
and some of their other toys, er... um, tools, and generally trying to
make the best of it.

I don't know if I had a good friend call me up saying they were looking
to move to Denver if I could yet recommend it  -- we're still
over-saturated with folks who were laid off who really do know their
stuff, and folks (like myself) who now fall in the severely
underemployed category.

But again, I'm a sysadmin with networking and general security
backgrounds who's worn a lot of hats (and probably mastered none... just
doing a "good" job taking care of LOTS of stuff) and things may be
better (or worse) in the Java programmer world out here -- knowing
someone in a shop that needs Java people would be the way to go, I
suppose.  If that's what you're looking for...

I do wish you well and good luck!  After having gone through this
experience I wouldn't wish it on anyone.  Perhaps the cycle is turning
around, perhaps it's recovered a bit and is "holding".  I can't tell. 
But there are some more job postings and the recruiters and such don't
appear to be as picky about things slightly again -- it used to be that
folks could judge by past projects whether or not you could do
something, but something's fishy in the hiring right now, and I can't
quite put a finger on it.

The closest I can figure out here is that somewhere the business has
fallen off track a bit in judgment of WHO to hire -- lately, very
SPECIFIC software knowledge is usually needed to get a foot in the door,
and *that* in an industry that throws out whole operating systems every
one to two years.  Does that make any sense?  Their specific proprietary
software package they want people for right now will be gone and
replaced by "the next latest-and-greatest" thing in about six months to
a year at most shops.  So why hire massive specialists?  Get a
generalist who is willing to learn it well enough to make it work
properly and who will put in the extra time effort and struggle, but who
also doesn't know just that ONE thing.

I'd want FLEXIBLE people right now, in preparation to finish existing
projects and prepare for new revenue-generators, not people that only
knew that one piece of software... but... obviously, I'm not a hiring
manager these days.  (Done that before too...)  GRIN.

Hire the person that can set up the routers, run the cabling, deal with
digital telco circuit outages, maintain the servers, keep a reasonable
level of security on the network, and who enjoys change.  (Heh heh...
hint hint H.R. people...)

Sorry, off on a rant here... not exactly as funny as Dennis Miller style
ones either... 

-- 
Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com