Job interview prep

I've got an interview tomorrow for a 3-6 month contract doing middle-tier J2EE stuff. Nervous as hell, but that's typical for me - no matter how long I've been playing the game, no matter how many interviews I've done, and no matter what kind of feedback I get (almost unanimously overwhelmingly positive, apparently I interview very well) I still get super anxious.

I try to get as much information as I can ahead of time. In this case I've already gone through the initial phone screen with the hiring manager, so I know what products they're using, what they're trying to accomplish, and where the team fits in with the company. I've spent the past 3 days or so doing little but skimming through as much as I can on the various bits I expect to need to know for the position. Strong unix (AIX and linux specifically - very strong linux here, very moderate AIX, but I've been a unix guy for 18 years straight anyway), strong java, middleware (the ejb/dbms/tx bit of J2EE, no real need for servlets, JSP, etc), some perl. They're a very large IBM shop, with WebSphere and Eclipse in heavy use. I don't particularly care for WebSphere, and very strongly dislike Eclipse, but I'm not expecting to walk into an IntelliJ shop either.

They're still on j2ee 1.3, which has posed a bit of an issue for me. Sun's RI won't run in a 1.5 JDK, evidently - I've tried in both Mac OS X and Windows XP (my linux box is tied up) - and startup fails while looking for some com.sun.corba.* libraries in both cases.

Back to pouring over j2ee 1.3 specs...

FUCK WINDOWS

Any system in which an application running in userspace can take the operating system down is not to be taken seriously.

It is a TOY.

Unethical spamming headhunters - your time has come.

Between May 2001 and February 2005, the depth of the most recent technology industry collapse, I worked sporadically at best. I sent my résumé to no less than 50 potential openings each week. For the first 6 months or so, I was sending it out at a rate of 50-100 per day. Throughout that period, I was lucky to even get one reply per month.

Now that the industry is turning around again, the slimy fuckers are coming out of the woodwork. I receive no less than 15 unsolicited emails per day from headhunters that clearly have not even read my résumé or profile information.

I have resolved to boycott any agencies that send "opportunities" to me that have clearly not even glanced at my CV. I'm in the process of compiling a list which I will probably initially post here. However, I would prefer not to do anything to increase search engine ranking for these unethical dirtbags, so posting here might be out of the question. Maybe just drop it somewhere with a robots.txt directive, or maybe as an image. Who knows, it might become a useful app if it looks like other people will want to submit entries as well. I'm wary of doing that though... the potential for abuse is high.

Helping Dreams Come True

Helping Dreams Come True

Hey, look! Latecomer to the blogosphere, my brother Jamie.