Tag Archives: internet

300 Seconds, BUSINESS, Eduardo Soliz, JUST SAYING, PODCASTS

300 Seconds Episode #97 – “Job Search Blues: Job Fairs”

Listen to the episode here!

Leave the real world behind for a few minutes by listening to “Super-Short Storytime” at EduardoSoliz.com/podcasts or find it on your favorite podcast app.  And now, on with the show…

You are listening to ‘300 Seconds with Eduardo Soliz,’ and this is episode number 97, “Job Search Blues: Job Fairs,” so let the 300 Seconds begin!

I spent the last episode talking about what a big pain in the posterior looking for and applying for a job online can be.  Fortunately, there is a place where you can go to shake hands, speak to a real person, and get that personal touch.  The job fair, which is in itself a different level of hell.

I should start out by saying that my experiences are colored by the fact that I am looking for a job in Information Technology, and in general, job fairs tend to suck for IT jobs.  At a small job fair, I’ll consider myself lucky if just ONE of the businesses is looking for any sort of IT position.  If more than one company at a job fair is looking for a technical support guy or a programmer, I’m thinking that I need to buy a lottery ticket because it’s my lucky day.

Unfortunately, when companies do drag their IT guys out of the basement and put them in front of people, they get to experience how socially inept they can be.  I’ve had multiple awkward moments at job fairs with IT people, possibly because I’ve been told by people I’ve worked with that I sometimes come off as intimidating.

One person refused to look me in the eye after I let him know what I thought of their pay rates.  Another one froze up after I handed my resume to him and introduced myself.  So yeah, my people skills might use a little fine-tuning.

And then there are those instances when the IT guys can’t be dragged out of the basement and so I get to spend a few minutes trying to talk shop to a HR gal or a supervisor that has no earthly idea what I’m saying.  Those conversations often end with the company representative telling me to go to their website and apply there…which completely defeats the point of the job fair.

I also love it when I walk up to a company’s table and the representative just starts blabbing away about their wonderful company and how wonderful it would be to work for them and how much they love it there and blah blah blah.  After their delightful speech, when I’m finally able to get a word in, I let them know that I’m looking for a computer job.  At that point, the air gets completely sucked out of the room when they sheepishly say: “Oh. We aren’t hiring for computer people.”  So maybe you should ask me what kind of job I’m looking for   before you give me the sales pitch, guys, I’m just saying.

Job fairs are a good idea in general, but for folks looking to hire computer professionals, they don’t seem to work as well as they should.  Or maybe it’s just me.  It definitely wouldn’t be the first time!

This has been 300 Seconds, the next episode will be posted after I register for the next job fair.  I am Eduardo Soliz.  For more podcasts, and short fiction, and my blog, visit EduardoSoliz.com and thank you for listening!

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300 Seconds, BUSINESS, Eduardo Soliz, JUST SAYING, PODCASTS

300 Seconds Episode #96 – “Job Search Blues: The Internet”

Listen to the episode here!

A quick note before I begin: This episode was written prior to my being hired at my current job. And now, on with the show:

This is ‘300 Seconds with Eduardo Soliz,’ and this is episode number 96, “Job Search Blues: Job Hunting on the Internet,” so let the 300 Seconds begin!

Complaining about one’s job is practically an American tradition, and I am certainly more than happy to let anyone within earshot know how I feel about my nine-to-five. I am currently in between jobs, and since I don’t have a job to complain about at the moment, I am going to spend the next few episodes complaining instead, about the delightful process of finding a job in this here 21st Century.

On the surface, looking for a job should be a breeze these days. Instead of flipping through want ads in the newspaper, we now have an overabundance of job websites out there that will be more than happy to take your resume and shoot it away to the four corners of the Earth. Instead of driving to an office and leaving a resume at the HR department, each company now has their own website that is more than likely is run by someone like Taleo or workday. Hooray for progress.

Monster.com, indeed.com, careerbuilder.com, dice.com…to see their advertisements, you would think that they all have the job of your dreams waiting for you. Just set up your account, upload your resume, and the job of your dreams will soon be yours!

As someone once famously said: Don’t believe the hype.

On paper, a job board is a Good Thing: It’s a place where, thanks to the Power Of The Internet, you can now search for an exact job title with an exact salary, within an exact number of miles from our home and find exactly what you’re looking for…maybe. I’ve done some programming, so I do know how dicey sorting through a database can be, but there’s gotta be SOMETHING in these algorithms that says: “Hey, this person has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and over a decade of IT experience: Maybe they aren’t terribly interested in construction jobs.” Or how when I look for ‘technical support’ jobs, I get job listings for pharmacy technicians and veterinary technicians. Forget “artificial intelligence,” we need “artificial common sense.”

Since the job boards kinda suck, instead you decide to skip the middleman and visit the website of a company that you would like to work for. If you’re lucky, there will be a link that says “Careers” on the home page that takes you directly to a page with a link that takes you to the job listings. If you aren’t lucky, you to see get a webpage full of stock photos of happy people that probably don’t work at the company at all. This page will list all of the departments, the cities, the benefits, the descriptions of jobs and maybe one or two testimonials from real employees. Also: Real attractive employees, companies don’t want you to think they hire ugly people. You will then spend at least a minute trying to a link to the actual jobs.

Once you find the specific job that you are looking for, the fun part begins: The Application. Step one is always straightforward: Your personal information. Cool. Step two: Upload your resume. Okay. Now type in your work history, that is, all the information that is on your resume. Yeah. Even though you’ve just sent them an electronic copy of your resume, they want to you hand-type all of that same information into their system. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that larger employers don’t have their own job sites, instead they use a third party like Taleo or Workday, and they both SUCK. They suck because if you apply to multiple companies that use one of those third party sites, you get to re-type in the same information FOR EACH FUCKING COMPANY. At this point in my career I have probabl about a dozen Taleo profiles and a half-dozen for Workday. How hard would it be for those guys to let me enter my profile ONCE and just re-submit it to different companies? I’m just sayin.

Of course, after you have checked every box, selected every option, filled out every field, and clicked ‘Submit,’ then there’s the waiting. And along those lines, this is the end of the epsode

This has been 300 Seconds, the next episode will be posted after I type in eighteen years of job experience into an application website…again . I am Eduardo Soliz, if you’d like to hear more 300 seconds subscribe via your favorite podcatcher and check out my website at Eduardo Soliz dot com for more. Thank you for listening!

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Eduardo Soliz, JUST SAYING, list, TECH

Signs that the group is a just a BIT older than you are

randomEven though I’m bear-ly in my 40s 😀 I joined an online group for older furries recently.  After a while, my Spidey-Sense began to tell me that most of other folks in the group have at least a decade or two on me:

  1. “Attachment unavailable”
  2. Vertical videos
  3. “I hate that thing that’s popular with the young people!”
  4. Black and white pictures
  5. Scans of actual Polaroid pictures
  6. Pictures rotated the wrong way
  7. Five-year old memes
  8. “Why is this [meme] funny? It makes no sense!”
  9. When people say ‘back in the day’ they REALLY mean it
  10. And of course: “Get off my lawn!”
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JUST SAYING, RANDOMIZER9.COM, TECH

In Defense of “Old Media”

Sony Transistor Radio Model S10MK2

Someone still loves you, radio!

I usually make my weekly run to the grocery store sometime during the weekend, which is probably not the smartest thing to do because everyone else does the same thing.  Of course, life often gets in the way of that plan and I end up going on Monday instead, which is also annoying because it means I have to burn precious after-work-before-bed time.  As I am one of those oddball men that actually likes to shop, it really isn’t that big of a deal because  I can easily spend an entire hour at HEB buying groceries for the week.  It also isn’t unusual for me to show up with a list of five items and leave with twenty…I’m thinking the two are related somehow.

In any event, it was time to go to the grocery store again, but this Monday introduced a new wrinkle: the Spurs were playing and it was an important game.  Like most folks, I don’t pay much attention to basketball until the playoffs arrive, and the Spurs had lost two in a row and so they were in a ‘must-win situation.’  While I would have loved to just sit and watch the game, I had groceries to buy and laundry to do after that, so I made my list, checked it twice, and headed out the door.

Now I have a problem: I can’t keep tabs on the game while I am in the store.  I do have a smartphone, though, so I figured I would open up a web browser and keep tabs on the game via  a sports website.  At the time I left my apartment, it was a close game and waiting for the browser to reload and update the score was agonizing.  It then occurred to me that for all the 4G-dual-core-Flash-touchscreen-whiz-bang technology my smartphone had, I would have been better off with a cheap transistor radio tuned to a local sports station.  Much to my chagrin, the last update came fifteen seconds before the game ended, and I ended up having to visit a different website to get the final score because the page stopped updating.

As great and wonderful as the Internet is, radio and television (aka “the old media”) still outdo the ‘net by leaps and bounds when it comes to things that are happening live.  I am certain many of us remember refreshing our browsers at work every few minutes on 9/11, only to be stuck with pages that loaded slowly, or not at all.  Meanwhile, at the same time TV and radio stations were providing a steady stream of information that kept going independent of how many viewers were watching.  Sure, it wasn’t all ‘interactive’ and ‘social’ and all those things we expect nowadays, but when something is happening right now, give me a radio or a TV set anyday.

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Uncategorized

You Only Spam The Ones You Love

I HATE SPAM.

Yeah, yeah, I know, big whoop, who doesn’t…but I’m not talking about the spam that promises cheap meds, or that king in wherever-it-is who fled the country and needs help getting his money, or the stock WHOSE VALUE IS ABOUT EXPLODE IN JUST A FEW DAYS SO BUY IT NOW!!! Mmm…no.

I can deal with that stuff, spam filters have gotten pretty good these days.

I’m talking about the stupid chain-letters and the stupid collections of “inspiring” or funny images (except for lolcats, they’re alright) and the stupid cutesy messages that well-intentioned friends send. What pisses me off even more is when I get them on my cell phone. Jokes are fine but NO FARKING WAY am I forwarding a message to ten other people because it says “IF U LUV JEBUS SND 2 10 FRNDS K THX BYE” I’d like to think The Almighty has better things to do than count the number of texts I’ve been sending. Also, I barely have ten friends now and so I’d like to hang onto them, thank you very much. (not true, but just I couldn’t resist the setup)

What bothers me isn’t that the spam is coming from friends. What bothers me is that these supposed friends are sending me crap instead of an ACTUAL message of some sort. Even if it is just “HOW U DOIN” or “DNT WRY BE HAPY ” I’d much rather get a personal message that someone put some effort into (even if it was thirty seconds of effort) instead of the same shit that everyone else and their dog is getting. I knew one person that pulled this crap for several months and when I got a new cell phone number, I sure as fark didn’t give it to him.

As a general rule, if the list of recipients is longer than the message itself, its going directly to Binary Hell!

No passing Go, no collecting $200…straight to BINARY FUCKING HELL.

Arrgh!

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Wii would like to browse

I decided to drop a few bucks and buy the Wii browser. The thought of not having to use my PC to check email sounds pretty nice. I figured if it wasn’t that great, I’d only be out five bucks. I was already pretty impressed with the News and Weather channels built into the Wii, but the fact that the browser was made by Opera gave me pause.

My last experience with Opera was a few years ago, just before it was ready for prime-time. It couldn’t render tables very well, which was a liability when reading forums. It did, however, have tabbed browsing, so it was a bit ahead of its time in that respect.

I have to say, the Wii browser is pretty nice. I can view almost all of my favorite websites just as they appear on my PC (MSNBC chokes on it for some reason, imagine that). It also has Flash support, which unfortunately means Flash ads. Youtube works pretty good, and fullscreen mode is supported. Now, if I can see Zero Punctuation on my 32″ TV, that will rock.

The icing on the cake? USB keyboards work on the Wii, which is a good thing, or else I’d have developed carpal tunnel trying to type this in.

Apparently, LiveJournal doesn’t like the way the Wii handles linefeeds, good thing there’s always good ol’ HTML!

No Zero Punctuation -sob- Hey Opera, when’s that Flash 7 support coming? 😛

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