The Penguin Tamer moves on

On Monday, I put in my notice at my current job in preparation of starting a new adventure next month. It was a decision I made with much regret as I loved the work, the team, and the company. What I didn’t like was being awakened by my pager on countless nights as some production system or another at work melted down. That, and the several weekends of marathon maintenance work, some keeping me awake all night. I have been hit hard enough lately with the Gulf War Illness fatigue that I couldn’t pile on weeks of guaranteed disrupted sleep. It was affecting my health, it was disturbing my wife’s sleep, too, and taking family time away from me on those work-filled weekends. Unfortunately, no other relief was in sight other than to change jobs.

It wasn’t log into my job search that I realized just how in-demand my skills were. My resume on CareerBuilder attracted 2-3 job opportunities each day. Unfortunately, many of those were generated by lazy recruiters doing keyword searches and consisted of far-flung jobs that often didn’t match my skills or interests. On the bright side, several actual, clueful recruiters did reach out to me with decent opportunities. One of them wrote that this was the hottest IT job market his firm has seen in years, and I believe it. Actual quote:

We are in the strongest market for IT careers that we’ve ever seen and will be sending out lots of emails today.

I was quickly drowning in job leads, and the home phone was ringing off the hook. I couldn’t deal with the attention, particularly since most of it was noise. So, I did what any good sysadmin would do and created an automated solution! I used site-specific email addresses on the resumes I posted and funnelled them to a procmail script which responded to each one. In this response, I spelled out exactly what I was looking for and put to rest any questions of whether I’d be interested in working in East Armpit, Illinois. Occasionally, a non-robot recruiter would respond, thanking me for the response that spelled out what was what. Most of them I never heard from again, including many (apparently offshore) recruiters who had clue that Charlotte was not in commuting distance from Raleigh.

To keep the home phone from ringing at all hours, I dusted off one my seldom-used spare phone numbers and had calls to it go directly to voicemail, where my outgoing announcement there spelled out what kind of work I’d be interested in doing. To date, I have 16 pending messages there which I’ll get around to listening to eventually. Maybe.

Screening these opportunities was one of the smartest things I did in my job search, allowing me to focus on only those that were the best fit. The best part is that now I’m off the job market, I can simply pull the plug on the custom phone number and email addresses and instantly end the recruiter harassment! Ah, peace!

CareerBuilder may have been king of job leads quantity but it was Dice that actually landed me my upcoming job. A recruiter found me there and got me connected with this Raleigh software firm. Things just fell into place from there! The work is interesting, the pay and benefits are better, and the commute is within easy walking distance of my home. Most importantly, the company highly encourages their people’s pursuit of public service. This is one thing I could not work out with my current boss, so I’m quite pleased that this came about.

So, while I’m sorry I had to make this move I’m happy with the upcoming adventure. The future is bright indeed!