June 10, 2010, I was laid off from Pronto.com after 4.5 years of employment, by a guy that I interviewed for my own supervisor’s position. Two hours after laying me off, the company immediately put my job description on craigslist in an entry-level capacity. I loved Pronto – I had worked there since it was just a few months old. I considered it “my baby”. June 10th was not a good day for me. Three days later they announced the buy-out of the rest of the original Pronto.com shares by their parent company IAC.
I’ve got a house, a wife to support, two kids and two broken cars that I need to fix. Everything nowadays requires money. I can’t wait to find work. Every day that I’m unemployed, I lose $250. Time to start my search for a new job, and fast!
The first place that I went was OneRiot.com and applied for a sysadmin position there. OneRiot.com is an up-and-coming Boulder startup that does ‘social search’. What they do is scrape twitter, digg and other sites and try to trend topics and put together news articles based on what they consider current trends. I passed their 2-hour scripting test that “nobody has finished in the 2-hour limit” in one hour and they were very impressed. I sat down with face-to-face interviews with 9 different people including their CEO. They checked all my references and after it was all done, they decided to not go with me. Later, they posted two entry-level positions for both halves of the job that I was interviewing for (part sysadmin, part QA). I figure that they decided to split my job and salary into two parts and have two people instead of one. This seems to be a trend in the smaller companies. Hire more ‘warm bodies’ (like they’re resources, not people) instead of higher-paid, more experienced people.
The typical System Administration Job Interview:
The job market is actually pretty good for my profession at this time. I’ve had at least 3-4 phone interviews per week and 1-2 face-to-face interviews per week so-far. I’ve got 5 companies that are seriously considering me and I’m just waiting them out for them to make a decision. I’ve also got a potential CTO position with a really fun startup in Boulder that I’m keeping my fingers crossed for.
So, I’m not too worried about my job search, but I’m starting to think about things like moving up into management. The money is better, depending on the position, I could still do some technical stuff, and I’m pretty good with people. I’ve lead people before and they seem to like my management style. I’m pretty easy-going. My main management principals are to stick up for my people if/when they make a mistake, give them the tools that they need to do their job and stay out of their way. It works for me and I think that it’s a fair way to manage.
My previous job was probably taken from me probably because of money. Why else would they hire an entry-level person the same day? Why would OneRiot.com not hire me and then open up two positions instead of the one that I was applying for? I have been either a Senior or a Lead System Administrator for the last 12 years of my professional life and my salary requirements are a little higher than the standard startup can afford. With experience comes higher salaries. So, either I need to start looking for a different role (programmer or manager) or go with a larger company that can afford me.
I love the tech industry. I love programming. I love Linux. I don’t know if I’d miss the whole tech thing or not if I were to make the leap into management. My perfect job would be a hybrid – a combination of management and programming, I think. If you’ve read my blog in the past, you know that I love to tinker with code and different things. I put together a bunch of systems for Pronto in the early days and I loved it. I’ve put together different ‘startup’ websites to see if they generate any interest. I love putting things together and being creative – if I go into management, I might miss that a little bit.
So, I’m thinking more holistically about my life/job/family now that I have some time to adjust my life direction a little bit. I’ll update my blog again with part 2 of my job search when I’ve made some more progress.
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