Annotated Chapter 15 Page 27
Sparrow: “What about a job in dramatic foreshadowing? Some of those have to be open, right?”
…and here we see one of the perils of doing annotations slightly out-of-order: I already posted the omake where Sparrow was working retail, but haven’t gotten to the chapter where she gets hired yet.
They’re in the right order in the print volumes, don’t worry.
And speaking of print-volume order — this wraps up Trade Paperback Volume 4, or the first chunk of Master’s Edition Omnibus 2, both of which are followed by Interlude 3. Which takes place 100% in flashback, so no worries about continuity! After the usual inter-chapter break, that’s where we’re headed next.
Walker: Would I be correct in saying that money is tight for you right now?
Jany: Well, yeah. So thank you again for this trip! It’s like a paid holiday.
Walker: Indeed . . . Of course, it isn’t just a holiday. You’re being compensated for the help you and your Being are giving me in my research. And it would help all the more if you were available to do this on a . . . long-term basis. So, Jany . . .
How would you like a job?
Boston.
Bianca: . . . Are you hiding in a pillow fort?
Sparrow: Yes. Yes, Bianca, I am. I have officially applied for a hundred jobs, and still haven’t been hired once. What am I doing wrong, huh? I have a good education! And it’s not like I’m picky!
I’d even take a job as an evil minion at this point!
Bianca: . . . I don’t think that’s a thing, Sparrow.
Chapter 15 ~ End
That’s OK. Fun fact, on the Sunday after I started my first job officially in IT after college, I had a panic attack about being 11 months post graduation and having not found a job yet, *despite* having worked at said job for a week.
To be fair, it was one of those jobs where they interviewed me and at the end asked me, “When can you start?” “Well, I have a job and I’d like to give two weeks notice, but I’m working for my dad who is really hoping I’ll get a job soon so I suppose sooner would work also.”
“Great! We promised you’d start working at the customer site on Tuesday, and we have a week of new hire training we want you to go through first.”
Now, that was on a Thursday and I had to move about a thousand miles for the job, so that new hire training didn’t exactly happen on schedule. But interviewed on Thursday, buy a new car on Friday, drive it a thousand miles on Saturday, started work on Sunday. That’s really not the best start to a relaxing career.
Did that job have any red flags? I mean, apart from that one? Absolutely. But it was in the right field and I had student loans to pay off. I was technically keeping up with them, but my savings account was dwindling to do that.
Despite the red flags, it wasn’t a bad job per se, but it easily could have been. But when I had that panic attack, I hadn’t learned enough to know it wouldn’t be, so I was certainly very anxious, and then I woke up not remembering the actual situation. It didn’t take long for me to figure it out; my bedroom in my apartment looked nothing like the bedroom in my parents’ house, but that didn’t really matter in those first few moments of being awake while I hadn’t yet opened my eyes. Fortunately that calmed me down pretty quickly once I did open my eyes.
You had trouble finding job IN IT?
College was a wonderful place full of learning resources. The libraries were all excellent, and the computer labs they provided for my classes were orders of magnitude better than the community college where I’d taken a few classes in high school. While they didn’t have specific systems administration training in the curriculum, the technical fascist of the computer center gave informal classes in the evening. Unfortunately, my official classes tended to be dull and boring. My grades were not stellar. Over the course of five years, I passed enough classes to graduate. But my GPA suggested I was bottom barrel material. My CS grades were decent enough as I tended to warp the curve without trying, but outside of CS they were not good. If you needed someone to sit between a chair and a keyboard and play your empire building games, you’d look for someone with that kind of a transcript.
But then they’d call me for an interview, or maybe even fly me in. I would answer interview questions like “are you familiar with the vi editor?” with “are you familiar with nvi? It’s a vi clone with more advanced features. I’m in the credits.”
“Have you used grep?” “Global regex print? Absolutely. It came from the ex editor, where it was such a useful feature it was made into a stand alone command.”
“What do you know about sendmail?” “I’m in the credits.”
I don’t remember the full list of open source programs I’d contributed to by that point, but the list was embarrassingly long for someone with my GPA. At least once, they asked me about a particular feature of one of those programs and I was able to honestly say, “Oh, yeah, I added that. So this is how it works…”
I suspect some thought that I would spend all of my time contributing to open source projects, while others were really concerned about being the most knowledgeable person in their department and understood that wouldn’t be true for long if I was there.
One of them turned out to be someone whose code I’d patched. He wasn’t a primary author, he had just contributed much like I had, and he was very insistent that my update did not address a problem that actually existed regardless of what the project’s bug tracking system may have indicated. That was one of the few interviews where I was told no on the spot. Most of them just sent me a letter within a week or two saying, “We’re sorry, but you’re overqualified.”
One of the places was doing something that was near some technology my father had actually developed. Much like the stuff I’d done in code, this was just a minor tweak to other people’s stuff, but still had a significant impact on the field. It seemed early on like my background on the stuff from having worked with my father was possibly going to be useful. But it turned into a situation like the guy whose code I’d patched. The hiring manager had come up with a similar but inferior solution and was annoyed to find that my father had a patent and was already in business with something that made his solution obsolete. He hadn’t actually needed a programmer. I’d been waiting to see how programming entered into it, but it turned out he just recognized the last name and called me in for an interview on the off chance he could give one of my father’s relatives a hard time. That wouldn’t actually have been an IT job, but the interview happened in that 11 month period and was framed as an IT job to get me to go into it.
There were a lot of places where I really wouldn’t have wanted to work as well. I’m not sure why I went to an interview in New York City, but I determined I wasn’t taking that one before I got to the hotel the night before simply because I would have needed to commute through New York City and the number of people to deal with is just mind-boggling.
If my grades had been good, I probably would have been snapped up pretty quickly and commanded a high starting salary. But instead I had a very different experience.
This was all in the mid 90s. There weren’t as many people in IT, but there weren’t as many IT jobs. I’m uncertain if it was harder or easier to get a job in IT back then. Since starting my first job, while I have interviewed a few places, all the jobs I’ve actually taken were ones where the hiring manager contacted me and said, “I’d like you to work for me, what will it take?” or something to that effect. There wasn’t an interview, because we always had an established working relationship of some sort. They knew what I could do, and i knew more or less what their department did.
Well, job in retail basically IS job as evil minion, isn’t it? Or does the evil minion job come with better health coverage?