[colug-432] job search

[Tom Hanlon]

I am going to add my 2 cents largely because it differs from the approaches
described already.

*Note that I am currently a hadoop trainer and that is the intersection of
two rather small worlds. Training is small and rather well connected,
hadoop was small when I got involved and to a large extent remains small.
So most of this might apply narrowly to someone similar, but maybe also can
be considered broadly.

My approach for the last 10 years has been 100 percent people and
connection driven and topic focussed. Resume style or cover letter or any
of that have been secondary. I rely on contacts, and I focus on topics that
are getting spikes of interest.

I might have been lucky to land at MySQL in 2006 and make friends there,
then all those folks split into many directions in 2009, and then that
pattern repeats.

Does this apply to your job search? Maybe .. maybe not. I work remotely for
San Jose area companies for the most part. So the remote piece may not fit
into a lot of positions. They are startups and folks move around a lot, so
the contacts spread.

I felt compelled to reply because my situation and approach seems a bit
different. Also as a trainer I can pivot rather quickly so that might have
something to do with it.

How would this apply generally? I dunno but looking back the high growth
stuff seems to have been my ticket all along.

What worked in the past..
1998 html world wide web PHP
2001 webserver, linux, XML, python
2006 MySQL, web scaling and performance
2009 Hadoop Big Data

What seems likely to work in the near future.
2016 and beyond.. Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Moving folks from R to
SciPy and Pandas notebooks and Dataframes, Kafka, Spark, Containers (docker
kubernetes), Microservices, public private cloud migration stuff, general
distributed architecture stuff.

Might not be as big of waves in the future as we had in the past, but there
are certainly current hot spots where the demand outstrips the supply.


If the technology is growing the companies are small and exciting (for good
or ill ).
When demand is high the bar in a certain sense is set low. You have to
deliver, but when the target is moving and growing there is a lot of on the
job learning. You can get your foot in the door much easier for say Perl in
1998, Python in 2001, etc, etc.

Just my 2 cents, I guess the summary is that I am contact and topic driven
more than anything else.

Looking back at how I landed positions might be interesting.

First training position: I had posted a helpful reply on a python email
list.
First PHP coding position: I had posted a helpful reply on a PHP list.
MySQL job: I went looking for that, but it was not resume driven, I called
or emailed and said "I can do that"
First Hadoop training job: linked in web search driven by employer, not me
looking for them, them looking for someone like me.
All other jobs: personal contacts.
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