End of Hiatus

I know I haven't posted much in the past many months. But I have a feeling that's about to change.

Why the drought? There are a combination of reasons, most of which I won't go into here, but one that I will mention is concern over any potential impact to my employment.

I started a new job at the beginning of April and, as one might imagine, there were a lot of things that I could have blogged about. After 10 years as a full-time telecommuter I find myself going into an office every day. That alone was probably worth a dozen postings. But even though my identity is fairly well hidden there are still people who might recognize references to my new employer and figure out that I am the author.

And it's not even that my new bosses are particularly evil or pointy-haired — they aren't — but it is a fairly big company and fairly big companies have a tendency to occasionally do pointy-haired things. They can't help themselves.

So while I could have blogged about my new pimps, I choose not to just to avoid the admittedly remote chance of offending them.

But I feel the urge once again and have a supply of topics about which I would like to write. I won't be winning any Pullet Surprises or Webbies; I might not even inspire (m)any comments. And that's okay, because I'm good enough, and I'm smart enough, and, doggone it, people like me!

Skillz Te$t

Today I had my the second interview "test" of my life. 17 years ago I had applied for a job at Convex and one of the interviews was with a group of programmers who spent an hour or so grilling me on everything I claimed on my resume. I had to write programs or functions in C, sed, and awk, evaluate the order of computation for an algorithm, and other computer gymnastics. I guess I passed because I was offered the job (which I turned down).

Today's interview was a screening interview for a consulting company. But it wasn't conducted by anyone at the company that might hire me. It turns out that there is at least one company whose major business is conducting technical interviews. They questioned me on AIX/Unix, project management, SDLC, leadership, SQL, C, Perl, and Korn shell programming. It was a bit nerve-racking.

I was surprisingly nervous the instant the phone rang. I didn't have a really good handle on what they might be testing me on because I've never seen a job description for the position. Plus, I've never done a technical interview on the phone, or at least not one that had been advertised as a "test". So I think it was all just so different that it was a bit discombobulating.

I think I did okay, though I stumbled on a couple of (hopefully minor) questions. The interviewer will send a report within a couple of hours and I hope to hear from the potential employer in a few days.

Update — 23 January:
I just got a call from the (in-house) recruiter and I passed the test. I have an interview next week.