Pants Full of Unix

… and by “love” I mean… something slightly other.

Recently, I was offered full time employment with $CURRENT_EMPLOYER, where, the attentive will recall, my job description is “only” backup & recovery production support. This is not a job description that I would like to maintain forever, nor one that I even think I'm particularly well-qualified for. (I was hired for this job, managing Veritas NetBackup, based on three weeks experience with the product, which means that there's plenty about it that I just Don't Know and figure out from First Knowledge–managing POSIX operating systems and the applications that run on them–so I've been pretty surprised that my employers seem to think I'm doing a swell job, but they do.)

It was a crisis of faith, and a decision that I didn't think I would have to make until the scheduled end of the contract in February. So I stammered a bit, updated my resume on Monster, and decided to see what would turn up. (I also talked with a certain weblog-enabling website with which you may be familiar, which might have worked and might still work out, but they needed somebody right now who was already local, so it didn't work out for the moment.) And the response was… voluminous. Partly this is because of the buzz words $CURRENT_EMPLOYER have added to my resume (”Veritas NetBackup”, “Veritas Cluster Server”, “AIX”, “HP-UX”), but mostly I attribute it to the time frame (if you're looking for an IT job, look between Thanksgiving and New Years; everybody just got their next years' budget–especially since most budgets are Q4-Q3–and they're looking to expand, provided they're not in the act of tanking or outsourcing everything and its brother).

I opted to take the full time position, sent off an email to the recruiters who'd contacted me asking whether I could forward their contact information to (whose background is a lot like mine, only but more network/security than storage/backups, and is looking in the same geographic area as I was at the moment), and passed the responses along. Enter MacArthur and Associates.

Damn but they're persistant. These people called me three times in as many business days, the latter two calls within thirty minutes of each other last night. So I returned the call, explained the situation, and the guy I spoke with went ahead and described the position. It was a perfect fit for my experience, including experience with some particular, obscure, hardware vendors' products. “Is your client, by any chance, $FORMER_EMPLOYER?” “Why, yes, it is.”

The truly attentive will also remember that $FORMER_EMPLOYER fired my sorry ass. And then they called me in a panic and gave me an outrageous amount of money per hour to fix things when they exploded (which I guess I haven't gotten around to describing here yet… I should really do that). In any case, there's a big difference between my former manager recognizing that he needed shit fixed in a hurry and could authorize paying me as a contractor without any trouble and my making it past the parties in HR who were, in vaguely 1/3 portion, responsible for my getting axed to begin with… so it would be a pretty bad idea for these guys to even send my resume on. More to the point, I've got no interest in going back there, for any amount of money.

Oh boy, was that offer a lot of money. Twice what I was paid while there, rounded to the nearest ten-kay (shit you not). This opening was precipitated by my PFY (Sorry, T, nothing personal meant by that) having said “Fuck you guys, I'm going home” recently himself, leaving them with one paper-experienced (but nigh useless in, you know, cognitive abilities) guy where the PFY (who is quite smart, but had a lot of stuff to pick up when he started working with me, having skated through places with more staff than needs, rather than the other way 'round) and I had only barely been enough together to keep back the tides of tragedy. Sounds like they want someone vaguely equivalent to either him or me, willing to manage people (something he'd do in maybe another five years or so, possibly post MBA, and something which I steadfastly refuse to touch with the business end of a ten-foot pox-stick) and also do real work, and probably hire another “junior” level admin.

And, you know, more power to them. The amount they're offering is what they should have been paying me for the amount of effort I was putting in, and, more to the point, they need more hands, guided by Clue no futher than one rung up the org chart, which is what it sounds like they're trying for now. I asked for the recruiter's contact information to pass along to (which either he didn't get around to sending me or went to ~/mail/spam, need to check on that) and bowed out, firm in the belief that he knew I was Not Looking at this point.

Then another person at the same agency called me again tonight.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't find a job teaching, recruit. It fucking kills me that they're now a necessary part of employment.