The Job Search Continues

I've been accumulating a small pile of job leads for which there is some initial contact, perhaps followed by mutual interest, a phone call, and then silence. On Thursday, I took as step toward following up on them to see if they have gone dead or merely dormant.

One of them will make me wait, for the contact is out of the office until next week, so sayeth her autoresponder. Another responded the next day to tell me that I'm not sufficiently steeped in vendor-specific technologies to be a good deal for them. The others have gone unanswered.

On Thursday night came the second phone interview with the really big Pacific Northwest software company. The conversation went well, even if it demonstrated that my grasp of algorithms and data structures is not everything you learn in the classroom. He seemed fascinated with one of the projects I had busied myself at my current employer, and we had a good time discussing the architecture behind that.

On Friday, I reformatted my resume to reduce some gratuitous white space and refreshed the major job boards with it. It now converts to HTML and text much more nicely.

On Friday evening, I received an e-mail from the Pacific Northwest. They want me to come out for an interview. Surprisingly enough, my wife seemed excited about that one. I will be attending that one.

I haven't given up totally on the local job search. One recruiter with whom I met a week and a half ago has called me a couple times to tell me of some other places where he'd like to vet my resume, and I've given him my consent on that. I have two sit down meetings with other recruiters this coming week. I believe this will be the seventh and eighth such agencies I've talked to since September.

I also learned that my coworker who had announced his plans to depart has reconsidered. The CEO had a talk with him on Monday and said that if the licensing deal goes through, they would like to put him in a more "customer facing" role, wherein he would be sent out to the Bay Area to work on site with the licensee to oversee product integration.

I'm not sure whether they can follow through on that promise, but it's a win-win situation for him because he's currently unattached and it would give him a free ticket to the Silicon Valley. Later on in the week, he faxed the other employer to rescind his acceptance of their job offer.