fedward, tumbling

I Need a Job Title

I’m assuming the tens of you who read this already know what it is I do in general, but since 2006 I’ve been doing IT consulting. This has involved a mix of programming, maintenance, and support. Before I became a consultant, my job title was “developer,” before that it was “programmer,” before that it was “internet engineer, lead,” and before that (back in the dark ages) I was a “network administrator,” “system administrator,” or “webmaster,” depending on who was doing the asking (all of those titles at once, interchangeably, though).

Thanks to the recession, consulting is no longer even bringing in the medium-sized bucks, though, and I’ve been looking for full-time (or even serious part-time) IT work. And essentially I’ve been failing at this, because I’m still looking with no end in sight.

So now I think I need to write a new résumé from a clean sheet, and I’m coming at it from the perspective that I’ve been selling myself for the wrong job. I have fifteen years experience in information technology. There are certain specific types of expertise I don’t have, but I have touched a lot of technology in all that time, some of it in quite a bit of depth. I am now effectively “senior” in experience and presumed salary expectation, but I have never managed people.  I did this somewhat intentionally, but staying out of the management track now appears to have been career-limiting.

Ideally in my new job I’d be responsible for:

• Making decisions about what hardware and software to buy
• Doing more software or database design than implementation, although some implementation is fine (and probably to be expected)
• Deciding what to develop in-house and what to hire out for
• Assigning both people and machines to get the most out of them.

Complicating this is the fact that I’ve never managed people (I’ve been a lead, and I’ve been senior-level, but never managing). So whatever title I’m aiming for has to be attainable given that lack of specific experience.

What’s the job title for all that?

So You’re Watching the Winter Olympics

Since I was nine years old I’ve been somewhat obsessed with the Winter Olympics.  It was 1980, the year the Games were in Lake Placid and thus well-televised.  I grew up in Oklahoma, which featured neither mountains nor heavy snow, so all the sports were essentially unavailable to me except for the indoor ones, and as for those I never got to any Tulsa Oilers games (at that age I was barely aware Tulsa even had a hockey team - soccer yes, hockey no) and I didn’t particularly care for figure skating.

But in 1980, two sports in particular appealed to me:  hockey and bobsled.  Hockey should be obvious here, since that was the Miracle On Ice (and I remember how the euphoria of the victory over Russia was tempered by the fact there was still ANOTHER GAME to play, and what a nail-biter that was).  Bobsled, though, appealed to my nine-year-old, Oklahoman heart as only something unattainable could.

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