Hello friends! TIME HAS PASSED. But here you are again! This day finds me employed, after a long struggle. Really, I’ve been job-seeking since January, though well in advance of when I needed to, as my graduation date was March of this year. Believe me, I am still fuzzily post-graduation, extremely happy to have no far less homework than while earning my degree (en français, bien sûr !).

Understanding that confirmation bias makes fools of us all, about two months ago I changed my resume (do I write résumé? seems soooo new yorker snobbish, though it is correct) in what may have been a crucial way. My tech recruiter friend gave me some terrific and honest (read: intense) feedback on my R/CL and told me to cut out the “References available upon request” line, because duh, everybody knows that and it just takes up space. For a few weeks, I had it removed entirely. Then, I did something rather bold, and added the following snake-oil-style pitch toward the bottom of my cover letter:

“But don’t take my word for it! Just ask person_1, the leader of the free world, or person_2, the founder of Mars, or even person_3, the inventor of Post-Its! Every one of these folks is happy to -brag about- be a reference for me, so please, contact them!”

And I got a call, from an awesome company that I have always been too afraid of applying to, thinking that the folks that work there are a special kind of brilliant & that I wouldn’t have a chance in hell at actually working there. One of the reasons, other than my qualifications, that they said they called, was because of one of those people who I’d listed in that section.

Typically, references are a very late game process in the hiring world. Why bother calling references, a time-consuming and very personal (and personalizing!) process, if your candidate hasn’t even made it through a phone screen and an interview or two? In other words – why call references unless everybody is serious? But the fact that I put a few folks on there who wanted to vouch for me made a huge difference. And Portland is really so small and the scene is so focused that the names are fairly well-known. That wasn’t an accident, but I met these great people naturally, by getting out, participating quite heavily (and earnestly!) in PyLadies, and making friends with the people around me.

After two phone interviews, a task, an all-day interview, and a few (totally transparent!) hiccups, I was offered the job at Puppet Labs as a support engineer, and I feel so lucky, I have to keep from gushing about it. I left my stable, lifer career nearly four years ago to do ambiguously Better, and yes, Virginia, this is Better.

SO! Now I am LEARNING, learning learning learning! I’m still having a hard time reading the tickets that come in, but what I am able to do is parse Puppet code, and explain what it is and does, and how it’s an enormous, Neil Armstrong-style leap over previous (and still very widely used!) server management technologies. I’m pretty sure I’m in the right industry, guys, as this is really cool to me. Puppet is a company I am extremely excited to work for, for many reasons, not the least of which is getting to know the complex, technical, and awesome product. I keep a notebook on what I’m learning, and I fill several pages a day. Future blog posts will probably just focus on Puppet stuff, unless I get a chance to work on some recreational stuff. Woo-hoo!

And one last thing: if you know me, you know my absolute most highly recommended piece of advice to those looking for jobs: start a blog. Start a blog, start a blog, start a blog. Don’t wait til you code every bit by hand, don’t wait til everything is Perfect, just go to wordpress or blogspot or whatever, and start a blog. Nearly everyone I’ve interviewed with has mentioned it. Fear not about seeming stupid, because you’re brilliant.

Ok – going to cut this off before I get weepy/proselytizey/we-are-the-world-y. GOOD THING.