Aug 252010
I’ve mentioned several times here that I had the chance at a really good job Out East. And I’ve also mentioned the numerous and seemingly more frequent disasters I’ve suffered of late (cat problems, money problems, computer problems, health problems, etc.). And several commenters have said that my luck *had* to change, and that things would balance out and I’d get the job.
HA!
Guess what.
Finally heard back today on when exactly I’m to go out there for the face-to-face interview: “Sorry, budget cuts.”
Well, I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t go out and buy a suit.
Anybody want to buy a cat? Slightly used, well tempered. A steal at only $2.2 million…
11 Responses to “Job”
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This is a step up. You didn’t get RIF’d a week after starting the job. 😉
Yeah. That was pretty much my first job. Got hired by OSC in January 1996 to design the thrust structure for the X-34B. Program got cancelled the next week.
Well, rats.
Happened to me, too, a while back. I had things set up to be the data base commissar for the Electricity Supply Board (Republic of Ireland). We were in the final stages of deciding on my location for the next two years when the Irish decided their budget needed trimming. The Yank who’d not quite yet been hired was first to go. I never got to go to the face-to-face, either. I spent part of that afternoon out back with my archery equipment, and my kids and wife stayed away from me.
You got the part where they liked you enough to think about shipping you there for a visit. That’s more that I’ve seen in a very long time. I still think you deserve better luck.
Got anything else pending?
> Got anything else pending?
Nope. That was the first hint of a Real Job in two years.
First in two years isn’t even close to my personal record. Nothing from 2000 to 2008 — and it seems to have been more of a bit of idle curiosity about who I was than it was a real job.
Yer not making me feel any more optimistic…
Well, if private spaceflight really starts going strong over the next few years, your prospects for a job should improve immensely.
Optimism? I’m a lot older than you, and that works against me. I’m probably a lot more likely to say something pointed about a situation placed before me. There are lots of guys with my background and my skill set. It’s been suggested a number of times that I just don’t “look right for the job.” And all this time I thought being competent was the most important thing … foolish me. Apparently, fitting in is more important than anything else, once you get to talk with them. Fitting in appears mean that the HR person has to like you.
You do have a future.
I’m supposed to graduate next summer, but if the job market is this bad, it looks like I’m going to grad school.
Huron’s comment about commercial space brings up a interesting question.
Have you submitted your resume to places like Virgin Galactic, Orbital Science, SpaceX, and Blue Origin?
Your expertise seems to be aerospace history; maybe you could sell your talents in the dual capacity of hunting down good ideas from the past in regards to how to do specific things, combined with giving them warnings regarding how _not_ to do things that were tried before and flopped.
You prevent them from going up even one major blind alley (like and ablative lining on the inside of a combustion chamber that SpaceX tried on the original Merlin design) with the info you can track down, and you are going to be worth every penny of your pay to them, and then some.
Admin wrote:
“I hadn’t thought about VG, but I’m not sure they’re in the market for design engineers, anymore than United Airlines is.”
Well, maybe you could have told them that if they drag their tank of nitrous oxide outside on a hot summer day for an engine test, without cranking up the refrigeration gear on it, the stuff is going to get above its vapor pressure as it goes down the thin, hot, plumbing to the engine – becoming a monopropellant like hydrazine or hydrogen peroxide and causing the whole works to blow up as it decomposes.
I actually dealt with this shit decades ago in regards to working out protein levels of various types of grains for a local lab.
…and it makes nitroglycerin look safe be comparison in regards to temperature.
Even at room temperature, the stuff had to be vented on a daily basis, as pressure built up inside the storage casks and threatened to rupture them.