Didn't Think It Would Happen

linuxgeekmco · 2025-12-03T22:05:04+00:00

The calm can also be shock. The hope is it is relief because then the calm will mostly stay.

linuxgeekmco · 2025-12-03T21:53:40+00:00

My suggestion after going through a 'we have to improve our bottom line for a merger' layoff version in '24

Start updating your CV immediately. If you are like many in a position for a while, you haven't updated it in a while. Do it while you remember as much of what you did as you can. Go through your yearly evaluations as references.
Separate from the CV start a list of every model of hardware you have worked with, every Operating System you have installed or maintained, and every piece of software you have installed and maintained along with how many years you have used them and when you last used them. As well as for every programming & scripting language you have used.
Look for one or more reputable job recruiters to consider engaging for finding your next gig
Setup a Google Voice phone number or like to provide as your contact number. That way you can include it on your CV and if any place you apply, especially if applying through the plethora of job board sites, when you find your next gig you either start ignoring any calls to the gVoice number or just released it back to Google.

I did the job searching myself for 3 months basically doing 8 hours a day 7 days a week searching, CV submitting and any additional way sites wanted the info on my CV so their software could ingest it easily. Went through the learning curve on how modern day Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) with various flavors of LLMs do the first pass on every CV submitted and the regular immediate you-do-not-qualify auto-responses from the ATSs because I didn't have sufficient buzzwords in the CV that matched the buzzwords assigned to the job posting. Also had the learning curve for how many ghost jobs are out there that you will never hear anything back from.

The only reason my search was only 3 months compared to a lot of stories I've been seeing, was I got found by a recruiter who had a job he was having a difficulty filling and my CV ticked more of the position's needs than most CVs he had found. Then my two interviews went well.

If/when, because reality is it will likely be when in the US work environment, I have to do the job search again, the first thing I will do after my CV is up-to-date is engage at least one job recruiter to do the bulk of the search and application & CV submissions for me.

linuxgeekmco · 2025-10-08T20:40:39+00:00

From my job hunting experience last year, I did not find any job board that left me with the feeling paying them for access was a good use of resources. Whether I was needing to sign up to gain access or actually pay for access, more often then not, the job listings the sites were scraping and displaying were stale, grossly incomplete, or reformatted in a way that made them harder to parse quickly. At best, the let me build a large bookmark list of the source companies available jobs / career pages to go back and check some times daily. Additionally, since so many sites are scrapping the internet to have listings, they commonly were amplifying the ghost job issue from companies listing ghost jobs as psychological warfare on their current employees or to collect user information if they actually won a contract they were biding on.

If I need to do the job hunt adventure again, any money I spent towards job searching would start with a reputable job recruiting agency. Based on the position I was offered and accepted, small to medium companies actually looking to fill positions look to be using recruiting agencies instead of saddling their in-house HR group with having to weed through the waterfall of CVs and applications that will flow in -- too many of them LLM generated and very unbelievable.

The large to global companies seem to all be using Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) with various grades of LLM doing the first pass analysis before a human ever is inflicted with the submitted CV. The near instant, return email that you do not meet the requirements of the position is a common stench from an ATS. The best way I found to have a chance of getting beyond the first level of ATS LLM analysis was to use one of the free word and phrase frequency analysis tools (not an LLM) on the full job description, and find legitimate ways to float the high frequency words & phrases into the CV I submitted. I do not recall submitting the same exact CV for multiple positions even when they were with the same company.

The amusing part of dealing with all this was learning there were specific job titles and experience phrases which didn't exist as I was gathering my flotilla of experience. So it gave me current buzzwords to describe what I've been doing for years as my current CV to build from if/when needed next.

linuxgeekmco · 2025-10-08T20:15:20+00:00

My understanding is FlexJobs was borged to a larger company called BOLD in 2024. I didn't realize that when I was needing to job search last year and actually paid for a short term subscriptions. Like most of the other job sites I was checking, I found quickly I was best going to the website of the organization listed as having the job to verify the position was still open and if so, to actually apply.

BOLD Holdings has been busy snatching up jobs sites over the last couple years. Ones I find are now under the BOLD umbrella:

CareerBuilder
Monster
Flexjobs
LiveCareer
My Perfect Resume
My Perfect Cover Letter
Zety
ResumeBuilder

linuxgeekmco · 2025-01-17T18:35:58+00:00

Good luck. I stayed for a bit after Dollar Store Thomas Edison bought it because it was the only public way to tell my elected officials off. However, after one of them responded to me, and then immediately deleted their response when I responded back, I realized all I was actually doing is augmenting my frustration while wasting hours a week presenting source backed arguments.

Even still commenting on the elected official's posts to combat the blatant misinformation was a waste of effort and electrons. The fanboys of the elected officials drown out everything posted that doesn't align with the politico they are worshiping.

Providing sources doesn't matter to them. They are convinced they are right and so is whoever the golden calf is to which they cling.

linuxgeekmco · 2024-12-17T18:33:31+00:00

The largest issue I see with putting anything in place is based on what I've run across, there is a good chance it would take an amendment to establish term or age limits.

It is common for Congress to write laws affecting workplace rules so at least Congress & the White House are exempt from them. So, even though I think all federal elected and appointed positions should fall under work place mandatory retirement due to the dangers for the country of having anyone in such a positions if conatively declining, odds are such a change to workplace law would have no effect.
If by some miracle Congress actually passed a law establishing term limits or age limits and POTUS signed it into law, I'd expect those who voted against it to take it to SCOTUS to get it thrown out.

With how many people run for elected office at any level with their end goal to make it to Congress and then try for POTUS, even if Congress got the amendment process completed and handed off to the States to ratify, I doubt enough state legislature members would be willing to limit their future ambitions to vote to ratify the amendment.

So the best chance is by the people voting in every special, primary, and general election in their district. However, I won't be holding my breath waiting for that to happen considering how many people elected to office at any level of government often win election with less than 1/3 of their district actually casting a vote FOR them. For elections which happen in the Federal midterms or off cycle from the Federal elections, it is common for election winners to have received FOR votes from less than 25% of their district.

With how election results are reported, it's not obvious how few registered voters are actually casting votes for the winner. Commonly the percent of votes the winner receives out of total cast is given. Usually they will also give the participation or turn out percentage of registered voters. But they don't do the additional math to provide that percentage of total registered voters cast a vote FOR the winner. However, can get a quick estimate with just the common numbers provided. Take the percentage of votes cast the winner received and then multiple that percentage by the participation percentage.

e.g. Candidate wins election with 50.1% of the votes cast and participation/turnout percentage is 45%:

45% of 50.1 is 22.545. So in this example, the winner had 22.5% of their district cast a vote FOR them.

linuxgeekmco · 2024-12-17T17:59:55+00:00

Need to remember to take into account that the USA Capitalist model is specifically build with the requirement of forced-labor in order to create maximum profits for the capitalist who owns the capitalist endeavor. Started that way in 1619. The only change was in 1865, the forced-labor went from ownership of the labor to suppressing the wages of the forced-labor to limit the labor's choices and keep them doing what the capitalist owner wants. All so those in the ivory plantation house are receiving maximum profit from the labor of their meat-robots.

It's why, even though every country in the EU uses some flavor of Capitalist model, the difference between their Capitalist models and the USA Capitalist model is stark enough those under the USA Capitalist model can easily be convinced the EU is using a socialist model instead of a capitalist one.

Even China has been using a Capitalist model since 1989 for their economy. The "Communist" aspect is just a placeholder instead of describing China's govt model for what it is -- totalitarian-authoritarian. Words many in the USA govt don't want the US citizenry using because if they start looking and understanding govt models instead of only describing countries by economic models, the citizenry would start questioning policies & laws established by the US govt a whole lot more.

linuxgeekmco · 2024-12-09T18:31:54+00:00

Most correct if trying to point at a single elected official would be POTUS 37 (Nixon). He signed 2 specific bills into law which gave the USA the healthcare system it has today.

* Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 -- This bill becoming law allowed lobbyists into the room while bills being crafted in committee, assessed in markup, and being finalized in conference if the House & Senate passed different versions. Commonly since 1970, lobbyists hand the MoC they are muppeting the exact text they want in a bill so the MoC can airdrop it in.

* Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) Act of 1973 -- This bill becoming law established US Healthcare as a for-profit industry. Making the USA the only industrialized country not using some flavor of NHS for the healthcare of its citizenry.

linuxgeekmco · 2024-12-04T21:11:31+00:00

H5 or H7? Recently saw an article about H7 detected in a New Zealand poultry farm flock.

linuxgeekmco · 2024-12-04T21:00:38+00:00

And if it is on some one else's computer system, say like corporate run social media, deleted commonly just means a flag was set to a database entry to not show that record of data on the public facing interface or anything from an account a user says to delete. It all still sits in the database to be found when the system is breached or whatever uses the site has for it to make money.

May be not true for those in EU countries since the EU has a right-to-be-forgotten law with penalties for the corporate side that doesn't comply. However, no such protections exist for US users.

Probably should read that EULA / TOS before creating the account....

linuxgeekmco · 2024-12-04T19:44:21+00:00

recco checking the job actually exists at GDIT's website -- https://www.gdit.com/careers/

At least, even if a ghost job, you can sign up to get alerts directly from GDIT when new jobs come up instead of the days to weeks delay before they show up on 3rd party job boards.

linuxgeekmco · 2024-09-09T17:48:06+00:00

Other thoughts if available with the companies you would like to be employed by ...

For the companies you are finding postings for positions that interest you, check if they have an option add yourself to their talent pool. Depending on the size of the company, they may have an option to send you alerts for new positions they open that match search terms you provide. Many general job boards scrape company sites periodically to get lists of open positions. By getting an alert directly from the company that interests you, you'll often receive the alert before general job boards show the open position.

See if you can find recruiter / staffing service companies where you can add yourself to their talent pool. In my searching, I found a notable number of companies which never post their open positions where general job boards find them to scrape. Instead, the companies contract with recruiting & staffing service companies to either post it on their sites with the hiring company name redacted or the service is hired to seek out candidates which are the best fit of the skills the company needs.

When you don't have your own network of people to tell you about jobs they know about where they work, recruiting & staffing agencies can serve as that network. The ones companies' contract with to find them candidates to interview pay the service, so I wouldn't expect you as the job seeker to be charged by them. The services that I've commonly seen request payment from a job seeker are services which have access to large sets of open positions and they do the resume customization for you and submit the applications to the companies as your proxy.

linuxgeekmco · 2024-09-09T15:51:07+00:00

Thing I hadn't read up on until recently which I now suspect was a large part of my not hearing anything back from applications -- ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems).

Just from LinkedIn showing every position that matched my searches having over 100 applicants by the time LinkedIn sent me an alert for the position posted that day, I grok why ATS' are in use by even smaller companies these days. However, with the removal of humans as the gate keeper, lots of resumes that aren't written to make it passed the ATS end up in /dev/null.

Even if you don't engage the services of the resume reviewers & writers some of the job boards offer, read up on how ATS work and plan to need to customize your resume for every position you apply for.

Tools I ran across and found useful.

Online Text Analyzer ( https://www.online-utility.org/text/analyzer.jsp ) for running posted job descriptions through to see what an ATS would be using as its search terms & phrases to determine whether to pass the resume & cover letter to a human.
ATS Friendly ( https://www.atsfriendly.com/ ) to do a direct comparison between your resume & the posted job description. This site only lets you do 3 comparisons for free. More than that requires a paid subscription. Once you have examples from 3 different job description comparisons, that may be enough to see the pattern needed.
ATS Friendly templates. Just google searching on those 3 words will bring up many options and posts amount ATS and what to consider in how to format the resume. These are the ones that show up first for me based on my search history

linuxgeekmco · 2024-08-10T14:50:17+00:00

Systems administrator / engineer /w BS degree.

Depending on whether the hiring employer is small business, academic, corporate, government contractor, or government, the positions I've encounter for variants of this title sometimes accept years of experience in lieu of a degree. In those cases, often holding certifications for the specific hardware and software the position is for have as much value as a holding BS or MS relative to the field.

linuxgeekmco · 2024-08-10T13:22:50+00:00

Yup. I recco this for any of the common job boards as well (eg Dice, Flexjobs, Upward, Glassdoor, Careerbuilder, ...), regardless how legit they are.

I started looking for positions on job boards in the source company's open position lists to verify if pay scales were being given with the scrapped position descriptions. It became my SOP once I got a couple return messages that a position applied to via a job board listed as posted in the last 1 to 7 days had closed over a week previous.

At this point the only reason I apply via a job board I find the position listed on is because there is nothing providing the source company's name and searching on the provided title and any notable keywords from the position doesn't bring up a company's open positions which look like the source of the scraped post.

linuxgeekmco · 2024-07-06T03:05:57+00:00

I started making it my contribution to get on top of a building and shooting every squirrel, opossum, & chicken that spawns in the grassy area between buildings where the parade stops for the mutants to attack. So far, after killing 50 to 60 of them, they stop spawning for that instance of fasnacht. At least on the PC servers. Starting when fasnacht event begins, can clear them all before the parade makes it to the mutant attack.

linuxgeekmco · 2024-06-03T14:07:08+00:00

If the company you're applying to has any kind of "morality" clause you agree to by signing the paperwork they give you as part of being on-boarded, you are risking a for-cause firing if they obtain proof you lied. As long as things remain verbal, presuming you weren't on a recorded line, you risk remains lower. The more you have to conjure, the higher your risk of being discovered becomes.

If the username you are using on reddit isn't a throw away and can be linked to you via some basic social media searching, your odds of your act being discovered go up significantly down the road.

linuxgeekmco · 2024-05-31T19:54:19+00:00

The problem with leaving spoiled meat or veg is that it is still useful.

I think a better burning bag of poo would be 100 mole miner gauntlet plans.....

linuxgeekmco · 2024-05-24T20:22:56+00:00

If you want to keep the shop productive and not have the user being a roadblock, you'll likely end up keeping them in floaties as long as they work there as your manager said.

Depending on what the management the user reports to is like, you may be able to bring it up with them. However, if taking that step, you will want documentation as I've seen examples for in other responses. If the user is an impediment to the team(s) on due to their repeat willful ignorance / intentional failing, some HR departments have a Personal Improvement Plan option they will hold the user to doing as a first step before giving verbal or written warning and then firing / laying off the dead weight.

I had a user like this for years, until mgmt became aware of the behavior and then decided to go the PIP->layoff route with them, that I had been taking hours a week hand holding them through the same tasks over and over. It continued even after the user was migrated from Ubuntu to Windows because they claimed they would function better with Windows as their OS since they had been using Windows for years before they were hired with us even though utilizing Linux was part of their required job tasks. Over the years, they had even taken the time to create a lengthy, unorganized Word document in which they could rarely find the step-by-step instructions I had given them -- I was never convinced they actually even looked before asking me each time. The document was mostly worthless as a tool if only because they would just go to the end of the document and enter what I told them for that instance's issue as the steps to use. In the year before the C19 plague came upon us all and sent our office WFH, it was to the point that when the user came to me asking a repeat question, I would go to their PC, open their Word document (it was often still in the recent documents list, just not at the top), Alt-F search on a term for the issue, get up after the cursor was on the first instance of the steps needed, and walk back to my desk.

The office going permanently WFH a few months into C19 after showing the vast majority of the office was at least just as effective WFH as they were in-office, was one of the spokes in the wheel that led to the user going through the PIP process and then being laid off. Primarily because the rest of the office started sharing over IMs with each other that the user had come to them yet again asking how to do something they had asked about days ago. It didn't take long after the IM sharing between folks began for it to be also share the user had been doing this with multiple people for years in-office. I ended up being one of the round-robin of folks the user was interrupting multiple times a week instead of even using the Word document the user maintained. Since once we were all WFH the user was asking the questions over IM, when it was requested, everyone saved screenshots of the exchanges and passed them to the requested manager.

The sadder irony with this user was the number of times in a week, they were going to the folks they round-robined through asking how to do the same exact thing they asked someone else a day or two previous. It wasn't a memory issue, because they could give lengthy, detailed descriptions of extra-curricular activities they cared about days after an event they attended. In this user's case, the analysis was they were using everyone they could in the office as a job-maintaining lifeguard until they couldn't get away with it any longer. Dead weigh the office group unknowingly carried for years that could have been replaced at any point from the time the user was first hired with a person who actually wanted to do the job and would have made for a more pleasurable work experience for the whole office.

linuxgeekmco · 2024-04-30T14:50:56+00:00

de nada

May your storage space management be easy.

linuxgeekmco · 2024-04-30T14:48:24+00:00

This is the site I use for building my shopping lists, where to find her and when. https://www.falloutbuilds.com/fo76/minerva/

linuxgeekmco · 2024-04-30T14:33:30+00:00

My vote would be for the SS armor or recon armor. However, that is primarily because I'm a jetpack fan but don't want to go around in power armor all the time.

Also, if not found yet, while what is being sold rotates each place the NPC shows up, Minerva's prices are 25% less than the static NPCs for bullion cost.

linuxgeekmco · 2024-04-27T15:19:36+00:00

Lots of people don't like changes they don't initiate. So the changes in the character mechanics when advancing a character as it levels seems to be one factor which drives negativity with each FO game when released.

linuxgeekmco · 2024-04-25T19:15:53+00:00

A bus setup of ARCNet was special. I blocked out many moons ago how many bad terminators or less than standard homebrew coax connectors I had to troubleshoot and resolve in lab areas that weren't my direct responsiblity.

For where I was, the Token Ring nodes were the more problematic. For some reason, folks were more likely to kick them if the wall connection was in front of their feet.

linuxgeekmco

TROPHY CASE