I had a vague hope for most of the day that the powers that be would intercede and pass the word before close of business. It would have been nice to spend the weekend in something other than a state of definite maybe. That might over-state the situation a bit, but the clock is running and almost everything involved in this process is time sensitive. The longer it takes to square things away here, the more of a headache it’s going to be to start getting things lined up on the other end. Until they officially put a mark on the wall, I’ll remain stuck somewhere between reality and happy illusion – and there’ll be a hard limit on how far I can and can’t prepare. Can I pack every stick of stuff in the house? Sure. But I don’t know if that means I’m going to spend the next two days or two months surrounded by boxes and making dinner every night in the one saucepan that I didn’t pack. I can’t make any definitive plans to get a house full of boxes from here to there. Maybe more difficult is that I can’t start making any decisions about where I’ll be unpacking all those boxes once they get to wherever they’re going. I’m getting visions of way too many nights hanging out in a not quite mid-grade extended stay hotel. It won’t take me long to close out on this end. That’s the beauty of planning your exit for the better part of the year. The issues that are bedeviling me tonight are all about what happens after the Mayflower truck pulls away from Memphis. I know I can torch that bridge when I get to it, but for someone who lives his life by a plan, it’s the kind of uncertainty that can keep a guy up at night. If there’s any up side, it’s that I seem to have gone from being paranoid about the job itself to only being paranoid about what it’s going to take to get from here to there. That’s progress.
Tag Archives: career
We’ve got a heartbeat…
I hear it in the hushed conversation over cubicle walls. I see the grins and sly thumbs up offered by our own HR staffers. Somewhere just beyond my field of view, the wheels of the great green machine are in motion. We’ve got a heartbeat. It’s faint, but there. After the torturous road this process has taken just to get to the “tentative” stage, I don’t dare to think of it as a done deal. The probability of success is definitely increasing, but that’s a long way from a signed set of orders and a new desk. Nevertheless, I’m raising the confidence meter from cautiously optimistic to hopeful.
Experience has taught me and millions of others that the Army is a serious player in the game of hurry up and wait. I’ve got the waiting bit down to a science. It seems that we’re about to get a lesson in extreme hurry up. I’m confident that in this case, hurry up is far preferable.
A sign of life…
After another week of ponderous waiting, I was given another gentle reminder that this thing up north might actually work out. I got to spend a few minutes talking to a to individual who will act as my “sponsor” during the transition and in-processing period. It wasn’t exactly the call from HR that I have been waiting for, but it’s a sign of life. At this point on the long, torturous process I seem to be overly given to looking for signs and reading tea leaves. Absent the magic moment when they throw the switch from tentative to official, that is probably as good as it’s going to get. After nine months, you’d think that I would be use to waiting for things to happen.
The ability of the system to make the simple things hard is never far from my thoughts these days. Since this whole exercise involves filling out some paperwork and moving my electrons from one database to another, it’s still hard to understand how it could possibly take as long as it does. The irony is that once they pull the trigger, they’ll probably want to give me a short reporting date and wonder why I can’t get out of here with a whole two weeks notice. I’ve been around this Army long enough to know better than spend a dime making preparations without a set of orders in hand. So, I hurry up and wait.
91 days…
The post I was set to bring you tonight will not be appearing because the subject matter went and changed on me between the time I started writing and the time it was supposed to post. Instead of another rant about the Army personnel system, I bring you tidings of great joy. The 30-day civilian hiring freeze is over – ending its 91-day reign of terror. Don’t believe, me? Check out the Civilian Personnel website for yourself.
Aside from the system not being at a complete standstill, I’m not exactly sure what the great thaw really means yet. I know that it means that personnel offices now have a 90 day backlog of hiring actions to clear and that’s never a quick process even under the most optimal conditions. I don’t have much faith at this point in any of the possibilities that looked promising back in February. Expecting magical reanimation of things just as they were at the moment they were frozen back in March seems about as likely as breathing new life into Walt Disney’s frozen head. Sure, it’s sounds possible… maybe… but not very likely.
What this probably means is that at least now there’s a fighting chance at working through the nomination-interview-hiring process to the point where a job offer is at least a possibility. So now it’s a mad race to spool up and flood my resume back into the Army system. Nothing like being back at square one.
Friendly advice for the young and ambitious…
I was once like you. I was young and ambitious. I wanted to streak up the career ladder further and faster than anyone. For those out there who want to climb, you’re eventually going to reach the point where you’ll be required to make a life-altering decision. You’re going to have to reconcile a nominal pay increase with the enormous pain in the ass that is becoming a first line supervisor.
If you’re even hesitating for a second in deciding whether that’s something interesting to you, let me key you into a secret – It’s not worth it. It’s not worth it at twice the pay. Sure, if you’re lucky there are going to be one or two hard chargers in your group, but most of the rest are going to be average at best and you’ll land an unholy sprinkling of dregs, sociopaths, malcontents, and those whose best service would have been to retire a decade or two ago.
Take a bit of advice from someone who was ambitious before you came along. Find yourself a nice mid-level position, gather the reins of a couple of projects, and enjoy a fruitful career concerned with meeting your own deadlines and being limited mostly by only your own capacity to work. Don’t, under any circumstances, allow them to make you a supervisor, team leader, or any other euphemistic term for becoming part of the problem rather than its solution. You’ll end up looking back at what started out as a promising career and wondering when it became a low-budget shitshow.
Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of previously de-published blogs appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.
The rate of return…
It seems that federal civilian agencies like my resume alot more than my brethren in DoD. Not surprising, I suppose, since we’re arguably the most un-military organization in the Army. As of this morning, that means 19 active referrals out of 365 total resumes sent out… giving me a return rate of 5.2%. I’d rather be at something like 10%, but it’s good to know that at least one in twenty actually ends up sitting on someone’s desk. Apparently opting for the even-wider-net approach has met with some limited success. Now if I can just get a few of them to call me for interviews and bump up the odds a few more points. One agonizingly slow step at a time, I suppose.
Progress…
If anyone is following along at home, tonight’s update is just a brief note to say that this morning’s interview went well. That is to say as well as an interview can go when the prospect of the interviewer being able to make an offer anytime in the near future is completely unknown. Like all my other sit downs with selecting officials from across the Mid-Atlantic, this office is also subject to my nemesis the hiring freeze. That unfortunate circumstance notwithstanding, I’m comfortable that I delivered the best pitch possible… and now we’re back to the waiting game. That’s progress.
Still haven’t found what I’m looking for…
If you would have told me back in August when I decided it was time to pull the plug on my Memphis experience, that I’d still be firing off resumes on the first day of spring in the following year, I simply would never have believed you. The irony of coming here in the first place was that I’d alwayherdsrd that getting back to the DC area was easy because no one from outside the area had any interest in going there. That may or may not be the case, but I’ve found that in most cases for jobs inside the beltway the typical number of resumes submitted for consideration is somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 with some running north of 500. I’ve got a healthy level of professional self confidence, but the odds get pretty long when you start talking about numbers like that.
There are still a couple of “maybies” out there that I haven’t written off yet, but it’s definitely slot slower going than I remember the last job search being. The department’s hiring freeze extending over the last two months, of course, hasn’t helped. The personnel office points only to the most recent memo that calls for the freeze to be reevaluated by April 1st to decide if it will be extended or to announce how hiring might be handled moving forward. It’s not reassuring that the hiring system will get back to something approaching situation normal any time soon, even if it starts up again in April. With a two month backlog and a notoriously slow process to begin with, things could be ugly for the forseeable future.
There doesn’t seem to be much to do now other than to continue piling my name onto as many heaps as possible and hope it turns up at the top of one of them. The federal government’s a big place and something will come along eventually, but this exercise in patience is wearing very thin. In hindsight, I’m sure this experience will be character building or something, but in the moment it’s enough to drive a man around the bend.
Perspective…
There’s nothing like a retirement party to put a career in perspective. We all like to think of our working lives as being productive and valuable and perhaps that maybe after 30 years of work, we’ve left our mark. Most of us, of course, would be wrong in thinking that. Sure, there are exceptions – Hyman Rickover is the father of the nuclear submarine force; Henry Bessemer made steel economical; Watson and Crick identified the double helix structure of DNA – but for the average schmo sitting in a cubicle there aren’t going to be entries in even the most obscure history book – unless you create your own entry in Wikipedia.
I attended a retirement luncheon – a function that no one ever really wants to go to, but that guarantees a long lunch without anyone getting on your case – and had the dismaying realization that even the people working next to you don’t really have a clue what you do on a day to day basis. The highlight of the “ceremonial” portion of the event was the soon-to-be-departed employee’s supervisor saying a few kind words. One would hope to hear how they made the workplace better, or contributed to the war effort, or saved homeless kittens in their spare time.
What this particular career boiled down to was this: A supervisory musing about how he’d “always remember the great report you wrote about the problems in Peoria.”
Wow. That’s perspective.
For most of us, that’s how a career is going to end. Think on that next time you’re working late on an “important” project or skipping vacation days to make sure a project is finished on time. In 20 or 30 years when your middle of the road colleagues are sitting around a table at a middle of the road restaurant bidding you farewell it’s likely all you’ve done is written a great report about Peoria.
Live your life accordingly.
Editorial Note: This is part of a continuing series of previously unattributed posts appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.
200 and climbing…
For those playing along with the fun filled and exciting game of How Many Resumes can Jeff Send Out Before Losing His Bloody Mind, the total now stands just north of the 200 mark. This is perhaps more impressive in the fact that it was at the 199 point that I ran out of available positions to apply for with the Army. So from here on out, we’re broadening the scope to include Army and every other government agency in the MD-DC-VA-PA area. Thank God for http://www.usajobs.com. I don’t know how anyone ever did this back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and resumes were delivered on paper.
If you’re curious about what lucky #200 was, that would be a Strategic Analyst on the Joint Staff. It’s a little vague on the duties, but it’s a pretty sweet title. Nothing appeals the heart stings of a career bureaucrat like a title bump… well, a title bump and a kickin’ retirement system. In the also-ran category for the #200 place of honor was Senior Advisor to the Treasurer of the United States. If you think the Joint Staff is vague, try figuring out what a “Senior Advisor” is supposed to spend their day doing. I read the job announcement twice and still didn’t really figure it out… but apparently the Treasurer needs two of them.
Winning the creepiest job announcement of the day is Army Intelligence, with a position that called for, among other things, background checks, urinalysis, polygraphs, credit checks, and psych evaluations. Those things aren’t really a problem, but when I came across a “condition of employment” that read: 7.) Must be willing to work unusual extended hours and forego conveniences normally afforded to civilian employees in CONUS/OCONUS, I decided that foregoing normal conveniences probably wasn’t something I was going to be interested in. That ones’s a rare pass.
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