The Job Market, Up Close and Personal (but not fair and balanced)

I was so excited yesterday. I had a job interview. After weeks of sending resumes into the ether, someone called me. I even had an "in:" I had trained the department in some of the software skills required.

Now this ain't no dream job. Not likely to give me a sense of personal achievement. As Fretman Sam used to say, I could cut this turkey by mail. Four month contract (no bennies). On site working their specified hours: don't give us no argument about your legal rights. It's definitely no more than four months: the doors are closing. (And the guy still says in the interview: "You're overqualified and we're afraid you might quit.")

Then there's a skills test. I did okay on the software I taught them. The test instructions were poorly written: unclear language, lots of time spent on something stupid, asking you to do things the slow/inefficient way, "you can't get there from here" instructions. When I said that I'd had to make adjustments for that, the tester laughed evilly and said, "Oh, you found that, did you?" It's a standard glitch in mating the two programs I was working with; I wondered how many people it tripped up. When the tester picked up my paper from the printer, he said, "You didn't put the body text in Arial. Nobody's doing that." "The instructions didn't say to," I said. "I thought it was implied," he said. No. And I'd never heard that you searched tech documentation for hidden meanings.

That wasn't the bad part. Then I was asked to take their squirrelly template in an arcane program (which I've done tech support for, so that's okay) and update the innards using unprounceable words full of $ signs. I did that. Turned out the test was to see if I'd notice that they put the wrong TOC with the original test document and that the links didn't work. Well, I noticed, but that all the links went to files I didn't have, so I didn't worry about it.

WTF? I've spent a lot of years acquiring skills. I am good at what I do. I've noticed over the years that that matters less and less. But what really matters is can I read your mind and watch my back at the same time, right?

The head of the department is supposed to call this morning. I'm not sure what to say. High on my list of want-to-but-better-not would be, "Do you feel this test adequately reflects your corporate culture?" I'm sure they had their goals in designing the test the way they did, but what I learned about them is:

• The tech writing department doesn't do its job well.
• Instructions and goals will not be communicated. "You didn't do what I meant," will be heard.
• I can't trust them, not only because they're incompetent, but because they're out to get me.

I may have actually done better than most people. Skillwise, anyway. But the kind of atmosphere I described coupled with the gloom of a dying organization is not where I want to be. Can I afford my scruples?

Somebody please tell me this is not how the whole job market is. Not that I'll believe you.

6:00:38 AM