Abandoning Schadenfreud
By Mitch Berg
At times, it’s hard to believe that it’s been almost five years since the most miserable year of my life started.
In late 2002, with the local software market in a drastic slowdown, I was contracting at a local manufacturing company. My project got de-funded – and when you’re a contractor, “no project” means “no job”. I went five months with no work at all, and six more months working little contracting jobs that barely paid the bills.
One of the low points, in early March – ten weeks into the ordeal – came with an interview at a local branch of a national company. Upside: it would have been a great job, and I’d have knocked it through the goalposts. Downside: it was on the far west end of Eden Prairie, highly inconvenient to Saint Paul. But I wasn’t going to kvetch about it; by this point, a job was a job was a job.
It was one of the most gruelling days of my life. The interviews started at 8:30AM, with one-hour conversations with the department head, the marketing chief and the technical communications lead. Then a lunch-time talk with the lead programmer. Then more one-hour interviews with the graphics lead, the QA lead and another marketeer. Of course, some of the interviews were a little…”off”. One woman sounded like she was trying to justify her job to me; another seemed to be sizing me up as an ally in an upcoming bit of office political intrigue.
The day capped off with a 90-minute chat with the Product Development director. During each, I tried to walk that fine line between “eager and aggressive” and “desperate” – which I most certainly was by this point. I left feeling things went quite well. And I followed up with a voice mail to the Product Development guy (who’d have been my boss) the next week.
And the next.
And the next, and the next. And the next, and the next.
Seven weeks after the interview, I finally got through. “Oh, you mean we didn’t send you a letter? I’m sorry. We took a different direction, and hired another graphic artist instead”.
I don’t like to indulge in schadenfreud – so I won’t. I don’t believe in Karma, but I do believe what goes around comes around, and I don’t need anything more coming around, thanks.
So I’ll wish the “best of luck” to my coulda-been, now coulda-been soon-to-be-former, colleagues. May your interviews be short, to the point, close enough to home, and successful.
The market’s a lot better now. Y’all will do great.
November 30th, 2007 at 9:34 am
Corel has long been a money wasting machine. 6 years ago, long before the acquisition of the mpls company, they were teetering on the edge of going away. How they got out of it I’ll never know…
Anyway, I blame Canada.
November 30th, 2007 at 10:48 am
Unrelated: http://www.startribune.com/562/story/1581857.html
Duty calls, Mitch! There’s a fisking to be done.
November 30th, 2007 at 11:15 am
I’ll second the note on Corel. I liked their early products, say around ’94, but they’ve been firing blanks for a long time. Still, yet another shift to China.
I’ve seen many horror stories coming from those attempts and very few success stories, unless you count my brother. His bank off-shored his software job to India and he went free-lance to another company. He made an absolute killing coming back to the bank to fix the Indian code under contract — he more than tripled his salary and those of some former co-workers he got hired to help and managed to score a monsterous bonus out of the mess.
Kinda makes the dig some co-workers made at hiring contractors seem silly, “But they don’t have job security!” My reply: “You think you’ve got more security? They get paid more and have an actual contract with a defined duration.”
November 30th, 2007 at 11:58 am
I’m surprised Corel’s still in business too… I would have figured that Adobe would have snatched them up years ago.
November 30th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
No kidding Jay, especially since Corel (while teetering on extinction) basically made their retail boxed products look exactly like Adobe’s stuff. It was really weird.
But I think Adobe is way too smart to buy that junk company. Corel has only delayed the inevitable – eventually I see that company going away…
November 30th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
Corel (while teetering on extinction) basically made their retail boxed products look exactly like Adobe’s stuff.
Which made sense, since their premiere product (JASC Paintshop Pro, once Corel Draw finally expired) was a low-end competitor to Photoshop. I may have to buy a copy fast, since I am vastly more productive on PSP than Photoshop. It’s a just-plain-better user interface for the occasional, accidental graphics geek.