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He’s in computers, right? Well, not exactly.

Posted on November 26, 2004 
Filed Under Life

Let me rant here for a sec. Eric is still unemployed. He’s been looking and following up on some decent leads, but this is a bad time of year and we’re hoping that something will come up soon.

Well-meaning and loving friends and family members have been driving me crazy. They want to help. But they don’t understand what Eric does. All they know is that “it has something to do with computers.” His experience for the past 20 years or so has been in banking. Specifically, he was a business analyst with a specialization in funds transfer systems. As I understand it, he was a bit of a project manager type, supporting the software for very large banks that allowed money to get from point A to point B. Once a quarter or so, he had to go to work on a Saturday for disaster recovery tests mandated by “The Feds” to make sure that if the systems crashed, the bank could recover every cent. They used software from a vendor but it had to be highly customized to suit the bank’s needs and that’s where Eric came in. He knows C well, and he’s familiar with a lot of technologies but his experience has mostly been on proprietary systems. He is an expert in all things funds transfer (VAX, SWIFT, OFAC, CHIPS, FedWire).

So with that in mind, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for him to go after general computer programming or consulting jobs. When his Mac is acting up, he relies on me to fix it. He’s brilliant, and can pick up any technology easily. Employers are looking for experience more than “read it in a book once” skills these days.

But those programming and consulting jobs are exactly what well-meaning friends and family keep sending him. “He’s in computers, right?” Well, that’s kind of like saying that you’re “in pens” because you have to sign checks on your job, so you’re qualified for a job as an attorney because that’s a job “in pens” too.

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