Job Hunting

[RubixsQube]

I was just offered a three-year science fellowship working with an 8-meter telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, which would mean I'd move from snow-covered New Hampshire to rainy/tropical Hilo, Hawaii. This is pretty exciting. And terrifying. But exciting. I'm still waiting to hear from a couple other places I've submitted applications to, but at least I have one possibility. 

[Griddlelol]

I was just offered a three-year science fellowship working with an 8-meter telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, which would mean I'd move from snow-covered New Hampshire to rainy/tropical Hilo, Hawaii. This is pretty exciting. And terrifying. But exciting. I'm still waiting to hear from a couple other places I've submitted applications to, but at least I have one possibility. 

 

Congrats! That sounds pretty awesome. Are any of the other places as cool as Hawaii?

[RubixsQube]

Congrats! That sounds pretty awesome. Are any of the other places as cool as Hawaii?

 

Well, there's a job working on one of the primary instruments being used on the James Webb Space Telescope, but I haven't heard back from the woman working on that, I'm expecting to hear in the next few days. That would be in Tucson, which is not nearly as exciting, but that's a very competitive job, and has high rewards (I mean, working on a space telescope is pretty awesome). 

[dibs]

Can't you just choose one, and if you ever feel like you have made the wrong choice, you can swing your telescope around and check out what is happening in the other places?

[feelthedarkness]

dropping out of life in hawaii for 3 years would be really sweet. it doesn't take much to get by there!

[Architecture]

Well, there's a job working on one of the primary instruments being used on the James Webb Space Telescope, but I haven't heard back from the woman working on that, I'm expecting to hear in the next few days. That would be in Tucson, which is not nearly as exciting, but that's a very competitive job, and has high rewards (I mean, working on a space telescope is pretty awesome). 

But then you have to live in Tucson.

 

Though the cost of living, Mexican food and pizza are all pretty fantastic in Southern Arizona.

 

I've been shooting out resumes like candy and not having much luck. Boo to job hunts.

[RubixsQube]

Yeah, and I grew up in Southern California, so living up in NH has been real tough, Mexican-food-wise. Tucson has a very large astronomy community, and is better located for traveling, as well. But damn, Hawaii for three years does sound pretty nice. 

[eot]

I was just offered a three-year science fellowship working with an 8-meter telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, which would mean I'd move from snow-covered New Hampshire to rainy/tropical Hilo, Hawaii. This is pretty exciting. And terrifying. But exciting. I'm still waiting to hear from a couple other places I've submitted applications to, but at least I have one possibility. 

That sounds rad. Are you an astrophysicist?

[feelthedarkness]

he's a professional telescope polisher. 

[eot]

Well, people who aren't astrophysicists work at observatories too, there's intradisciplinary elements in most research.

[RubixsQube]

That sounds rad. Are you an astrophysicist?

 

I generally say I'm an astronomer, but yes. I study supermassive black holes (there is another black hole astronomer thumb, too!), and I just spent the last few months applying for postdoctoral positions now that this one is ending. 

[RubixsQube]

Ok, so, not to monopolize the thread, but I was just offered the 4-year position working on the James Webb Space Telescope's premier instrument, NIRCam, the near-infrared camera. This is a pretty big deal, and may make my career, potentially. Ffffuuuccck.

[Bjorn]

That's awesome!

[syntheticgerbil]

So I am going to jump ship from my garbage part time job at Starbucks and try to find another part time job that hopefully pays the same or more (If I do delivery driving I generally will get paid more minus gas according to my math). I've only been at Starbucks for two and a half months however and will be leaving it off my resume and just say I have been doing freelance and I am looking for more stable pay, which isn't a lie, I still have been but Starbucks is seriously has been and even though I only work 24-30 hours, getting up at 4 am multiple days of the week and having a constantly busy hell of a time isn't good for me. I am not on that schedule on my days off so I just feel tired, confused, and zombified when I am supposed to be doing something else, like contract work. That is just not a good sleep schedule and I suppose I thought a coffee shop would be way less stressful than this. However I guess I should note they had me take a job at the busiest (or second busiest) location in Austin. They also alleviated some stress by hiring new people, if they don't call in or quit (which is pretty common) so now I get almost half the money in tips than before, which is a huge bummer.

 

So I don't know. I am really having an issue considering whether I should just put in my two weeks at this shit job and hopefully find a job pronto in the meantime because of the problem of having to explain the two weeks to a potential employer of a job I purposefully left off my resume. My second option is just to just never put in my two weeks and just keep working at Starbucks until I find another job and then just quit Starbucks the same day since I mean, it's fucking Starbucks. Problem there is despite me hating the job, I generally the people I work with, especially the manager so I would feel pretty guilty about that.

 

Which should I chose? Also to consider when I started job searching for low paying jobs like this back in November I got a lot of calls back and a few interviews where the freelance looking for stable part time work really seemed to work out. Plus my previous experience over the years with the part time jobs while I was in school the first time around were that these places always needed a body to fill a position and quickly if they were truly interested really did not have time to work with some kind of two weeks notice. One time I told an employer to give me about two days to decide and I was passed up since they really needed people to take shifts ASAP.

 

The reason I chose Starbucks because of the benefits which I haven't earned yet, but really benefits be damned for all of this stress and toll on my mental and physical health. This also really doesn't help with focusing and getting my work done for my classes.

[undermind9]

My second option is just to just never put in my two weeks and just keep working at Starbucks until I find another job and then just quit Starbucks the same day since I mean, it's fucking Starbucks. Problem there is despite me hating the job, I generally the people I work with, especially the manager so I would feel pretty guilty about that.

 

That pretty well decides itself there.  The corporate overlords aside there are real people on the ground who would be directly effected.  Even if the turn over rate is high the immediate short-handed shift(s) and stress put on former team members sounds pretty substantial.  

 

When I was working retail through college and someone just up and quit it was an infuriating process.  Mostly because our store was a single-attendant shift and the absent person meant doubles or extra unplanned working days.  It still happens in my place of work now, a shop or field installation guy decides done working and vanishes - those jobs they were working on get hosed along with their former peers.

 

I am obviously pro-fair warning quitters, i know if one of my artists decided to quit on a Friday it would wise to not put me as a reference.  The same goes in reverse, if I was to hire someone who was working - and then magically able to start the following few days I'd wonder if that was omen of things to come

[syntheticgerbil]

From talking to everyone I know personally about it they seem to think I should just up and quit. However, I'm thinking I might not be that drastic and see what I can work out depending on what I can find. Like two weeks is too long but maybe I can last for a week out and transfer some shifts to people who owe me a day and then work whatever I can myself. I'll see. Now to find the job.

[gavku]

RubixsQube that job sounds amazing!!!! congrats dude!!!

[Griddlelol]

Don't just quit without handing in notice, I'm not calling you an asshole, but it's a pretty selfish thing to do. Someone did that at my previous job, which while wasn't retail, was high stress as we had a huge back catalogue of samples to process with a massively under-staffed and under-trained team (it was quality control for a food/food additive manufacturer).

Fucked up everyone's work, requiring Saturday shifts and people to be trained on stuff they'd never done before (and inevitably fuck up the first few times), just because the guy was too scared to say he was leaving since we all got along? Screw that, if you want to leave, give 2 weeks notice. It's not like the other job won't understand you need 2 weeks. 

[Merus]

I think if you were going to have time/energy to find a job, you'd be doing so, so take that into account. I don't know how it is in America, but here, at least, telling employers you can start in two weeks because you have to give notice at your current job says that, when you eventually move on, you won't leave them hanging.

[syntheticgerbil]

Screw that, if you want to leave, give 2 weeks notice. It's not like the other job won't understand you need 2 weeks. 

No that's the thing, I am not going to list or speak of the job I have now because no one wants to hear how I flaked after three months. And my experience with low paying jobs is they want to start you within the same week almost every time. Unless whatever job I find has a later start date than expected, I am for sure not going to make some kind of compound two job schedule work for two weeks plus work that around school plus work that around the contract job I got going right now. It's already draining enough. Really the contract needs to be first priority as those people need my care the most, but they also don't really require a schedule, just the job done... at some point.

[Merus]

So I got a job; a little nepotism, I guess, as it's doing IT work for the organisation my mum founded, but it's working with their current IT guy who's grown too busy to do a lot of the improvements he wants to do, and so I'm working with/for him. Corporate governance!

[melmer]

I got a new job today OOOOOOSH. I'm now or soon to be an Email developer at a bleeding edge responsive email company. I say bleeding edge as apparently a lot of big business look to them for new trends and what not in the email world. And inside the company they'll be looking to me to code them LOL

The job ad did request you had to have been building responsive emails for at least a year.... I've designed at built 1 so I'm a little scared I've bitten off more than I can chew. Also I asked about working hours and the lead developer guy says they stay for at least an extra hour every day and one time they stayed there for 24 hours.... FUCK THAT SHIT! I really don't like working beyond my contracted hours, to the point where I even got pushed out of a job I had 4 years back because I was leaving "on time" when everyone else stayed on till 6-7pm. I'm an extremely efficient worker and I get my shit done in the time allotted, plus, I've got a life! I need to get home and watch game of thrones and shit! Why should I give away my free time so somebody else can get rich off of my work. The companies relatively small and expanding at a really fast rate, so maybe I'll feel differently here, if I feel like I'll be rewarded in the future. I made it clear in the interview that I intend to become a manager.

Anyway. The lead developer guy said normally the CEO of the company is telling them to go home, so it's not like they're being told by a manager to stay late so I'm not too worried. Maybe I need to stop being a baby. My girlfriend works at least an extra hour every day, I just need to suck it up.

I fucking killed it in that interview. Got a cool 3K pay rise ( I did ask for 5K but he haggled me down saying they couldn't afford it) I'm happy. The way it was going at my old job I think I would've had to wait 3-4 years before I saw that salary.

Slowly taking over the world one email at a time. This company does all emails for Sainsburys (one of the big UK supermarkets). So if you receive emails from Sainsburys in about 2-3 month they'll probably be built by me. I'll make sure to include a wizard in my code.

[osmosisch]

Congrats mington. I'd definitely stick with trying to work normal hours, it's not like those extra hours are actually adding much to your net work done anyway if you're actually working all the time. There' sonly so much juice in th eol' battery.

Post a pic yof you looking miserable at your new desk!

[melmer]

Hahaha I'll do that! I don't start till July 13th as I'm off on my honeymoon for the week.

They had a 3ft Darth Vader figure, a life size card board boba fett and a full size mame arcade cabinet. I think I'm going to fit in I hope they all like losing at street fighter. Oooooh sunset riders

[syntheticgerbil]

Hm, so the advertising company I've done a few recent animation projects with sent me a request to do a gig where I build a website using HTML. I don't know HTML or anything about web design so I don't know where they got that idea. I badly created my own website in Dreamweaver, but the next iteration will just be a template, I'm done with that headache.

 

Anyway, that's not really my point. Before I read the last paragraph about HTML coding, I thought this was to be an animation job again for them. It is for a website run by some right wing gun nut who has a bunch of stories about the goodness of carrying a gun and also has a bunch of angry and sarcastic rants against the "nanny state" of gun control we live in. I don't agree with any of this shit and I find that kind of gun nut tone toxic to the United States' culture of violence. I originally had a sinking feeling that I was going to have to turn down this gig because of moral reasons, which makes it super awkward and could possibly make them think less of me for not thinking a job's a job. Luckily, like I said, it wasn't for animation and for HTML stuff, so I could just turn it down without even mentioning the subject matter and they will still probably send me more work in the future.

 

But what do you guys think? What if it were for animation? What is a good way to handle stuff like this without burning bridges?

 

I had actually ran into this before in 2010 when I a guy I went to school with was trying to get me to help him do a bunch of paper doll animation for this short on the creation of the constitution. Once I got the info I saw that that gig was for a shitty right wing blowhard Glenn Back type on talk radio who I guess was going to spread a bunch of misinformation via this cartoon. I turned it down and my colleague did not understand why I'd care what it was for. It didn't matter though because that was most likely a one off thing and not a source of continuous projects (not that I'd want them).

 

I've also gone back and forth on doing art for companies for casino games, but ultimately I think I'd feel a bit rotten on that stuff because the only reason gambling is a thing that makes money is because it preys on addiction and nothing else. There is no game there, everything is stacked against you.