Take the bad memories with the good
As I am converting my journal of experience with GreyPilgrim, Inc. to HTML for posting on the Web, I am more-or-less reliving both the good (feeling more like an engineer than at any other time of my life) and the bad, such as this experience from September 1996:I went with my boss to Windsor, CT this week, to visit the US headquarters of Asea Brown Boveri (ABB), whose nuclear division showed some promise as a service provider partner. We had a scheduled meeting with a division head that actually had the power to make a decision. (You're always told when job-hunting to try to get yourself into the office of the person with the power to hire you. This is the analogous scenario for our case.) Meeting scheduled at noon, we get there promptly (for me, after a five-hour drive) -- and the guy's not there.Funny thing: I have interviewed for several consulting gigs since, and it's common these days to have interviewers not offer to pick up travel costs, or to offer you lunch or even a cup of coffee. More often than not, the interviewer can't even offer you the gig: this is a maneuver designed to get you out the door so the hiring company has time to bring in others they like better. I used to think that the first thing that went out the window in times of budget cuts was R & D; now I see what really gets thrown out is hospitality. There is little kindness in the engineering world today. And I can't even blame Bush for that; it predates him by years.
Instead, we get a 90-minute meeting with two lesser supervisors (one of whom was reading our material as we talked). We get no offer of refreshment, we get no promise of so much as a return call, and I give away valuable copies of reports. After talking this over with Jean, I became steamed at such unprofessional behaviour (and "unprofessional" is a word I hate to use and seldom do) on the part of an industry giant like ABB. I told the boss that I'd not visit ABB again for any reason unless they paid me for the visit, in advance.
But I digress. The experience journal is up for several months so far:
Labels: rhetoric
posted by Ron @ 9:13 PM
Site Feed
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home