I received and e-mail a few days ago from a company looking for a Help Desk Supervisor. Since I really enjoyed my years doing that function, I responded to the mail. The composer of the e-mail Mel* called me the following day and we had a very good chat. He gave me the low down on the job, which was L1 and L2 support for a government agency with a team of 7-12 people. I would be working for a major IT company who has been outsourced to this contract. While is sounded like a challenging role, it also appeared to be a good move for me. "Mel" told me he would set me up with a phone interview with the manager and a face to face interview would follow. The phone interview was set up and I chatted with two gentlemen from NY (one was with the IT company and the other was with a 3rd party they contract with). "Mel", who set this up, was on the west coast, and was on the call.
The first red flag was that the call to me was 15 minutes late...a definate red flag. Then, the person who was supposed to join the call (the NOC Mgr), was not able to attend the call...red flag #2. They apologized for the delay and I forgave them...we all have work to do. They did the usual "Why do you want to leave" type of questions and a few of my qualifications to do the job. They told me it was a Monday thru Friday, 8-5 job for the most part and told me a bit more about the environment. It was not a badly managed office, in their opinions, but they had a lot of trouble with personal conflicts. Ok, no biggie, I can work with almost anyone, especially if I am one that can set some policies in place. However, the #2 NY guy (who was a TL, but not on the same team...weird) told me the job was more like a "player/coach" role. I would be expected to do desktop support, phone support, AND run the team. To make matters more interesting, there would be two TL's for the same team and it is just a 7 AM to 6 PM desk...not 24 hours where 2 TL's may be needed...red flags 3 and 4.
They asked me to do a face to face interview on Tuesday and I agreed, but I am most likely going to cancel it. "Mel" and the Ny guys were not on the same page and the job I was told about by "Mel" is nothing like what was told to me by the NY duo. Does the right hand know what the left is doing?
I am not worried about this at all. I have been on a few phone interviews that did not go well, and since I am happy where I am now and it is paying the bills, I can afford to be picky :-) .
On the work front, I finally finished installing all the monitoring software on the remote servers. If I was talented with scripts, I would have done so, but by the time I would have made and tested it, I could have had all the files FTP'd to the servers, unzipped and installed. There were only 13 servers at this one location...all Linux except one and the Linux installs were very painless.
The stock market took a pounding yesterday, but the company stock is enjoying some gains. I am sure my 401k and my IRA both lost a lot yesterday, but they were riding on all time highs, so I am not very upset. The market does that sometimes. That is why I have mutual funds!
*Not his real name
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