...and this is a first even for my m4|) b4|)-j0b-lu[|< 5|<1llz0rz. I just heard back from my recruiter at Vado about the Cadence position. Seems the picture is, Cadence had a bunch of long-term contractors, and wanted to hire people full-time because they were tired of paying the cost of contractors, and that's what the open senior-Linux-sysadmin positions were. But the contractors liked the money they were making contracting, and didn't want to give it up, so Cadence advertised the positions externally.
Well, seems they'd filled two of the three positions, and were about to make me an offer for the third one last night, when the last contractor -- who actually took part in two of my three interviews -- decided he'd rather stay at Cadence than keep making consulting money. (And I don't blame him -- from what I know about the job and the company, this would have been about as close to my dream job as is ever likely to become available short of the human race suddenly acquiring starships or me suddenly magically becoming young enough and fit enough again to go for a slot as a fighter jock.)
I've had plenty of weird shit happen before during the last three years on jobs that were Almost There. Every time I've gotten close to getting hired for a job, Something Has Happened. AOL redefined the position. ITA Software apparently decided I was tainted goods when the engineering VP who'd recommended me left the company suddenly. Amazon threw me the Hostile Attack Interviewers From Hell. One of the other job prospects decided to fill the position internally. And so on, and so forth, und so weiter.
But this is the first time I've lost a job opportunity to one of the people who interviewed me for it. That is a record even with my history of running foul of Murphy's Law.
I'm well qualified, I have a very wide base of knowledge, numerous areas of expertise, I graduated magna cum laude from my CS program, and I have somewhere between ten and fifteen years' industry experience .... but until and unless I can break this pattern of being monkeywrenched one way or another at the eleventh hour, all that counts for slightly less than a small bucket of warm spit. Sometimes it really makes me wonder why I keep trying.
