Career Chat V: the Common Ruin of the Contending Classes

[Madame deVenoge]

11 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Job hunting is horrible these days. I'm seeing some things I could do half asleep, but most of the gigs want you to have a masters degree and ten years experience to do things I'd expect most recent college grads could do. And the pay is usually shit too.

We're all getting hustled to some extent. It shouldn't be this way.

My issue seems to be that although I know they want to get rid of me, it’s difficult to schedule an interview when I’m working 12 hours a day.

That said, this busy time will be over soon and I’ll have more time, imminently.

[Tywin et al.]

2 hours ago, Madame deVenoge said:

My issue seems to be that although I know they want to get rid of me, it’s difficult to schedule an interview when I’m working 12 hours a day.

That said, this busy time will be over soon and I’ll have more time, imminently.

Given your field I'm surprised any company would want to be hiring right now. It's pretty hard bringing someone in at the busiest time of the year even if it's not something that would require a lot of training. Our dumbass office thought it was a bright idea to bring in two new people in early December to help finish up work before the end of the year, but all it did was pull people away to train them so we ended up getting even less done.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

42 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Given your field I'm surprised any company would want to be hiring right now. It's pretty hard bringing someone in at the busiest time of the year even if it's not something that would require a lot of training. Our dumbass office thought it was a bright idea to bring in two new people in early December to help finish up work before the end of the year, but all it did was pull people away to train them so we ended up getting even less done.

Actually her field is HOT right now (almost as hot as Mme. deVenoge).  

I checked, we currently have 107 staff positions open of varying levels (including one in the accounting/audit area).

[Madame deVenoge]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

Given your field I'm surprised any company would want to be hiring right now. It's pretty hard bringing someone in at the busiest time of the year even if it's not something that would require a lot of training. Our dumbass office thought it was a bright idea to bring in two new people in early December to help finish up work before the end of the year, but all it did was pull people away to train them so we ended up getting even less done.

The thing to note is that not all accountants have the same busy seasons. Tax people have certain deadlines, depending on personal tax or corporate, etc. Corporate accountants have month-end close. SEC Reporting people have deadlines based around 10-K and 10-Q filings. I have no idea what internal audit deadlines are. External auditors (the people you think of as “the auditors”) have deadlines similar to SEC Reporting if they audit public companies, though private company auditors are generally locked in only from December through March or April.

The one company (Company B that I unfortunately had to cancel on) was insane - remember how their earnings call prep was more important than mine? I think I dodged a bullet because of that extreme lack of flexibility on their part. Days leading to the earnings call are critical, while the day of the earnings call is a complete slack-off because the work has been done (though my bosses are still busy - they have investor and analyst meetings). 

A one-hour Friday Zoom interview with Company C at the end of day on a Friday is completely do-able at any point.

The three-hour in-person with company A is on a date that I told them would be absolutely acceptable. It’s before we file, to be sure, but it’s in the lull period of wrapping up the audit, which Boy Wonder is taking the lead on because he cut me out of that picture. It’s also on the day of the earnings call itself, which, as above, means that my bosses will be meeting with investors and analysts and my absence won’t be noted.

I am definitely making sure that I have all of my duties regarding our filing done by that date so I can be free.

To be sure, this is also not the busiest time of year for me. I would be blackballed in the field if I quit any time between late October though mid-February or late March (depending on the company’s filing status). The Q3 filings are first part of November, and then the 10-K filings start in February and go through March 31 depending on the filing status of the company; hence, that timing.

Other than that, I can quit any time after we file a Q1 or Q2, so basically any time that is 45 days after the end of Q1 or Q2 is an excellent time to make a move in my field.

If I play it right, get an offer the week of the 8th, and if the future employers are amenable, I could take a week vacation after I file the Q, then give a one-month notice (standard at my level of seniority), vest in my stock, and start in. Win-win.

My stock is only meaningful because I worked my ass off for it.

Edited April 26 by Madame deVenoge

[Jaxom 1974]

Hmmm...phone interview for a position I can absolutely do, though I'm not certain they can afford me, tomorrow.

But the in person interview on Friday...once we confirm a time...for the position I had the phone screening for last week...that's the one that sounds soooooo right...fingers crossed!

[Madame deVenoge]

For those keeping track of my drama -

Company A appears to likely be off the table. My hometown bestie has stated that:

1. They have not paid her consulting firm’s bills, and will be in no position to pay the placement firm that her firm will require for hiring her as a FTE (the fee is based on a percentage of her billings and is north of $100k);

2. Company has NOT PAID ITS AUDITORS  who are, uh, the first people you pay, right along with your attorneys and payroll.

3. They are likely to file a late Q1 since they have not closed their books yet and I’m not sure on how many NT’s one can file before the NYSE listing standards require de-listing.

Surprisingly enough, this company was owned by some Former Overlords who usually have some messy companies in their portfolio group, but this one is way messier than their usual that I have worked for and audited, back when I did audit.

The above notwithstanding, I’ll still do my one hour interview tomorrow as a courtesy, though I should probably mention my price, to avoid wasting their time.

Edited April 27 by Madame deVenoge

[A Horse Named Stranger]

So you will end up following your heart or pumpkin to NY to work for Zabz company. Helicopter mum on her way.

[Jaxom 1974]

As expected, the phone interview today was not in a position to be able to offer me compensation where I needed it to be and the hiring manager was smart enough to recognize that early on and not waste either of us days. He did, however,  ask me to forward a copy of my resume so he could share with a different area of the company that might have a better fit.. 

On to tomorrow's interview.

[Tywin et al.]

15 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

As expected, the phone interview today was not in a position to be able to offer me compensation where I needed it to be and the hiring manager was smart enough to recognize that early on and not waste either of us days. He did, however,  ask me to forward a copy of my resume so he could share with a different area of the company that might have a better fit.. 

On to tomorrow's interview.

Just remember, project confidence. 

 

[Madame deVenoge]

39 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

As expected, the phone interview today was not in a position to be able to offer me compensation where I needed it to be and the hiring manager was smart enough to recognize that early on and not waste either of us days. He did, however,  ask me to forward a copy of my resume so he could share with a different area of the company that might have a better fit.. 

On to tomorrow's interview.

Always best to be upfront, IMO. There’s a lot of variability in titles and salary in the current market. 

Glad you got some further interest more to your comp level as a backup plan!!!

[Datepalm]

Blergh, also still job hunting - had the dreaded/desired campus visit to a big university in Canada a few weeks back, and while glad for the experience, have zero excitement about the job (and zero expectation that I'll be offered it.) Typical weird academic sniping, for reasons which I dislike but understand, but also one dude straight up loathing me for reasons I don't understand, which is more annoying (might have just been sexism, had a classic moment where he pretended not to understand me during my job talk and wouldn't relent until a (male) professor in the room basically just repeated me back to him. Even his own colleagues were starting to look baffled.)

Department chair kept playing weird "gotcha" moments, asking me multiple times over the two days to list courses from their catalog that I thought I could teach and then sniffing and informing me I can't just teach any course I want. Some weird internal politicking regarding the person I'd be replacing (who is long gone) and being sat in front of a syllabus and scrolling through it there and then to see if I could teach it. It was nothing especially unusual from the four minutes I had to look at it, so I don't know why the drama on THIS course. (So, um, yes? That's literally the job description.) My working theory is this person agreed to retire on condition their pet course keep being taught an no one wants to take it on - more because the tone of the syllabus is "crotchety old guy professor who will have you using a slide-rule", to the point of cliche, rather than anything about the material being especially tricky or even terribly dated. Anyway, so new hire. IDEK. Learned a lot about this kind of thing, moving on.

Still waiting on a few postdocs (including one I have an interview for at the same institution as above, so that may be weird) but worst case I also have a bit more research money and work with the Very Large Organization to keep afloat for another year, so it's just more uncertain bouncing about, which I could use a break from.

In other news, I'll be in New York for a few months from Monday though.

[IheartIheartTesla]

When I was in the market for academic jobs before I decided to make the switch to industry, some of the better organized departments (and the ones where teaching was as important as research) would ask you to prepare a lecture from a course and teach it to undergraduates. It takes the guessing out, although I found it onerous to prepare both a research talk and a teaching lecture. It also made the visit extend over multiple days. I dont miss those days very much.

[Datepalm]

2 hours ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

When I was in the market for academic jobs before I decided to make the switch to industry, some of the better organized departments (and the ones where teaching was as important as research) would ask you to prepare a lecture from a course and teach it to undergraduates. It takes the guessing out, although I found it onerous to prepare both a research talk and a teaching lecture. It also made the visit extend over multiple days. I dont miss those days very much.

Yeah, I was grateful there was no teaching demonstration on this one in terms of my own energy levels and ability to keep smiling and not to snipe back at various little barbs, (a colleague in the audience later tactfully described it as "so interesting to see the cultural differences between Canada and Israel") but it would have definitely been more straightforward than this institutional mind reading. (Also, I'm a better lecturer than interviewee.)

It was only 1.5 days, and not particularly busy ones, but still treated a bit like, at minimum, a Victorian tuberculosis patient. Lots of gentle solicitations on whether I perhaps need just ten minutes to myself? Or maybe to lie down with a cool cloth over my eyes before dinner? Then most of the second day was various entirely unnecessary bureaucracy stuff - like, why set up a whole meeting with an HR person to talk someone you have not offered a job through the minutia - and I mean, really detailed - of the classes their nonexistent kids could get a discount on  in the university's extension school? They seemed to not be entirely sure what to do with me, having flown me out there.

[maarsen]

12 hours ago, Datepalm said:

Blergh, also still job hunting - had the dreaded/desired campus visit to a big university in Canada a few weeks back, and while glad for the experience, have zero excitement about the job (and zero expectation that I'll be offered it.) Typical weird academic sniping, for reasons which I dislike but understand, but also one dude straight up loathing me for reasons I don't understand, which is more annoying (might have just been sexism, had a classic moment where he pretended not to understand me during my job talk and wouldn't relent until a (male) professor in the room basically just repeated me back to him. Even his own colleagues were starting to look baffled.)

Department chair kept playing weird "gotcha" moments, asking me multiple times over the two days to list courses from their catalog that I thought I could teach and then sniffing and informing me I can't just teach any course I want. Some weird internal politicking regarding the person I'd be replacing (who is long gone) and being sat in front of a syllabus and scrolling through it there and then to see if I could teach it. It was nothing especially unusual from the four minutes I had to look at it, so I don't know why the drama on THIS course. (So, um, yes? That's literally the job description.) My working theory is this person agreed to retire on condition their pet course keep being taught an no one wants to take it on - more because the tone of the syllabus is "crotchety old guy professor who will have you using a slide-rule", to the point of cliche, rather than anything about the material being especially tricky or even terribly dated. Anyway, so new hire. IDEK. Learned a lot about this kind of thing, moving on.

Still waiting on a few postdocs (including one I have an interview for at the same institution as above, so that may be weird) but worst case I also have a bit more research money and work with the Very Large Organization to keep afloat for another year, so it's just more uncertain bouncing about, which I could use a break from.

In other news, I'll be in New York for a few months from Monday though.

It seems that you have somehow been transported into a Robertson Davies novel. He tended to be rather scathing about academia in a major Canadian university.

[Zorral]

47 minutes ago, maarsen said:

It seems that you have somehow been transported into a Robertson Davies novel. He tended to be rather scathing about academia in a major Canadian university.

Ya, but it's like this across the board now.  Far more so in the US, where blatant war is being waged on education at all levels, as well as on libraries and librarians, by all the same suspects for all the same reasons as they are waging war blatantly on women and science and honest journalism, and honest legal systems, from cops to judges.

https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-explained-or-what-on-earth-is-an-adjunct/

[Madame deVenoge]

@Datepalm - this is some truly next level stuff!!!!! LOVED the descriptiveness.

I hope it goes well for you.

[Datepalm]

3 hours ago, Madame deVenoge said:

@Datepalm - this is some truly next level stuff!!!!! LOVED the descriptiveness.

I hope it goes well for you.

Thanks Chats! As y'all know, lengthy write-ups are how I process things . Plus I always love checking in on this thread.

Also, that was without the actually funny details, like how the catering for lunch with graduate students didn't show up - it was accidentally delivered to another building on the campus, where someone just took it, which absolutely horrified all these poor Canadian souls. Fortunately also very few grad students showed up, because free food is the actual currency of grad school, but people kept apologizing for all of that, which as far as I can see no one is to blame for.

Then they put the wrong restaurant on my schedule for dinner. Luckily it was closed, so I at least didn't sit there for a half hour wondering if I was being stood up. (Dinner, incidentally, was excruciating - I don't know if the ice-breaker of the mix up made it better or worse.) There were also weirdly hearty congrats for making it to a secondary campus in the suburbs half by transit, when I literally have a literal PhD* in public transport planning. Which is why they were interviewing me.

I submitted the costs of the transit pass in my receipts.

*pending approval

[Datepalm]

6 hours ago, maarsen said:

It seems that you have somehow been transported into a Robertson Davies novel. He tended to be rather scathing about academia in a major Canadian university.

Lol I may check that out. For a while most of my fiction reading was university-set murder mysteries, which is not psychologically subtle.

It is bonkers across the board, to use the academic term. Adjunctification and precarity are notoriously bad in academia, but my field is small and people (from my program at least) do get tenure-track jobs. I'm not having the best year, but not a catastrophic one either, and it's fairly early. But just today I got a note about a postdoc position at a major (and fancy) UK university that I'm at too early a career stage for their postdoc - it's a postdoc for someone who has already done multiple postdocs. Which is wild and exploitative - this is a temporary, poorly paid gig, which nevertheless has really high requirements - if you're past several postdocs and still don't have the cards lined up right for a tenure track job, you probably have some red flags that mean you won't get hired for this either. This seems explicitly written up to take advantage of someone who is like a trailing spouse or desperate for a visa or alternatively willing to just keep taking rolls at the tenure-track roulette (not for another 1-2 years, but for 6-8, at this point) without being worried about paying bills, getting a pension or having any life stability.

 

 

[Starkess]

I recently surpassed the milestone of 100 job applications this go round. So far, 1 phone screen, after which I was rejected, and the previously detailed job where I went through two interviews (incl in person) and reference only to get ghosted...

 

A fairly accurate representation of job hunting.

[Tywin et al.]

8 minutes ago, Starkess said:

I recently surpassed the milestone of 100 job applications this go round. So far, 1 phone screen, after which I was rejected, and the previously detailed job where I went through two interviews (incl in person) and reference only to get ghosted...

 

A fairly accurate representation of job hunting.

I'm just saying, rogue evil military scientist is still on the table! 

Try to stay positive. 

Edited May 1 by Tywin et al.