Subj : Why each temporary job ended, duh! (was: Resume questions, how convey?) To : comp.programming,comp.lang.java.programmer,comp.lang.lisp From : rem642b Date : Sun Sep 04 2005 12:41 am > From: Tim X > I suspect he has never been told the reasons why he lost each job he > had. That remark would apply in only one case, when Four-Phase told me they didn't think I'd be able to maintain the COBOL compiler all by myself, but told the state employment department that they dismissed me because I'm disabled, whereby they were not obligated to pay their share of my unemployment benefits. However in all other cases I had a clear reason for the job ending: SCU payroll program: Job accomplished, all done. SCU pre-registration program: Job accomplished, all done. NMR research: Job accomplished, all done, and a better job awaiting. Remote sensing: After having me add features in SAIL program, then having me convert entire program to MainSail, they discovered MainSail had too many system bugs, so they decided to convert it all to Fortran, and one of their other employees had more Fortran experience so they decided to have him do the conversion, and I had another job waiting anyway. Various porting jobs at IMSSS: Job accomplished, all done. Research on instructible robot: We'd gone about as far as we could go with the cruddy context-free parser we were using, and another department was using a new parser we didn't have access to, and they had more urgent use for me on another porting project. CAI-Calculus: Program all working, end of five-year funding, couldn't get funding for follow-on project for CAI-precalculus due to recession. Tracking lineaments: One-person company had only $1500 total cash available to hire me in middle of recession, I had used up $1492 of that and reached a good stopping point, and any more significant unit of work would have gone past the available cash, and it would have been unreasonble for me to work an additional 25 minutes to use up that last eight dollars and not be able to accomplish anything worthwhile during that itty bitty final time period. > I think its very likely Robert has been given all sorts of made up > reasons for why his jobs were terminated or contracts were not > renewed ... The only time we had a follow-on project planned was that CAI-precalculus. It wasn't just me laid off. It was our entire staff, appx. ten employees, except my supervisor who was strung along another year, and the head honcho who retired and closed down the entire institute at that time. In the majority of cases, where I was hired just to perform a single major task, either helping port some software system to a new platform, or writing a single major application from scratch, it was obvious from the start that as soon as the task was completed the job would be ended, and that's exactly what happened. In all those cases we had success, either working program put into full use, or existing software now working just fine on new platform. If you honestly believe I was lied to in any of those cases regarding the reason for the project ending, please explain your perverse opinion to the whole world here. .