The last day on my contract at Fidelity Investments is today. I have worked for them since September 2005, and I also worked for them before during Year 2000 testing during 1998. I have a good rapport there, and I hope to have at least one, possibly several, recommendations coming from associates and managers there.

I am looking for project management or QA work - both skills are current, as I've done a smattering of both over the past four years, and even a bit of"glue" type scripting in Bash, Perl, and Python, though I'd only consider myself competent in Bash.

I am quite the jack of all trades though, a quick study, effective learner, always willing to teach others what I've learned. I enjoy testing, as many of you here know.

On the project end of things, I have become adept at smelling out bad and failing projects and helping to effectively terminate the bad ones, saving the company time and money.

If you know of leads or contacts in the industry, do let me know. Thanks!

I don't have any leads, but I wish you well in these difficult times.

2009 is going to be a tough year in the present economic climate and I fear things will get much worse for workers, unless they fight back and win a la France.


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masinick wrote:The last day on my contract at Fidelity Investments is today.!

I am sorry for your job loss; I don't know of any leads either. My husband's company just announced a mandatory pay cut for everyone; at least they still have jobs. I'll pray for you and your family and a job soon.

Brian,

I sincerely sympathize with you.
I lost my employment fifteen years ago, during the last IT"crisis" in France.
It took long months to find a new job.
Luckily in France we have a social welfare that works, that we want to be maintained.

The 'social movement' we had in France last Thursday does not pretend to have the economic crisis solved by magic.
We want to have the education system preserved, we are opposed to social welfare fund cuttings when the government refunds the banks...

I work in a IT service company.
The strike thursday was not only followed by public companies employees or union members.
There are in France layoffs announced in Hewlett Packard, Motorola... Guys who thought they have a steady job in a famous company.
Some of us were in the streets of Toulouse on thursday afternnon. A nice sunny afternoon. Among more than 50.000 people.

un sticker a obtenu un franc succès au coeur du cortège parisien avec pour slogan « Rêve général »

« Rêve général »= General dream instead of: « Grève générale »= General strike

Brian, I wish you the best in your job hunting.
Don't give up

Yves

.

I empathize with you - I teach in California and the governor says we're going to run out of money in February. But the school year ends in June. Hmmm.

john

Sorry to hear this Brian. I hope your not out too long. Maybe think of it as a short rest and enjoy some of it.

You could always come to my place and shovel a couple of feet of snow but I wouldn't recommend it.

Thanks to all of you. I have not landed any opportunity yet. I am just trying to make my network - of friends, forum partners, and so forth, as robust as possible. You never know when that may lead either to an idea or directly to a specific opportunity. I still dream of the day when I can take my combined interests of research and testing Linux distributions and apply it to some real life situations. During my time at Fidelity, I actually DID get to leverage my UNIX and Linux skills for a while, as the market data applications migrated from Sun Solaris' UNIX implementation to Red Hat's RHEL. I was also able to move into project management and lessen my direct role in QA testing, which had been one of my objectives. With that, I now have two very current skills - in QA and Project Management, both of which I have used actively in the past year.

I have to keep job hunting and spend most of my time doing that, but as I can spare a moment here and there, I intend to keep using and testing Linux distros, and I will most certainly continue to use and test antiX, SimplyMEPIS, and sidux heavily.

Thanks again everyone for your kind words. If any of you do come up with either ideas or leads, I am most appreciative of them!