Plaidophile

Outlook: GOOD

Interviewed with a local staffing company which has a large ongoing contract with Sandia Labs. Several positions available which meet my qualifications and so on, and a few of them I have a very good chance at getting. The staffing company seems to have it together, and they have an amazingly good benefits package (they meet or exceed Sandia's standard package in every way).

The lowest salary on any of the positions was $60k. Many of them were well above $80k. Not bad!

The average contract length is about 2 years, but this staffing company has absolutely no problems with finding new positions for their employees. There's also staffing-company get-togethers and so on, and some pretty damn cool benefits, like:

• 4 weeks of general-purpose personal time per year, which you can also cash out at any time (and up to 4 weeks carry over per year, anything in excess automatically getting cashed out)
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage for $7/week and extremely low deductibles
• A generous 401(k) package
• Reimbursement for job-related conference travel and memberships, etc. (so I can keep going to SIGGRAPH or whatever)
• Pre-approved membership to Costco
• Relocation opportunities in 6 states
• Lots and lots of employee-appreciation programs
• No overbearing IP agreement! (Basically, anything I do on billable time belongs to the client. Everything else is mine. Totally reasonable and expected. Unlike some of the places I've worked for.)

So anyway. This was just a first-cut interview with the staffing company for deciding which positions they'll send my resume in for. Chris (guy at the staffing company) will handle all of the cover-letter-writing and resume-submission, and then I'll interview with the individual project managers and so on. This will probably require me coming up to Albuquerque again, but oh well, it's not like I'm busy with anything else these days (except maybe now i'll get around to painting my kitchen and stuff).

So, like, yay! and stuff.