Entries tagged 'job searching'

The job search continues and continues to wear on my soul.

I got a rejection for a job this week that was frustrating because it came about two weeks later than they said I would be hearing back. That there was no hint of an apology for this makes me more frustrated because it is the sort of courtesy that would have cost them absolutely nothing.

My feelings are pretty mixed. I wouldn’t have called it my dream position, but it looked like a compelling challenge that would have lined up with a number of my interests in a way that I never really expected to find. But there were some red flags about the company that I had talked myself into accepting. Maybe it is all for the best.

Meanwhile, I continue to apply, I continue to learn, I continue to try.

A disheartening thing about the job market right now is that it feels very stagnant, and I find myself coming across job listings that I skipped over earlier because it fell outside of the parameters I really need or want, but decide it’s time to just go ahead and apply to it and see what happens.

And then I notice that I actually did apply to it some weeks or months ago, and just never heard anything back.

I interviewed with a company recently that ended up deciding to not hire anyone right now. I am grateful to have gone through the process at least, just getting to flex that muscle of talking to interviewers and doing some technical exercises.

I continue to apply for other positions, riding that rollercoaster, and still somehow retaining some sense of optimism that the right opportunity is around the next bend.

I’m still looking for a job.

It is a new month, so I thought it was a good time to raise this flag again, despite it being a bad day to try and be honest and earnest on the internet.

I wish I was the sort of organized that allowed me to run down statistics of how many jobs I have applied to and how many interviews I have gone through other than to say it has been a lot and very few.

Last month I decided to start (re)developing my Python skills because that seems to be much more in demand than the PHP skills I can more obviously lay claim to. I made some contributions to an open source project, ArchiveBox: improving the importing tools, writing tests, and updating it to the latest LTS version of Django from the very old version it was stuck on. I also started putting together a Python library/tool to create a single-file version of an HTML file by pulling in required external resources and in-lining them; my way of learning more about the Python culture and ecosystem.

That and attending SCALE 21x really did help me realize how much I want to be back in the open source development space. I am certainly not dogmatic about it, but I believe to my bones that operating in a community is the best way to develop software.

I think my focus this month has to be on preparing for the “technical interview” exercises that are such a big of the tech hiring process these days, as much as I hate it. I think what makes me a valuable senior engineer is not that I can whip up code on demand for data structures and algorithms, but that I know how to put systems together, have a broader business experience that means I have a deeper of understanding of what matters, and can communicate well. But these tests seem to be an accepted and expected component of the interview process now, so it only makes sense to polish those skills.

(Every day this drags on, I regret my detour into opening a small business more. That debt is going to be a drag on the rest of my life, compounded by the huge weird hole it puts in my résumé.)