On looking for a job

— Posted inUncategorized — 4 min read

I personally regard looking for a job as a dreadful experience / roller coaster.
The only good part I can think of is the futures you imagine as the job descriptions settle into the back of your mind but that is also a bad part since most of them if not all end up being shattered. It is a kind of heart break.

I think having had a really bad experience being fired unexpectedly a while back and struggling to find work in my home country tainted the job hunting experience a little more for me than for other people.

Searching

The first struggle is trying to navigate through all these different websites (some times they look like they are from the 90s) and use the search function to try to find something you could do.
Sometimes it is similar to what you are doing and sometimes it is something you could do.

I am currently employed so this is not a desperate search which makes it a shade nicer.

When rejected or ghosted it does not hurt quite as bad as it used to, they probably were not a match for me anyway.

I did struggle some time ago trying to get into a consultancy firm (big 4 some call them) but there seemed to be a moat around them and I could not even get a phone call interview. It made me believe I was not good enough and it has taken a lot of self care and self development to get over that thought.

Finding

Then there is the work of going through the processes, sometimes without an idea of the possible compensation which makes it a waste of time both for you and the potential employer.
This includes phone interviews, aptitude tests, take home projects, culture fit interviews and team interviews (the ones that matter to you).

Now imagine 3 or 5 of these streams going on at the same time but having started at different times. My mind just goes to mush. oh, and you have to do your day to day work too and be a human being to your partner, family and friends (kids?).

I think of it as a strobe light; you get a flash of blinding light (a lot of information) about an upcoming call or interview, this makes you research their products, culture, what the internet says about their interviews and how to game them. The interview happens and then blackness.
Until the next flash of light, from the next job ad or an ongoing process.

Every employer also expects you to jump the minute they say jump and it throws your plans into disarray.

The further along I am through the process the more my mind visualizes how it would be working there and then I even start to doubt myself! is that the work I want? is that who I want to be? silly self monologue, just follow the money.

Getting

Lastly comes the curse of the winners, everybody wants to be here and might compromise their integrity to get here but once I have multiple offers my heart breaks again.

Evaluate all the pros and cons of each company vs the salary they are offering. Perks, culture, location, when do they want you to start, what that would mean to your future, what you should do for your family…

Goodbyes

If you are this far along, the worst part is over but you are not out of it yet.
Hand in your notice.
Deal with some of the most awkward situations a human can have and wait your notice period.
Deal with self doubt, am I doing the right thing? arg, its to late to back out now.

Hello!

On boarding in a new company can be fun but the “trial” period is also heart wrenching for me. 6 months where you are trying your best while not knowing much and where the company can just fire you on the spot.

It feels like a leap of faith.

I have been lucky enough that my leaps have landed up to now. I will try my best to keep that streak going.

Are we just a fluke?

— Posted inUncategorized — 2 min read

From what I have read it seems like we are the only conscious beings around in quite the distance. not even fully in control, its like we are driving something that we think is a car but we cant really understand, from it’s roof Mr Bean style and the controls are not really responsive. oh, and the more you use the controls during a day the less effective they become!

It is challenging to feel responsible for one self (or motivated sometimes )when you are not even in control.

The closests I have come to control is establishing systems kind of like rails in that metaphorical desert that would nudge the car where I want it to go. These systems are not a final solution since sometimes they are ignored.

I dream of being aware of everything my body does and being able to guide it and use it to its full potential, like riding a race bike vs stumbling in a unicycle while having to juggle.

Having that absolute power leads me to the next question after what we are… why we are…

What is the point of us being here?

In a micro scale, affecting those close to us, we need to maximize their happiness in the long term.

In the macro scale, enjoy the ride? a single one of us wont make a difference. Perpetuating the species at least gives us a chance to become better.

I think about this image a lot:

we are not even the jellyfish, we are zappies going around the jellyfish that somehow became self aware of a subsection of the zappies.

Hi you

— Posted inUncategorized — 4 min read

At night I get the urge to write. It goes away soon enough and it is no where to be found the next day. Doubts creep up. who will read this? why? why am I even writing it? is it nowhere or no where? everything is an obstacle too big to deal with and no writing happens.

Maybe at night I’m so tired none of those things matter.

Last nights motivation was so high that it carried into this morning. Only after 3 or 4 YouTube sessions, dealing with work, catching up with friends, winning 15 games of Magic Arena, sorting the laundry that had been drying for a couple of days, trying to clean the steel plate of a weight vest and watching a further YouTube video marked for watch later did I muster up the courage to write this (as a form of procrastinate on making lunch).

Was that even the right voice to write that in? don’t forget to capitalize stuff. At least the autocorrect catches the big mistakes.

We have been listening to a podcast called hardcore history. one thing the author talks about multiple times during the 10 hours we have listened to so far is how accounts of what happened come from people that wrote and recorded what happened, one of them was mostly a play writer with an audience of Greek people, others were Egyptian accountants. It made me think that humans have a drive in them that pushes them to create. I have found myself mostly consuming and barely creating, at least things that last.

One could argue that my jokes or thoughts count as creating but they feel ephemeral and lost to the wind.

Looking at paintings or sculptures makes me think that they are only admired now because they were groundbreaking at the time or because how few there are left. Nowadays better paintings and better sculptures can be made. Same for writing I guess.

So many books and blog posts are available right now. writing a new one feels like adding a drop to an ocean.

There is also the snapshot characteristic of the piece. I have always felt ashamed of what I created before since the me looking at it could do it better or doesn’t agree with it anymore. I can feel future me reading this right now and facepalming. should I persevere?

What about being judged? opinions expressed in paper and sent to the internet are forever stored, forever recorded and at the ready in case anyone wants to cancel you. the writing can be misinterpreted and what if this costs you an opportunity in life? the same argument could be made for the writing having the same change to grant you an opportunity. with so many unknowns it is hard to make a decision.

On why writing

Humanity exists and moving forward it can either be better or worse. It is a complex system and it is not clear how it will react to an stimulus, for example, another complex system might be a sick human, you administer medicine and it ends up making them worse, or in another case it makes them worse and then better? Humanity as a whole cant be studied like clinical trials that weed out which medicine only makes you worse.

My point is that I think Humanity should strive to be better because the alternative is to be worse, wither and die which we might as well do anyway so why not try the alternative.

One way to make humanity better is to educate them more, not with new facts or hard information but how to think better so they can make their own decisions. this can probably be expressed better.

Sharing of knowledge requires communication. The mediums I can think of are writing, audio and video. The one easiest to do is to just write and it is also one that in a blog form would allow for editing in the future.

So I think that is what I am going to do.