Post-Redundancy Thoughts

A random, ranty, sweary collection of thoughts and feelings that I captured at various points across my redundancy journey.

Most of what I’ve noted down can be classified into one of the following: keeping motivation, keeping focus, keeping busy, keeping fresh, and keeping sane.

So, in no particular order…

• Market conditions are tough, absolutely no question about that, and arguably tougher than I’ve seen them in most of my career — but that’s no excuse for some of the arcane practices I’ve seen.

• Interviews are far, far more convoluted than they should be. When things get to 4–5 stages, you really need to question what on earth you are doing.

• Don’t even get me started on tech tests.

• Feedback, or lack of. Ghosting. Seriously. This one really fucked me off — we’re not on fucking Tinder here, we’re talking about a person’s livelihood, and you can’t even be arsed to send a fucking automated rejection. Absolute bullshit.

• The phrase “hit the ground running” — fuck off. A huge misnomer, and in hindsight, a massive red flag.

• Related: “we need someone who can code.” I might be a tad rusty and I might not know all the ins and outs of TypeScript, but I’m not going to forget 15+ years of solid FE engineering overnight. It’s annoying and disconcerting when this type of comment is coming from Heads of Engineering.

• Picture the scene: you ace the first few stages of a process, and get told as much via the hiring manager. You score very highly on leadership and values. Confidence is good — not cocky, but certainly not low. You go into a pair-programming test and see that there are three other people on the call.

  You do the hour-long test, riddled with nerves; you get most things working. The test wasn’t perfect, but you had an hour, and for brevity you use an :any on some TypeScript to get things working.

  Feedback eventually comes back: you’ve not made it through. Down to the :any and a test not mocking something correctly.

  In a one-hour tech test, with three people on the call — one leading, one pairing, and one who I still don’t know what the fuck he was doing there — they deemed me not good enough and discarded all the previous positive feedback. I gave some pretty scathing feedback in return. I felt it was unfair and unjust. Still do.

So why am I writing this?

Because along the way, over those six months, all of the folks involved introduced fear, doubt, and anxiety into my life — ranking me on a small window of opportunity, in a very opaque and often outdated and drawn-out process.

And before you think “wow, how cocky is Chris” — let’s be fair: it’s absolutely both parties. I’m not without blame and not infallible in all this. Letting skills lapse due to leadership roles, maybe not prepping enough — fair. But interviewers and businesses are equally, if not slightly more, to blame.

Unrealistic expectations in a very short amount of time. Not taking a person’s history and complete experience into account. Inexperienced interviewers. And probably the biggest one: not looking at the complete interview picture across all stages.