Post-Redundancy Thoughts

A random, ranty, sweary collection of thoughts and feelings that I captured at various points while I was made redundant.

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 any on some TypeScript types to get things working.

  Feedback eventually comes back: you’ve not made it through. Down to the use of 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.